38Across the empire’s settler societies, therefore, Britishness was a concept capable of a range of notions of identity. To be sure, we must be careful not to impute to these British identities a strength that they did not in fact possess. Even English-speaking settlers who proclaimed their Britishness often meant different things by it. Neither should we take such proclamations at face value. English-speakers were not always ‘celebrating a fully formed sense of community’; more likely they were ‘advocating the strengthening of an identity that they believed could, if properly cultivated, provide the basis for a pan-imperial unity’.73 Conversely, although skin colour was never in theory a bar to British citizenship, in practice it often proved to be so, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, those non-white groups who sought the protection and privileges provided by that citizenship increasingly found that Britishness was racially defined.
A ‘British’ or an ‘Anglo-’ World?
How far did the British World cast its geographical shadow?74 As an Anglophone cultural community did it embrace the United States? The boundaries of the British World remain decidedly ambiguous – and thus open to interpretation.75 Opinion is divided on the question of when or even whether the United States was lost to the British World. Some see the British World as synonymous with the self-governing dominions. The antipathy towards America that existed in parts of British society, and the isolationist and anti-colonial attitudes of the United States, reinforce their view.76 Others, however, speak of an ‘Anglo- World’, comparing the experiences of the frontier societies of America (and Argentina) to those of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.77 They draw attention to how ‘improving’ ideologies of
73 Potter, News and the British World, p. 5.
74 For some perceptive remarks on this issue, see Bridge and Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the
British World’, p. 10.
75 Buckner and Francis, ‘Introduction’ to Rediscovering the British World, pp. 9–20 (p. 13).
76 For the ways in which British and American attitudes over such fundamental ques-
tions of public policy as race could differ significantly over time, see J. Dickenson,
‘ “Nice Company for Christian Men!” Adela Pankhurst Walsh and the British
Empire’, in Darian-Smith et al., Exploring the British World, pp. 40–59; D. Goodman,
‘Anglophilia and Racial Nationalism in the Debate about US Entry into World War
Two’, in Darian-Smith et al., Exploring the British World, pp. 107–25; and D. Torrance,
‘Race and the Rhodes Scholarship in America and South Africa’, paper given at the
British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July 2004.
77 See especially J. Belich, ‘The Rise of the Angloworld: Settlement in North America
and Australasia, 1784–1918’, in Buckner and Francis, Rediscovering the British World,
pp. 39–58. We are grateful to Professor Belich for supplying us with a copy of his
paper prior to publication.
39Reconfiguring empire: the British World migration, constructed around the rural ideal of the independent yeoman farmer, or its urban counterpart, that of the free British (skilled) labourer, circulated around an English-speaking world, to which the United States very much belonged.78 In a similar vein, studies of the Welsh ‘disapora’ have shown how settlers fashioned their cultural identity through American journals and newspapers – the print-media of Welsh migrants were particularly powerful in the United States.79 The similarity in British-imperial and American-republican racial discourses has also been noted. A study of the Anglo-American settler world argues forcefully that the idea of a ‘white man’s country’, and the exclusionary and discriminatory practices it fostered, were a transnational phenomenon: new ways of thinking about racial identification in these societies did not emerge simply in parallel but were ‘dynamically inter-connected’.80 Britain’s demographic, commercial and financial ties to the United States are interwoven with our study of the British World economy. In the realms of migration (Chapter 3) and investment (Chapter 5) we are struck by the similarities in Anglo-Dominion and Anglo-American relations, while in the realm of trade (Chapter 4) we draw greater lines of differentiation. Of course, this is an over-simplification. Different patterns of migration within and beyond the empire led to different types of migrant experience (see, for example, the analysis of migrant remittance behaviour in Chapter 3). Conversely, notwithstanding the intensifying commercial competition between Britain and America during the late nineteenth century, intermarriage and consumption habits extending across an ‘Anglo-’ (not just a ‘British’) World acted as a counter-weight to the feeling that what had previously been regarded as a friendly offshoot of Britain was now to be viewed with a measure of jealousy and suspicion. One’s perspective on Anglo-Americanism changes according to one’s vantage point, therefore.81 A narrow focus on high society and politics runs the risk of elevating security and trade as the defining
78 Belich, ‘The Rise of the Angloworld’; Hyslop, ‘The British and Australian Leaders
of the South African Labour Movement’; and R. Waterhouse, ‘The Yeoman Ideal
and the Australian Experience’, in Darian-Smith et al., Exploring the British World,
pp. 440–59. See also R. D. Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and
Settlement: Imagining Empire, 1800–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
pp. 37–8, 41, 44.
79 A. Jones and B. Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire, c. 1851–1939: An
Exploration’, JICH 31:2 (2003), 57–81.
80 M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries
and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), pp. 1–12 (quote from p. 5).
81 For the latest, synoptic study, see K. Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain
and America (London: Little Brown Book Company Ltd, 2007).