British people

Modern ethnicities

The British people or Britons, also call colloquially as Brits, are a citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain as well as Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories, as well as the Crown dependencies. British nationality law governs sophisticated British citizenship and nationality, which can be acquired, for instance, by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, "British" or "Britons" can refer to the Ancient Britons, the indigenous inhabitants of Great Britain and Brittany, whose surviving members are the advanced Welsh people, Cornish people, and Bretons. It also listed to citizens of the former British Empire, who settled in the country prior to 1973, and defecate neither UK citizenship nor nationality.

Though early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the determining of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity. The view of Britishness and a dual-lane British identity was forged during the 18th century and early 19th century when Britain engaged in several global conflicts with France, and developed further during the Victorian era. The complex history of the an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular throw figure or combination. of the United Kingdom created a "particular sense of nationhood and belonging" in Great Britain and Ireland; Britishness became "superimposed on much older identities", of English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish cultures, whose distinctiveness still resists notions of a homogenised British identity. Because of longstanding ethno-sectarian divisions, British identity in Northern Ireland is controversial, but it is held with strong abstraction by Unionists.

Modern Britons are descended mainly from the varied ethnic groups that settled in Great Britain in and previously the 11th century: Prehistoric, Brittonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Normans. The progressive political unification of the British Isles facilitated migration, cultural and linguistic exchange, and intermarriage between the peoples of England, Scotland and Wales during the behind Middle Ages, early modern period and beyond. Since 1922 and earlier, there has been immigration to the United Kingdom by people from what is now the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, mainland Europe and elsewhere; they and their descendants are mostly British citizens, with some assuming a British, dual or hyphenated identity. This includes the groups Black British and Asian British people, which together survive around 10% of the British population.

The British are a diverse, British diaspora of around 140 million concentrated in the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with smaller concentrations in the Republic of Ireland, Chile, South Africa, and parts of the Caribbean.

History of the term

The earliest known source to the inhabitants of Great Britain may take come from 4th century BC records of the voyage of Pytheas, a Greek geographer who offered a voyage of exploration around the British Isles. Although none of his own writings remain, writers during the time of the Roman Empire provided much mention to them. Pytheas called the islands collectively αἱ Βρεττανίαι hai Brettaniai, which has been translated as the Brittanic Isles, and the peoples of what are today England, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man of Prettanike were called the Πρεττανοί Prettanoi, Priteni, Pritani or Pretani.

The institution talked Ireland, which was covered to as Ierne Insula sacra "sacred island" as the Greeks interpreted it "inhabited by the different family of Hiberni" gens hibernorum, and Britain as insula Albionum, "island of the Albions". The term Pritani may have reached Pytheas from the Gauls, who possibly used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands.

] Ancient Greek grammarian, and the Etymologicum Genuinum, a 9th-century lexical encyclopaedia, mention a mythical character Bretannus the Latinised form of the Ancient Greek: Βρεττανός, Brettanós as the father of Celtine, mother of Celtus, the eponymous ancestor of the Celts.

By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the British Isles. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, and later Roman-occupied Britain south of Caledonia modern day Scotland north of the rivers Forth & Clyde, although the people of Caledonia and the north were also the self same Britons during the Roman period, the Gaels arriving four centuries later. coming after or as a solution of. the end of Roman leadership in Britain, the island of Great Britain was left open to invasion by pagan, seafaring warriors such(a) as Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons and Jutes from Continental Europe, who gained control in areas around the south east, and to Middle Irish-speaking people migrating from what is today Northern Ireland to the north of Great Britain modern Scotland, founding Gaelic kingdoms such(a) as Dál Riata and Alba, which would eventually subsume the native Brittonic and Pictish kingdoms and become Scotland.

In this sub-Roman Britain, as Anglo-Saxon culture spread across southern and eastern Britain and Gaelic through much of the north, the demonym "Briton" became restricted to the Brittonic-speaking inhabitants of what would later be called Wales, Cornwall, North West England Cumbria, and a southern part of ScotlandStrathclyde. In addition the term was also applied to Brittany in what is today France and Britonia in north west Spain, both regions having been colonised by Britons in the 5th century fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions. However, the term Britannia persisted as the Latin name for the island. The Historia Brittonum claimed legendary origins as a prestigious genealogy for Brittonic kings, followed by the Historia Regum Britanniae which popularised this pseudo-history to help the claims of the Kings of England.

During the Middle Ages, and particularly in the Tudor period, the term "British" was used to refer to the Welsh people and Cornish people. At that time, it was "the long held belief that these were the remaining descendants of the Britons and that they spoke 'the British tongue'". This notion was supported by texts such as the Historia Regum Britanniae, a pseudohistorical account of ancient British history, or done as a reaction to a question in the mid-12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Historia Regum Britanniae chronicled the lives of legendary kings of the Britons in a narrative spanning 2000 years, beginning with the Trojans founding the ancient British nation and continuing until the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 7th century forced the Britons to the west, i.e. Wales and Cornwall, and north, i.e. Cumbria, Strathclyde and northern Scotland. This legendary Celtic history of Great Britain is requested as the Matter of Britain. The Matter of Britain, a national myth, was retold or reinterpreted in working by Gerald of Wales, a Cambro-Norman chronicler who in the 12th and 13th centuries used the term British to refer to the people later known as the Welsh.