In Our Time - Englishness

Episode Date: April 20, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the characteristics of the English identity. “An Englishman’s word is his bond”, “An Englishman’s home is his castle”. “England is a nation of shopkeepers”, but also “the most exclusive club there is”. To Cecil Rhodes to be an Englishman was to have “won first prize in the lottery of life” but to Jonathan Swift the English were “the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”. Organised, effete, cruel, brave, inventive, determined …Who are the English? And when, how and in what heat was their English identity forged? Britain has now the highest percentage of inter-racial marriages in the world. Does that say as much about the English as their previously branded characteristics of gravity, sense of order, domesticity and propriety? What was Englishness and is it possible now to define it in anything more than the loosest and baggiest terms?With Paul Langford, Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford; Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern History at London Guildhall University; Professor Lola Young Director of the National Museum and Archives of Black History and Culture.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, an Englishman's word is his bond, they say. An Englishman's home is his castle. England is a nation of shopkeepers,

but also the most exclusive club there is. To Cecil Rhodes, to be an Englishman, was to have won the first prize in the lottery of life, but to Jonathan Swift, the English were the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. Organised, effete, cruel, inventive, brave, determined, who are the English, and when, how, and in what heat was their English identity forged? As we approach the First St. George's Day of the new century, I'm joined by Professor Paul Langford, author of Englishness identified manners and character from 1650 to 1850, by Peter

Mandler, Professor of Modern History at London Guildhall University, and by Professor Lurley Young, director of the National Museum and Archives of Black History and Culture. Paul Langford, the starting point for your book is 1650. This is an England that's just killed its king. What did the rest of Europe think of us then? Well, I suppose, to sum it up, the rest of Europe had the lowest possible opinion of the English. This was a nation of fanatics and king-killers, and wildly inconsistent and even barbaric people. And although they had a longer collective memory of the significance of England,

incontinental Europe in 100 years' war and so on, by the mid-17th century, the general assessment was very disparaging indeed. Can you give us some examples of people from other parts of Europe saying the English were like this? Can you bring some sources to bear on these generalisations? Yes, though most of them are. are fairly anonymous and fed back into English literature, so reproduced by the English themselves.

But if we turn to someone like Bishop Bostray, for example, who composed some quite influential sermons about the English, all of them disparaging, the impression that he wanted to get across was that ultimately this was an extremely inconsistent nation, that it was untrustworthy. Perfidious Albion is a much later coinage. It's actually late 18th, early 19th century. but in French commentaries especially it's there very firmly in the middle of the 17th century. I think it has its origin ultimately in the belief not only that the English were unreliable in religious terms but that they had kept chopping and changing.

If they'd been a reformation with logical consequences, that would have been something rather different. What had actually happened was a rather unpredictable series of transformations going right from the mid-16th century up to the mid-17th century and culminating in regicide. Peter Milder is going to be very very important. difficult to get hold of a central core of Englishness, but we're going to try to do that. But presumably what we've been talking about so far, English at that time meant largely

the English upper classes, the English aristocracy. In Michael Howard's phrase, the state hadn't yet been nationalised, was the sort of identity sketched in by Paul Langford applicable to just a few thousand people or were the rest, including even the what were called in the peasantry thrown in. I think as we talk about national identity and national character, we have to keep in mind that the population in question

shifts dramatically in size. And even if we can detect some continuities in the characteristics assigned to the English, who the English are is going to change really quite dramatically between the 17th century and the 18th and then again between the 18th and 19th and the 19th and 20th, growing, I think,

each time. and I think a lot of the material upon which Paul's early assessments are based are drawn from a very small number of people who do the traveling that is necessary to make cross-cultural comparisons. And so the English we're talking about are English aristocrats, English mill. In your view, did their characteristics brand through the population or were they a discrete class? I think to a lot of these 17th century,

century observers, it didn't matter much one way or the other. That is, those were the people they saw, they talked about them naturally as the world. It's got to be recognized that people on the continent especially did not, in fact, think that England had much of an aristocracy, and they didn't think it was an aristocratic country. Indeed, the reason they thought it was barbaric, in a way, was that it was so populist. The English aristocracy was regarded in the 17th and to a considerable extent in the 18th and even early 19th century as quite an oddity. in a Europe that was dominated increasingly by a rather francophile conception of a cosmopolitan aristocracy.

In the 18th century, Lelian, London was the world's biggest commercial centre, so we're moving on now. It had a huge number of peoples from all over the world there, and expressions we use mostly erogatory about it, like the sink of the world. Does the word Englishness at that time, does it escape of being a racial category, do you think? It's very difficult to say, I think,

because the term race, first of all, there's lots of slippages around that. So sometimes race is equal to culture or a little bit different. Sometimes it just means family lineage. Sometimes it means a national entity. So the way in which English is used also has some of those slippages. So people refer to the English race. Whereas in the great chain of being, if you look at how the races were constructed then,

that's not the way in which they were made around this idea of a national entity. So there's lots of different ways, I think, of thinking about the English, what that means and Englishness. But how do you think about the English from the 17 and 18th century? What do you see there, from your perspective, in charge of the black archives and from your studies and what you do? Well, I think what's interesting for me is that looking at those accounts which do survive of people like Ignatius Sancho or Oladau Equiano from the middle of the 18th century, What they were saying about their experience of being black or rather being African slaves or ex-slaves in England, particularly in London, those periods, is very interesting

because they tend not to talk about the English. There's a perception of white people. There's a perception of Europeans. And the term English doesn't seem to be often used. So people write about their experiences in London, for example, like Ignatio Sancho, running a grocer's shop in Westminster, talks about, yes, you know, he's had quite a good life, he's embedded in English society to an extent.

But on the other hand, he notes that walking along the street, well, I wasn't much abused today, as though normally he is. So there's these kind of contradictory experiences of what it means to be black in England at that time. So you've given us, Pauline, for a rather bleak account, the way the English were regarded in 1650, the execution of Charles I, first.

When did that change or did that change? What began to be forged as an English identity when? Well, plainly identity, certainly in the case of what I'm talking about, is a collective project conducted partly by insiders, partly by outsiders. And that's really what interests me mainly. But if I took outsiders as key contributors to that project, I think you'd look at the second quarter of the 18th century

and a very well-known name, that of Voltaire. who in a way created a whole genre of travel literature at the centre of which you would find the English for the next century. And I think that timing is not coincidental because it went with what was beginning to look like the effective establishment of political stability in England. Remember England was thought of as inherently unstable in political terms. But here at last was an emerging stability

that went not with absolute monarchy, but with a parliamentary system, a fairly oligarchical one, but nonetheless a kind of pluralist. politic and with that went the scientific revolution and a growing

continental perception of the intellectual achievements of the English. I think Paul is certainly right to suggest that

political institutions move to center stage and they are going to have a very long-lasting effect on foreigners as well as natives' understanding

of Englishness because it is in the early 18th century that England starts to develop really distinctive qualities and also qualities that other people

think are worthy of imitation. And then of course commercial power begins to pick up as well. One of the most interesting aspects I think of thinking about Englishness in the 18th century is the way in which attributes formerly assigned to the Dutch, on account of their great prosperity and commercial success

in the 17th century, begin to transfer over to the English who are eclipsing the Dutch as masters of the world's trade. I mean, I think one interesting thing about Englishness around that time is this sort of formation in relation to otherness so that

it doesn't sort of spring up, as it were, sort of on its own. It is related to being different to other groups of people, different in relation to other European countries, so that the way in which they conduct themselves abroad is contrasted with the way in which the English see themselves as conducting themselves abroad, particularly in the colonies. But also in relation to those really far out others in Africa or in India or in North America,

who had depicted as being something, absolutely the antithesis of European and particularly English civilization. Paul Langford, how did the fact that the English, and to the same extent, as it were other parts of the Isles, as Norman Davis calls them, how far did the fact that we, as Ireland had come from Scandinavia, we'd come from North Germany, there was the Celts around, and Normans had swept in, and so on, How far was that sort of history taken into account when notions of identity were beginning to be forged?

Very much so, though in a way which might surprise us today a little bit, I think. One's really got a contrast to two completely different notions of the ethnic basis of Englishness. There's one that we're still a bit familiar with today, and indeed in a sense we live under its shadow. It's the Victorian view of Englishness. and that's of a kind of master race of Saxons who swept into Britain exterminated or expelled the Celts and created this masterful breed

that's not the 18th century view and it actually comes quite late on even in the 19th century I would have thought it was mid to late 19th century the 18th century view was of a mongrel nation that as you say was a succession of rather motley invasions tribes from Germany, Vikings,

Normans And then, of course, in the 18th century, you talked about the sewer or the sink of the world. London was the world's biggest commercial centre by the middle of the 18th century, and was extremely cosmopolitan. And on the whole, I think English commentators and those from outside thought that this mongrelism must be connected with the growing record of English achievement. Oddly enough, it was the Celts at that period, who were regarded as being very purebred,

and that was thought to be a disadvantage. and people recommended from London to the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish that they should intermarry more with other people so that they could catch up with progress, as it were. Peter Mandler. Yes, I mean, I just want to make a little protest against the tendency of 18th century historians like Paul Langford to say that everything in 18th century is good and everything in the 19th century is bad because I think although it's true that a more biological understanding of race

became more prevalent in the 19th century, to say that that is the Victorian view. It seems to me to radically oversimplify things. I think one of the strengths of Paul's arguments about the 18th century is that some of these notions of the virtues of mongrelism persist in the 19th century and that in fact there's a line somewhere in Paul's book, which I'm sure he meant very casually, but I think it can't be sustained anything more than casually,

which is that there was as much discussion about race in England as anywhere else in 19th century, but this seems to be absolutely wrong. There was actually less biological understanding of race in 19th century Britain than, say, in France or Germany. And that these, precisely these arguments that Paul is laying out, that the English are a very mixed breed, mixed not only but between Anglo-Saxons and Celts, but when the Normans arrive with new infusions as well.

And that being a mongrel gives you signal advantages, I think these arguments were very prevalent in the 19th century. Lillet, sorry, up to you. But there's different kinds of mixing, and there's different kinds of lines that are drawn, aren't there? And I think that does begin to emerge in the 18th century, and especially with this drive to colonize and slavery.

So that the idea of mixing with different races that are seen to be different species is absolutely not on and in fact leads then into the 19th century ideas about eugenics, which is all about, you know, breeding pure races

and not having that into mixing because that then induces a degeneration of the original race. So there's different kinds, as there are these different kinds of notions of what constitutes a race, so there's different kinds of mixing. No, I agree.

and obviously at the height of racial thinking, no one would argue that it was as easy for blacks and whites to intermingle as Celts and Saxons. Nevertheless, the ideas that Paul lays down in the 18th century do have a legacy in the 19th, and one of those legacies, that legacy is abolition. An abolitionism, which does rest on the assumption that the slave is a man and a brother,

and in some ways is part of the huge melting pot that is humanity. That's true to an extent. But I mean, even some of the foremost abolitionists did not believe in equality as such. But that's not what we're talking about. No, no. It really isn't. We're talking about Englishness. We're trying to get at that.

And this is part of it, but I'd like to try to hold on to some out. Or maybe it isn't worth talking about. I might be interested to think if it is worth talking about for a few minutes. Do you think the idea of Englishness is an imposed notion from historians and people of tidy minds who like to think. that these packages exist and people like myself are all too willing to

ungullable assimilate them and talk about them. Do you think there is anything in it essentially the idea of Englishness? I mean, are we talking about something that we're inventing or are we talking about something that may really be there? It's difficult to make that distinction even because we can say, yes, it's a construct

that people have constructed this idea of what constitutes the national character in relation to the English or any other national group. But by the same token, it has a kind of material reality by which we live so that people think about the English or the Scottish or whatever so that it does have a kind of reality and I think you for me I don't see how you can decouple it from discussions about race and ethnicity because that's absolutely embedded

in those discussions even though it's not always brought out well I think one has got to recognise that it's a very plastic thing it is a construct and I was looking at one rather particular form of construct there are lots on the other hand people act by these things. And Englishness, for example, as a political force is quite a potent 18th century set of views, assumptions about the way the English are, which, particularly in wartime, is used a great deal for propaganda purposes and motivates all kinds of people at all levels of society. Peter. I agree with what Lowell and Paul have said, which is similar. However, I think I would say that the categories of national character are very

slippery and capacious. They're a bit like horoscopes. You can read into them whatever you like. And some of the traits attributed to the English in Paul's book are mutually contradictory, so that the English are at the same time frank and open, and they're

also hypocritical. The English are highly mobile and restless, they're also slothful and immobile. And so I think we have to appreciate that, especially in times of war when national character and national identity are being lifted up as banners to rally large numbers of people,

incompatible people behind them, they take on a sort of looseness, which makes them not so useful for serious social analysis. The notion of Englishness, in terms of its power, achieved an urgency and a potency because of the colossal growth of Britain and England as one of the motors and the principal motor in Britain,

a quite extraordinary growth in about a sort of, century, which, according to some historians, has never been paralleled before or since. And England, Britain, took over an inordinate amount of the world's trade, the world's territory, and so. And so people sought for an explanation. Why did this happen to this tiny, wet, offshore island up there on the left-hand side of Europe, as it were? Did that prompt discussion, Pauline? Did that make people dig and say, oh, that's because we are such and such, which is why we, as they would say, did this? Well, very much so, and I think in the process,

they created the contradictions that Peter has spotted. But I think one's got to start from the important point that whereas in other countries of Europe, commentators would have fastened very much on individual rulers and leaders, Frederick the Great in Prussia, Catherine the Great in Russia and so on. They certainly never accused the English royal family of leading this imperial charge. So they really were looking at basic,

social causes and sometimes they looked at economic factors and at what we would call class structures and so on. But the search for a national character that would help explain this extraordinary energy and success was really quite a conscious project. I think they picked out things that looked plausibly helpful but had been presented unhelpfully in the past. So something like this rather barbaric kind of energy of the 17th century becomes, in the course of the late 18, 30, 19th century, a very focused energy that is concentrating on very specific ends. Hence, the so-called industrial revolution in the view of many people. And just to pick out one other thing that I think was rather crucial, that the English had been thought of by other people as being bad at governing other people

and not very good at governing themselves. The English view in the 17th, early 18th century, was that they were good at governing themselves, but they probably wouldn't be very good at governing anyone else. that's quite different a century later. In the course of the late 18th century, they come to decide that they're really governors of other peoples all over the world. Now, that's partly a response to the practical experience of that,

but it involves reconstructing this national character so that a libertarian people become a rather more orderly people and one that can deal with realities in a very pragmatic way. Peter Mandler, do you think that what constituted the English and the British in the way they'd come about as the people they were, was the key to this extraordinary leap into prosperity, territorial domination, and so on. Are you asking me whether I think it is the English national character

that's responsible for the English rise to greatness? Well, as I say, I'm not sure that historians are the best people to answer this question. I certainly wasn't saying that. I think if we could do that, I think if we could do that, do social psychology of the past in a scientific way, in the way that social psychologists attempt to do social psychology at the present, we might be in a position to answer that question, but I think the materials that historians bring together that Paul brings together are not really

appropriate for answering that question. They are post facto explanations. Yeah, of course. Well, old history is post facto explanation. How would you account for it then? Well, I mean, I think I would also point to social structures and political structures. But they were created presumably by the people we're talking about. But as much as psychological capacities, I mean, I think Paul's point is that there was, and I think he's right, that long before nationalism became an issue in places like France and Germany, that the English were of interest as a nation and the psychological characteristics, the English were of interest, because there was this problem to explain.

And, you know, social science wasn't very well developed then, and people fell back on these sort of rather anecdotal. of what the people were like, and then possibly also on biological explanations, which seemed very simple and neatly packaged. Lola Young, from where you're coming from, would you see that particular and spectacular change in the status of the country? It's economic and it's territorial and it's intellectual and social status, having anything to do with, how would you define it? You know, people always want something.

that's very neat and a sort of linear account of why this happened and how that came to be. And as you say, history is only about sort of post facto sort of analysis of what's gone on. But I have to stick with Paul and Peter on this one and sort of not try and be sort of pushed into a corner on that. Because I don't think in any kind of real meaningful way you can say that, you know, that because the English are deemed to be like this or would deem to be like this, then this happened, this followed on, in constructing a sense of... So what would be your explanation, well, I don't have an explanation. I'm not historian and I wouldn't pretend to be somebody who was, you know, had all of those sort of facts.

But you've studied the impact of Englishness, don't you? Well, you get the impact of what people think about Englishness. And, you know, that is an important distinction. When you say about Englishness and you bring up these sometimes contradictory characteristics, all you're doing is filtering out the bits that don't fit the picture that don't fit the story. No, but actually you're not. You're actually putting forward a very complicated view, which is interesting.

I mean, English are supposed to be very melancholy, and they point to the place of Shakespeare. Many characters go mad or blind or die violently. And yet, English is supposed to be full of optimism and vim. Look at the English novel, full of comedy, in optimism and vim. Look, at Shakespeare, I mean, that's the point you can find anything in Shakespeare. Exactly. To me, I was to say this is only evidence that these very loose, baggy cyclone,

categories not very useful in explaining historical change. Because by the time I come deeper into the 19th century, the English are stodgy, thought of, stodgy, dull, full of proprieties, boring individuals and as much of structures. Increasingly, I think they thought of was that way. It's really the other side of the coin of all this success, isn't it? It involves a kind of repression of various kinds,

repression of that temperamental waywardness of the 17th century. and a growing emphasis on the need for rules, decency, decorum and so on. But Peter mentioned earlier on the demographic context, and it is rather vital, isn't it? We're talking about a country that multiplies in population terms several times over between the mid-17th to mid-19th century, and Britain had the fastest growing rate of population for large parts of that period. The internal sense of destabilisation and of growing social tension is quite marked by the early 19th century.

What do you make of the fact that England was represented to some extent by John Bull? Was that character, what did that represent as far as your concern? Well, he's a caricature of a caricature, really. And it's interesting to reflect on John Bull. For someone of my generation, post-Second World War, I'm very familiar with the image, post-Churchill, the Bulldog breed and all that. When I asked my students about this once a few years ago, none of them had heard of John Bull.

I think John Bull was very specific to some of the things I talk about, the sense of stalwartness, backs to the wall, defensiveness, mainly in adversity and wartime. And John Bull, as a stock character, was actually generated during 18th century wars, and then rejuvenated during some 19th and perhaps even some 20th century wars. Talking about wars love young brings us the fact that we were an imperialistic, we, the British, were imperialistic,

and the English were a strong part of that. and a lot has been said about the British Empire as empires go. I think it's not bad as empires go, but it's a good thing that empires have gone. What do you see the empire saying about Englishness? Well, it incorporates some of the things that Paul was beginning to speak about and Peter too in relation to the idea of a Victorian type of Englishness, if you like, which was to do with this sort of civilising mission,

you know, taking to the outer reaches, the far-flung outposts of empire, all the benefits of English civilisation, culture, politeness, etc, etc. To the extent that, of course, then Indigenous cultures become overlaid with that, not completely obliterated, but certainly overlaid with that.

So that, for me, would be an abiding, impression of what empire meant in cultural terms. Of course, in social and economic terms, then there's a whole other picture and that kind of destabilization of those countries that were colonized. You know, we still see the effects of today. I think Lola has introduced an important word

that has gone strangely neglected in this discussion so far, which is civilization. I think when we think about ways to describe the English and societies in general, we have to remember that there are categories competing with national. categories, and one of those is civilization. And civilization is an incredibly powerful concept by which the English understood what they

were about in the 18th then in the 19th centuries. And it seems to me that what the idea of civilization combines is an idea of what's special about the English with what's not special about the English. That is, civilization is a category, is a set of attitudes and manners, which is potentially accessible to everyone, maybe even perhaps to the other races, the darker races, maybe not, but potentially accessible to very large numbers of people who aren't English, and yet the English are better at it than anyone else. That is, there's a ladder rather than a branching tree, which describes the way that

the world is differentiated, and the English are more rungs up than other people, but it's their responsibility to drag people up behind them. And that seems to me a rather different understanding of the English place in the world than the idea of Englishness, which emphasizes the specialness and exclusivity of the English, with crop qualities that other people can never hope to emulate. Would you agree with that, Paul Langley? Yes, I do, though. It's a question of chicken and egg, isn't it?

I think people got to national character because they were unaware of any conceptual or explanatory structure that would reach helpful conclusions of the sort that Peter was looking for in terms of civilization. And they made the fairly obvious assumption, which is plainly flawed in many ways, that it was the nature of the English that generated their leadership in civilization.

But they weren't a simple mind. as that. They related it to lots of other things about which modern historians would agree, the power of commercialisation, for example. I mean, the 18th century was, in some ways, the first age of globalization, and the British were at the leading edge of that for all kinds of economic, geographical and other reasons. Well, the last part of the programme, I'd like to try to talk about modern English identity. And Lurley Young, when the immigrations to England in the 1940s and 1950s, have you any view from your studies, of any general sense of what was made of the then-existing English character

by those who came into the country? I think it's important to remember that when people came from the Caribbean, from Africa and from the Indian subcontinent during that period, that they already had a view, if you like, of the English and English culture and civilization because of the ways in which the curriculum reflected, you know, the character. and so on and so forth in those countries. So people were quite sort of familiar with the English character, if you like. And I think that there was a sense that this character, this English character,

was about sort of tolerance and humanity and being cultured and civilised and so on and so forth. So I think there was quite a positive view of what constituted Englishness or what people could expect when they came to live in Britain. That view, of course, was... Was that view challenged by the reality? It was deeply challenged by reality, although, again, one has to say that it wasn't a kind of blanket,

totally hostile reception. And I think it was Sam King from Lambeth who said that, you know, one third of the country were sort of indifferent, another third of the country were openly hostile, and another third were really nice, ordinary people. So you do get this kind of mixture of responses to black immigration. Do you think that that immigration in the 40s and 50s, coinciding with the end of empire, had a seismic effect on the way that English people regarded its character?

I don't know the answer to that. I mean, it's plain that among some generations of white people, it was regarded as a major change. My own perception is that among other generations it hasn't had that kind of seismic effect. But if we're, can I raise a question? If we're talking about how you look for or get to something you could call an English identity, assuming that's a good thing to do, which we're not necessarily doing, we're actually talking of identifying with lots of different kinds of things, aren't we actually? You can identify with the institutions with Parliament, the monarchy, the law and so on,

all of which are beginning to look a bit rocky in terms of traditional British and English notions. you can identify very sentimentally with aspects of English life, which may or may not be problematic for immigrants, things like village cricket and thatch cottages and so on. You can try and engage sentimentally with what you believe is the essence of the society you're in or have got into, and that becomes a rather mystical thing, a bit like German Haimat.

Or you can look at the things that my characters in the 18th century were looking at, which is the alleged vices of virtue, of the sorts of people you're among. And that's a particularly sensitive character because it can be used and abused for all sorts of political purposes, as stereotypes have in the 20th century.

It's rather different from some of these other kinds of things. But these things aren't necessarily either or, are they? Because I think all of those things are often wrapped up together and they all kind of comprise a big sort of mythical, slightly fantastical notion of what that world is about. And of course you have all sorts of other identities that have nothing to do with your national... And I think one of the big questions about post-war developments in national identity is, does the nation play the same, have the same prominence in people's menu of identities that it did in previous generations?

What your view on that? I think today very much not. I think here we have to look at globalization and we have to look at the rise of consumer society and we have to look at disillusionment with political institutions, which undercuts precisely that set of nationalization. We have to be careful about blanket saying that blanketly, because when has a country not been quite steadily and healthily and rightly skeptical of its political institutions? Any sort of self-respecting countries got to do that. I mean, I'm just trying to get at the idea of an English identity now. One suggestion that was made by someone is that actually were the English, the British, and now having hyphenated identities. I think that a suggestion was made. I was talking to Jonathan Freeland, who writes for The Guardian.

and he talks himself as Jewish English. I, much lesser thing, would say Cumbrian English, people hyphenating their relationship to England. Do you find that? Yes, I do find that. And, you know, one could say that, you know, the precedent for that is in North America where the hyphenated identity has been around for some time.

And as somebody once said, you know, there's a lot hanging on the hyphen and whether you actually put that in or not. I think the thing around Englishness is particularly interesting at the moment and because, you know, again, there's a slippage between English and British, which has been around for some time, but more recently with devolution, more recently with the kind of thoughts and discussions that have been carried on around being Europe, being part of Europe, the fears about North American imperialism and so on and so forth,

have left sort of England, as it were, in the centre, but without feeling that it has a centre, so that people's relationship to Englishness has not been as fully developed, if you like, as it has been to being Scottish or being Welsh or being Irish. Is that necessarily a bad thing, or is that rather a relaxed adult attitude to take, Paul Lundner? Well, I think in many ways it might be.

One of the most interesting statements that I came across that I quote in my book is associated with Kant and with some other German philosophers. It was that the problem about the English was not that they were arrogant and hostile to other people, but they weren't very interested. They just got on with doing whatever they were doing. And I think it would be very hard to predict from this standpoint

what will happen in these matters, even in the next few years, let alone the coming decades. Yes, I mean, today there may be a massive stock market crash, which will sweep all the pertinences of the globalization away with it. And next year there may well be a major crisis of confidence in the Scottish Parliament. And, well, historians are notoriously poor, prognosticators. I think one of the lessons of the plasticity of national character

and the language national character over the last 300 years is that we'd be fools to try to say which way it's going to head in the next century. Yes, we must be sort of very cautious about predicting, but I suppose, you know, we need to be concerned perhaps in as much as if there's seen to be a vacuum around Englishness. It's about who then might move in to appropriate the idea of Englishness and how that might be then used for more sort of xenophobic But I mean, Melvin's suggestion is that the vacuum is itself a sort of healthy adult state to be in. I think it could be. I think it potentially could be because, to me, you know, the breaking down of those barriers,

the breaking down of those sort of distinct categorizations in a way that sort of reveals the complexity. You know, what does it mean to say that we're English? Can I say I'm English? Who can you say you're English? It's an interesting question because a lot of black people will say they're black British, but they won't necessarily want to say they're black English. However, more black people that I see and read about are beginning to say, well, yes, I am English

and what that means is a redefinition of what it means to be English. But perhaps it's more of a harking back to the older definitions of Englishness which does sort of incorporate what we call mongrelisation. Is there a sense in which the British Empire, one of the things that could be said, that you can talk about it in a thousand ways, one of the senses that did provide a common experience, and it was the British Empire.

So there is a common experience. Some people were terribly abused by it. Some people became quite disgracefully enriched by it or whatever. But it was still a common experience. Does that feature in any way in your thinking? Absolutely. It certainly does. Because, I mean, in a way, for me, using the term black history is a kind of flag of convenience, if you like,

because what it's meant to signal is that we do have this intertwined history that goes back hundreds of years in Britain. Britain and that particularly the experience of empire and colonialism and slavery, painful as it may be, you know, was something that brought us together in lots of different ways, as you say, most of those were kind of on an unequal basis, but nonetheless there has been that continual interchange and sort of mixture, if you like. Would you make of the statistic that's been pulled out and that I trailed in this programme, that Britain has the highest rate of interracial marriages in the world.

What do you reckon to that? Well, first of all, again, it's interesting that people find this something to sort of talk about and with varying degrees of concerns. Again, it's very difficult to sort of say, well, because people are doing this, this is what it means, or this is how things will pan out. So, you know, in terms of making a comment about the meaning of that, I think we'll have to watch and see what that means.

But it's not the first time that it's happened in a way. I mean, going back to the middle of the 18th century in London, there was something like 20,000 black people, most of whom were men. And, you know, a great number of those black men married white women. And so there has been that sort of interracial coming together sexually, again, for hundreds of years. So in one sense, it's nothing. new. Can you compare though? I mean, can you make any value judgments about the difference between this high rate of racial intermarriage in Britain and a very low rate of racial intermarriage among

African Americans in America? Well, I think, and again, several people have asked this question because it's something that's around at the moment. I think it's partly due to the way in which we socialize in this country, which although to a large degree, there is a large amount of separation with many white people never coming across black people in a kind of social context. But in the United States, what seems to happen is that the ghettos are very much more clearly delineated, whereas here there's never been to the same extent

that kind of racialized housing thing. So you get people, you know, black and white living on the same estates, going, traveling together, you know, sometimes socializing together at the same clubs and so on and so forth. saying it's all totally integrated and everybody's all together, but it's much less segregated. So you're more likely to grow up living next door to a black or white person if you're black or white. Paul Langford, from your book was the starting point of this discussion and the idea of Englishness.

From your understanding of Englishness, do you think that we're in the middle of forging yet another sort of Englishness? I know I've been told by Peter that historians are lousy prophets. Well, be a lie's a prophet for a while. I mean, do you think that he is an Englishness being forged, and I'm stressing Englishness, because we would have had a very different discussion where we're talking about Scotland, where we're talking about Wales, where we're talking about islands,

but do you think that an Englishness might be even defined more sharply by the increasing independence of aspect of Scotland and Wales? Well, it's conceivable, but I'd still want to be. want to Hedge, my bets a bit with Peter. Let's face it, the key thing that's changed is that the English habit of assuming that when they talk of Englishness, they mean Britishness and the two has somehow interchangeable. That is no longer wholly tenable. I think that could produce some interesting adjustments of view and attitude within England. On the other hand, I agree with what you said earlier on about attaching too much significance to the parliamentary changes.

After all, in the history of the British Isles, the unitary parliamentary state dominated by the English in the form that it has recently been dominated by it is actually something that started in the early 18th century, really. And there have been many other political changes in that geographical unit over many centuries. I'd be very surprised if the English didn't adapt to that fairly readily and pragmatically without engendering some great new kind of identity

or vision of themselves. Peter Mandler? Yes, well, I think that although the Victorians imagined that the English had defined themselves in relation to their parliament since the dawn of time, since they were Germans in the... The Saxon within Gamotov. Right, since they were sort of in the misty forests of Germany

where they had some kind of primitive parliament. I think that was a view very specific to the 19th century, which was the very brief peak of the phenomenon that Paul was just describing, and it seems not unlikely, but unnecessary for political institutions to be our principal nodes of self-identification in the future. Do you see an English character sort of somehow pushing through? Well, the short answer is no, because I don't sort of think,

I don't believe in this kind of packaged entity called the English character. I think there are a set of characteristics and qualities which people draw out in order to fit a kind of narrative that suits a particular set of stories, and those may be different kinds of narratives. So I think the one thing that you can say is that things will change is always a continual shifting and sometimes those shifts seem like huge ones

but in retrospect they're not so huge. Well, thank you very much, Lely Young, Paul Langford and Peter Mandler and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com. Thank you, UK, forward slash Radio 4.