British as dominant group
The concept of "British as a dominant group" refers to the significant influence that British immigrants, particularly from England, Scotland, and Ireland, had on the cultural, linguistic, and political landscape of North America from the early seventeenth century onward. This influence began with a large influx of English settlers, including indentured servants, who established the foundations of colonial life. By the 1700s, additional Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and Catholic Irish populations began to arrive, yet English customs and the Anglican faith remained predominant.
The British Crown's control over immigration ensured that over 70% of early immigrants were English, leading to the widespread use of the English language and the Anglican Church's established role in daily life across the colonies. Settlement patterns were influenced by geographic and religious divisions, with differing dominant groups in the northern and southern colonies. The introduction of African enslaved people further complicated this dynamic, as they became integral to the Southern economy while also being influenced by British culture.
Despite the eventual American Revolution, which sought to overthrow British rule, the cultural legacy of British settlers persisted in the newly formed United States and Canada. As a result, North America today reflects a society with deep British roots, while also having evolved to embrace contributions from a variety of other immigrant groups.
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British as dominant group
Beginning in the early seventeenth century and continuing unabated for more than three centuries, there was an immense flood of immigrants from Britain to North America. These people determined the linguistics, culture, religion, and politics of North America in ways that are still perceptible.
The 1600s were marked by a wave of English immigrants, including indentured servants, to remote colonies in England’s North American and Caribbean territories. These early arrivals were joined in the 1700s by Scottish and Scotch Irish settlers, then later by Catholic Irish. In the first two centuries of settlement, African enslaved people were introduced to the New World. These later arrivals had an inestimable impact on North America, but certain factors help explain the British stamp.
The dominance of the English, both in the colonies and in Great Britain itself, was one factor. The British Crown exerted control over immigration in the 1600s, with more than 70 percent of immigrants being English. Few Scots, Welsh, or Irish immigrated in the first decades of the colonial period, thus giving the English language and the Anglican Communion (later the Episcopal Church) a commanding position in everyday colonial life. When non-English groups arrived, they were confronted by a generally anglicized society.
The changing dynamics of political and religious thought and the distance across the Atlantic Ocean helped make settlement a regional phenomenon. The land settled by various Britons was isolated and inwardly divided, often along religious lines. For example, in the northern colonies, where there was less arable land and farms were small, dissenters from within the Church of England, known as Puritans, were the dominant group, along with a few Dutch- and German-speaking peoples. In the southern colonies, particularly in the tidewater regions, the traditional Episcopal faith was observed. Other Protestants, such as the Presbyterian Scotch Irish, were pushed to the frontier, where they raised large families to work small farm plots. The dominant Anglo-Americans with the best land settled onto large plantations.
It was in the coastal region, with its link to the Caribbean sugar centers, that African slavery began to take hold in British America. Slavery served as cheap labor that allowed for an almost aristocratic way of life that provided material benefit to the empire. Enslaved people contributed much to the way of life in the South but were in turn anglicized. This continued until the British government made an effort to end the transatlantic (though not domestic) slave trade in the late 1700s.
British domination of North America was seemingly ensured by the British defeat of the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the decline of the Spanish in eastern North America. Yet in fact these events precipitated the end of direct British rule in the colonies. Though the colonies remained divided on many issues, grievances against the British Crown led to the American Revolution. Drawing from the ideas of leading Enlightenment theorists, especially Englishman John Locke, the American revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing British rule and establishing a fledgling republic.
North America did not, however, become less British as a culture. The United States, and later Canada, essentially continued the same patterns of commerce, settlement, and relations with Indigenous peoples begun in the colonial period. Subsequent non-British immigrants to North America thus entered a society defined by British roots but open to contributions from elsewhere.
Bibliography
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Bailyn, Bernard, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. University of North Carolina, 1991.
Black, Jeremy. The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History. Routledge, 2015.
Hopkins, A.G. “The United States after 1783: An American or a British Empire?” Asian Review of World Histories, 2022. Brill, brill.com/view/journals/arwh/10/2/article-p205‗9.xml?language=en. Accessed 31 Oct. 2024.
“British Reforms and Colonial Resistance, 1763-1766.” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/american-revolution-1763-1783/british-reforms-1763-1766/. Accessed 31 Oct. 2024.
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McFarlane, Anthony. The British in the Americas, 1480–1815. Longman, 1994.
Sarson, Steven. British America, 1500–1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire. Hodder, 2005.