Are these people really British?

[glitterpaperchain]

In 1688, foreign strangers were arriving on British shores daily. The locals complained of despoilment of their environment. Londoners complained that French was everywhere, and not a word of English could be heard spoken! The French immigrants were denigrated either for being too poor, thus a drain on rate-paying parishioners, or too prosperous, at the expense of local merchants and business owners.

(Taken from Thou Savage Woman by Blessin Adams, great book!)

That sounds exactly like what I hear the media saying about immigrants now! So when the far right are making sure that Britain is for the British, shall they make sure we all trace our lineage back to the 1600s, and make sure no descendents of those awful French immigrants count as British?

Op, your post is facile

I think a lot of the immigration stuff is tipping over to direct racism
police post a photo of a male who isn’t white and the comments are “send them back!”
where to? He’s from Burnley as his parents were and grandparents

What about those bloody beaker people?!!

Who cares, half the thread is saying English people in England for 1000s of years aren't English so if we aren't from here neither is he.

We're really not. We're one of the most homogenous nationalities on earth. Yes, there has been a lot of immigration in the past few decades, but most white British have stayed the same since the Vikings shagged us. From the link below:

• There are separate genetic groups in Cornwall and Devon, with a division almost exactly along the modern county boundary.
• The majority of eastern, central and southern England is made up of a single, relatively homogeneous, genetic group

Check this out; it's fascinating.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-really-are-genetic-map-british-isles

I’m descended from those Huguenots, do I get a French passport?

It is interesting though, mine arrived about 1701 in London (Spitalfields obviously) and then the first person to marry into the family who was an English Londoner was in 1809. So for 100 years they just intermarried with other French families, and didn’t integrate at all. They went to a French church in Spitalfields and all the records for them are in French. I wonder if there were French schools?

I do like to remind my Reform loving mother about this every time she moans about immigrants.

@glitterpaperchain That sounds exactly like what I hear the media saying about immigrants now!

I don't care what language anyone speaks, but I care about values. The issue is that I see far too many people coming here with poor ethics and values. Not wanting to help other people, stealing, placing a higher emphasis on money rather than character, assaulting people, driving obnoxiously loud and fast cars, etc. Some cities and towns are not safe enough to walk through at night.

And yes, you can say that some people born in the UK are like that... but the difference is that we can't deport those people. It makes absolutely no sense, in any shape or form, to say "it's OK for immigrants to be dicks because some people in the UK are dicks."

You know that we're all African, right? So none of us should be in the UK. We should all leave it and let it return to the wild.

All of us are Out of Africa...

Its not illegal to seek asylum so they were probably not referring to asylum seekers.

Immigration is like weather and it's been going on nearly as long. It's varied a lot over time and place.

As such, it's often been good for the people experiencing it (even lifesaving), but a certain level of it can sometimes be badly planned or harmful, even though every single immigrant might be a perfectly nice person.

It's not one thing, that is always either good or bad. It doesn't have to have anything to do with race at all.

Rolling our eyes at people who are unhappy about current immigration somewhere, just because immigration at some other time happened, or was good, is a bit like saying "it's just summer!" to someone struggling in a heat wave with temperatures made worse by global warming.

What has often been good or harmless can sometimes not be good. What's good and enriching and valuable in one city can be badly organised and disrupting of community cohesion in another.

Racists do exist but leaving this conversation only to them is crazy.

Was no one else shouting "That'll teach you for Lindisfarne" at the telly during the World Cup quarter finals?

If only we were able to have an economic and practical discussion about immigration without all the racism and stereotypes

That's genuinely fascinating thanks! Especially the bit about the Celtic strands (in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Devon etc being very different to each other).
However, this paragraph is important:
All four grandparents of the volunteers selected in this study were born within 80 km of each other. Because grandparents contribute a quarter each to their descendants genome, focussing on this group of volunteers means that the researchers were effectively sampling DNA from the volunteers’ ancestors, allowing a snapshot of UK genetics in the late 19th Century

It means the study is a little skewed in terms of whose DNA is included. On the one hand that obviously avoids more recent movements of people (so it avoids not only the last few decades but any changes since the late 19th century).
However, it also biases the samples a bit since the types of families whose grandparents all stayed in the same place might also be the types of families whose great and great great grandparents stayed in the same place. Eg, my grandparents all came from different corners of Britain. So by design I wouldn't be included in the study. However, I don't know if the factors which made my grandmother's parents more likely to emigrate from Wales when she was a child also caused her grandparents and their grandparents to move around. (They did, we found out some of them came from Cheshire). So families where there was movement in the 18th century, and then later movement in the earlier 20th century wouldn't be captured at all.

I don't know if I'm explaining myself clearly but while it's a very interesting study I don't think you can read from it that populations were stable up until the grandparents generation. What it tells you is that people whose grandparents and parents didn't change location much also had great great great grandparents who didn't change location much.

And you don’t think there is any sneering on the other side of the argument?

Do you not know that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa?

My paternal grandfather was Irish and it never occurs to me to claim that I am Irish in any way. However my mums side is Welsh as far back as you can go and having spent so much time in that lovely country I do sort of feel Welsh if that makes any sense

There have been immigrants entering the UK since the Ice Age, but in more recent history we have seen Romans, Vikings, Huguenots, Palatines, Irish, Jewish and Post-Empire Commonwealth immigration.

If certain political parties really do wish to ‘send them back’, I’m guessing there will be about 40 people left.

Ah,

Just read further about the study it's based on and it's specifically targeted at people from rural regions. That makes a lot of sense and sort of confirms what I was wondering about in my very long winded post.

The answer is yes.

And yes they stayed in that community.

Even more than that, stories are still carried down in the family about life before to today in some cases.

This isn't unusual. My Dad's family is Scottish. The family rumour was that were involved in the Battle of Culloden. That's 1746. This does indeed seem to check out. That's well over 250 years that this knowledge has passed down in the family. There's a few bits of myth in there too but for the most part it seems accurate.

I know what you mean! I am part Irish but wouldn't describe myself as "Irish" because while it's a beautiful country and I've visited there on holiday I haven't really spent enough time there to describe myself as Irish without feeling like a massive poseur. I also don't really feel the need to "come home" some Americans do. Whereas if someone like Ed Sheeran does because they've been raised spending a lot of time there with Irish family it is different. But I do feel more Scottish because I have Scottish family still there and spend more time there. But if anyone asked Id say I was English still.

The problem starts when, for example, Americans visiting Ireland or Scotland get pissy because the "Scottish" hotel owner or whoever looks South Asian and therefore isn't "really Scottish". It's fine to romanticise one's heritage in other places. I don't think it counts above actually being born/living in a place or confers the right to complain somewhere has changed in the 150 years since their ancestors left it.

That really is interesting. Thank you for sharing that.

"So for 100 years they just intermarried with other French families, and didn’t integrate at all."

There are other cases of that as well from the same sort of time. When Britain defeated France in the 1760s and took Canada from the French, some French colonists remained there (which is why they now also speak French in Quebec).

But, like with your ancestors, they just intermarried with other French families (and worshipped at the same Catholic church etc). This means that for anybody studying family history it becomes an absolute nightmare because everyone ends up being related to everyone else with cousins and second cousins marrying each other.

The same thing happened with the French colonists who left. A lot of them moved to Louisiana (around New Orleans). They also intermarried within their own community and eventually became known as "Cajuns".

It really is so fascinating to find out that it also happened here as well.

Thank you for sharing this.

Dear me.

Yeah I get that. I am white British as the short answer
the longer answer is a black gg grandparent migrated from Barbados and married a white English woman
I did my family tree then the ancestry DNA

Ethnogenesis is the term for what people are reaching for here. At what point is a group of people a defined and stable ethnic group? Ethnicity includes components of both genetics and culture.

This is similar to the question of "at what point do we call something a new species" in that there isn't a pure test you can do. There are innumerable debates about whether some certain type of bird is a new species or a subspecies of another one.

Just because there isn't a hard cutoff, as in, English humans didn't separately spring into existence separately from the rest of homo sapiens! doesn't mean it's not meaningful to talk about ethnic groups.

"Are x people British?" forces the question of "what does it mean to be ethnically British?", even though a lot of people would like to sidestep it by saying it's anyone who spent a couple grand on a passport.

Others may not agree but I don’t think this is a good way to represent another person’s book.