The British construction of whiteness: unionism, imperialism, and the United Kingdom
What is the connection between contemporary whiteness and the historical development of British unionism?
To explain: ‘whiteness’ is a form of identity based on an idea of race. It is most usually implicit, unspoken, and invisible. In James Baldwin’s terms, whiteness is the identity of those ‘who consider themselves white’.
Most people who think of themselves as white do not tend to think of this whiteness as a racial identity.
In Britain, north America, and much of Europe whiteness is what it is. Race and ethnicity is taken as what it isn’t. In most respects, whiteness defines the normal and defines difference.
Such whiteness has not always existed in such ways. It has come about through historical processes. People who think of themselves as white are the products of a history in which this identity emerged.
This history is a colonial one, it is rooted in the empire that the English forced on the world. And then this empire became British, instead of (and as well as) English. It came to see itself as the superior white British civilisation, making the rest of the world a better place.
An important part of this is the change from just England to Britain. How the union between England and Scotland created a world and an empire full of people who saw (and continue to see) themselves as white.
The historical development of the union of Scotland and England (as the United Kingdom) overlapped with the emergence of British (Scottish and English) settlement and political dominance. The two things should not be taken as accidental — they are part of the same process.
Whiteness is part of the colonial history of British unionism.
Dyer on whiteness
Reading the introduction of Richard Dyer’s classic introduction to Whiteness, I have been struck by a relatively small point that he raised.
histories of white consciousness in European countries… may help to explain patterns of popular investment in imperialism, …[such as] the Scottish involvement in British imperialism, noted by Tom Nairn, as a way of asserting a common white British identity without having to become English, a motif of national-regional inclusion within an imperial project that may well be identified in many other countries. Whiteness has been enormously, often terrifyingly effective in unifying coalitions of disparate groups of people. It has generally been much more successful than class in uniting people across national cultural differences and against their best interests.’ (Richard Dyer, Whiteness, 1997, p.19)
That is, the idea of whiteness — and the ways in which this idea was put into practice — was an important means of integrating differences between Scots and English. The common ground of the new united sense of British was being white.
Empire, slavery, and race
The earliest colonial settlement of Virginia and New England happened at the time of the union of the crowns (1603 onwards), when England and Scotland remained separate nations. Hence there are places such as Jamestown (King James I) and Charleston (King Charles II), founded specifically by the English (although named after monarchs who were also kings of Scotland).
Simultaneously, Scotland — as the poorer nation in this arrangement — also tried to develop its power and economy through colonisation in America. This was manifest most famously (and disastrously) in the Darien settlement in what is now Panama in the 1690s. The collapse of this colonial venture practically bankrupted the already limited Scottish economy.
Partly as a result of this, the Scottish Parliament agreed in 1707 to unite with England, and thus the United Kingdom of Great Britain came into being. For the next 70 years, this union resulted in the very successful development and expansion of now British colonial rule in north America. The very substantial land appropriation in this continent and the commercial investment of labour development in these lands (together with trade with Europe and India to the east and the Caribbean to the south) saw significant economic growth for both the American colonies and for Britain as a whole.
Most importantly here, we must remember that this was a racial process.
Over the process of the seventeenth century (when the American colonies were under English, not British, rule) the colonists had developed an economy that increasingly relied on importing forced labour. Early reliance on either semi-forced English, Scots, or Irish labour (as indentured workers) had not been enough to sustain the potential for intense commercial development of the new lands that had been taken in Virginia, New England, and the colonies that came under English control. Attempts had been made to coerce (through enslavement) the people of the indigenous nations of the region. But likewise, this proved to be insufficient.
Thus, through a process of commercial and political development by the English in the seventeenth century, the economy became more and more based on the capture, transportation, and exploitation of enslaved women and men from West Africa. This happened in the English colonial territories in both the Caribbean and in the north American continent. Despite the high capital outlay required by farm owners for the purchase of enslaved people to work their industries, this was economically (and politically) preferable to the reliance on a wage-based workforce.
And so, during the eighteenth century, particularly following the political unification of Britain, this successful slave-based economy in the American economies became highly systematised and industrialised. In the minds of the British colonials, the enslaved Africans became a form of machinery that they could purchase and put to use to grow their wealth out of the seemingly limitless land available for them in north America.
Needless to say, the enslaved people who had been kidnapped from Africa, imprisoned, and then subjected to this brutal treatment did not see themselves in the same way. There are numerous examples of attempts by enslaved people to resist their enslavement.
The conventional wisdom among English speakers in Britain and America is that a pre-existing idea of race was the basis for how the British viewed the commercial and political development of their colonial settlements. That is, it is assumed by many that the British saw themselves as a ‘white’ people who were racially distinct from the ‘black’ people that they had brutally taken from Africa to enslave. This idea of race was seen (and is still seen) as natural and neutral, that is as a simple description of the way the world is.
However, contemporary scholarship has turned this on its head. Although there were various ways in which differences between the English (particularly) and the Africans were viewed, the idea we now think of as race is something that emerged from this history.
That is, to summarise a pile of scholarship, the contemporary idea of race is something that came out of the English, and then British, political economy of enslavement.
And as part of this process, the idea of ‘whiteness’ — the British as a people who identify as white — is also a legacy of this history.
The emergence of whiteness
The British development of commercial and military power in north America (and then later in other parts of the world, such as in Asia and Africa) is the reason why British people now think of themselves as white.
In fact, we can say there are three specific components to this process:
- The enslaved people from Africa, who came to be defined as ‘black’, and who were politically subjected through violence to the white colonialists of north America
- The powerful English nation, who dominated the colonial settlement of north America and who also politically dominated the political balance of the British Isles, leading to a union into Great Britain in 1707.
- The people of Scotland, who eventually became part of the political structure of colonialism, as a unit within the United Kingdom. Scots, and Scotland as a whole, began to profit substantially from both the union of Britain and its colonialism. For example, as Stephen Mullen has shown, the economic growth of the city of Glasgow in the eighteenth century relied on this enslavement-based colonialism (particularly through the trading of slaves by Scottish companies, and the wealth derived from Scottish-owned plantations in the Caribbean and Virginia).
As Dyer noted, both the English and the Scots began to identify themselves as sharing a similar racial identity, as ‘white’ — in distinction to the people they chose to define as ‘black’, who they were enslaving and exploiting.
To put this as simply as I can, the idea of race — the ideology of racialising people, in particular black and white — did not only come about through the imbalanced relationship between colonists (British) and enslaved (Africans). It was also created by the process of bringing together the different (‘white’) identities of the colonists in north America.
That is, in particular the collaboration between the English and the Scots in the colonial political economy, in the union between Scotland and England. The United Kingdom, as a colonial and enslaving power, was a significant factor in the creation of a single racial formation of whiteness within this context.
Of course, in retrospect the development of this process was complicated by the separation of the American colonies from British rule. Following the war of independence in the 1770s/80s, an independent, hybrid identity as (white) American emerged based on the premise that ‘we the (white) people’ were separate and distinct from the old country of the British. This identity in itself was born out of the racial identity of whiteness, which had by this time transcended the unionism of England and Scotland.
Thus, with the emergence of the United States in the century after independence, a distinct sense of north American racial white identity emerged. And this whiteness again relied on the racial formation (i.e., the idea) of being different from and superior to enslaved Africans (and the enslaved descendants of Africans) as black.
Of course, the historical processes did not stop there. In the USA, some of the political tensions within the idea of whiteness were literally fought out in the Civil War of the 1860s. And after that, the violence of this racialisation continued into the post-slavery era of Jim Crow, lynchings, and segregation. And it remains today, fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, with mass incarceration, racially-based economic segregation and disadvantage, and of course a heavily racialised politics most clearly evidenced in the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016.
But, the ‘loss’ by the British of America in 1783 was not the end of this racialisation of the British as white. Its legacy on the eastern side of the Atlantic remains strong, particularly after nearly two centuries of British colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.
The local politics of white identity remain a very significant element of British politics, and have been played out in the decisions taken in recent years over Brexit and Scottish separation/independence.
The ‘ancient’ (presumably white) British Isles
One (extreme) example of this is an article by the right-wing commentator Melanie Phillips. In the London Times, in March 2017, Phillips argued for the historical unity of the people of the ‘ancient British Isles’:
‘Britain… is an authentic unitary nation. It didn’t begin with the [1707] union with Scotland but as the British Isles, an island nation…’ (from The Australian)
Such an appeal to the ‘authentic’ unity of an ‘island nation’ is based on what she later rooted in ancient history. That is, the ‘essence of a nation’ such as the British Isles
‘is a shared sense of destiny for a people bound together by loyalty to a communal existential project’ (such as a kingship)
And for Phillips, the people of this nation have their antecedents in the group the Roman writer Tacitus called ‘the Britons’. She quotes Tacitus as saying:
Their religious belief may be traced in the strongly-marked British superstition. The language differs but little; there is the same boldness in challenging danger, and, when it is near, the same timidity in shrinking from it. The Britons, however, exhibit more spirit, as being a people whom a long peace has not yet enervated” and so on.
Thus, she puts this together as ‘an ancient polity known as the British Isles’, which includes Scotland (despite its long standing independence from such a polity), and also the whole island of Ireland, which ‘belonged for far longer than it has been an independent republic’.
My concern here is not so much with the contortions of Phillips’ argument, but instead with the centrality of the invisible ideas of race and whiteness that lie within it.
Phillips’ argument is using a political union (allegiance to a single kingship) as the primary unifier (although she shows no historical evidence of the Britons or British ever having had such. One step down from that, her argument is geographical — in terms of the boundaries of the ‘ancient’ British Isles. This in itself becomes complicated by at one stage arguing that (the northern part of the) island of Ireland is ‘tacked on’ to Britain and thus not part of it, whilst at the same time being part of the unity due to the long history of British colonial rule over the island.
What is not explicitly mentioned, apart from the brief reference to the ‘people’ that I quoted above, is that first and foremost this is a racial formation of British unity.
It does not matter in reality whether the unity is racial, geographical, historical, or political — since all of these are social constructions which are put to use for the exertion of (and resistance to) power.
Thus, the collation between history, descent, unity, and the combination of the separate parts all come together in the Phillips’ implicit idea of this primordial ‘ancient nation’ in racial terms — as a white people who are unified within their differences.
This unification is a contemporary expression by Phillips of British unionism (or British nationalism). But it is in itself part of that historical development of white racial identity during the relatively recent colonial era from the seventeenth century onward.
It is worth briefly noting here the role that the people of Ireland have had in this historical process of the emergence of whiteness an expression of the unification of different British identities. For much of this history there has been an exclusion of the Irish from such an identity, which has been in part political (as a subject people), in part religious (as Catholic), and in part racial — as a ‘race’ apart from the British. In some senses, the white British and the white American racial constructions of the Irish have been a particular marker of the boundaries of white identity.
The ambiguities of this have continued into contemporary British politics (particularly with the ongoing tensions of the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom). In contrast, in north America Irish identity has been largely conflated as a common ‘white’ American identity — along with other ‘white’ European identities, such as the descendants of German, Scandinavian, and Italian immigrants to the US.
Romanticisation of whiteness and unionism
I would like to conclude, though, with a brief mention of a figure who appears to have been at the heart of this emergence of white racial identity from British unionism. This is the Scottish writer, Sir Walter Scott, who in the early nineteenth century was a very significant political and literary proponent of a common British identity that can be marked out by the concept of whiteness.
Scott wrote in particular of the historical emergence of a Scottish identity, emerging from the mists of time, that somehow became folded into the larger narrative of Britishness. Alongside this, he also wrote racialised works on the emergence of an English identity (as a blend of medieval Norman and Saxon differences), and also about the tensions and conflicts between the English and the Arab Muslim world at the time of the crusades.
Together these established a romanticised fictional history of a sense of Brutishness as a common white identity — vis-a-vis the Muslim/Arab world (of colonial Britain’s ‘Orient’) and in the various historical forerunners of the union of the people of Scotland and England. Much of this romanticised ‘fake history’ is the basis of polemics such as Phillips’ idea of the ‘ancient’ British ‘island nation’.
Alongside this, however, is also the significance of Walter Scott in the development of white identities in the United States, particularly in the nineteenth century with the development from the Civil War, to attempted Reconstruction, to the horrors of Jim Crow and lynchings.
The works of Scott (a number of years after his death) fed into the white Southern narrative of the ‘Lost Cause’, the noble traditions of the Confederacy, and in particular into the symbols and ideas of the ultimate white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan. Thus the burning cross emerges directly out of the pages of Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake. And the Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Klansmen, which became adapted as the very influential movie The Birth of a Nation in 1915, was written as an obvious pastiche of Scott’s historical fiction.
The connection between Scott and the development of white Southern racialised identity was noted as far back as Mark Twain in his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi:
Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments … sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
Scott’s racialisation of whiteness and British identity was indeed different from figures such as Dixon and the post-Civil War southern confederates who ushered in the age of Jim Crow and lynch-based terror against African Americans.
But there are, it appears, clear lines of connection between the union of Britain, British colonialism, and the emergence of racial identities of whiteness and blackness that remain a very significant aspect of contemporary American and British societies. These lines of connection are part of the long historical process that has brought us both Donald Trump, Brexit, and the still pressing need for civil rights resistance in groups such as Black Lives Matter.
In short, British unionism is a part of the historical construction of white racialised identity.
Malory Nye is an academic and writer who teaches at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He can be found on Twitter (@malorynye) and on his website, malorynye.com.
He produces two podcasts: Religion Bites and History’s Ink.
Malory Nye is also the author of the books Religion the Basics (2008) and There Shall be an Independent Scotland (2015).
Also by Malory Nye:
Main picture credit: Ku Klux Klan Imperial Kouncil in Shaughnessy, Vancouver, British Columbia, November 1925 by Stuart Thomson. (This image is available from the City of Vancouver Archives under the reference number CVA 99–1496)
