Ethnic Diversity in Britain

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Курсовая работа

Ethnic Diversity in Britain

Гомель 2007

Introduction

The aim of this work is to find more facts about the country concerned, to work with further sources in order to learn deeper information about the population of Great Britain, to show the contemporary information of today's population of Great Britain.

The work is divided in three chapters. The first «U.K. Ethnic Groups» includes information about the ethnic population of the Great Britain. It is also the biggest part. According to the size of the chapter it is seen that the highest degree of attention is given to this one. It is so because this chapter contains the most important and full information about ethnic groups in the U.K. The chapter is divided in five parts according to the region. Each part contains particular information about the population in this very region and figures reflecting the numbers of minorities. Also it is important to give information about the native inhabitants of Great Britain.

The second chapter shows information about the population of Great Britain in general. It contains some separated parts. The fourth part includes the detailed data of the variety of the communities, the people, the origins and way of life.

The information of the third chapter is the most up-to-date. It reflects the modern situation of the population. It shows the main problems of today's Britain, such as overpopulation, and gives some reasons for that.

For millions of people all over the world, Britain is the land of tradition, the Royal Family, Beefeaters, Bobbies on the beat and, above all, white people. In much of middle America, it comes as a shock for them to hear that there any black people in Britain at all. But even if people can get their head around the idea that an Afro-American might be British, the notion that he could be an MP often perplexes them.

An MP Surely, one can see their eyes say, a British MP must be white. There are many lifetimes of war, conquest, history, literature, culture and myth behind the idea that Britain is a racially pure society. And in the study of history, myth is just as important as reality. But the racial purity of the British has always been a myth.

From the days when the Norman French invaded Anglo-Saxon Britain, the British have been a culturally diverse nation. But because the different nationalities shared a common skin colour, it was possible to ignore the racial diversity, which always existed in the British Isles. And even if one takes race to mean what it is often commonly meant to imply - skin colour - there have been black people in Britain for centuries. The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years before Christ. But even in Elizabethan times, there were numbers of blacks in Britain. So much so that Elizabeth I issued a proclamation complaining about them. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, black people make fleeting appearances in the political and cultural narrative of the British Isles. Black people can be seen as servants in the prints of Hogarth. In Thackeray's «Vanity Fair», Ms Schwartz, the West Indian heiress is obviously supposed to be of mixed race. She is gently mocked but her colour is not otherwise remarked on.

Britain has always been a multi-racial society. What is new is the visibility of its racial diversity. And what is newer still is a willingness to accept that all the races can have parity of esteem. For a long time, even when it was acknowledged that there were people of different racial origin within the British Isles, there was an assumption that the white race and culture was, and should, be dominant.

Racial stereotyping echoes through British literature and culture almost to the present day. And for some time, assumptions of racial inferiority coloured mainstream British perception of non-white culture and art. The Notting Hill Street Carnival is the biggest street festival and a miracle of creativity with costumes that take months to sew and wonderful music and dance. But it is only recently that mainstream press has reported it as anything other than a law and order issue.

However, in recent years, people have begun to acknowledge the presence of non-white people in Britain in a positive way. And even to talk about Britain as a multi-racial Society. Although there are some people who would resist this description and pretend Britain's continuing ethnic diversity doesn't exit and insist on Britain being described as a European or white country. But although the phrase multi-racial society is used quite frequently, a genuinely multi-racial society with genuine parity of esteem is quite difficult to achieve. The Caribbean is often cited as a part of the world where you can find multi-racialism in action. The national motto of Jamaica for instance is «Out of Many, One People». However, it is noticeable that even in these supposed bastions of harmonious multi-racialism, tensions have arisen between different races. In Trinidad, for instance, the archetypal multi-racial island in the sun, there is bitter rivalry between the Asian and African-Caribbean community. The issue is equality. Where one ethnic group is demonstrably subordinate to another, it is idle to talk about multi-racialism because in reality one culture is dominant. Furthermore, the political attractions of playing the race card are often irresistible, multi-racialism just doesn't have the same visceral appeal to popular sentiment. But multi-racialism is a tricky balance to achieve. On the one hand, there has to be a measure of economic equality and genuine parity of esteem. But on the other, it should not mean obliterating differences or pretending differences do not exist. Britain would be the poorer without its different races and their different cultural traditions. But it would also be a mistake to try and iron out these differences in the name of multi-racialism. Of course, a vexed question is of the relative merit of different cultures and cultural traditions. It is very difficult in these cases to distinguish where objective judgement starts and prejudice begins. In European societies, the bias tends to be that European culture and tradition are necessarily superior. But in the words of the American blues songs «It ain't necessarily so.»

There is no doubt the history of twentieth century popular music is very much the history of African music as it has been mediated through North America. There is almost no sort of pop music that doesn't owe something to black American influence. And in art, the influence of African art has long been acknowledged on modern abstract painters like Picasso. More recently, the literary establishment has been willing to acknowledge the contribution of black and ethnic minority writers like Ben Okri, Alice Walker and Nobel prize winning Toni Morrison. And at the level of popular culture, different races have enriched British life greatly.

1. U.K. Ethnic Groups

1.1 The Native British

The first human inhabitants of Britain settled there in prehistoric times, when Britain was joined to the continent. They came there over dry land.

Later (after 3000 BC1) the Iberians and the Apline tribes lived on the British Isles. Those peoples probably formed the basis of the present-day population of the country.

In different periods of the history of the country it was occupied by different invaders. Soon after 700 BC Britain was invaded by the Celts, who are supposed to have come from Central Europe and settled in Britain. From 55 BC the Celts were subject to the conquest and occupation of the Romans, later (in the 5th century) of the Germanic tribes (the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles), then of the Danes and of the Normans'. Thus the English nation was formed of all those peoples. [1]

1.1.1 The Anglo-Celtic People

Anglo-Celtic is a notional racial or cultural category, used primarily in Australia to describe people of British and/or Irish descent. To a lesser degree the term is also used in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. It is considered to refer to the ethnic majority in Australia, where it applies to at least 80% of the population. In this instance, «Anglo» is an abbreviation for Anglo-Saxon, a collective term for ancient Germanic peoples who settled in Britain (especially England) in the middle of the first millennium.

«Celtic», in this instance, refers strictly to the nations of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and the Isle of Man. The term does not include the Celtic peoples of continental Europe, such as the Bretons.

The term Anglo-Celtic is used by secessionists in the Southern United States, such as the League of the South, whose mission statement is «to protect the historic Anglo-Celtic core culture of the South because the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English have given Dixie its unique institutions and civilization». Celtic traditions and customs have continued in England, particularly in extremities of the south west and the north. As a whole, England is not a Celtic country because it lacks a Celtic language; during the 'Celtic' era, Great Britain was populated by a number of regional Celtic tribes, none of whom directly ended up forming the English nation. In Celtic languages, it is usually referred to as «Saxon-land» (Sasana, Pow Saws, Bro-Saoz etc), and in Welsh as Lloegr.

Unlike many of the above examples, there is little political motivation behind this search for a more complex identity, but a recognition that local linguistic and cultural peculiarities can be traced back to Celtic origins. Cumbria, for example, retains some Celtic influences from local sports (Cumberland wrestling) to superstitions, and traces of Cumbric are still spoken, famously by shepherds to count their sheep. There has been a suggestion to bring back Cumbrian as a language and about 50 words of a reconstructed, hypothetical «Cumbric» exist. However, most competent scholars believe that it would be little different from an archaic dialect of Northern Welsh, but the evidence is far too slight to make a meaningful attempt. The county is also home to the Rheged discovery centre profiling the Celtic history of Cumbria. Its name is cognate with Cymru, the Welsh name for Wales meaning Land of Comrades. [2]

English Celtic revivalism has not always been popular with its neighbours, many of whose own revivals have sought to counteract the majority culture of England within the United Kingdom. It also tends to be apolitical, in strict contrast to that of the «Six», Galicia or even Padania. Early revivalism concentrated on King Arthur, fairy and folklore and also Boudicca, whose statue stands outside the Palace of Westminster. Boudicca, who fought Roman imperialism, was looked up to by one or two Victorian English imperialists, who claimed «her new empire» was bigger than the Roman. Modern revivalism has focused more on music, mythology, rituals such as the Druids and a better understanding of Celtic festivals that have been observed in England since the Celtic period, and dialect or language. [3]

Some recent studies have suggested that, contrary to long-standing beliefs, the Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons) did not wipe out the Romano-British of England but rather, over the course of six centuries, conquered the native Brythonic people of what is now England and south-east Scotland and imposed their culture and language upon them, much as the Irish may have spread over the west of Scotland. Still others maintain that the picture is mixed and that in some places the indigenous population was indeed wiped out while in others it was assimilated. According to this school of thought the populations of Yorkshire, East Anglia, Northumberland and the Orkney and Shetland Islands are those populations with the fewest traces of ancient. [4 p. 26]

1.1.2 The Cornish People

The Cornish people are regarded as an ethnic group of Britain originating in Cornwall. They are often described as a Celtic people. The number of people living in Cornwall who consider themselves to be more Cornish than British or English is unknown. One survey found that 35.1% of respondents identified as Cornish, with 48.4% of respondents identifying as English, a further 11% thought of themselves as British. A Morgan Stanley survey in 2004 indicated that 44% of people in Cornwall identify as Cornish rather than English or British. As with other ethnic groups in the British Isles, the question of identity is not straightforward. Ethnic identity has been based as much on cultural identity than on descent. Many descendants of people who came and settled in Cornwall have adopted this identity.

In the 2001 UK Census, the population of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly was estimated to be 501,267. Cornish community organizations tend to consider half of these people to be ethnic Cornish.

A recent survey by the University of Plymouth found that, when given the opportunity, over a third of pupils in Cornish schools identified themselves as Cornish.

The UK government has agreed recently that English and Welsh will have an ethnicity tick box on the Census 2011 but there will be no Cornish option tick box. Various Cornish organizations are campaigning for the inclusion of the Cornish tick box on the next 2011 Census. Many who perceive themselves to be of the Cornish nation also consider themselves to be descended from the Brythons, or Cornovii (Cornish), of the post-Roman period. For this reason they consider there to be a kinship connection with the Welsh and Breton peoples and more distantly with the Scots, Manx and Irish. After the Anglo-Saxon conquest of southern, eastern and central Great Britain, Brythonic speakers were gradually pushed further into the fringes, eventually cutting them off into three groups - the Southwestern Britons, the West Britons (the Welsh) and the Northern Britons.

This sense of a shared past is given voice in such organizations as the Celtic League and Celtic Congress, both of whom recognize Cornwall and the Cornish as a Celtic nation. Today, many family and given names from Cornwall are clearly rooted in the Cornish language. [1]

1.2 Scotland

The most recent national survey of Scotland's population, the 2001 census, revealed that almost 98% of the country's inhabitants were white. However, it also showed that Scotland's number of foreign-born residents is increasing faster than that of England or Wales.

Out of every 1,000 people, on average: 880 are White Scottish; 74 are White (non-Scottish) British; 25 are from other white groups, including Irish; 11 are Asian; 3 people are of mixed race; 3 people are Chinese; 2 people are Black.

In 2001, 3.3% of people living in Scotland were born abroad, up from 2.5% in 1991. Scotland had a population of just over 5 million people at the time of the 2001 census. It covers an area of 78,772 square kilometers, meaning that, on average, just 64 people live on each square kilometers of Scottish soil (for England the figure is 377, in Wales 140).

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