CONVERSATION BETWEEN BRITISH AND AMERICA PRESIDENT AFTER COVID-19|INDIA UPDATES
Channel: KNOWLEDGE INFO
Date: 2020-08-30

The British people, or Britons, are the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.[32][33][34] British nationality law governs modern 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 Celtic Britons, the indigenous inhabitants of Great Britain and Brittany, whose surviving members are the modern Welsh people, Cornish people, and Bretons.[33] It also refers to citizens of the former British Empire, who settled in the country prior to 1973, and hold neither UK citizenship or nationality.[35]

Though early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain[36][37][38][39][40] in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity.[41] The notion of Britishness and a shared 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.[41][42] The complex history of the formation of the United Kingdom created a "particular sense of nationhood and belonging" in Great Britain and Ireland;[41] Britishness became "superimposed on much older identities", of English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish cultures, whose distinctiveness still resists notions of a homogenised British identity.[43] Because of longstanding ethno-sectarian divisions, British identity in Northern Ireland is controversial, but it is held with strong conviction by Unionists.[44]

Modern Britons are descended mainly from the varied ethnic groups that settled in Great Britain in and before the 11th century: Prehistoric, Brittonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Normans.[45] 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 late Middle Ages, early modern period and beyond.[46][47] 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.[48] This includes the groups black British and Asian British people, which constitute around 10% of the British population.[49]

The British are a diverse, multinational,[50][51] multicultural and multilingual society, with "strong regional accents, expressions and identities".[52][53] The social structure of the United Kingdom has changed radically since the 19th century, with a decline in religious observance, enlargement of the middle class, and increased ethnic diversity, particularly since the 1950s, when citizens of the British Empire were encouraged to immigrate to Britain to work as part of the recovery from World War II. The population of the UK stands at around 66 million,[54] with a 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.