The Idea of English Ethnicity [Hardcover]

In this major contribution to debates about English identity, leading theorist Robert J.C. Young argues that Englishness was never really about England at all. In the nineteenth century, it was rather developed as a form of long-distance identity for the English diaspora around the world. Young shows how the effects of this continue to reverberate today, nationally and globally.

• 
  
• Written by an internationally established theorist, whose work has been translated into 20 languages
  
• Shows how potent the idea of Englishness is
  
• Helps to explain why the UK continues to act as if it has a ‘special relationship’ to the US
  
• Helps to explain why the UK is so successfully multicultural
  
• Part of the prestigious Blackwell Manifestos series

Preface.

Introduction: Exodus.

1. Saxonism.

2. ‘New Theory of Race: Saxon v. Celt’.

3. Moral and Philosophical Anatomy.

4. The Times vs. the Celts.

5. Matthew Arnold’s Critique of ‘Englishism’.

6. ‘A Vaster England’: The Anglo-Saxon.

7. ‘England Round the World’.

8. Englishness: England and Nowhere.

Notes.

Index

Nonetheless, The Idea of English Ethnicity remains an eloquent and powerfully-argued analysis of Victorian ideas of Englishness and race. Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is the extent to which it succeeds, despite the uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding its central thesis, in convincing the reader that the Victorians did indeed lay the foundations for a ‘clãô