Union of Scotland and England

The British today

Despite opposition from within both Scotland and England, a Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706 and was then ratified by the parliaments of both countries with the passing of the Acts of Union 1707. With effect from 1 May 1707, this created a new sovereign state called the " Kingdom of Great Britain". This kingdom " began as a hostile merger", but led to a " full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world"; historian Simon Schama stated that " it was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history".

After 1707, a British national identity began to develop, though it was initially resisted, particularly by the English. The peoples of Great Britain had by the 1750s begun to assume a " layered identity": to think of themselves as simultaneously British and also Scottish, English, or Welsh.

The terms North Briton and South Briton were devised for the Scots and the English respectively, with the former gaining some preference in Scotland, particularly by the economists and philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, it was the " Scots [who] played key roles in shaping the contours of British identity"; " their scepticism about the Union allowed the Scots the space and time in which to dominate the construction of Britishness in its early crucial years", drawing upon the notion of a shared " spirit of liberty common to both Saxon and Celt... against the usurpation of the Church of Rome". James Thomson was a poet and playwright born to a Church of Scotland minister in the Scottish Lowlands in 1700 who was interested in forging a common British culture and national identity in this way. In collaboration with Thomas Arne, they wrote Alfred, an opera about Alfred the Great's victory against the Vikings performed to Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1740 to commemorate the accession of George I and the birthday of Princess Augusta. " Rule, Britannia! " was the climactic piece of the opera and quickly became a " jingoistic" British patriotic song celebrating " Britain's supremacy offshore". An island country with a series of victories for the Royal Navy associated empire and naval warfare " inextricably with ideals of Britishness and Britain's place in the world".

Britannia, the new national personification of Great Britain, was established in the 1750s as a representation of " nation and empire rather than any single national hero". On Britannia and British identity, historian Peter Borsay wrote:

Up until 1797 Britannia was conventionally depicted holding a spear, but as a consequence of the increasingly prominent role of the Royal Navy in the war against the French, and of several spectacular victories, the spear was replaced by a trident... The navy had come to be seen...as the very bulwark of British liberty and the essence of what it was to be British.

From the Union of 1707 through to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Great Britain was " involved in successive, very dangerous wars with Catholic France", but which " all brought enough military and naval victories... to flatter British pride". As the Napoleonic Wars with the First French Empire advanced, " the English and Scottish learned to define themselves as similar primarily by virtue of not being French or Catholic". In combination with sea power and empire, the notion of Britishness became more " closely bound up with Protestantism", a cultural commonality through which the English, Scots and Welsh became " fused together, and remain[ed] so, despite their many cultural divergences".

The neo-classical monuments that proliferated at the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th, such as The Kymin at Monmouth, were attempts to meld the concepts of Britishness with the Greco-Roman empires of classical antiquity. The new and expanding British Empire provided " unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility and the accumulations of wealth", and so the " Scottish, Welsh and Irish populations were prepared to suppress nationalist issues on pragmatic grounds". The British Empire was " crucial to the idea of a British identity and to the self-image of Britishness". Indeed, the Scottish welcomed Britishness during the 19th century " for it offered a context within which they could hold on to their own identity whilst participating in, and benefiting from, the expansion of the [British] Empire". Similarly, the " new emphasis of Britishness was broadly welcomed by the Welsh who considered themselves to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Britons – a word that was still used to refer exclusively to the Welsh". For the English, however, by the Victorian era their enthusiastic adoption of Britishness had meant that, for them, Britishness " meant the same as 'Englishness'", so much so that " Englishness and Britishness" and " 'England' and 'Britain' were used interchangeably in a variety of contexts". Britishness came to borrow heavily from English political history because England had " always been the dominant component of the British Isles in terms of size, population and power"; Magna Carta, common law and hostility to continental Europe were English factors that influenced British sensibilities.

Union with Ireland

The political union in 1800 of the predominantly Catholic Kingdom of Ireland with Great Britain, coupled with the outbreak of peace with France in the early 19th century, challenged the previous century's concept of militant Protestant Britishness. The new, expanded United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland meant that the state had to re-evaluate its position on the civil rights of Catholics, and extend its definition of Britishness to the Irish people. Like the terms that had been invented at the time of the Acts of Union 1707, " West Briton" was introduced for the Irish after 1800. In 1832 Daniel O'Connell, an Irish politician who campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, stated in Britain's House of Commons:

The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the British Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Briton if made so in benefits and justice; but if not, we are Irishmen again.

Ireland, from 1801 to 1923, was marked by a succession of economic and political mismanagement and neglect, which marginalised the Irish, and advanced Irish nationalism. In the forty years that followed the Union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had as Benjamin Disraeli, a staunch anti-Irish and anti-Catholic member of the Conservative party with a virulent racial and religious prejudice towards Ireland put it in 1844, " a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world". Although the vast majority of Unionists in Ireland proclaimed themselves " simultaneously Irish and British", even for them there was a strain upon the adoption of Britishness after the Great Famine.

War continued to be a unifying factor for the people of Great Britain: British jingoism re-emerged during the Boer Wars in southern Africa. The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility for Britishness. In 1887, Frederic Harrison wrote:

Morally, we Britons plant the British flag on every peak and pass; and wherever the Union Jack floats there we place the cardinal British institutions—tea, tubs, sanitary appliances, lawn tennis, and churches.

The Catholic Relief Act 1829 reflected a " marked change in attitudes" in Great Britain towards Catholics and Catholicism. A " significant" example of this was the collaboration between Augustus Welby Pugin, an " ardent Roman Catholic" and son of a Frenchman, and Sir Charles Barry, " a confirmed Protestant", in redesigning the Palace of Westminster—" the building that most enshrines... Britain's national and imperial pre-tensions". Protestantism gave way to imperialism as the leading element of British national identity during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and as such, a series of royal, imperial and national celebrations were introduced to the British people to assert imperial British culture and give themselves a sense of uniqueness, superiority and national consciousness. Empire Day and jubilees of Queen Victoria were introduced to the British middle class, but quickly " merged into a national 'tradition'".

The UK represents people of many different origins and cultures. From before Roman times to the present, a succession of conquerors and refugees have settled in Britain.

Traditionally the early inhabitants of Britain are thought to have been Celts. They are the ancestors of many of the people in Highland Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall today.

Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans – all came to Britain in search of gain. Each wave of invaders was in due course assimilated. But differences remained in language, culture and their particular national character.