One of the most bizarre characteristics of those who want to maintain what’s left of the liberal international order is their refusal to accept reforms that might head off its destruction. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire rise of what is termed ‘right-wing populism’ by its opponents stems from the unwillingness of mainstream political parties to control immigration. Considering that the continued growth of right-wing populism makes the position of the old liberal consensus ever more precarious, you’d think the latter’s defenders would have decided to compromise, but mostly, they have not.

And they could have; the forms of immigration that voters most strongly object to are also those which have the fewest practical benefits. If mainstream political parties had managed to shut down the fraudulent asylum system, enabled deportation of foreign criminals, and heavily restricted flows from countries where immigrants are particularly likely to be net drains on the state or to cause social problems, this would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populist parties. Yet with the partial exception of Denmark, mainstream parties have been unwilling to do this. Currently, Shabana Mahmood is attempting to save Labour from electoral extinction by adopting aspects of the Danish model, but is being met with vociferous opposition from within her own party.

The reason for this unwillingness is, of course, ideology. It’s entirely obvious that the asylum system functions primarily as a way for young men, and later on their families, to bypass formal immigration routes and achieve settlement in Britain. It’s also obvious that a disproportionate amount of the problems of immigration in general come from just a few parts of the world. Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the second world war takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where ‘asylum seeker’ meant a political dissident from the eastern bloc, does not matter. The system’s advocates seem to live in a world made up entirely of rhetoric where principles take precedence over reality.

I think that this failure to reform is an example of one of the most interesting and important tendencies that you can observe in history: when a system collapses because its ruling elite obstinately stick to an ideology that is no longer fit for purpose. The historical examples below are not exact parallels to the immigration situation; in many cases they show that those who resisted reforms to an outdated system had material as well as ideological reasons to oppose change. But they do share two important aspects with it. Firstly a failure among elites to recognise that the world had changed and that to survive they would need to set aside parts of their ideology. And secondly a failure to set aside special interests for the good of the body politic.

In the early 16th century the Mamluk rulers of Egypt came under attack from the expansionist Ottoman empire. While the Ottoman armies, particularly the elite janissary corps, were enthusiastic adopters of firearms, the Mamluks disdained firearms, viewing them as dishonourable. As David Ayalon describes in Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom (1978), the Mamluks had built their entire identity around the furūsiya knightly code which prioritised horsemanship and the use of the bow, the lance, and the sword. Two sultans in the last decades of Mamluk rule attempted to introduce arquebus infantry units, but this met with fierce opposition from the Mamluk elite. The few units that were produced were poorly paid and manned only by those of low status such as black slaves or foreigners. At the battle of Marj Dabiq in 1516, the Mamluks were defeated by Ottoman arquebuses and artillery, resulting in them losing control of Syria. The next year, as the Ottomans began threatening Cairo, the Mamluks attempted to adopt firearms more seriously, but it was too late, they were defeated again and the sultanate was incorporated into the Ottoman empire.

The aristocracy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth maintained the ‘golden liberty’ of their nobles’ commonwealth from the 16th century until the partitions of the late 18th century. This ensured extensive privileges for themselves, including the liberum veto; the right for any noble to nullify all legislation passed in a sejm parliamentary session. It also ensured a weak, elected monarch under the control of the nobles. This system was justified as protecting against the ‘tyranny’ that existed in centralised states like France, but it also meant that the commonwealth had no central state that could have supported a modern army, making it increasingly vulnerable to encroachments by its centralising neighbours like Sweden and Russia. Every attempt at reform was prevented by the aristocracy, fearful of losing their privileges. The final attempt was the establishment of a modern constitution at the Great Sejm of 1788 to 1792, but this also ultimately failed due to the intervention of the Russian-backed Targowica Confederation of conservative nobles. They wanted to restore their ‘golden liberty’ but ended up aiding in the final dissolution of the commonwealth in 1795.

In the lead-up to the American civil war, the doctrine of states’ rights was frequently employed by the south. The constitution of the Confederacy, in its very first line, replaced “in order to form a more perfect union” with “each state acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government”. During the war, this doctrine seriously impeded the war effort. A famous example was Georgia’s governor Joseph E. Brown’s attempts to stop Georgia’s troops being used out of state; Brown also opposed central conscription, as did governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina. Historian Frank Lawrence Owsley argued that states’ rights were the seeds of death of the confederacy and that its gravestone would have read “Died of State Rights”.

The Moriori of the Chatham Islands, who had branched off from the Māori hundreds of years earlier, were invaded by two Māori tribes from the north island of New Zealand in 1835. Michael King’s 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered describes how over the centuries the Moriori had developed a doctrine of nonviolence, with conflicts being resolved by ritual combat which would stop at the first sight of blood. When the Māori invaded, a council was held among the Moriori:

“The younger men spoke first. They argued that the prohibitions on killing devised by Rongomaiwhenua, Pakehau and Nunuku were intended to prevent a small population of related people destroying themselves in a chain of blood feuds. Such principles did not envisage, nor were they appropriate for, an outright invasion by people who were prepared to kill on a large scale […] The Owenga chiefs Tapata and Torea put the contrary case: the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative.” [...] Finally, because it was the wish of all the elders, the view of Torea prevailed. There would be no killing from the Moriori side. They would return to their villages from Te Awapatiki and offer the New Zealanders peace and friendship and an opportunity to share the resources of Rekohu in partnership, without rancour or resentment [...] What mattered above all else, Torea stressed, was that they did not compromise their mana.” (King 1989: ch. 3)

This resulted in the numerically superior Moriori being massacred by the Maori invaders, and the survivors enslaved, in what is now known as the Moriori genocide. The slavery of the Moriori was ended by the British administration in 1863, but the population never recovered; the last full-blooded Moriori died in 1933.

In 1912 Tibet gained its independence from the collapsing Qing empire. During this period, the 13th Dalai Lama (r. 1895 to 1933), who had previously lived in exile and had become aware of how dangerously far behind his country was falling, attempted reform. He made strenuous efforts to modernise, introducing Western-style education and improving the military and taxation systems. However, these efforts were resisted by the powerful monasteries, who resented the taxes and considered the reforms to be anti-Buddhist, and these efforts foundered in the mid 1920s. In his final testament of 1933, the Dalai Lama warned of the coming destruction of Tibet’s traditions and identity if they could not defend their land. Tibet belatedly started trying to modernise their military in 1949, but was defeated when China invaded in 1951, and was subsequently incorporated into the PRC.

So, will our societies follow the same pattern? I remain optimistic about the chance to enact necessary reforms on immigration and asylum, although I am pessimistic about the ability of mainstream parties to do so. Despite growing calls from, for example, The Economist, to scrap the asylum system, the examples above show that elite groups will often hold to a failing ideology right until the end. In this scenario, as with the Mamluks or the Polish aristocracy, they will be replaced by those not beholden to outdated ideology. If and when this change occurs, I am confident that we will look back with utter astonishment that the current system was allowed to go on for so long, and with contempt for those who enabled it.

Bibliography

Ayalon, D. (1978). Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom. Frank Cass.

Chase, K. (2003). Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Cambridge University Press.

King, M. (1989) Moriori: A People Rediscovered. Penguin Random House.

Related articles

1. ”National identity is just about citizenship”

2. “Nations are modern creations”

3. “Europe was a backwater before colonialism”

4. “Climate change will lead to human extinction”

5. “Your ancestors had kids in their teens”

6. Anti-Essentialism

Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact. Traditionally, these were things like a saying about health or wealth from your grandmother, or an old proverb of forgotten origin. But from the mid 20th century, ideas originating from academia or political activism, transmitted by mass media and mass education, came to be ever more influential in determining mainstream culture. This has given rise to what I have come to think of as modern folk beliefs; simplistic, muddled and often moralistic versions of the original ideas that have become widely held among large segments of society.

I started off this series by titling it ‘folk beliefs of the upper normie’. As the introduction to the first article goes into in more detail, ‘upper normie’ describes someone who is intelligent enough and sufficiently plugged into highbrow discourse to have imbibed its ideas successfully, but who is too conventionally minded to really question them. This term describes those most likely to hold the beliefs described in the first three articles well, but I subsequently broadened the concept to ‘modern folk beliefs’ as I think that the beliefs about climate change and family structure in the more recent articles are not restricted to this group. Also, I was sick of typing ‘upper normie’. The subject of this article though, anti-essentialism, definitely counts as an upper normie folk belief.

So what do I mean by anti-essentialism? I mean the belief that social outcomes are not determined by inherent, essential qualities of people or groups, but by structural forces acting upon them. Most obviously anti-essentialism denies human nature. It denies inherent human tendencies like tribalism, and inherent differences between people and groups. But anti-essentialism goes further than merely denying biological reality; it often denies the existence even of inherent cultural differences, or of any group tendencies that might come close to being a stereotype. Therefore anti-essentialism is a broad concept encompassing both the blank slate view of human nature and social constructionism in general.

You can see the anti-essentialist worldview in many commonly-expressed beliefs. One example is the belief that racism and crime are solely caused by poverty, as Zack Polanski claimed last year (“antagonism towards migrants comes from poverty”). Other examples I’ve encountered frequently over the years include the belief that sex differences are entirely down to societal expectations, that IQ tests only measure how good someone is at doing IQ tests, that race is purely a social construct, and that stereotypes are always false.

Anti-essentialism has a characteristic vernacular; where possible it tries to replace active or descriptive terms with the passive voice, in order to imply some outside force at work. Example terms include ‘minoritised’, ‘racialised’, ‘oppressed’, ‘marginalised’, ‘criminalised’, ‘gendered’, ‘socialised’, ‘unhoused’, ‘disenfranchised’, ‘undocumented’, and ‘assigned (male at birth)’. Readers will have doubtless observed how this language has crept into officialese in the last few years.

A key feature of how anti-essentialism is employed politically is that it is employed selectively. Essentialist definitions of things like whiteness, Englishness, or masculinity come under the most sustained deconstructive efforts, while other, favoured identities are reinforced. An example of this is the phenomenon of asymmetrical multiculturalism; the peak-woke era saw Blackness elevated to an essential characteristic with a capital B, while attacks on small-w whiteness, conceptualised as merely an artificial creation of power, intensified.

While it elevates favoured identities, anti-essentialism also denies them agency. The structural forces that are deemed to determine things only ever seem to emanate from categories like the Western world, or men. Green MP Hannah Spencer gave a good example of this during her by-election campaign, responding to Matt Goodwin’s question about why terror attacks like the Manchester Arena bombing happened, with “because people like you are dividing people”, before swiftly trying to backtrack.

Anti-essentialism lies behind many of the beliefs I’ve discussed in previous articles. The claim that nations and peoples are merely artificial creations driven by the needs of modern states, as I went into in two earlier articles in this series, is an anti-essentialist one. So is the ‘developmentalist view’ of modern family structure that ignores the deep history of how much marriage and family norms differed around the world. So, partly, is the view that Europe was a backwater before colonialism, only developing subsequently due to the benefits it extracted from the rest of the world. The failure of British authorities to recognise the ethnic factor behind grooming gangs was influenced by anti-essentialism, as is the widespread view that cultural differences mean nothing more than food and music.

The purpose of this article is to provide an intellectual history of how anti-essentialism achieved the status of ‘common sense’, beginning with the banishment of biology from social science, and later with the rise of social constructionism and the discrediting of cultural essentialism. My own position on the essentialism question is that it’s true that specific essentialist explanations of human behaviour can be false or oversimplified, such as the strict demarcation of racial difference which characterised some 19th century thought. To this, anti-essentialism can provide a necessary corrective. But any attempt at an accurate assessment of human behaviour requires looking at the biological, the cultural, and the socially constructed together. Rigid anti-essentialist worldviews remove the biological, and often even the cultural, from the equation, and thus fail at the most basic level.

The declining role of biology in social science in the early 20th century

Traditional European thought assigned an important position to essential attributes, be it Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s substances, or Christianity’s Imago Dei. The origins of modern anti-essentialism lie in the enlightenment, and in early liberalism and socialism. John Locke is often cited as an early exponent, describing the human mind as “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1689. Karl Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845) that “[t]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.” John Stuart Mill wrote that “[w]hat is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing” in The Subjection of Women (1869).

However anti-essentialism did not dominate either elite or mass opinion before the 20th century, and by the late 19th century the intellectual climate had become particularly essentialist. Intellectually this climate was strongly influenced by the new Darwinian sciences of heredity, while materially it was influenced by the yawning gap in capabilities and wealth that had opened up between Europeans and North Americans and the rest of the world.

This was the intellectual world that the modern anti-essentialist worldview still defines itself against, citing the original sins of essentialism; scientific racism, eugenics, and IQ determinism. But scholars at the time were not simple biological determinists; American sociologists “more or less viewed race as a contributory but not necessarily as the primary explanation for human behavior” (Degler 1991: 16). As an example, see the views of leading American sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901:

“In a speech in 1901 before an audience of social scientists, Ross noted that there were two ways to account for differences between groups of people. “There is the equality fallacy inherited from the early thought of the last [eighteenth] century, which belittles race differences and has a robust faith in the power of intercourse and school instruction to lift up a backward folk to the level of the best.” The counter-fallacy, which he saw growing up “since Darwin,” “exaggerates the race factor and regards the actual differences of people as hereditary and fixed.” He told his audience that at the present time “the more besetting fallacy” was that of race. For race was “the watchword of the vulgar,” and therefore social scientists ought to be wary of it.” (Degler 1991: 18)

Carl Degler’s book In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (1991) provides a good overview of the rise to dominance of anti-(biological)-essentialism in the American context from the early 20th century onwards. The American context is of course not the only one that matters, but given how the liberal American worldview spread over the entire Western world over the 20th century, it’s probably the most important one.

There are many characters in this story, but Degler identifies Franz Boas as the first and most influential. Boas, most famously in his The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), first established the idea that, contrary to existing mainstream social science, all human differences could be explained by culture, and that no people or culture could be judged as superior to any other (i.e. cultural relativism). In the next few decades, Boas’s ideas would spread widely over social science. Subsequent important figures included Boas’s student Alfred Kroeber, who proclaimed the necessity of the total separation of social science from biology (Degler 1991: 82-84), and Otto Klineberg, who aimed to rid psychology of the idea of race differences (his Race Differences, published in 1935, was dedicated to Boas).

Outside of the race question, there was growing opposition to earlier ideas that delinquency and criminality could be predicted from cognitive measurements, and to some extent of the validity of cognitive measurements at all (Degler 1991: ch. 6). Influential journalist Walter Lippman attacked the idea that IQ tests were meaningful measures of intelligence in a series of articles in 1922. His book Public Opinion of that year was also the first to attack the idea of stereotypes, coining the term in its modern usage.

As the early decades of the 20th century progressed, biology lost its explanatory role within the social sciences. The narrative told today is that this was purely a matter of better science discrediting pseudoscientific theories that had been motivated by racism. But Degler found that there was actually little new scientific work involved in the shift to the new paradigm:

“What the available evidence does seem to show is that ideology or a philosophical belief that the world could be a freer or more just place played a large part in the shift from biology to culture. Science, or at least certain scientific principles or innovative scholarship also played a role in the transformation, but only a limited one. The main impetus came from the wish to establish a social order in which innate and immutable forces of biology played no role in accounting for the behaviour of social groups.” (Degler 1991: viii)

The early 20th century was a time when many people believed strongly in the possibilities of egalitarian political and social change; anything that got in the way of this, including an essentialist view of humanity, had to be discarded. Many of the most influential thinkers were deeply personally committed to attacking any evidence of racial difference. Boas carried out a famous study in 1909 and 1910 intending to prove that rather than being biologically determined, skull shape was actually determined by the environment. On his motivations, Degler writes that “Boas’s professional correspondence similarly reveals that an important motive behind his famous head-measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in keeping America diverse in population and open in opportunities for all.” (Degler 1991: 74). In 2002, anthropologists reanalysed Boas’s data and found no effect of environment on skull shape.

Another important factor was a change in the demographics of American academia. By the 1910s social scientists came increasingly from recent immigrant backgrounds, particularly Jewish, and were thus particularly motivated to counter criticisms of immigrant groups found in contemporary works like Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race or Carl Brigham’s Study of American Intelligence (Degler 1991: 200-201).

Therefore even before the rise of Nazism and the second world war, often cited as being what turned the West away from essentialist thinking, anti-essentialism was in the process of taking over. Nazi racial and social thinking did, however, harden taboos against essentialism, and provided even greater impetus to its opponents. This was most obvious in relation to race, for example see the UNESCO statements on race of the early 1950s, but was not limited to this. The postwar decades saw anti-essentialism moving beyond biology to a broader denial of the validity of the idea of essential attributes at all. This development is a huge topic but I’ll provide a few examples in the section below.

Broadening the scope of anti-essentialism after the second world war

An early example of this broadening was the attack on the idea of stereotypes, which, as I mentioned above, had first been attacked in the 1920s by Lippmann. During and after the war, a research team led by ex-Frankfurt school theorist Theodor Adorno produced The Authoritarian Personality (1950). This work was the culmination of a project to counter anti-semitism and fascism, and had a huge impact on social science in subsequent years, designating a whole swathe of character traits as pathological. One of the personality dimensions on the The F (Fascism) scale which they produced was the tendency to hold stereotypes. In this, and in Lippmann’s earlier writing, we can see the origins of the thought-terminating “that’s just a stereotype” response when someone identifies a pattern about a group. Though as more recent work like that of Lee Jussim shows, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology.

In criminology and psychology, Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1961) argued that madness was a construction of the age of reason, not an innate characteristic. He continued his approach in Discipline and Punish (1975) arguing that the idea of criminality was historically constructed through power relations. American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s Outsiders (1963) argued that ‘deviance’ was not something inherent but a ‘label’ that society gave to certain behaviour. You can see in works like these the origins of beliefs that crime can be explained entirely by social conditions, as well as the opposition to institutionalisation of the mentally ill even when they pose violent risks to others.

The specific term ‘social construction’ was popularised by The Social Construction of Reality (1966), written by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who argued that human behaviour is structured by the roles that we are socialised into. You often hear this idea in common ‘vulgar anti-essentialist’ statements about things like sex differences only existing because we are socialised into them.

In feminist theory, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, arguing that female nature is not natural but imposed by society; as she wrote “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. The sex/gender distinction was reinforced in later works like Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society (1972). Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), went further, arguing that both sex and gender are socially constructed, and that the category of women itself was a problematic one, that could be ‘denaturalised’ by, for example, a drag show (Butler 1991: 175).

By the 1970s, the term ‘essentialism’ was used in academic debate to identify that which should be opposed. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) argued that European orientalists “adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study” (Said 1978: 97). He claimed that European conceptions of the middle east were constructions intending to depict it as exotic and irrational in order to justify colonialism. This is the origin of the contemporary squeamishness about ‘exoticising’ non-Western cultures, even when identifying genuine cultural differences or performing valuable academic work. Actual orientalists, for example, did things like deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics and excavating the ruins of Ur; more significant ultimately than exotic literature or paintings.

Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class (1991) argued that the idea that Western countries had particular cultures defined by being things like individualistic or enterprising was ‘cultural racism’, little different from the old biological racism (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 24-26). Ideas like this are widespread today; one consequence of the denial of Western cultural particularism is the idea that it is wrong to take cultural differences into account when determining immigration policy.

By the 1990s then, if not earlier, anti-essentialist ideas had become dominant across much of social science and the humanities and in mainstream media and education, prescribing the bounds of acceptable opinion. Thus they had also become dominant in the minds of people who grew up in this period, creating anti-essentialism as a modern folk belief.

Strategic essentialism

The tendency to explain everything in terms of power relations, social construction, and language caused a problem for those making anti-essentialist arguments. This was that anti-essentialism deconstructed the identity of the groups that they wanted to elevate. Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall, for example, deconstructed an essentialist view of Caribbean identity in his Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1990). Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, published in the 1970s and 80s, argued that the category of homosexual was constructed, while deconstructing ideas of gender and sex was a major focus of much feminist theory. If all these identities were made up, on what basis could activists try and raise their status?

This problem was solved by strategic essentialism, an idea most associated with postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak. This justified mobilisation on the basis of an artificial, essential identity, like blackness, in order to overcome oppression. Activists, of course, do not usually require a coherent intellectual framework in order to be hypocritical, but strategic essentialism provided one when it was needed. Examples of strategic essentialism in practice include the attacks on whiteness and the elevation of blackness that we saw particularly in 2020, asymmetrical multiculturalism, and the oddly essentialist feature of trans ideology that you can have an essential gender identity that exists in the wrong body.

Pushbacks to anti-essentialism

Over the second half of the 20th century there were several attempts to challenge anti-essentialism, but none managed to overturn it. E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, aiming to integrate evolutionary biology into the study of social behaviour of animals, and more controversially, of humans. This met with a hostile reception from sociologists and from some politically radical biologists, most famously from Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, and social science remained anti-essentialist. A rare exception was the field of evolutionary psychology; important works included Donald Symons’ The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby’s The Adapted Mind (1992), but evolutionary psychology never became integrated into social science as a whole.

When he was writing around 1990, Carl Degler thought that he was observing the beginnings of a return to using biology in the social sciences (Degler 1991: 327). Ten years later, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002) was a bestselling full-frontal attack on the ‘standard social science model’ and social constructionism, in which he looked forward to the future integration of fields like neuroscience and behavioural genetics into the social sciences. However, as Ed West noted in two articles in 2022, the blank slate remained stronger than ever 20 years after its publication.

The resilience of anti-essentialism is not really that surprising considering the social concerns of anti-essentialist academics and activists. They recognise that giving any ground at all made their project of social transformation more difficult, and that while a liberal, high-decoupler like Pinker might be able to maintain his commitment to liberal egalitarianism while also accepting biological reality, this is less likely for the bulk of the population.

The internet, however, may have dealt a more serious blow to anti-essentialism by removing its gatekeepers, particularly in recent years. When I first started to seriously question the essentialist worldview in the 2010s, there wasn’t really much information out there that genuinely challenged it. Steve Sailer, Razib Khan, and Ed West were some of the few exceptions, Today there is much more available, and anecdotally, younger right-wingers are far less likely to hold to the anti-essentialist liberalism of their older counterparts. Much of this content available today is intellectually and morally questionable, but then so is the anti-essentialist mainstream, which simply fails to describe the reality that people live in. Much manosphere content, for example, while often wrong about the specifics, at least begins from the correct premise that men and women are inherently different in their approach to love and sex.

Academia remains anti-essentialist, though with some exceptions. Lee Jussim’s work shows that “stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology”. Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World (2020) describes the deep history of Western traits like individualism and the nuclear family. Garrett Jones’s The Culture Transplant (2022) shows how cultural differences persist in new environments.

In politics, the Trump administration, in putting forward a more essential view of American identity, represents a significant shift; Christopher Caldwell interprets last year’s US National Security Strategy as arguing that “we have arrived at the end of the politics of the blank slate”. In Britain too there has been a revival of the idea that Britishness means something more essential than a thin adherence to ‘British values’, and a growing recognition that immigrants are not just an undifferentiated mass that can be molded successfully by the institutions of the state.

Looking ahead, one possible future is that the shift towards using LLMs to answer questions re-homogenises opinion towards a centrist, anti-essentialist consensus. But I think it’s unlikely that this could recreate the old world quite as it was; there is simply too much information out there and too many ways to get it. And as we recede further away from ‘The Age of Hitler’ that defined postwar morality, the power of that taboo on essentialism will continue to fade.

Bibliography

Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Cornell University Press.

Balibar, E, Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Verso.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.

Degler, C. (1991). In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. Oxford University Press.

Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Penguin Books.

Jones, G. (2022). The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left. Stanford University Press.

Lippmann, W. (1921). Public Opinion. Macmillan.

Lissak, R. S. (1989). Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890-1919. University of Chicago Press.

Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin Books.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Penguin Books.

Related articles:

Reading it brought home to me how rare it is to see high-quality social scientific investigation into the consequences of Britain’s experiment with mass, unselective immigration. We are only now really coming to terms with the reality of the grooming gangs, perhaps better termed mass rape and abuse gangs, and it is clear that a large contributor to how they were – and likely still are – allowed to operate with relative impunity was an aversion to truly appreciating what was going on from an ethnic perspective.

The ethnic component to the grooming gangs

Speaking simplistically we could divide incidents of rape into two categories, ‘intra-community’ and ‘extra-community’. The ‘intra-community’ type is individual men committing a crime that they would expect to be punished for, by their community, if it was discovered. The second is that which takes place between communities, i.e. what invading armies have done throughout history, from the rape and pillage of medieval warfare, to more modern examples like the rape of Berlin in 1945, the mass rape by Pakistani soldiers during the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971, or contemporary atrocities in Sudan. This type is committed by a group, to a group, and is more normalised by its perpetrators, who have little expectation of punishment by their own group.

The reason that the left in Britain failed to grasp, or deliberately misunderstood, the true nature of the grooming gangs is that they tried to interpret them purely as examples of the first category, when to a significant extent they are examples of the second. When talking about causes, efforts are made to keep focus on comfortable home-turf topics like classism, the underfunding of public services, and generalised male violence and misogyny. These things were undoubtedly important: it’s clear from reading the accounts that both the police and social workers tended to view the girls as problem children who there was no point in helping, as they had made their own choices to end up where they were.

You could also go some way to explain the fact that the perpetrators were predominantly Pakistani, and the victims white English, on the grounds that social groups in the affected towns tended to cluster by ethnicity, and that vulnerable girls living in chaotic situations tended to be English. Additionally you could point to the fact that a good number of those convicted were already involved in serious crime and were thus not exactly representative members of their community.

However, it’s also true that the crimes had many characteristics of ‘extra-community’ rape. Many of those convicted were ordinary men working as takeaway owners and taxi drivers, and this profile is likely more characteristic of the more numerous, peripheral perpetrators who abused girls when given the opportunity by the core members but who were not directly involved in controlling and pimping. Going by the many accounts of victims being trafficked around the country and being abused by hundreds of ‘Asian men’, these perpetrators, most of whom escaped justice, must number in the thousands. Another aspect of ‘extra-community rape’ was the common pattern of a girl initially being raped by one or two men, who would then call a group of others to come and join them to continue the abuse.

Most explicitly, you can see in many accounts how the girls’ whiteness was clearly relevant in their abuse. A victim in Rotherham was called a “white slag” and a “white cunt” as she was beaten, while another one in the town was told “that is what white girls were for.” Another said her abusers “spoke about ‘white girls’ as people they could use, saying they needed to keep Pakistani girls ‘pure’”. Another Rotherham victim was called a “white bitch” and that Asian women did not perform oral sex as it was against their religion. A victim in Keighley was called a “little white slag”, one in Rochdale was also called a “white slag” as she was punched in the face, while a victim in Oxford was told to recruit more girls, who also had to be white.

The anthropological context

The reason I found Alison Shaw’s book so illuminating is that it relays many examples in the population she was studying of an attitude that it is natural for men to take sexual advantage of women who are outside, uncovered, and unprotected by male relatives, and that if this happens, it is the woman’s fault. Holding these attitudes is not the same thing as actually committing rape, but it’s hard to avoid noticing how closely they fit with the accounts of how the grooming gangs operated and what the men thought of the girls they were abusing.

One mosque committee member used this image to explain the ideals of purdah:

“If you have something valuable, you keep it safe. If you have a diamond you lock it in a case. You don’t leave it for anyone to take. A woman is like a diamond. She is precious. You should keep her inside the four walls of your house. She should look after the house and children, and you look after her. Inside the house, she is in charge. My place is outside”.

For many people across the generations, the experience of living in Britain has reinforced aspects of the traditional view of the relationship between men and women. This is because images of women in the west provide constant reminders of the contrasting Islamic ideal. A corollary of the idea that a woman should be protected is that a woman who is ‘outside’, among men, unprotected, is ‘free for anyone to take’. Western women in particular appear to break all the rules of purdah. ‘They are regarded as sexually promiscuous, moving freely from one man to another, behaving and dressing in order to provoke men. A woman out alone is in effect ‘asking’ for sexual relations with a man. Rape, young and older men have insisted, is always the woman’s fault, because it is the ‘natural’ result of a woman dressing provocatively and being out alone. In this view, western women are simultaneously exciting and despised for having no sense of shame and being ‘used by more than one man; like prostitutes’. As the man quoted above put it:

“Women are exploited in English society. They are like toys for men to play with. They are cheap. Women are out on the streets, in shops, on the television. They work like slaves for a pittance in factories, in shops and as cleaners. There’s no respect for them.”

His wife then showed me what she thought of English women by pulling her shalwar tight across her buttocks, loosening her hair and swaying her hips, in imitation of how an English woman attracts a man.” (p. 167).

The role of protective male relatives is key: it was their potential objection to sexual activity which mattered most. One man, in response to her asking him why it was not acceptable for a female relative of his to date, but it was acceptable for him to date English girls, said:

“[T]hat’s different. The difference is, English people don’t care. The girls don’t mind; you tell them you can’t marry them, you’re just passing your time, and they don’t bother. They’re just passing their time too. If their brothers or fathers got angry, we would understand, but they don’t bother. Mostly, they are not even living in the same place. How can you respect men like that? They just say it’s the girl’s choice, it’s her life, and that’s what the girls say too.” (p. 173)

Shaw’s book is generally quite unflinching about the negative aspects of what she sees, but I did notice one difference between the original 1988 and revised 2000 edition that shows that she too may be shying away from reporting some of the most controversial statements. I don’t have the original edition, but this site reproduces some excerpts. In it we have a pretty clear statement from a recently arrived Pakistani man that rape of unprotected women is to be expected from ‘real men’:

“Many Pakistanis hold a low opinion of western social and sexual mores and particularly of the position of women in western society. English women are seen to break all the rules governing sexual morality. The western system, it is thought, permits free sexual relations and allows, even encourages, women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. One Pakistani man who had recently arrived in England, commented on seeing a number of female University students sunbathing that the male undergraduates who were passing by could not be real men or else they would have thrown themselves on the women. Pakistani women often cite Britain’s high divorce rate and the increasing proportion of illegitimate births as evidence of the low moral standards of the west.” (p. 140)

In the updated edition the inflammatory quote from the Pakistani man has been removed:

“Many Pakistanis hold a low opinion of western social and sexual morality and particularly of the position of women in western society. They consider that the western system permits free sexual relations and even encourages women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. They often cite Britain’s high divorce rate and the increasing proportion of illegitimate births as evidence of the low moral standards of the west.” (p. 266).

I’d encourage people to get the book for themselves. Shaw is by no means hostile to the people she studies, but she is clear-eyed. Aside from the grooming gangs, it provides context on other characteristics of the Pakistani community that are useful to understand its interactions with wider British society. I won’t reproduce those here, but I tweeted about some of them recently. Examples are things like the sex-segregated physical layout of Pakistani houses, and how this was replicated in Britain, how clannish, extended family communities can exploit individualist welfare states, why the biradari social structure makes sense in Pakistan and how it persisted in Britain, and how immigration to Britain was always a community effort. These are all examples of something I have written previously on: our failure to appreciate how particular Western family structure is compared to that which many immigrant groups come from.

The failure of social science

When I was reading the book I kept thinking “this should have been required reading for the police when evidence of the grooming gangs started to become available”. But of course, the opposite was true, as Chris Bayliss notes in his excellent article on this topic (which also has a good background on Mirpur and its moral systems):

“[T]here was effectively zero cultural or anthropological interest in the Asian communities that had settled in England either from academia or from government. This was the era of the Macpherson Report, and memories of intimidation by the National Front were recent, which there was a sense that the police hadn’t done enough to stop”.

A few exceptions notwithstanding, Shaw’s book is, in my experience, not representative of anthropology or sociology in general. Instead, these disciplines hold that structural forces determine things, and they share an unexamined assumption with much left-wing activism that non-white groups cannot really possess any negative characteristics. Thus something like the idea of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ can only ever be a ‘trope’ or narrative that must be challenged. Any genuine understanding of how society functions and how ethnic groups differ from one another is thus prevented, making these disciplines increasingly useless for understanding our society. As I’ve written about before, what social science should really be is systematised ‘noticing’, but it is often nothing more than thinly disguised activism.

If academia is the supply-side, then the demand-side of government is even worse. As Bayliss described in his article, over the last few decades, half-understood anti-racist assumptions have become ingrained in the organs of the British state, and the saga of the grooming gangs has provided many examples of where a frank assessment of what was going on was inhibited by fears about racism and stereotyping Asian men. This squeamishness was well-known to the abusers themselves, who took full advantage of it. A care home manager, interviewed in the 2003 documentary Edge of The City, told the interviewer that the stock answer men waiting outside care homes would give to police was “you would not do this if I was white”. The abusers would tell girls not to tell their parents what was going on as they were “bound to be racist”.

My overwhelming frustration with all this is that a huge amount of harm could have been prevented had our society not gone down this bizarre path of refusing to notice any patterns that would paint a non-white group in a negative light. Examples are not limited to grooming gangs. Yesterday it was revealed that triple-killer Valdo Calocane had been released after “the team of professionals considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention”, while it was revealed in an inquiry in 2020 that a security guard did not approach the Manchester arena bomber before his attack in 2017 for fear of being racist. There are many more examples, see my article on ‘the war on noticing’ for them.

Political figures have recently started saying that the era of mass migration is coming to an end. But to deal with the situation this era has produced, these sorts of wilful, harmful denials of reality need to end too.

Related articles

Like many people, I’ve had to update my view of AI capabilities over the last few months. Before late 2025, while I had been using LLMs increasingly (mostly Claude for coding, and ChatGPT and Gemini for basic research) I felt that they couldn’t really be trusted to do more than spit out something plausible-sounding, which might or might not actually work, or be true. In the last few months though, things have changed. Claude frequently gets code right the first time, and when it doesn’t, it’s able to correct its mistakes after a few iterations. Using ChatGPT or Gemini for information produces far fewer hallucinations – I still see them sometimes but it’s now at the stage where I generally feel I can trust their output.

Responses to Matt Shumer’s recent viral Something Big is Happening post ranged from enthusiastic agreement to scorning it for being an obvious hype-marketing ploy. The thing is, it is a hype-marketing ploy, but it is also substantially true. ‘LLMs are just stochastic parrots’ may have been persuasive in 2024 but it sounds absurd to someone who’s used Claude or Codex to do software engineering work in 2026. Whether or not we are in an AI-driven stock market bubble is irrelevant: as with the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, its bursting would do little to head off the progress of the technology. Some make an analogy to the smoke and mirrors, grift-filled cryptomania of 2020-2022, saying AI is just the same. But this is just surface level pattern matching without any understanding of the fundamentals. Yes, people hyped crypto in these years just as they are hyping AI now, but no one looking at the actual technology could think that AI is mostly just hype as crypto was.

I share the view that AI is the most important technology humanity has ever developed. But while I find it incredibly impressive, I don’t feel good about AI – at best it evokes ‘wow that’s useful’ and at worst it evokes the prospect of complete human disempowerment, or worse. And I am hardly alone – has there ever been a technological advance that has made people as sad as AI has, even including its creators? Sam Altman tweeted recently that he “felt a little useless and it was sad” when using Codex, while Dario Amodei continually warns about the existential dangers of what he is building.

For all AI’s current achievement and future promise, where we are now doesn’t really feel like the technological future we were expecting. I think that this is because that vision of the future is still determined by the 20th-century idea of progress, of things like fast cars and space travel. AI is unlike anything else we’ve ever invented, but if we are looking for an analogy, it would be something like cotton spinning.

The 20th-century idea of progress

The 20th century produced a highly appealing form of progress that is still with us today. The most exciting aspect was a ‘bigger, faster, stronger’ vision where humans were empowered to continually go faster and further than ever before. Faster and more powerful cars, bullet trains and supersonic planes, nuclear power, space rockets and the moon landings. A complement to this was the automation of physical drudgery, with the spread of things like vacuum cleaner, washing machine, dishwasher, gas and electric oven, and microwave.

‘Bigger, faster, stronger’ stagnated from the 1970s and 80s. Cars stopped getting faster and lost the space-age styling they had had, at least in the US, in the 1960s. Airliners topped out at a cruising speed of around 550 mph, while Concorde, over twice as fast, remained a niche service and was retired in 2003. High-speed rail technology, despite its recent spread in China, has not changed substantially since it became widespread in Japan and France in the 1980s. Culturally the ideal of speed has receded. As a child I remember the Thrust series of jet-powered cars that held the land speed record being a big deal; the record has not been broken since 1997. The airspeed record has stayed unchanged since 1976, set by the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. The world’s most nuclear-reliant country, France, built its power infrastructure in the 1980s; since then Italy and Germany have phased out their own nuclear power network, and Taiwan is soon to follow. Appliances that automate physical drudgery have also not seen much change since the 1970s, except perhaps industrial robots.

Even in China, a place that lacks the regulatory constraints that have made grand infrastructural improvements more difficult in Western countries, the achievement is mostly one of building at speed and scale, rather than pushing the envelope. Electric cars are one partial exception that make it feel genuinely futuristic, as I previously wrote about, but these are a 100-year-old technology, revived in the service of energy independence and the environment. This of course may change now that China has reached the technological frontier, but we haven’t seen it yet.

There are many reasons behind this stagnation which I won’t go into detail about here. One cause is increasing regulation and risk aversion in Western countries. Another is the end of cheap oil after 1974. There is also the fact that the key technologies driving the age of speed were the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, and the rocket engine, which started to hit diminishing returns in the decades after WW2.

This technological stagnation led to a decades-long hangover of disappointment; many people weren’t willing to let the 20th-century vision of the future go. J. Storrs Hall asked “Where’s my flying car”, while Peter Thiel complained “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Personally I think the idea of post 1970s technological stagnation is overblown. Computing and the internet clearly were transformational, while medical advances, which are even more unsung, have been life-saving and life-changing. Cancer survival rates have hugely improved since the 1970s, and various hugely life limiting conditions such as cystic fibrosis can now effectively be cured, or at least managed.

However, these changes didn’t feel as transformational as previous ones because they didn’t fit the ‘bigger, faster, stronger’ paradigm that people were expecting. While the internet was a bigger, faster, stronger information and communications system than came before, you couldn’t feel that on an emotional level like you could when pushing the speed limit on a new motorway or watching the rumble and fire of a space launch.

The special emotional pull of 20th-century progress is, incidentally, the reason why I think that Elon Musk was, until he started getting involved in politics, so widely admired. Musk kept the flame of 20th-century technological progress alive with space rockets and cars, two of its most emblematic examples. While he clearly does have a genuine interest in these areas, I also think it’s important that Musk, with his talent for publicity and marketing, knew that that’s what would get people excited. However, even his efforts are perhaps more innovative in a 21st century way than a 20th century one. Teslas have great acceleration, but the electric drivetrain enabling this is a 100-year-old technology that lost out to petrol engines at the time. Instead, it’s self-driving technology that is truly new. And while SpaceX’s reusable rockets are genuinely incredible, using them for Mars colonisation was always just a marketing ploy. The major economic incentive for cheaper space launches is to put more satellites in space, so that ultimately you can scroll TikTok even when on flights, cruise ships, or while climbing Everest.

There have been increasing efforts over the last decade to try and get us back on track to 20th-century progress. Some examples are the philosophy of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build, the renewed push for nuclear power, YIMBYism and the Abundance movement. In the physical world, there are startups developing new supersonic jets and nuclear fusion. These efforts have had some success, but clearly we have not yet revived the dynamic of the 1960s: in the West, the regulatory state remains restrictive.

Automated cotton spinning is real technological progress

AI feels in line with the type of technological progress since the 1980s, i.e. software and communications. While people paint visions of the acceleration in more physical, 20th-century sorts of progress that AI will enable, these effects have not been seen yet. My perception is that AI does not feel wondrous except to those who want to ‘build’ in the, for now, relatively narrow way that it enables. Personally, I am fully aware of the astonishing nature of the technology, but even so I have to consciously think about how it is a machine doing all this stuff, otherwise I forget and take it all for granted.

Most people don’t think about AI much at all, even if they have started to heavily rely on it. Others worry mostly about its impact on their white-collar jobs, or feel that AI is automating the parts of their life that they want to do, like creating art or writing, and not those they do not, such as cleaning or laundry.

I think the idea of the 20th-century idea of progress was an anomaly. Many of the most impressive examples of this were not actually all that economically impactful, such as Concorde or the Apollo program. I love high speed rail, but many lines do not make economic sense, as China is finding out today. Even the ‘physical drudgery’ automating appliances of the 20th century were unlike what AI is doing today, as they automated only the lowest skilled and least desirable forms of human labour.

The most transformational technological progress in the past was actually much closer to what AI is doing now. This involved automating things that skilled workers could already do, enabling them to be done far faster and more cheaply. Automated cotton spinning and weaving, the wonder industries of the first industrial revolution, worked like this. Early cotton mills certainly attracted a lot of interested observers, but they hardly evoked the quasi-spiritual wonder of seeing a Saturn V rocket taking off. And there were more people, like hand spinners and weavers, violently opposed to them than there were industrialists and their supporters that supported them.

Nevertheless, automated cotton production, and the subsequent automation of other handicrafts, utterly transformed society, by replacing skilled labour and making its output a commodity, making manufactured goods cheaply available to everyone. Initially, automated cotton spinning increased demand for handloom weavers due to all the cheap yarn available, but ultimately weaving was automated too. For now, AI is increasing the productivity of software engineers, without making them redundant, though as with the handloom weavers, I don’t expect this ‘centaur model’ of human-AI collaboration to last very long, at least in its current form. Even with the current level of technology, it’s easy to see how much it could achieve on its own once it’s fully integrated into the software engineering lifecycle.

All that is to say, AI is further proof that the 20th-century, Star Trek future is not really what technological progress is. Technological progress has no necessary connection at all with human empowerment, it just enables us, in Peter Thiel’s words, to do more with less, or perhaps going forward, for more to be done with less. It’s going to be a disconcerting next few years.

Related articles:

1. ”National identity is just about citizenship”

2. “Nations are modern creations”

3. “Europe was a backwater before colonialism”

4. “Climate change will lead to human extinction”

5. “Your ancestors had kids in their teens”

6. Anti-Essentialism

At various points over the years I’ve observed people in Britain and the West in general failing to grasp how much marriage and family structure varied across the world throughout history. These misunderstandings are seldom stated explicitly, and likely not held fully consciously, but you can detect it via throwaway comments. “Girls used to be married off and have kids in their teens” is one example. References to “the Taliban’s medieval attitude to women” is another, or “they are 500 years behind”. Or in response to some way women are oppressed somewhere else in the world, “what about how women were treated here in the Victorian era?”

If I were to make this view of history more explicit it would be something like:

People everywhere used to live in a uniform, static, and gender unequal ‘traditional past’, but modernity has and will continue to transform these societies in the direction of freedom and gender egalitarianism.

This viewpoint does describe a real trend – clearly, gender relations and family structure have been transformed globally over the last few hundred years. Most places in the world are more liberal and gender egalitarian today than they were in 1800, and on the whole there is a correlation between these changes and being more politically and economically modern. However, the broad trend leads people to miss the immense variation that existed historically across the world before the global transformation began.

This article will go into these differences in more depth, and will investigate the origins of the misconceptions. First I’ll provide a brief overview of the differences here, to be expanded on in the next section. The age at which girls married ranged from early teens in India, mid teens in the Arab world, late teens in China, to mid twenties in parts of northwestern Europe. Choice of marriage partner was to a significant extent up to the couple in northwestern Europe, but arranged elsewhere, ideally with a first cousin in the Muslim world or South India, but with non-kin elsewhere in India and in China. Once married the couple might live in a newly established nuclear household in parts of northwestern Europe, with the husband’s parents in China, or in a joint extended family household in India. Lines of descent among the nobility were traced both through the male and female lines in Europe, but only through the male one in much of the rest of the world. Aristocratic women might live their lives secluded from unrelated men in the Muslim world and India, or socialise in mixed-sex environments as in European courts.

The previous modern folk beliefs that I’ve written about had quite clear and recent intellectual origins, and are generally employed by a particular type of person (the upper normie of some of the previous articles) to bolster a certain political viewpoint. The misconceptions about historical family structures though are more nebulous, and older; as we will see, having their origins in social theories developed as far back as the eighteenth century. They are also less tied to one side of the political spectrum. The left is disinclined to believe in any history that would cast the Western world as progressive compared to the non-Western one. And a certain segment of the right, in promoting things like tight extended families and teenage brides, seem to be envisaging some sort of generalised trad-life that owes more to premodern India than it does to the history of their own countries.

How much things really differed across the world historically

This is far too vast of a topic to comprehensively cover here, so below I’ll just describe the most relevant differences as I see them, looking mostly at Europe, India, China and the Muslim world, as these were the largest and most prominent civilisations. For deeper reading on these topics, see the works in the bibliography, particularly Emmanuel Todd’s The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, Alan Macfarlane’s Marriage and Love in England: 1300 - 1840, and Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World. See also Alice Evans’s substack The Great Gender Divergence.

Age at marriage, cousin marriage, and extended versus nuclear families

In much of the world, girls were married in their early teens, and they would leave their own family to join their husband’s extended one, living together in one household (patrilocality). A well-known example of this is the traditional Indian joint family which was the dominant Indian family structure until the 1990s (Chadda and Deb 2013). Here, parents, their married sons, and the sons’ wives and children all lived in the same household, making up a collective economic unit1. Girls were married no later than puberty: the average female age at first marriage in India was thirteen in the early 20th century, with their husbands being in their late teens (Bhagat 2015). Once married, the girl would enter into a female household hierarchy with her mother-in-law at the top, then the wife of the eldest son, and then the wives of the younger sons. This system of very early marriage was made possible economically by the fact that there was no expectation that the teenage couple would establish their own household.

Marriages in India were, of course, arranged by the parents. In north India, a marriage partner had to be from the same caste but could not be from the same gotra (lineage), thus cousin marriage was proscribed. In South India however, both cousin marriage and uncle-niece marriage were preferred, and still were as of the 1990s, which saw rates of 47% in Tamil Nadu (Rao et al 2009).

Women in imperial China married later than in India: between sixteen and nineteen from the sixteenth century up until the 1960s. The average age for men was 21 from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries (Lee & Feng 1999: 65 - 72). As in India, the normative family structure was married sons living with their parents as a collective economic unit, with the household head holding absolute authority, (Lee & Feng 1999: 125), although in practice often only the eldest son remained. Marriages in China were also arranged, but as in north India, marriage within the same extended family was forbidden.

In the middle east, marriage was early and endogamous, preferentially between the children of brothers. Edward William Lane, a translator of The Thousand and One Nights who lived in Egypt in the 1820s, wrote that the usual age there for brides was between twelve and sixteen, and a few years older for men. Alexander Russel, who spent fourteen years in Aleppo in the mid 18th century, wrote in his The Natural History of Aleppo that the usual age of marriage for a girl was between fourteen and seventeen, but sometimes as early as twelve or thirteen.

Cousin marriage, specifically between the children of brothers, was preferred because the ties of brotherhood were more important than the marital bond. As Lane wrote:

“It is very common among the Arabs of Egypt and of other countries, but less so in Cairo than in other parts of Egypt, for a man to marry his first cousin. In this case, the husband and wife continue to call each other ‘cousin’ because the tie of blood is indissoluble; but that of matrimony very precarious”.

Similarly, in One Thousand and One Nights, you will repeatedly encounter this form of marriage held up as the respectable ideal (Todd 1985: 21). In the account of a merchant’s love for his wife it translates to “he loved her excessively, since she was the daughter of his paternal uncle”.

This ‘fathers brothers daughter’ (FBD) form of marriage, and the clan-based society that results, was characteristic of the Arab and Muslim worlds and remains so to this day. See Alice Evan’s Cousin Marriage and Islam for more on this2.

Europe, or at least western Europe, had a distinct marriage pattern, described most famously by the Hajnal line. One characteristic difference from elsewhere was that marriage took place later. For women in France between the 16th and 18th century it averaged between 21 and 27 (Bardet 2001), in southern Italy between the 16th and 18th century 22 ½, and in late 18th century Spain 23. In Britain it was even older, never younger than 24 for women from the 16th century onwards, except for in the baby boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. The earliest age I’ve found in Europe is from a study of Tuscany in the 15th century, which found that it averaged 19 for women, with a modal age of 16, and an average age of 28 for men (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985: 205). The late marriage pattern is thus not universal across Europe, but it seems predominant, generally with the higher ages in the north west.

Cousin marriage was officially forbidden in Europe, a result of the long crusade by the church going back to the second half of the first millenium (see Henrich 2020). This was largely successful, although never completely: royals continued to practice it to cement family alliances, and protestantism relaxed the prohibitions.

Compared to today, families still held significant control over marriage partners, but this was counteracted by the relatively late ages at marriage and the fact that the church promoted marriage as a contract between the couple, not their families. The requirement for a mutual ‘I do’ in the marriage ceremony embodies this (Henrich 2020: 166). In northwest Europe in particular the consent of the couple was an essential element of marriage, and the marriage system was largely directed and managed by the young people themselves (Thornton 2005: 54). The idea of consent was not unique to Europe: Islamic jurisprudence also promoted the importance of mutual consent in the marriage ceremony, but this was counteracted by early age at marriage and the ‘father’s brother’s daughter’ cousin marriage norm.

Household structure in Europe mostly ranged from nuclear, as in England at least since the end of the high medieval period (see Macfarlane 1986), to the stem family, common in Germany, where the eldest son continues to live with his parents. In some parts of Europe, as in the Tuscan study I mentioned above, extended households defined by a patrilinear group were common, as in Asia, and the expectation was that married sons would continue to live under their father’s roof (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985: 290). This communitarian family structure though seems to have been quite rare in Europe aside from in the east. See Todd’s The Explanation of Ideology for more on family structure in Europe and elsewhere.

Monogamy, polygamy, and patrilinear vs bilateral descent

Until European marriage norms started to spread around the world in the 20th century, polygyny of some kind was the most common type of marriage system. This either took the form of one man being permitted multiple wives, or of him being permitted one wife plus legally recognised concubines. Representative surveys of preindustrial human societies such as the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967) have generally found that between 70% and 85% permitted polygyny. Naturally this does not mean that polygyny was practiced by a majority of the population across the world – the maths of the sex ratio doesn’t permit it. But the differences certainly affected elite practices.

Polygyny was accepted in Hinduism and practised by elite Hindus (and Sikhs). Hindu religious texts like the Manusmriti specify the allowed number of wives per caste and how co-wives should be treated. To take one, relatively recent example, Man Singh II (1912 - 1970), the Maharaja of the princely state of Jaipur until Indian independence in 1948, had three wives, while his predecessor had five and multiple concubines. In imperial China, multiple wives were not permitted but official concubines were (Lee & Feng 1999: 75 - 76). Concubines had a lower status than wives, but they were still officially recognised, and their children could be legitimate heirs.

In the Islamic world, men were permitted up to four wives, while concubinage with enslaved women was common among elites in all the major Muslim empires. Ottoman sultans frequently did not marry at all, and instead produced sons with a variety of concubines, often slaves imported from the Caucasus. Their sons would then fight it out to succeed him on his death. This system persisted right to the end: the last Ottoman Sultan Mehmed VI (ruled 1918 - 1922), was the youngest of 42 siblings and half-siblings born to various concubines of his father. As Henrich goes into in more detail, the Ottoman system was thus an example of an exclusively patrilineal descent model, tracing descent only through the male line (Henrich 2020: 155).

Sub-Saharan Africa seems to have been the most extreme example of a polygynous society, one where a large percentage of women were polygamous wives. To a significant extent it still is, although this is declining: as of 1995, a ‘polygamy belt’ stretched from Senegal to Tanzania, in which it was common for a third of married women to be in polygamous unions. In Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Senegal, more than 60% of married women in 1970 were in polygamous unions, which had dropped to less than 40% in 2000 (Fenske 2015).

The particularly high rates in West Africa may be influenced by the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade which contributed to a sex imbalance by taking more men than women. However, rates in East Africa, from where more female slaves were taken, are still quite high. Some example numbers from survey data between 1990 and 2009 in Dalton and Leung 2014 are 33% of men in polygamous marriages in Senegal, 20% in Nigeria, 16% in Ghana, 16% in Uganda, 18% in Mozambique, and 9% in Kenya.

Christian Europe after about 1100 was the only major civilisation which did not permit polygyny or official concubinage. Unofficial concubinage was, of course, present, but a society’s ideals do have an effect even if not strictly followed, particularly on which heirs count as legitimate.

As Joseph Henrich describes in the ‘WEIRD families’ chapter of The WEIRDest People in the World, the church fought continually to impose the ideal of monogamy. In early Christian Germanic Europe, rulers often had many recognised concubines and fathered legitimate heirs with them, as you can see in the lives of the early Merovingian and Carolingian kings. For example Theuderic, son of founder of the Merovingians Clovis I, whose mother was likely a concubine, became a king after him just as did his sons by his recognised wife.

A last gasp of the old system can be seen in Robert of Normandy successfully naming William (the Bastard) his heir in the 11th century, despite him being his son by his mistress Herleva. Later on in Europe, the church fully imposed the monogamous ideal and something like this was no longer possible, as the struggles of Henry VIII to beget an heir indicate. Rulers, however, did often ‘acknowledge’ their illegitimate children by giving them titles and privileges (such as Charles II did with his various illegitimate children).

Unlike the Ottoman system, the European one was a bilateral descent model, where it mattered both who your father and your mother were for legitimacy. This, together with the requirement for monogamous marriage, and the development of primogeniture, are the reason why in Europe you occasionally got women inheriting the throne if a king had no legitimate sons, such as Isabella of Castille, Elizabeth I of England, or Maria Theresa of Austria3. It’s notable when looking at medieval and early modern history how much more common this was in Europe than Asia, where there were no established rules that permitted female succession. You occasionally got examples of where the rules were broken, generally by the mother or consort of an emperor, such as 7th-century Chinese empress Wu Zetian, but these were far rarer than in Europe.

Other differences: female seclusion, the treatment of widows, divorce, and female infanticide

All premodern societies, including Europe, practised seclusion of women from public life to some extent, especially elite women. But the extent of this seclusion differed quite radically. Bernard Lewis’s The Muslim Discovery of Europe contains various examples of the shock Muslims displayed at European women’s relative lack of seclusion. As one Syrian said of the Crusaders:

“The Franks have no trace of jealousy or feeling for the point of honor. One of them may be walking along with his wife, and he meets another man, and this man takes his wife aside and chats with her privately, while the husband stands apart for her to finish her conversation; and if she takes too long he leaves her alone with her companion and goes away.” (Lewis 2001: 286).

Similarly, India had the purdah system of female seclusion, while, as I’ll expand on later, something similar (terem) existed in Russia prior to Peter the Great’s reforms. China too secluded aristocratic women, with foot binding being a highly physical means of achieving this. Europe lacked this strict sex segregation; while the freedom of women was restricted, royal courts were mixed-sex environments.

Divorce was harder in Europe historically than in most of Asia. The Islamic world permitted divorce, as did imperial China. In these cases it was generally much easier for a man to divorce his wife than the other way around. In imperial China’s dishu system for example, permitted reasons for a man to divorce his wife included her indulging in excessive gossip, suffering from a severe illness, or being unable to bear a son. Today, access to divorce is generally seen as a feminist issue, but when you take into account the asymmetry that existed in premodern divorce practices, things get more complicated.

The treatment of widows differed significantly across the world. The Islamic world that offered them the most autonomy; widowed women re-marrying was an accepted practice. Catholic Europe discouraged it, but protestant Europe encouraged it; both Luther and Calvin supported it in their writing. China strongly discouraged it. India also strongly discouraged it for high-caste women, with the promotion of sati being the ultimate example of what esteemed conduct was for widows. In the Chinese and Indian case, the negativity around widow remarriage was linked to the extended family households: women were expected to stay and care for the dead husband’s parents.

Finally, female infanticide was the primary means of population control in late imperial China, with recorded rates for some years in certain populations reaching 40% of all female births. Male infanticide was practised too, but at lower rates (Lee & Feng 1999: 7). Female infanticide was also common in India, but forbidden in Christian Europe and the Islamic world.

The intellectual history of the misconceptions

Considering all these historical differences, where did the misconception of an undifferentiated ‘traditional past’ come from? Arland Thornton’s 2005 book Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life provides a good explanation. For Thornton, ‘reading history sideways’ (see here for a summary) is the tendency to assume that historical processes are universal and linear and that societies move along them from less to more developed.

Thornton identified the origin of these ideas in the first European writers to write cross-cultural comparisons of world civilisations, starting in the 18th century. They observed that family structure in places like India or China was very different from what they were familiar with, and therefore assumed that their own countries had been like this in the past. This misconception was strengthened once non-European countries started to modernise, as they increasingly adopted European family structures (initially as state policy, and later organically). This made it seem like the adoption of these family structures was simply part of economic modernisation.

These ideas were formalised in the modernisation theory of the 1950s and 1960s, which developed broad models of the demographic transition that accompanied modernisation, which were assumed to apply everywhere. Talcott Parsons, who was highly influential on modernisation theory, saw small nuclear families as the quintessential modern form of an individualist, liberal, democratic, and economically dynamic society.

As a result of all this, the idea that the West had relatively recently gone through the same transformation that the developing world was going through at that time became widespread. Thornton notes that he found it difficult to disabuse his students of the idea of ‘the great family transition’, writing that “this notion is so strongly embedded in American culture” (Thornton 2005: 108).

The first real challenge to the ‘developmental paradigm’ started in the 1960s from scholars associated with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure (Campop), founded in 1964. As this post describes more fully, Peter Laslett, a cofounder of the group, discovered in the 1960s that, contrary to the large patriarchal families he had expected to find in the parish records of 17th century England, families had actually been predominantly small and nuclear. He and others in the group developed these ideas in works such as Household and Family in Past Times (1972). Other authors I’ve drawn upon in this article were also associated with Campop, such as Alan Macfarlane and Emmanuel Todd.

These scholars were conscious at the time that they were correcting widespread misconceptions. Peter Laslett wrote an article in the London Review of Books in 1980 about some of them, in particular, the one that the nuclear family was a modern invention. However, despite all this work, now dating back sixty years, disproving the old developmental paradigm of family structure, my experience is that popular opinion on this subject is still heavily influenced by it, and that people continue to read history sideways.

Becoming modern was becoming Western

Something that I think is also underappreciated is the extent to which countries wishing to modernise deliberately adopted European marriage and family norms. Generally this happened at a top-down, state driven level prior to any significant organic development.

The first state to attempt this was Russia. Peter the Great’s reforms from the end of the 17th century aimed to produce a modern, European style state with a ‘service nobility’ that was dependent on it. His reforms were widely targeted: well-known ones include restructuring the military, taxing beards, and forcing men to replace their robes with trousers, but he also attempted to transform marriage and family life for the elite.

A decree of 1702 mandated the free consent of the bride and groom in marriage, and the minimum age was raised to 17 for women and 20 for men4. Traditionally, a more Asian system of early and arranged marriages had been the norm – foreign visitors to Muscovy in the 16th century noted that girls were married at twelve or thirteen, and boys at fifteen or eighteen (Levin 1989: 95-96)5. Prior to Peter’s reforms, aristocratic women had lived lives of seclusion (referred to by historians as terem), similar to the system of purdah as experienced by women in India. In 1718, because he wanted a European-style court, Peter started to promote mixed-sex assemblies with socialising and dancing, ending the terem system. The impact of these reforms was limited to the aristocracy, but they did substantially succeed in shifting social life in this class from an Asian to a European model.

Other modernising countries followed from the 19th century. Japan ended legal recognition of concubinage between the late 19th and early 20th century (although the end of arranged marriage did not come until the postwar era). The Republic of Turkey’s reforming, Swiss-influenced civil code of 1926 abolished polygamy, and in one of its subsequent revisions it started requiring the explicit consent of both parties to marriage. In China, official concubinage was criminalised in various laws from the 1930s to the 1950s, while the New Marriage Law of 1950 required consent of both parties and allowed officials to reject marriages they deemed to have been forced. In India, polygamy for Hindus was formally abolished with the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, which also required the free consent of both parties.

What you see in these examples is that the adoption of Western marriage and family norms was initially a top-down state driven modernisation effort. Part of this may have been a recognition that large, patriarchal extended families or clans were antithetical to the strong, modern state and dynamic industrial economy that these countries saw in the West and wanted to emulate. But my guess is that to a large extent the modernisers in these countries imported aspects of Western culture simply because they observed that ‘this is what it is to be modern’.

In all cases it took time for the real societies in question to reflect these new norms, but eventually, the experience of modernisation led to their advance in a more organic way, as the increasing power of central states and industrialisation dissolved the context in which patriarchal clans function. Even in a country like Qatar, for example, which never went through the same state enforced Westernisation of marriage norms as other countries did, rates of polygamy are falling.

However, significant differences remain. Cousin marriage remains common in the Muslim world, while polygamy remains widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s telling that unlike in Asia, African countries were less likely to criminalise polygamy as they started to develop, and indeed, Kenya formally legalised polygamy in 2014 – previously it had been illegal under the British-inspired civil code, though permitted in practice. These places are among the least developed in the world, so perhaps the modernisation theorists were right, and the Western family system fits best with a modern economy and society.

However, looking back at the history, the prestige of the West, driven by its power and wealth, clearly played a vital role in the spread of its marriage and family system. As Arland Thornton put it, “Western family ways are not inherently appealing to all, but have their attraction primarily through their connection with health, wealth, power, and progress” (Thornton 2005: 159).

The future of the Western marriage and family system

As the relative prestige of the West falls, and it becomes just one example of a wealthy, modern parts of the world (and in many ways, a poorly run example), will this mean an end to the dominance of the Western marriage and family model? Absent state collapse, I don’t foresee a return to extended family clans, and it’s hard to see any of the old models making a comeback (although Steve Sailer has theory that an alliance of rationalist polyamorous tech workers and immigrant African polygamists could push to legalise polygamous marriage under a banner of anti-racism and ‘love is love’). On the whole, the world is still moving more towards the Western model than away from it.

However, the model has been breaking down for some time within the West itself. Late marriage has increasingly become never-marriage, and nuclear families have, for the bottom part of society, been replaced with a more chaotic system of single mothers often supported substantially by the state. Even the neolocal nuclear household is under threat, as young people struggle to afford properties they could raise a family in. Meanwhile, mass, unselective immigration policies have reintroduced clannish family systems into Western countries for the first time in centuries, exploiting Western societies in appalling ways, such as with the Pakistani grooming gangs in Britain. More recently, the emerging aesthetics of the modern manosphere are that of a post-white Western world, where figures like Andrew Tate promote a distinctly Middle Eastern morality, emphasising male brotherhood and solidarity above all, with women relegated to a neo-harem.

Even more fundamentally, birthrates are now cratering worldwide. While there’s nothing inherently fertility-retarding about the Western family system, clearly there is something about modern society in general that is. The floor is open for a different system that can reproduce itself, as long as it can do this faster than it loses its children to the mainstream. See Eric Kaufmann’s book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? for more on this.

The dangers of not appreciating the deep history of the differences in marriage and family structure

In addition to being factually wrong, I think the failure to appreciate differences in marriage and family structure over history has a malign effect on Western societies. A failure to appreciate the differences in history also tends to mean a failure to appreciate the differences today. Sometimes the whole subject is ignored, while sometimes it’s assumed that a modern environment will quickly and inevitably produce modern structures. There is a widespread lack of appreciation of what cultural differences really mean, not surface level things like food or music, but the structure of social and family life itself. These failures of imagination have contributed to various disasters. They range from the failure of nation-building in post-Taliban Afghanistan, to failing to control chain migration from extended family societies6, to allowing grooming gangs to run unchecked in English towns. I hope that this article goes some way to correcting them.

Bibliography

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Bhagat, R. B. (2015). Do Early Marriages Persist in India?. Paper presented at the National Seminar on the Marriage and Divorce in a Globalised Era: Shifting Concepts and Changing Practices in India, organised by Centre for Culture and Development held on 10-11th April, 2015, Vadodara.

Chadda, R. K., & Deb, K. S. (2013). Indian family systems, collectivistic society and psychotherapy. Indian journal of psychiatry, 55(Suppl 2), S299-S309.

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Darwin, G. H. (1875). Marriages between first cousins in England and their effects. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 38(2), 153-184.

Evans, A. (2023, 1st October). Cousin Marriage and Islam. The Great Gender Divergence.

Fenske, J. (9th Nov 2013). African polygamy: Past and present. Vox EU / Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Fenske, James. (2015) African Polygamy: Past and Present. Journal of Development Economics, 117 . pp. 58-73.

Goody, J. (1996a). Comparing Family Systems in Europe and Asia: Are there Different Sets of Rules?. Population and Development Review, 1-20.

Goody, J. (1996b). The East in the West. Cambridge University Press.

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Laslett, P. (1980). Characteristics of the Western European Family. London Review of Books, Vol. 2 No. 20 · 16 October 1980.

Levin, E. (1989). Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700. Cornell University Press.

Lewis, B. (2001). The Muslim Discovery of Europe. W. W. Norton & Company.

Lee, J. Z., & Feng, W. (1999). One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000. Harvard University Press.

Macfarlane, A. (1986). Marriage and Love in England: 1300 - 1840. Basil Blackwell.

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Rao T. S., Prabhakar A. K., Jagannatha Rao K. S., Sambamurthy K., Asha M. R., Ram D., Nanda A. Relationship between consanguinity and depression in a south Indian population. Indian J Psychiatry. 2009 Jan;51(1):50-2. doi: 10.4103/0019-5545.44906. PMID: 19742204; PMCID: PMC2738415.

Reid, A. (2024, 11th July). What age did people marry in the British past?. The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure blog.

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Scheidel, W. (2009). A peculiar institution? Greco–Roman monogamy in global context. The History of the Family, 14(3), 280-291.

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Todd, E. (1985). The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems. Basil Blackwell.

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Thornton, A. (2005). Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life. The University of Chicago Press.

Wetherall, W. (17th February 2025). Social status laws in Japan, Caste, class, and titles of nobility since 1868.

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The three times I’d visited China previously had all been between 2008 and 2010, and then, even in the major cities, it very much felt like a country that was still in the process of being built, and where the sense of alternative modernity that I noticed this time wasn’t really present. There were no Chinese EVs on the roads and more foreign cars, payments were made in cash rather than with WeChat and Alipay, and there was little high speed rail (I took a night train for the 750 mile journey from Shanghai to Beijing, a journey that can now be done via HSR in four and a half hours). On this visit though the country substantially felt like it had been built, and the way in which this had been achieved made it feel more alien despite it being more modern.

I’ll mostly be drawing on experiences of the mainland – Hong Kong and Macau, naturally, feel different. Additionally, the places we visited are the wealthier parts, so this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive overview of the country as a whole, just some impressions of its cutting edge.

Cities

The cities we went to had clearly had a lot of care and attention put into them to make them pleasant and safe environments. The streets, metros and parks were clean and well cared for, and despite the busy roads, the environment was pretty walkable, with a lot of pedestrian crossings and overpasses. One notable thing was how prevalent public toilets were compared to London, where in my experience, they are more likely to have been converted into underground bars called things like Ladies & Gentlemen or WC Wine & Charcuterie. A small but significant measure of public goods provision.

One of the main things I wanted to see in China was the skyscraper light shows, and I wasn’t disappointed – every city we visited had one, and they were amazing. Pictures don’t do them true justice, so here’s footage of the Shenzhen one, or see this article for more about them – they are indeed a triumph.

Chongqing, additionally, had a saturday night drone show, which was technically incredible, though I think artistically rather lacking. It was though, another good example of being able to see an alternative modernity, in that the things being celebrated, like Chinese cars and the police, showed some very different societal values from London’s New Years Eve one of sport, music, diversity, and cups of tea.

Outside of the city centres, everywhere was somewhere along the scale from, at best, a 21st century ‘gleaming new malls’ environment to, at worst, 20th-century soviet style apartment blocks. Nowhere we went to seemed run down, even in random suburbs or smaller towns – the most common environment was a Drukpa Kunley style basically fine collection of medium sized apartment blocks and malls.

Something many people note about China is the lack of a historic built environment, which we found to be true, even in cities with a long history like Guangzhou. The only exceptions were a small number of historic sites preserved for tourists, or Disneyland-like reconstructions of old neighbourhoods like Chongqing’s Shibati or Guangzhou’s Yongqing Fang. This tendency is not unique to China, there is a historic East Asian tendency to build in wood and to rebuild often, but it’s still odd to be walking around cities in one of the world’s oldest civilisations and seemingly encountering barely any buildings built before 1970. European colonial ones, such as on Shamian island in Guangzhou, are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The city centres have a seemingly bizarre amount of security. You have to get your bag scanned at every metro station and at various public spaces, such as in order to cross the Haixin pedestrian bridge over the river in Guangzhou. Many public places had large concentrations of police, sometimes with military-style vehicles, that gave a sense of a society teetering on the edge of civil conflict, which is odd given the apparently placid nature of the crowds. You could often look down on a crowd of people and see the flashing epaulettes of security guards or police weaving their way among them.

This made me think about what level of increased security I’d actually want in Britain in order to stop petty crime like phone snatching. I would certainly want more than we have, but I don’t think I’d go as far as to require bag scans at every tube station. As far as I can tell, China had three train station stabbing attacks in 2014 that could conceivably have been prevented by these measures, but none since then. More recently there has been a rise in vehicle ramming attacks instead, and we saw a lot of bollards that have supposedly been installed to prevent these. It shows the mimetic nature of these types of crime around the world – it’s not only Islamic terrorism.

The ‘China as authoritarian society’ meme though has its limits; you also see many examples of where policing doesn’t have much effect and things feel quite chaotic. As I’ll talk about more in the next section, public transport has ubiquitous smartphone loudspeaker slop, despite all the signs forbidding it. People seemed to be unable to wait for passengers to get off a metro carriage before getting on themselves, also in violation of the announcements urging them to wait, and in Guangzhou at least, electric scooters were constantly terrorising pedestrians on pavements.

Guangzhou and Shenzhen

The homogeneity and newness of the built environment can make a lot of Chinese cities look pretty physically similar. This definitely applied to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, even though the former is very old and the latter very new. They both seemed, unsurprisingly, very modern and prosperous, with a weird sense of being made up of a kind of aristocracy of young professionals living above a class of older people doing menial jobs.

An exception was the area around Xiaobei station in Guangzhou. This is known as an African/middle eastern district, so much so that the beggars (the only beggars we saw in China, who looked like they might have been Uighurs) addressed us with Salaam Aleikum as they asked for money via QR code. Even here though, Chinese people were still doing most of the jobs, the Africans and middle easterners are there as traders, not workers. Xiaobei is thus more like what diversity would have looked like in a medieval city than a modern Western one.

Chongqing

Chongqing was more interesting physically, with its multilevel urban environment at the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers. This is why it’s recently become Instagram and YouTube-famous, and I half expected the city to be full of Western influencers, but apart from at the influencers’ favourite plaza, this was not the case. In fact, we saw very few non-Chinese, or non East-Asians, in Chongqing or anywhere else, bar Hong Kong or Xiaobei.

Chongqing was the capital during much of the second world war after Japan had conquered the coastal regions, and the museum complex built at the site of Chiang Kai-Shek’s hilltop residence was keen to emphasise that the world’s wartime anti-facist capitals had been Washington, London, Moscow and Chongqing. It’s definitely true that the China theatre of WW2 is pretty unknown in the West, apart perhaps from the rape of Nanking, so it was interesting to learn more about the Japanese land and air campaigns in China. You can see the reason behind the persisting anti-Japanese feeling in China as well as why this is met with incomprehension in the rest of the world. Chinese WW2 history will emphasise the suffering caused by Japanese campaigns there and the bitter resistance, while the rest of the world will remember mainly that Japan was nuked in 1945 and since then has mainly made great cars and anime.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong, of course, felt less Chinese (or at least less PRC Chinese) and more international than the mainland cities, although it still surprised me how Chinese it was. I think I’d subconsciously expected it to have contemporary London’s levels of diversity, when really it was more like London in 1975 (90% Chinese). Still though, the higher levels of English, ability to use credit cards, and lack of an overwhelming police presence made it feel very different to the mainland cities. It’s still a great place though I’d have loved to have visited it in the 1980s when it must have felt truly unique. Now its cityscape, while very impressive, doesn’t seem that different from what you find on the mainland. As with the mainland cities, little of its architectural heritage has been preserved, and colonial era buildings are a rare sight.

Macau

Macau was a bizarre place. We visited on New Year’s day, a public holiday in China, so it was absolutely packed with Chinese tourists taking pictures of each other in hanfu (more about this in the phones section). The city is basically lots of casinos on the seafront, a few old Portuguese buildings, and a lot of somewhat run-down apartment blocks in the city proper. Macau supposedly has a GDP per capita of $76,000, the 8th highest in the world, but you wouldn’t know it from walking around the streets. Presumably the gambling money doesn’t stay locally.

Phones

China is by far the most smartphone-possessed society I’ve ever experienced. The most commonly remarked upon aspect of this is payments, as cards are rarely accepted and the default method is to use the ‘master apps’ of Alipay or WeChat to pay for everything. Cash is still accepted in most places, but it clearly wasn’t the preferred option and I never saw a Chinese person using it. Personally I found the Chinese system less convenient than just using a credit card, even after I’d got used to it, and it was annoying to be made completely dependent on your phone. But it’s certainly interesting as an example of how a society has developed a different payments system, seemingly going straight from cash to phones without cards as an intermediate step. As an aside, one other effect of the decline of cash compared to my previous visits was that it made the figure of Mao loom less large, as his image is present on every denomination of bank note, but is rarely seen elsewhere.

A more negative aspect of phones in China is that it is even worse than Britain for loudspeaker slop on public transport. Every single train and metro carriage had multiple people, from all age groups, blasting out short videos, or carrying out voice note conversations, often with the characteristic slack-jawed scrolling face that characterises the post-2020 world. I’ve heard a theory that China only allows TikTok overseas in order to weaken the West through distraction, while its own domestic version serves educational content. I can say definitively that this is not the case, or if it is the case, it has failed, as based on what I saw, no one has been more one-shotted by short video apps than the Chinese.

The content that people were watching appeared to be the same sort of thing as they watch on TikTok here: celebrities, soft porn, food, face-close-to-the-camera rants, and in one case, an AI generated video of the British royal family, which together with the various Harry Potter themed things we saw, was the only display of our soft power in evidence. The restrictions that do exist seem to be only for under 18s, though on one occasion we saw a little girl, sitting quite happily on the metro without a phone, being offered one by her grandfather, seemingly worried that she didn’t have anything to distract her.

There were frequent signs and announcements telling people not to play sound from their phones, but these were resolutely ignored and I never saw anyone being asked to stop. The CCP can achieve a lot, but they’re clearly powerless against the power of the scroll, a struggle unfortunately made more difficult by the excellent mobile signal everywhere from the metros of every city to most parts of the high speed rail network we travelled on. Britain’s poor mobile signal on public transport does have a few blessings.

Another phone thing in evidence was that every possible photo spot was full of dutiful instagram boyfriends (or whatever the local equivalent is) trying to capture the right shot of their girlfriends, after which it was inspected and redone if necessary. This phenomenon is hardly unknown in other countries, but it seemed especially prevalent in the places we visited in China, and not only in the big tourist spots. Many of the girls were done up in hanfu, which was quite nice to see; it would be a bit like 21 year old girls in Britain taking days out to Regents Park dressed in Georgian era dress. You’d also get the hanfu-attired girlfriends photographing their ordinarily-attired boyfriends, though I think I only saw one man dressed in hanfu himself. I think in general there were more young couples, and fewer large groups of young people, than on the streets of Britain.

Cars

One thing that gave me the alternative modernity vibe particularly strongly was walking next to busy highways in Guangzhou, where most of the cars were domestic, and almost all were electric. This made the sound of the roads oddly quiet, relatively speaking – the noise was from rolling tires, not engines, and when a petrol engine did go past it was a noticeable exception. There were a lot of BYDs, which I was familiar with as they’ve recently been introduced in Britain, but mostly it was brands I’d only read about, such as XPeng, Zeekr or Beijing auto, or never heard of at all, like GAC, Denza, AION or Chery. There were also quite a lot of Toyotas, BMWs, Mercedes and Teslas, but Chinese brands definitely predominated.

It was funny that the petrol engines you did hear always seemed to be from German cars, and you can see the dilemma of the German car manufacturers; they still sell a lot in China, but this is declining, and Chinese brands are increasingly encroaching in Europe and in their overseas markets. There were very few American cars except for Teslas, and very few Korean ones, which I found surprising initially, considering how dominant they have become in Britain in recent years, but apparently sales have been low since 2017 due to boycotts caused by Korea’s deployment of a US missile defence system (THAAD).

We’re still just at the beginning of the Chinese car export boom, and there will be a lot more Chinese cars on the world’s roads over the next ten years. If you look at the website for one of the aforementioned brands, they’re inevitably just about to launch in Britain, or already have.

Trains

Travelling around on the high speed rail network is an amazing and sometimes uncanny experience, where things feel, for the most part, very efficient and also very tightly controlled (we only went on the new high speed rail lines, the older rail lines are probably different). You can only enter the vast, airport style high speed rail stations by scanning your passport (or ID card for Chinese citizens), which also has to be linked to your ticket. In fact, for all intents and purposes, your ID document is your ticket: this is China’s ‘real name verification’ system which is also required in various other cases such as the mobile phone service (or bizarrely, to visit the museum of the Opium War in Humen).

You do get a somewhat authoritarian vibe when you’re required to scan your passport for every single train journey, but the system works, and there were barely any delays. The journey between Guangzhou and Chongqing in particular was an amazing experience, travelling though hundreds of miles of mountain landscapes at nearly 300 km/hr. We didn’t visit any of rural China, but from the train you could see that many people were still engaged in small-scale agriculture. It was weird to travel from a city that felt far more advanced than British ones, to a countryside that seemed far less. China’s alternative modernity is not evenly distributed.

Reportedly the network has been massively overbuilt, with only a minority of lines being profitable, and we saw evidence of this in the cheap tickets, often empty carriages, and high speed rail stations in relatively sparsely populated locations. This may be a negative for the Chinese taxpayer, but it’s great for the traveller. The only real negative on the train network is the inescapable loudspeaker smartphone slop.

Summing up

I don’t think I can really ‘sum up’ without saying something trite. But I don’t think you’ll get an experience like this anywhere else, and I’d recommend it to anyone. This is a good article on tourism in China in general, about the practicalities, where to go etc. Despite, as he writes, the corpus of “I went to China and here are my field notes” articles being both large and tiresome, I hope readers have found this one interesting.

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I certainly found this surprising when I first saw it, considering that the stereotypical white American identifies their ancestry as something like Irish or German, but never English. This also marked a significant change from previous censuses: in the 2000 census German was by far the largest white ancestry (42.8 million), with English fourth (24.5 million) after Irish and African American. The British total would also include Scotch-Irish1 (4.3 million), Scottish (4.9 million), Welsh (1.8 million) and British2 (1.1 million), but at 36.6 million, this was still less than the German total. This widely disseminated map of the 2000 census shows English ancestry predominant only in Utah and parts of New England.

People have offered a few speculative explanations for this change. One is that it is merely a statistical artifact, with the level of English ancestry identification depending on whether the respondents answer ‘American’ or not, as ‘American’ ancestry generally means old stock British origins. Another is that the rise of ancestry DNA tests have disproved family myths about ‘ethnic’ ancestors and shown that their ancestry is actually substantially British. Another is that there is a resurgent racial/Anglo consciousness, or that identifying as ‘not English’ was a boomer fad of the 90s and 2000s.

With the current fight over the resurgent idea of heritage Americans, this is a timely question. This article will look into possible explanations, try and get a better sense of the true level of British ancestry, and go into the history of how the US’s self conception changed from ‘distilled Anglo-Saxons’ to a ‘nation of immigrants’ in the 20th century.

Article subsections

1. British ancestry in the US census over time

2. Genetic studies on US European ancestry

3. What we can tell from US immigration history

4. The transformation of American identity into ‘a nation of immigrants’ in the 20th century

British ancestry in the US census over time

This chart shows ancestries (alone or in combination) from the US census in 19803, 1990, 2000 and 20204. In addition to the original figures, I’ve added all the British ancestries (English, British, Scots-Irish, Scottish, Welsh) together into a ‘Total British’ category, and then added ‘American’ to this to make a ‘Total British and American’ category. (Those who put their ancestry as ‘American’ tend to be of British ancestry). Raw data is here.

There was a large drop in people claiming English and British ancestry in 1990 and 2000, but a return to the 1980 level in 2020. However, if we look at total British and American ancestry, then we see a drop between 1980 and 1990, but subsequently the numbers are pretty stable. I’ll go into more detail on this imminently, but the short explanation is that in 1990 and 2000 English was not offered as an example ancestry on the census form, while in 2020 it was (under a changed ‘race’ box), and thus the ‘statistical artifact’ explanation explains most of the change.

Since 2005, ancestry data has been collected by the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) instead of in the census. This data tells a similar story (source data). English and British ancestry slowly declines from 2005 until 2019, then jumps in 2020. There has also been a sharp rise in overall British ancestry in 2024, though this is driven almost entirely by over a million more people identifying as having Scottish ancestry. I’ve got no idea what the cause of this is, you could speculate that it’s due to Trump’s Scottish ancestry, though there was no comparable rise in 2016, and Irish also saw a big jump.

The changing wording of the census and ACS questions are what has driven apparent rises and falls in ancestry numbers. This Washington Post article (archived version) goes into more detail and includes the exact wording, which I’ve reproduced below.

In the 1980 census, English, together with German, Irish, Italian and various others, was listed as an example ancestry, and as you can see from the first chart above, English ranks highly in responses.

On the 1990 census English was dropped as an example, but German and Irish remained (with German first), and the results reflect this, with a large drop in English, a large rise in German and roughly stable Irish.

In 2000, German and Irish were also dropped, and they then continued to decline as English did. Italian stayed on the list and continued to rise.

Since 2000 the ancestry question has been dropped from the census and transferred to the ACS. However from 2020 both the census and the ACS changed the ‘race’ question, which had previously not allowed any more detail than ‘white’, to include a write-in box for racial ancestry, with the top three example white ancestries being German, Irish and English.

It’s certainly possible that increased ancestry DNA testing or social trends explain some of the increased English ancestry identification in 2020, but clearly the main factor is this changed prompt. However, it is notable that English ancestry seems to be affected more by it being listed as an example than other ancestries are. In 2020, English, German and Irish were all added as example ancestries, having been absent since 1990, but German and Irish saw a much smaller uptick than English did. This would fit with the idea that English ancestry is more latent than others, and people are less likely to identify it unless they are prompted.

So what can we say from this about the real levels of British ancestry in the US population? Going by this data, including American ancestry, around 60 million white Americans have full or partial British ancestry: around 30% of the roughly 190 million non-Hispanic white Americans, or 18% of the total population. This is about 50% higher than German, the next largest ancestry at 40 million. Clearly though these questions of ancestry are highly malleable, so next I’ll look at what genetic and historical studies say about the proportions.

Genetic studies on US European ancestry

Unfortunately the genetic clusters used by most studies are too broad to answer the question. For example this recent paper was identified by Lyman Stone as showing levels of British ancestry of 85% in the US white population. However, as others (and he) subsequently clarified, the ‘British’ cluster here really just means northwestern European, so it doesn’t tell us much.

The only study I’m aware of that does shed more light on the question is the 2015 paper The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States, based on 23andMe data. 23andMe breaks down ancestry into categories including ‘British / Irish’ and ‘French / German’, which is not ideal for isolating British specifically, but is still more useful than other papers I’ve found. Figure S10 in the paper shows the relative proportions of different European ancestries per state, from which we can see that the British/Irish proportion (25% to 40% for most states) is multiple times greater than the French/German one (8% to 16%).

Kasia Bryc, one of the authors of this paper, has made the source data available on her website. I combined it with the non-Hispanic white populations of each state from the 2010 census to arrive at an estimate of the proportion of each ancestry in the US non-Hispanic white population. The results for three of the groups are in the table below (full data here). I’ve included the estimated ancestry numbers based on the 23andMe study numbers, the ACS numbers from that year, and the proportion by which the ACS numbers are greater than the 23andMe numbers.

The resulting numbers from the 23andMe ancestry percentages plus state populations are smaller than the ACS numbers in all cases, and they should not be taken as an accurate guide to total numbers. The total percentages of all ancestry groups only ever add up to around 70% despite all major groups being present, and to take one example, they only result in 4.5 million of Italian ancestry, less than the 5.1 million Italian immigrants to the US over its history. 23andMe customers are also, of course, not a representative sample, though I would not expect significant differences between the European ancestry groups I am interested in here as they have similar income levels.

What is useful is the relative difference between groups. While British/Irish ancestry is 1.2x more prevalent in the ACS than in the genetic data, French/German ancestry is 2x more prevalent, and Italian ancestry is 3.8x as prevalent. I will assume that it is British, rather than Irish, ancestry which is undercounted in the ACS, due to it being a less salient and desirable one. Going by this data then, the census/ACS proportions of only 1.5x British vs the next highest ancestry of German is a significant undercount, and there are likely tens of millions more Americans of British ancestry than show up in the census or ACS data.5

These results fit with the idea that people are more likely to choose more desirable and salient identities. In Mary Waters’ study of the way that Americans chose their ethnicities in 1990, she found that Italian was the most common response to the question, “If you could be a member of any ethnic group you wanted, which one would you choose?”, on the grounds that Italians had a warm family life and excellent food. Italian was also the ancestry most likely to be chosen for children of mixed marriages (Waters 1990: 142-143).

As for the question of whether ancestry tests like this made a different to people’s self conception, it seems plausible, but I haven’t found any studies on it.

What can we tell from US immigration history?

So, genetic data indicates that British ancestry is significantly more prevalent than is reported in census data. What does the demographic and immigration history of the US tell us?

Before the 1830s there had been little non-British immigration to the US, and the population was growing fast almost entirely though natural increase. On the eve of the revolution the white population was 60% English and 80% British (Kaufmann 2004: 13), and in the decades afterwards immigration levels were very low (Kaufmann 2004: 20). The white population more than trebled from 2.2 million to 7.9 million over the forty years from 1780 to 1820 (the fertility rate was 6.3 in 1820). Going by the British percentage in 1776, this would have meant around 6.4 million Americans of British ancestry by 1820. Immigration then began to pick up, though slowly at first: only 750,000 came between 1820 and 1840, (going by the numbers in Dinnerstein 2009) by which time the white population had nearly doubled to 14.2 million, so we could estimate at least 11 million of British ancestry in 1840.

From 1840 until the late 1920s the US saw large amounts of immigration from elsewhere in Europe. The total numbers of European immigrants (from 1820 until 1995) were around 38 million (Dinnerstein 2009), with the largest non-British sources being Germany at 7.1 million, Italy at 5.4 million and Ireland at 4.8 million. However Britain still remained the third largest source, at 5.1 million. (This is quite a good visualisation of total immigrant flows).

Considering the estimated 11 million white Americans of British ancestry in 1840, their high fertility rates, and the subsequent 5.1 million British immigrants, it seems unlikely that ancestry for any other European-descended population today could approach much more than half of the British one. We do have studies finding that immigrant fertility rates were higher than native ones, but the differences largely evened out by the second generation (Hacker et al 2019). I’m not going to attempt the calculations that take into account year of arrival and fertility rates, though I’d be interested in seeing any attempts at this.

The 1920 National Origins immigration formula (Senate Report 81-1515 of 1950, p. 886) estimated British ancestry at 39.2 million (41% of the white population), with German at 15.5 million (16%) and Irish at 10.6 million (11%). This is more in line with the immigration history and the genetic studies than with more recent census data which shows a British descended population of only 1.5x the German numbers. Considering that post-1920 immigrant flows are unlikely to have much effect on the composition of the US white population due to the small numbers relative to the existing population, we can say that this too supports the view that British ancestry is significantly undercounted today.

The transformation of American identity into ‘a nation of immigrants’ in the 20th century

So what’s the explanation for this undercount? One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read is Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, which I’ve referred to several times in this article . It’s quite hard to acquire but he’s made it freely available here. It details how mainstream American self-conception shifted over the 20th century, from one defined by its Anglo-protestant identity to ‘a nation of immigrants’.

When I first read this it made me realise how much my own ideas of what America was (which was certainly, at the time, uncomplicatedly that of ‘a nation of immigrants’) had been formed by the films and TV I’d consumed growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. One I remember in particular was the 1986 children’s cartoon An American Tail. This was a retelling of the Jewish immigrants who had migrated from the Russian empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Jews are represented as mice fleeing the Cossacks (menacing cats), to America, the land where ‘there are no cats, and the streets are paved with cheese’. Re-watching these clips now, all the references are clearly based on the Jewish experience, but this is never explicitly mentioned and, as can be seen by its title, the film is conceived of as a general American narrative. There was also, of course, Disney’s Pocahontas in 1994, though this added to the impression, as it hardly portrayed the English settlers in a very positive light. Probably the most prominent symbol of America in my mind at the time was the Statue of Liberty, which I had understood solely in its recast ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ form rather than its original message of political liberty.

As Kaufmann’s book sets out, until the late 19th century the American self-conception was of an Anglo-protestant people whose political liberties were traced back to the Anglo-Saxons. Only in America had they fully thrown off the Norman yoke and thus become distilled and superior Englishmen. You can see this throughout the pre- and post-revolutionary period, in the 19th century and into the 20th. In 1776 Thomas Jefferson spoke of “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” In 1889 Theodore Roosevelt situated the winning of America’s wars as “a work that began with the conquest of Britain, that entered on its second and wider period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that culminated in the marvelous growth of the United States” (Kaufmann 2004: 17-18).

Immigrants could become American, but this Americanisation process meant adopting Anglo-Saxon identity. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “the representatives of many old-world races are being fused together into a new type”, one that was “shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day” (Kaufmann 2004: 30).

From the last years of the 19th century Anglo-Saxonism began to lose prominence. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis held that the experience of the frontier, not English origins, was central to American identity: “in the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.” (Kaufmann 2004: 51). But Turner was still an assimilationist who worried about the cultural impact of new immigrants: this was a long way from ‘a nation of immigrants’ or the subsequent cosmopolitanism.

From this period onwards various influential activists and intellectuals started constructing an alternative, cosmopolitan vision of American identity, one where Anglo-Saxonism and the settler experience would be banished so that a universal nation could take its place. The late 19th/early 20th century Columbia professor and social reformer Felix Adler sought to recast the mission of Reform Judaism into a universal one whereby eventually all ethnicities, including his own, would dissolve into a universal one (Kaufmann 2004: 91). Jane Addams and others in the settlement movement working to alleviate poverty in immigrant dominated cities, spoke repeatedly of the need to downplay Anglo-Saxonism in favour of a more cosmopolitan standard (Kaufmann 2004: 99). The melting pot term was popularised by Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot (1908), in which the protagonist looks forward to ethnic divisions melting away. Philosopher Horace Kallen attacked Anglo-Saxonism and assimilationism and advocated cultural pluralism in articles such as ‘Democracy Versus the Melting Pot’ (1915).

Prominent early-20th century scholar John Dewey also sought to downplay Anglo-Saxonism but was more skeptical of cultural pluralism. In a letter to Kallen, Dewey expressed his approval of his ‘Melting Pot’ essay. ‘I quite agree with your orchestration idea’, Dewey explained, ‘but upon condition we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously. I never did care for the melting pot metaphor, but genuine assimilation to one another—not to Anglo-saxondom—seems to be essential to an America’ (Fallace 2012).

It was writer Randolph Bourne who most fully articulated what became today’s asymmetrical multiculturalism in his article Transnational America, published in The Atlantic in 1916. Bourne wrote that the time had come to assert a higher ideal than the melting pot, that Anglo Americans should give up their search for a native American culture, and embrace cosmopolitanism, which should be protected: “[w]hat we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.”

These intellectual movements were made up of liberal Anglo-Protestants and the descendants of recent Jewish immigrants. Both groups sought to escape the strictures of their own ethnic backgrounds and were attracted to universalism, trends which Kaufmann describes as expressive individualism and cultural egalitarianism. The Jewish ones also likely additionally resented Anglo-Saxon predominance in particular. A few decades later, the Jewish predominance became more marked with the rise of the group known as the New York Intellectuals, which came to dominate American intellectual life in the mid 20th century.

The early 20th century also saw a rise in cosmopolitan rhetoric from more mainstream Anglo-protestant institutions such as protestant churches, but neither these nor left-wing intellectuals were enough to change a nation’s culture on their own. On the whole, Anglo-Protestantism was still in control, as seen in the passing of the 1924 Immigration Act which intended to maintain America’s ethnic balance, even if it was becoming less predominant in elite circles.

In the 30s and 40s, universalist and cosmopolitan ideals began to be taken up among more mainstream segments of the population. Danish origin historian Marcus Lee Hansen wrote an influential immigrant-centered version of American identity in the late 1930s. In 1943 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie published One World, which became a record-breaking bestseller. He wrote “Our nation is composed of no one race, faith, or cultural heritage … They are linked together by their confidence in our democratic institutions … Minorities are rich assets of a democracy” (Kaufmann 2004: 178).

Meanwhile the increasingly influential New York intellectuals continued to develop progressive ideas into a vision of liberal cosmopolitanism intended to displace the traditional Anglo-American identity. One example was the attack by Marxist critics at Partisan Review (such as Clement Greenberg and latterly Dwight Macdonald) against American art movements like regionalism6 in favour of a radical, European avant-garde tradition.

In the decades during and after the second world war, mainstream American opinion and institutions switched wholesale to the new idea of America’s identity. The immigrant-centered interpretation of the Statue of Liberty and the ‘melting pot’ became standard in school textbooks. In 1952 Truman, attempting to liberalise America’s immigration policy, attacked immigration restrictionism on ethnic grounds as unworthy of American ideals, invoking Emma Lazarus’s ‘huddled masses’ poem as well as the ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ biblical passage (Kaufmann 2004: 183).

The symbolic triumph of this movement was the election of the first Catholic president John F. Kennedy in 1961, who had published, with the ADL, the book A Nation of Immigrants in 1958. You can see in this map that accompanied it the downplaying of British ancestry that continues to this day (see the French in South Carolina and the Swiss in Kentucky).

Subsequently America saw the various civil rights acts, the 1965 immigration act which ended the policy of maintaining America’s historic ethnic identity, and then the whole post 60s cultural transformation towards valorising non-Anglo cultures, the more exotic the better, and towards asymmetrical multiculturalism.

Of course, by the 20th century, America was to a significant extent a nation of immigrants, and the descendants of Irish, German, Jewish etc immigrants would have increasingly entered into elite institutions even had the national culture not become pluralist. But this does not mean that the cultural change itself was inevitable. Many other dominant ethnicities fight to maintain cultural hegemony even in the face of large ethnically different populations, as in Iran, Dubai, Israel, Burma, Estonia or Russia.

This is what explains the sharp drop in Anglo-Protestant identification between 1950 and 1970, as can be seen in this chart from Kaufmann’s book. Considering this was a time of relatively low immigration compared to previous or subsequent periods, this drop can be put at the feet of this cultural transformation. To many people it seems unremarkable that today Western countries valorise the exotic and the marginal, but this valorisation is in fact deeply odd historically speaking, and stems from these early 20th century intellectual trends finding fertile ground in the society of 20th century America and the West more widely.

In conclusion

So to wrap up, the apparent rise in British ancestry in the census and ACS is indeed predominantly a statistical artifact. I would not discount the effect of genetic ancestry testing, or of political changes making heritage Americanism more salient, but I can’t prove them. However more generally, genetic and historical studies indicate that British ancestry in the US population was substantially undercounted both before and after the changes in the census and the ACS. I haven’t come up with numbers for how much in this article, but going by what I’ve found out I’d estimate the true numbers are at least 30% higher than the 60 million British ancestry count from the 2020 census.

So what of the future? A revival of explicit Anglo-Saxonism today is unlikely. I can’t see a return to the America of the 19th century that you can see in an issue of the popular Anglo-Saxonist Century Magazine from the 1890s, dedicating a large amount of column inches to subjects like ‘By the Waters of Chesapeake’, ‘Drowsy Kent’ or ‘A Summer Month in a Welsh Village’. However, the recent prominence of the idea of ‘heritage Americans’ shows that the fight to maintain an American identity that reaches beyond the cosmopolitan and outgroup-biased ‘nation of immigrants’ persists.

Data

Data for charts is here.

Bibliography

Bryc, K. et al. (2015). The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States. The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 96, Issue 1, 37 - 53.

Dinnerstein, L. (2009). Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. Columbia University Press. Appendix.

Fallace, T. (2012). Race, Culture, and Pluralism: The Evolution of Dewey’s Vision for a Democratic Curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(1), 13-35.

Hacker, JD., Roberts, E. (2019). Fertility decline in the United States, 1850-1930: New Evidence from Complete-Count Datasets. Ann Demogr Hist (Paris). 2019 Jun;138(2):143-177.

Kaufmann, E. (2004). The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Harvard University Press.

Lissak, R. S. (1989). Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890-1919. University of Chicago Press.

Senate Report 81-1515 of 1950.

Van Dam, A. (2024, December 6). What’s America’s largest ethnic group, and why did we get it wrong for so long?. The Washington Post. Archive.

Waters, M. C. (1990). Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. University of California Press.

Related Articles

I’ve also turned on paid subscriptions to this substack. All posts will remain free to read for now, but if you feel you have too much money and would like to give some to me, and/or would like to support my writing and enable me to write more frequently, I would hugely appreciate it.

Writing

I’ve written for Unherd today about the ONS’s recent release of statistics that led to lots of catastrophising about the idea that they showed an unprecedented number of Brits emigrating. They don’t show this at all, the real story is the continuing massive inflows of people, particularly from South Asia and Africa, and the asylum problem looming ever larger and growing even more absurd (many now arrive on normal visas, then switch).

I published the latest in the modern folk beliefs series on the idea that climate change will lead to human extinction. I’ve decided to broaden the scope of the series from ‘folk beliefs of the upper normie’ given that the holders of some of these beliefs can’t so easily be fitted into this category. And also because I’ve become sick of typing the words ‘upper normie’.

I’m currently working on two more articles for this series. One will be on the somewhat vaguely held belief many people have that family structures and the position of women were the same everywhere in history — provisional title “modern folk belief: your grandmother had kids in her teens”. The other will be on the idea of of anti-essentialism, i.e. the intellectual trend dominant since the early 20th century associated with the blank slate view of human nature. I also might do a followup to “Europe was a backwater before colonialism” looking at the myth that the West’s wealth today comes from slavery and colonialism.

Books

For the family structures article I’ve been reading various things including Alan Macfarlane’s Marriage and Love in England, Emmanuel Todd’s The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, and Arland Thornton’s Reading History Sideways. And on essentialism, Carl Degler’s In Search of Human Nature. And as for other books…

Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

I re-read this for my book club – it remains a fantastic book and a more clear-eyed guide to startups and venture capital than any other book I’ve encountered, puncturing many of the myths and cargo cult thinking present in the startup world. It’s a bit dated when it comes to China and AI but I think this is forgivable – I’ll probably do a short review soon.

The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700 - 1850 (Joel Mokyr)

I’ve had this book for a while — I bought it last year together with Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective in order to read an ‘ideas’ vs a ‘material’ explanation for the industrial revolution. I only managed to read Allen’s at the time, partly due to the fact that the Mokyr’s is massive at 500 pages long, but after Mokyr’s recent Nobel win, I thought I’d take another look.

I think we’re about five years into a broad-based intellectual shift towards the ‘ideas’ / ‘great men’ explanation vs the ‘material interests’ one for historical events. When I was growing up material interests were what all smart people believed, so it’s been interesting seeing other explanations come back to the fore. These things of course go in cycles of fashion, leading to an overcorrection, and back again.

The Age of Hitler (Alec Ryrie)

I’m reading this for a book club. The idea of Hitler and the Nazis as providing our foundational moral framework is one that has been discussed a lot recently. It seems obviously true to me, and I’m looking forward to reading a proper treatment of it.

Articles

I’ve read a lot of good articles this month but one that stood out was Dan Williams’s Let’s Not Bring Back The Gatekeepers on the social-media enabled end of elite media gatekeeping, and the older linked Richard Hanania one on elites and populism. I don’t agree with all the conclusions of either, but these dynamics have been completely core to politics in all Western countries over the last ten years so it’s always an important topic. Williams is correct that the liberal elites largely have themselves to blame for this. In common with many, I’m continually astonished by how the growth of what they would call ‘the populist right’ was almost entirely avoidable by them had they merely enacted less insane immigration policies, as, for example, Denmark did.

Podcasts

I’ve been enjoying the new ‘Anon and I’ podcast, especially the episodes with Eggroll Shogun on Japan, CJ on British social housing, and Jew and a Half Men on ‘The State of Jews’. A couple of the guests on other episodes appeared to be literally insane, which was also entertaining.

The Works in Progress episode “The economics of the baby bust” with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde was very good — I didn’t expect a discussion on the fertility crisis to make me laugh so much, but it did, as well as providing some incredible statistics such as the fertility rate of Mexico now being lower than non-Hispanic white Americans, at least according to the work Fernández-Villaverde. This is something that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, and I think highbrow discussion of this topic is still mostly restricted to rationalist pronatalists. The mainstream educated classes are still stuck in 20th century fears of overpopulation, or ‘we shouldn’t have kids anyway because the immigrants will replenish us’.

Years ago I read Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? which argued, the future will be dominated by the offspring of the very religious. I would say that in addition to the very religious, it is unusual people of other types who will be the first to escape the fertility crisis. Strange, welfare hacking single mothers as in the case of Thea Jaffe; the very wealthy; and possibly, rationalist pronatalists. All groups who have some immunity to the fertility shredding effects of the modern world whereby everyone can see, via Instagram and TikTok, the sort of urban, consumerist lifestyle one can achieve by eschewing children.

Twitter’s most notable recent current thing – women doing PhDs

I always enjoy watching the rise and fall of Twitter’s current thing over the cycle of a few days to a week. The most notable recent one was Ally Louks mark 2 in the form of Juliet Turner, the PhD biologist who was attacked by various of the most moronic manosphere accounts, and as with Ally Louks, gained general sympathy and a massively increased profile as a result. This time things were even more absurd given that this PhD thesis couldn’t even be conceived of as woke or frivolous, unless you think that any sort of non-directly applicable research is frivolous. Furthermore its subject of The Evolution of Cooperation and Division of Labour in Insects, is one that, at least in theory, is relevant to a right-wing view of the world given its relations to sociobiology. E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, who was attacked in the sociobiology wars in the 70s by people like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin for attempting to integrate biology into the study of human behaviour, did his own PhD on ants.

A similar sort of post you see pop up all the time is some variation on “Men don’t care if you’ve a PhD / girlboss, they’d rather marry a hot waitress who’s sweet and bakes cookies”. While as with most manosphere context, there is a grain of truth here (men aren’t really very attracted to women’s education/career achievement per se), overall it’s a completely false impression of how relationship formation among educated professionals actually happens. Educated professional men care a lot about things that are correlated with educational / career achievement such as intelligence and having interests. These men are, in practice even if not in theory, also incredibly sensitive to class and educational background when choosing a long-term partner. From people I know in my own life for example it’s very common for men to marry someone from a completely different ethnic or cultural background but with a similar educational background. But it’s almost unheard of for them to marry a British woman from a drastically different class/educational background.

I think Cartoons Hate Her’s The Gender Wars are Class Wars remains the best explanation of this dynamic, in that a certain subset of lower class men attracted to this sort of content have no idea how relationships among educated professionals work. A guy whose current dating pool is waitresses thinks “if I became rich and successful, that means I can marry the hottest waitress.” I think another part of the explanation might be that while women are comfortable saying things like “I want an educated man” it sounds a bit embarrassing as a man to say that, when according to manosphere discourse you’re supposed to be laser focused on markers of fertility and cookie-baking ability to the exclusion of everything else.

1. ”National identity is just about citizenship”

2. “Nations are Modern Creations”

3. “Europe was a Backwater Before Colonialism”

4. “Climate change will lead to human extinction”

5. “Your ancestors had kids in their teens”

6. Anti-Essentialism

Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact. In the traditional conception, a folk belief was something like an old saying about health or wealth from your grandmother. But from the mid 20th century, ideas originating from academia or political activist movements, transmitted by mass media and mass education, came to be ever more influential in determining mainstream culture, replacing older sources such as the church. This process gave rise to what I have come to think of as modern folk beliefs: somewhat muddled, simplistic and often moralistic versions of these original ideas, widely held among certain segments of society. Today, due to the internet and social media, top-down cultural transmission is not the force it once was. However these sorts of modern folk beliefs remain prevalent, and some find even more fertile ground in the new media environment.

In my previous articles in this series I used the term ‘upper normie’ to describe those most likely to hold these folk beliefs. This describes someone who is intelligent enough and sufficiently plugged into highbrow discourse to have imbibed its ideas successfully, but who remains, despite their own self-conception, too conventionally minded to really question them. For this article though I’ve dispensed with this formulation, as going by the survey data, climate catastrophism is a much broader phenomenon.

“Climate change will lead to human extinction”

Climate change activism has been around since the 1980s but became particularly prominent in the 2000s and 2010s, peaking around 2019. That year Michael Shellenberger noted that the commentary on the issue had become increasingly apocalyptic. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that young people like her believed the world was going to end in twelve years, while Greta Thunberg claimed that by 2030 we will set off a chain reaction that will lead to the end of civilisation. Joe Biden called it an “existential threat to humanity” in his final presidential debate of 2020, as did Kamala Harris. In Britain, these were the years of Extinction Rebellion: two of their activists, interviewed by Sky News in October 2019, claimed that ‘our children’s future is disappearing’ and that ‘billions of people are going to die’. As we’ll come to later, mainstream climate science never remotely supported these sorts of claims, though this had little effect on the activists.

This sort of rhetoric had a profound effect on a large swathe of the population, with many coming to believe that climate change would lead to the end of civilisation, or even of humanity itself, within their own lifetimes. A 2019 survey found that 54% of British adults thought that climate change threatened human extinction. In a 2021 survey over half of young people across the world reported that they thought humanity was doomed due to climate change. And in 2023 nearly two thirds of young Americans endorsed the statement ‘humanity is doomed’ and over half said climate change made them hesitant to have children. Readers will doubtless have encountered claims such as “well we’ll all be dead in thirty years anyway” or “I couldn’t bring children into a world that’s burning up from climate change”.

Over the last few years climate change has declined in salience, overshadowed by more immediately compelling movements like BLM in 2020 and the years after, and more recently by Gaza. Greta Thunberg herself diluted her focus from late 2023, adopting the keffiyeh in addition to her trademark woolly hat.

At the same time, the more rational class of activist has increasingly been calling for a proper contextualisation of the risks. 80,000 Hours, the Effective Altruist organisation which aims to guide people towards careers working on the world’s most pressing problems, published a ‘problem profile’ in 2022 asserting that while ‘climate change is going to significantly and negatively impact the world’, it is less pressing than higher priority areas like power seeking AI systems or factory farming. Climate change is currently only number nine on their list of the most pressing world problems. Similarly, a few weeks ago Bill Gates published an article saying that while climate change is serious, the doomsday view is incorrect, and that instead of focusing primarily on lowering emissions we should aim to improve human welfare more broadly.

This relative downgrading of concern is somewhat reflected in the public opinion survey data. The percentage of British people who are ‘very concerned’ about climate change dropped from 44% in autumn 2021 to 35% in spring 2025. There is no survey data from the last couple of years on the ‘humanity is doomed’ question, but going by the still-high level of concern in the surveys, and personal observations, I think it’s likely that substantial numbers still hold this view.

I went through a similar process of downgrading as I learnt more about climate change. Growing up during the years when concern about climate change was rising, I naturally became concerned by the catastrophic predictions and the calls for urgent action. I never had much respect for the ‘hard deniers’ who argued either that warming wasn’t happening or that it wasn’t caused by increased CO₂ emissions, and while there were figures around, such as Bjørn Lomborg, who argued for a position closer to the ‘rational activists’ I mentioned above, I felt them to be too politicised. So I started to read some of the official IPCC assessment reports that were generally held up as the consensus view of mainstream science. As I read these I began to realise that there was a vast discrepancy between what the reports said and the doomsday view that I heard all around me. What they said was that climate change was a serious issue that would cause various negative impacts, but nothing in them supported the idea of humanity’s imminent doom.

80,000 Hours’ position, or Bill Gates’s one, provide good overviews of the real risk from climate change. For a more comprehensive account, see this report on existential risks from climate change (shorter summaries here or here). Or indeed, just read the official IPCC reports. The key points are that the projected level of warming is likely to be harmful but far from existential, and that average living standards will probably continue to rise due to continued economic growth – despite climate change. Furthermore, the efforts to tackle climate change enacted so far have had a meaningful effect on projected future warming, making the worst outcomes even less likely. You could try and steelman the 2010s’ activists and say that the projections were more dire in these years than they are now, but the ‘extinction’ scenario was never one that mainstream science predicted.

How did climate activism stray so far from climate science?

So how did climate catastrophism become such an entrenched belief among a large swathe of society, when even mainstream climate science doesn’t support it? As far as the supply side goes, i.e. the deliberate strategies of the activists, the simplest explanation is that they recognised, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, that the science is dry and remote, and the most negative predicted consequences of climate change are uncertain and relatively far in the future. In many cases they are also outweighed by economic development. They knew therefore that simply relaying the science was insufficient to get people motivated enough to support political action. Thus we get, as in the Extinction Rebellion clip linked to above, activists promulgating to the public predictions like ‘billions will die’ if we do not take drastic action.

To the extent that this strategy was deliberate, you could put it under the category of ‘highbrow disinformation’ (also covered well here by Dan Williams) – misleading ideas promulgated supposedly for the greater good. But of course, watching the way activists talk, as in the Extinction Rebellion clip above, it seems that they seemed to believe these doomsday ideas themselves even more strongly than the public came to. This leads us to the demand side: why did so many people come to believe the doomsday view?

One reason seems likely to be human tendencies towards sacralisation and eschatology. I follow Jonathan Haidt in observing that purity/sanctity is a key human moral foundation, and that with the decline of religion people must find other outlets for this urge. It’s clear from observing the rhetoric of climate activists that they are seeking a sacred cause to dedicate themselves to, and found it in the environment and the idea of the planet. If the effects of climate change are interpreted as the planet ‘dying’ then this of course has a finality to it that the actual scientific projections do not. Once you sacralise something and link it to the end of the world, you remove it from cost/benefit calculations, and from considerations about tradeoffs. Therefore arguments such as those of Bill Gates above, that economic development in many cases has a greater effect on human wellbeing than climate change, are felt to be almost sacreligious, as exemplified by this Slate response entitled ‘Respectfully, Bill Gates Should Shut Up’.

People who hold the doomsday view of climate change also share the negative attitude to economic development that is widespread in Britain and Europe, and to a lesser but still significant extent in the US. This attitude views economic growth as irrelevant or even harmful, so the idea that we can actually successfully mitigate the harms of climate change is anathema. As Bill Gates noted, the number of global heat deaths has actually been decreasing for some time, largely because more people can afford air conditioners (while there are actually ten times as many deaths from extreme cold). In fact, people continue to flock to places that would be practically unlivable without air conditioning in summer, such as Phoenix or Dubai.

Similarly, natural disaster deaths have fallen 90% in the past century because of things like better warning systems and more resilient buildings. Considering that the actual scientific projections are not, contrary to the doomsday view, ones of extreme and sudden change, it seems highly likely that differences in economic development will continue to be more significant than climate change, however significant that may be absolutely. The economic development of Bangladesh over the last twenty years illustrates this point. When I was at school in the early 2000s, Bangladesh was held up as a perennially poverty-stricken place, beset by natural disasters, imminently to be inundated by climate change-caused rising sea levels. In fact this was exactly the period in which Bangladesh’s economy began to take off: its GDP has roughly quintupled between 2005 to 2025, in which time it has become far more resilient to natural disasters like cyclones.

Another aspect behind the doomsday view of climate change is the totalising mindset of this sort of activism: seeing the fight against climate change as just one part of a wider struggle against capitalism, imperialism, Zionism etc. If the world must be completely revolutionised for us to solve climate change, then more tractable solutions are discounted, or in some cases, such as nuclear energy, actively fought against. Climate change can simply be folded into the omnicause – complete with anticapitalism, degrowth and climate reparations – without thinking too much about the details. Hence why the priorities of Green political parties are so detached from actually tackling climate change.

Finally, there is the question of how seriously to take ‘beliefs’ in humanity’s imminent extinction. It is only possible for large numbers to hold this view because for most it is little more than vibes and rhetoric, or at best an inchoate sense of calamity mixed in with other things (as in “I can’t have kids because of climate change”). I always somewhat admired environmental activist George Monbiot, despite his politics, for practicing what he preaches. He froze in his house rather than use his wood-burning stoves which he had previously installed at great expense, after learning that they were actually bad for the environment. He gave up flying after concluding that most planes should be grounded, and he came out in support of nuclear power, after previously being strongly against it, recognising how necessary it would be to achieving his environmental goals. Monbiot, at least, honestly recognises the sacrifices that would be needed, as do some of the more dedicated activists, but these numbers do not approach the half of the population purporting to hold the view, who continue to live as normal.

The future of climate change and climate catastrophism

Over this century, the world will continue to warm, and this will cause negative effects, but the most pressing global issues will continue to be more immediate ones like immigration and demographic change, warfare and the changes brought about by new technologies, particularly AI. The level of economic development will continue to have a more significant impact on humanity than climate change will, both in positive and negative ways. And new technologies will also have the most impact on climate change itself. Climate activism will not go away but will likely fade into the background of activist causes, while climate catastrophism will become a slightly embarrassing belief which people will forget they ever held.

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The uproar over Sarah Pochin’s comments on the skewed representation of Britain’s demographics in its adverts continues. Keir Starmer called her comments “shocking racism and it’s the sort of thing that will tear our country apart”; a sentiment echoed by many other MPs and political figures. The offending statement in question was:

“[I]t drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of, you know, people that are basically anything other than white [...] well it doesn’t reflect our society”.

Pochin phrased things indelicately and somewhat hyperbolically. Nevertheless, her comments were more fair and accurate than those of her critics, which in their extreme disingenuousness offer a perfect example of how officially accepted opinion on matters of race works in this country.

Pochin was not complaining about non-white people being in adverts. She was complaining about them being disproportionately represented. We do have statistics on this question. A month ago Channel 4 put out a report titled Mirror on the Industry, containing statistics of the demographics of UK TV advertising. In 2024, Black people (4 per cent of the population) featured in 51 per cent of ads, 23 per cent with them in a lead role. South Asians (8 per cent of the population) featured in 17 per cent of ads, 6 per cent with them in a lead role. East Asians (1 per cent of the population) featured in 11 per cent of ads, with 2 per cent of lead roles, while mixed ethnicity people (3 per cent of the population) feature in 9 per cent of ads, with 4 per cent of lead roles.

All these groups are hugely over-represented in the “% of ads featuring” stats, but this statistic is not the clearest one as “featuring” could mean various things, from a face in a crowd to a significant role. So if we take the “lead roles” statistic as the most significant one, then Pochin was correct about non-white over-representation in general, but only about black people in particular. South Asians are actually slightly underrepresented in lead roles, while the East Asian and mixed categories are over-represented proportionally, but still at a low level absolutely.

This sort of statistic is something that self-defined respectable voices refuse to discuss honestly. Channel 4 themselves in their press release that accompanied the report completely failed to mention it, instead focusing on the under-representation of pregnant women, LGBTQIA+ people, and the disabled. (A tangential point, but considering that we are told not to stereotype based on appearance, that trans women are women, and that not all disabilities are visible, complaining about visual under-representation of these characteristics is absurd).

The succession of MPs that lined up to excoriate Pochin displayed a similar level of disingenuousness. Predictably, many offered only platitudes that had nothing to do with the actual issue, such as a dictionary definition of racism, or claiming “the colour of someone’s skin” drove Pochin mad, or the importance of diversity on TV. Others went with the well-worn accusation that you’re weird for even noticing (doubtless they would be the first to notice if there were too many white people). None of them engaged with the substance of what Pochin was saying, and so for all the ways she failed to offer a sober and nuanced take, her opponents, in throwing around accusations of racism and refusing to even admit there is anything to see here, are far worse.

None of these reactions, of course, are that surprising given how taboos around race in our culture have developed over the last few decades. I think it is interesting, though, to look into exactly why things have developed as they have.

Diversity is blackness

Diversity has become a sacred value in our society, but the extreme overrepresentation of black people in particular is clearly not about literal “diversity”, as there are over twice as many South Asians as black people in Britain. The most bizarre example I have seen of this tendency was in adverts for ScotRail in 2024, whose homepage at the time featured three black or mixed black people, six white people, and no Asians, in a Scotland that was 93 per cent white, 3.9 per cent Asian, and 1.2 per cent black. So what’s going on?

Some people have claimed that this is due to British advertising agencies being based in London and reflecting what they see around them. I don’t think this is true though – London’s population is 14 per cent black, far more than the rest of the country, but it is even more Asian: 21 per cent.

Others, usually in the American context, cite studies showing that black people care more about seeing their own race in adverts than white people do, and so the advertisers are catering to this. I am sceptical of this explanation even in America, but in Britain, with black people making up such a tiny percentage of the market for the vast majority of products advertised, it certainly cannot explain things.

I think the real answer is less concrete than these explanations and has more to do with the broad ideas our culture has developed about what is to be celebrated and even sacralised. At the more prosaic level there is the prominence of blacks compared to other non-white groups in sports and entertainment, which will raise their “coolness levels” comparatively. But this is not the whole story: the other aspect is altogether weirder. Western countries have elevated diversity and anti-racism to sacred values since the 1960s, and black people have emerged as the totemic figures to represent these values because they have been deemed the ultimate oppressed group. Channel 4’s graph above demonstrates this by the post-BLM spike in black representation, from already high levels to even higher levels.

The dominant cultural influence of the US, with its larger and more established black population, is also crucial. Britain at least does have a black population, but I once came across an account of an Austrian writing on this topic who claimed that due to US influence there were more black than Turkish people in Austrian ads, despite there being barely any black people in the country but hundreds of thousands of Turks. I have heard similar accounts from Poland. But moving the explanation to the US doesn’t answer the question, it only shifts it, as the same dynamic is at play there too, where blacks (only 14% of the population) have an outsized presence in advertising and culture in general compared to say, Hispanics, who are a larger proportion (20%) of the population.

Advertisers are not consciously deciding to overrepresent black people in particular due to some commercial metric, they are, as advertisers always do, attempting to convey an image of desirability, aspiration, and in the broadest sense of what society deems as “good”, and to link it to their products. Diversity is seen as good, and in the somewhat inchoate thoughts of the advertising executives, black people are diversity.

What will be the effect of Sarah Pochin’s statements?

As we have seen, the official response to Pochin’s comments from the centre and left of the political spectrum has been obtuseness and outrage. But many voters will have been noticing these things for years and will instead be thinking some variation of “well she’s right though isn’t she, and I’m glad someone in politics finally said it”.

Someone previously responded to me on this question saying this topic needs nuanced comment, not venting on live TV in the manner of a simplified “boomer caricature”. Personally I would have much preferred it if sensible, competent people had been nuanced and sensible on issues of race and immigration over the last few decades. But they haven’t, and there’s little sign they are becoming so now. What we have instead is an asymmetrical multiculturalism where over-representation of non-white groups is either taken as natural or celebrated, while overrepresentation (or even accurate numerical representation) of white people is castigated. So if “boomer caricatures” are the only alternative, then sign me up.

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The Financial Times recently published Stephen Bush’s “The truth about immigration” – the article is paywalled but you can see some sections in the tweets I posted about it. As a guide to the truth it’s seriously lacking; it simply accepts the status quo and is full of lazy arguments and non-sequiturs, but what it aptly demonstrates is that the liberal centre has run out of ideas on immigration. Therefore I wanted to go through its points in detail.

Bush begins with an uncontroversial observation: almost every rich country has an ageing population and is having fewer children, which makes it more difficult to finance the expectations people have of public services given current levels of tax. He then says that states have “filled the gap” with immigration. It’s certainly true that the ageing population and increasing levels of immigration have occurred over the same time period, but an immigration policy that was primarily focused on maintaining the fiscal health of the country would look very different from that of most Western nations.

Such a policy would not allow in large numbers of low-skilled workers and their dependants, who soon become eligible to make full use of the welfare system, as the Boriswave in particular has enabled. It would not maintain an asylum system costing billions in hotel and legal fees. It would not allocate half of all council housing in one of the world’s most expensive and productive cities to recent immigrants, many of whom are not even in employment. More broadly, it would not continue the pyramid scheme of mass immigration at all because it would recognise that this would produce an even greater fiscal crisis in the future. It thus stretches credibility to say that immigration is about filling the gaps.

At this point in the article, you come to realise that it is illustrated with photos of people granted asylum from outside of Europe to Denmark, “challenging ideas of belonging and foreignness”. This is an interesting choice considering the famous graph showing that immigrants from non-Western countries are a net drain on the Danish public finances.

Bush then begins his examples of the truth about immigration with universities:

In the UK, overseas students have allowed universities to stay open even as domestic fees have been subjected to a long period of sharp, real-terms cuts.

The discourse around universities is strangely unlike that around anything else. It is often said, as Bush does, that overseas students allow universities to stay open. But is this a good thing? As John Burn-Murdoch, who contributed data to the article under discussion, noted in 2023, the UK graduate wage premium has been steadily falling for 25 years. In 2022 it was down to around 38 per cent, and this is for all graduates, including those who graduate from top universities and then go on to highly paid roles in finance, law and technology etc. How financially valuable is a university education for the bottom tier of universities, considering the vast debts that graduates now end up with?

If you look at the graduate outcomes provider level data, the median earnings 5 years after graduation in 2022/23 was £31,800, which was only marginally higher than the median full time earnings for all UK employees aged 21-29 (£29,120). And there are many, low-ranking universities in the list where the median earnings is thousands of pounds lower than the overall median. Considering these low rankings, it seems unlikely that these graduates are going to significantly increase their earnings as they age. Considering the questionable value of many of these low ranking university degrees, then, is it right that they should be funded by essentially selling UK visas?

Onto the labour market: Bush writes that “[i]mmigration has filled vacancies in the country’s care and construction sectors”. I previously wrote about the massive expansion of immigrant labour in Britain’s care industry after 2020. This was far too drastic to have been merely a response to labour shortages, and was more about employers, and immigrant workers themselves, taking advantage of much laxer rules than had existed before. Originally, only 6,000 of these visas were expected to be granted annually, but the numbers reached 349,000 by 2023.

Bush then goes onto the well-worn idea that opposition to immigration is just about discomfort with change. He writes:

London is an excellent example — opposition to immigration was much higher in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when the capital had far less of it than it does today. But now, few Londoners expect anything else than to live in a diverse, multiracial city and so changes in the scale of immigration are much less politically controversial than they were before.

This is possibly the most egregious claim in the whole article. Most working-class white British Londoners abandoned the city in the late 20th and early 21st century — in large part due to a feeling of alienation from the mass immigration into it. Most people living in London today are recent immigrants or their descendants, so it is hardly surprising that they expect to live in a diverse, multiracial city. Londoners, by and large, have not adapted to change. They have changed places.

Bush goes on to talk about how immigration has waxed and waned over time, using the example of his grandparents. Past immigration is often used in this way, to equate it to current immigration and make the latter seem normal. But Bush’s grandparents were part of about 150,000 Jewish immigrants who came from the late 19th to the early 20th century, into a Britain of around 40 million. They therefore represented about 0.4 per cent of the population, a proportion they maintain today. By contrast Britain since 1997 has seen hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year, with the population of post-1950s immigrants and their descendants now approaching 30 per cent of the total population and 40 per cent of the school-aged population.

He then goes on to some international comparisons, starting with Japan.

For decades, Japan has had much lower rates of immigration than other rich countries, something made possible because its pensioners have lower incomes than their peers.

Japan’s pensioners don’t technically have lower incomes than their peers. The OECD’s latest data from 2020 shows that Japan’s over-65s receive 85 per cent of the average income of the total population, compared to 86 per cent in Britain, 84 per cent in Finland, and 82 per cent in Denmark. What is true is that a greater proportion of their income comes from paid work than in most other rich countries: the elderly in Japan (and South Korea) have notably higher workforce participation rates than in comparable countries.

However as the linked OECD data shows, government transfers in Japan still make up a larger proportion of its recipients incomes than the state pension does in Britain (around 50 per cent vs around 40 per cent). Low pensions don’t therefore seem likely to be a significant reason why Japan has had significantly less immigration over the last few decades than Western countries — its different ideological approach is likely to be more relevant. Despite increasing levels of immigration in recent years, it is still very far from the situation of Western Europe; it accepts very few asylum seekers, and the majority of immigrants come from east or south east Asia. Economic explanations for differences like these can often sound more intelligent, when if you look at the actions of decision-makers, it’s more about ideology.

Bush then moves to Denmark, noting that it is often seen as a model for “how to do it” for centre-left parties (I wrote about this myself last year). Yet Bush thinks that the Denmark option is not a model for most countries. One piece of evidence given for this is that Denmark is not a “frontier state” and it is easier for it to shut its doors, but by this logic no northern European country is a “frontier state” (Britain is apparently a frontier state because it’s on the borders of the EU). He also writes that Labour are more vulnerable to bleeding support to their left than the Danish Social Democrats were when they tackled immigration, but considering that Starmer currently is, in his own awkward and self-defeating way, trying to tackle immigration and already bleeding support to the left, he might as well do it properly.

Bush then moves onto the centre-right, first saying that it was Australia’s unique geographical and geopolitical situation that enabled it to stop the boats, but then admitting that some European countries are now doing this too via outsourcing it to Libya and Turkey. He cites the Italian model of keeping numbers high while limiting paths to citizenship and to family reunion as not being one Labour could persuade voters to swallow due to how untrusted they currently are on immigration. But it’s hardly as if Labour could become much less trusted than they already are.

Then we have a common trope emanating from the left — a graph showing that people believe that immigration is far more important as an issue facing the country as a whole than it is to them personally, with the implication that their concerns are therefore illegitimate. It’s completely core to left-wing ideology to care about broad issues that do not affect people’s day to day lives: climate change, or Palestine for example. Yet when people care about what immigration is doing to their country in a broad sense, this is said to be the result of some sort of media manipulation distracting them from their true interests.

Bush finishes his global immigration tour by asking us to consider the Dubai model of large numbers of single male migrants who are not expected to integrate into the national culture. Isn’t this exactly what people don’t want, he asks?

But it also means more areas where the immigrant population consists of solitary men, who are either single or miles from their families, neither of which local residents want, and is, again, bad for integration. Has Dubai, which has much higher numbers of immigrants but essentially no permanent path to citizenship, really done a better job of integrating people and preserving its identity than the UK has?

This is missing the point. Dubai’s single male migrants are not housed at taxpayer expense, and it’s hard to imagine cases of them being placed so blithely into situations where they are able to sexually assault local girls, as happened in Epping, kicking off the recent protests. On the question of preservation of identity, it’s hardly as if the British model can be marked as success. Our policy of allowing in tens of millions of migrants over the last few decades, while pretending that there is no difference between them and natives, has led to a narrowing into meaninglessness of officially allowed expressions of British identity. We are now supposed to believe that it’s made up merely of the ideals of postwar global liberalism, i.e. the famous five fingers of British values, and to welcome the retconning of our history, which pretends that the country was always multiracial.

Bush ends with an exhortation for governments to be clear-eyed about the tradeoffs in immigration policy — he seems to simply accept that the way we currently do things is the only way, it’s just that we need to be more honest about it. But there are lots of ideas for how to, if not solve all our problems, at least improve things. Some of these are currently being floated by Reform, below are a few more.

We could start by considering the Danish model: contra Bush, there are many aspects that could be implemented here. Or if that sort of consensus is impossible to achieve in Britain, then go harder. Abolish the asylum system as it currently stands and scrap the entire human rights regime that prevents deportations working as they should. Even The Economist now recognises that this is necessary. Pressure countries to accept deportations via removal of aid and the threat of restricting visas. Commission a detailed analysis of how “family reunification” really works — it should become clear from the analysis whether an immigrant group is using this route to facilitate chain migration. If it is, tighten restrictions from that country. Restrict post-study visas to high ranking universities to ensure that they are selling an education, not a visa. Change the Indefinite Leave to Remain rules to introduce five-year visas for low skilled workers that do not have a path to citizenship. If someone wants to come to Britain and work as a care worker for five years, save up some money, then return home, then fine. But allowing this to permanently change the demographics of the country is an antiquated idea and has to go.

Public opinion is shifting fast; I believe we are currently in the early stages of a respectability cascade towards a new consensus that the immigration policies of the last few decades have been a disaster. Those who consider themselves sensible truth tellers on immigration, like Bush, have no answer to the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in. They have run out of ideas.

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1. ”National identity is just about citizenship”

2. “Nations are Modern Creations”

3. “Europe was a Backwater Before Colonialism”

4. “Climate change will lead to human extinction”

5. “Your ancestors had kids in their teens”

6. Anti-Essentialism

See the introduction to the first article for the full idea of the upper normie and their folk beliefs: below is an abridged version.

I have always liked the concept of the upper normie. An upper normie is someone who holds conventional mainstream opinions but is a bit more intelligent than the average and thus considers themselves to be more sophisticated than the normal normies. Common examples of the upper-normie worldview in Britain are the #FBPE movement, James O’Brien fans and The Rest Is Politics listeners.

Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact, and I have come to think of much of the upper-normie worldview as a collection of these folk beliefs. These are not the old sayings about health and wealth that might be passed down via your grandmother, but somewhat muddled and simplistic ideas about history, nationhood, economics, colonialism, race etc. that originated from academia, the media, the cultural industries, governments and NGOs.

“Europe was a backwater before colonialism”

This folk belief holds that before the colonial era (i.e. around 1500) Europe was a poor and primitive backwater compared to the civilisations of Asia, particularly those of China, India, and the Middle East. The belief has a counterpart in a related one, which I may deal with in a future article, that Europe’s subsequent wealth can only therefore have been acquired via slavery and colonialism.

This ‘Europe as backwater’ belief can be found in the pages of The Guardian (“In the 15th century, China was the most advanced civilisation in the world, while Europe was a backwater”) and the Financial Times (“how did Europe, a backward continent with miserable weather and dirty little cities, for a time grow faster than the rest of the world?”). It’s found in some of the bestselling popular history books of the past few decades. Niall Ferguson, one of the most prominent popular historians of the 2000s and 2010s, wrote in the introduction to his 2011 book Civilization: The West and the Rest (reviewed in The Guardian article cited above) that “Western Europe in 1411 would have struck you as a miserable backwater” (Ferguson 2012: 4). Peter Frankopan, in his 2015 international bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, writes that as a result of the European discovery of sea routes to America and Asia, “suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system” (Frankopan 2017: xviii).

In my previous article in this series I described how the modernist approach to the study of nationalism has provided the intellectual basis for the widespread belief that nations are modern creations. While the historical debate on the question of the ‘Great Divergence’ (when and why Europe began to technologically and economically outstrip the rest of the world) has more intellectual diversity than that about nationalism, it is a similar story here. Various authors, in an attempt to counter the eurocentrism they perceived in the discourse, have done all they can to try and prove Europe’s backwardness in the centuries before European dominance became indisputable in the 18th or 19th centuries. 1500 is often chosen as the example year representing the beginning of the colonial era, so I will use that year here too.

For a few different reasons, including the rise of China from the late 90s, and the trend towards self-abasement in the broader culture, this ‘backwater’ rhetoric found a ready audience and became a new conventional wisdom. However, as we will see, this new conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Below I’ll provide a history of the debate, then a description of the actual technological and economic situation in Europe compared to Asia in 1500 and in the years afterwards (I’m focusing on Western Europe but will use ‘Europe’ for convenience). Finally I’ll describe why I think this belief has become so widespread.

The history of the ‘Great Divergence’ debate

The original approaches to the question of the great divergence tended to look at broad social structures rather than the specifics of technology (which the authors would not have had access to). They contrasted dynamic Western capitalism with stagnant oriental societies, as in Marx’s idea of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ of self-sufficient, communal villages, or in Weber’s books contrasting capitalist Protestant Europe with China and India. The 1980s and 1990s saw works that took a more detailed look in this same vein, such as Eric L. Jones’s The European Miracle, published in 1981, and David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, published in 1998. These located the roots of European exceptionalism, and thus of the great divergence itself, as going back to the 15th century and beyond.

The California School and countering eurocentrism

The loose grouping of scholars termed the California School was a reaction to what they saw as a dominant and eurocentric narrative. They aimed to show that there was nothing exceptional about Europe in technology, science, living standards or social organisation compared to Asia until the 18th or 19th centuries, and for some of them, that Asia had the better claim to be more advanced during this period (Vries 2010, Goldstone 2009). They also often explicitly stated that their intentions in writing were to combat eurocentrism.

There are two types of California School work – the first type emphasises the fundamental similarities of pre industrial revolution societies, by showing that anything especially advanced or dynamic that existed in Europe also existed in the advanced civilisations of Asia. The second type goes further and tries to show that Europe was backward (and indeed a ‘backwater’) compared to these Asian civilisations.

Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (first published in 2000) is the best-known example of the first category. Pomeranz identifies the consensus at the time he was writing as being that of Eric Jones’s aforementioned The European Miracle, in which Europeans were uniquely wealthy in human and physical capital long before industrialisation (Pomeranz 2021: 10, 31). Pomeranz’s intention was to show that the pre industrial revolution world was in reality one of ‘surprising resemblances’, where any technological or institutional advances Europe possessed were also found elsewhere (Pomeranz focuses on China, particularly the advanced Yangtze delta region).

For Pomeranz, the divergence did not come until the 19th century, and was not based on any special characteristics of European civilisation, but was due to contingent factors like the ‘ghost acres’ provided by the colonisation of the Americas, and the easily accessible coal in Britain. Pomeranz has since revised his view of divergence to the mid 18th century (see his articles of 2011 and 2017), but his main argument of a ‘late divergence’ remains.

Then there is the second category, those who make the ‘Europe as backwater’ argument. Andre Gunder Frank in his ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998) aimed to show that before 1800 there was a sinocentric world economy in which a less productive, less advanced Europe had only a marginal position. His argument focuses mostly on Europe’s negative balance of trade with Asia; how Europe had to use American silver to pay for Asian goods as there was little demand there for its own. As I will go into in more detail later, this is a broadly accurate description of trade relations at the time. However the problem for the argument is that you cannot use a small amount of intercontinental trade in mostly non-competing goods (i.e. goods that could not be produced in Europe for climatic reasons) to prove a ‘Europe as backwater’ thesis.

An extreme example of the second category is John Hobson, who, in his The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (2004), is explicit that countering eurocentrism is his primary goal in writing the book. He tries to prove that the credit for every single European invention or achievement should in reality go to Asia, for example that the ultimate origin of the steam engine is Chinese because they invented gunpowder and understood atmospheric pressure (Hobson 2004: 210). Hobson makes a few reasonable points about the historical balance of trade and about advanced Asian technology such as in Chinese iron production, but he is so keen to prove his point about Europe’s backwardness that he often strays into ludicrousness. He claims among other things that Arab sailor Ahmad ibn-Mājid sailed around Africa before Europeans did1, and that St Augustine was black (he was really of Berber origin). Most incredibly, he appears to think that most of the earth’s landmass is in the southern hemisphere but that the eurocentric Mercator projection erroneously shows the opposite (Hobson 2004: 5-6).

Overall, some of what the California school argued was reasonable (e.g. Pomeranz’s points about the advanced civilisation of China), while other arguments (Europe as a backwater in 1500) were less so. But it is these latter arguments which have been especially influential and have formed the basis for a widespread false belief.

Attempts to quantify the great divergence

Concurrently with the works of the California school, various scholars attempted to come at the question by quantifying historical levels of development for different parts of the world. I share the skepticism of those like Gregory Clark or Patrick O’Brien who think that the paucity of data means it is impossible to provide meaningful measures of fundamentally modern concepts like a country’s GDP per capita for the pre-modern world. There is a risk that putting numbers on things makes them seem more certain than they really are. However, the estimates are worth describing, and I think they are at least directionally correct.

The work of Angus Maddison is the best known example of this approach. He claimed that while China was the world’s leading economy in terms of per capita income in 1300, outperforming Europe in levels of technology, by 1500 Western Europe had overtaken it on both counts (Maddison 2003: 157). The GDP per capita numbers (in 1990 international dollars) he estimated for 1500 are $771 for Western Europe, $600 for China, Korea, Iran and Turkey, $550 for India and $500 for Japan (Maddison 2003: 117). Since his death the Maddison Project has continued his work – the numbers have changed in their latest (2023) estimates of GDP per capita, but the broad pattern is the same.

The map below is based on Maddison’s original 2003 numbers for GDP per capita in 1500. As mentioned these numbers are estimates based on fragmentary sources, but I think that the map does at least correctly give a sense that Europe was, together with the regions centred on China and India, one of the three core economic centres in 1500 (as it was of population, which in a pre-industrial world, was a highly correlated metric).

A more recent example from 2017 (on which some of the most recent Maddison Project estimates are based) is Stephen Broadberry who finds that the most advanced areas of Western Europe pulled ahead of China (as a whole) in GDP per capita by the 1400s at the latest (and were far ahead of India and Japan). The figures he gives for 1500 (in 1990 international dollars) are $1114 for England, $1483 for the Netherlands, $1483 for Italy, and $858 for China (he gives figures for Japan and India from 1600 only, at $605 and $682 respectively).

As many including Pomeranz have noted, comparing particularly wealthy Western European countries with the whole of China is not a fair comparison. The most advanced area of China – the Yangtze delta – Broadberry finds to have been on a par with or slightly below the most advanced areas of Europe from the 15th to the early 18th century, as in this table from the paper. (Note that the Chinese decline in per capita GDP after 1700 is due to a population boom in the absence of significant productivity increases, rather than an absolute GDP decline).

On the related question of technology, a paper from 2021: Comin, Easterly and Gong’s Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 BC? assembled indices of technology adoption (from 0 to 1) for different parts of the world at different points in history. It tells a similar story to the GDP per capita figures, with the figures for 1500 being Europe as a whole 0.86, Western Europe 0.94, China 0.88, India 0.7 and the Arab world 0.7.

Overall then, the most recent attempts at quantification of the great divergence question find that the advanced parts of Europe were equally or more advanced than similar areas in China around 1500, both of which were more advanced than regions elsewhere.

The current state of the debate

The academic consensus now seems to be that it was in the early 18th century that advanced regions of Europe pulled decisively ahead of the advanced ones of Asia (Pomeranz 2017, Bisin & Federico 2021: 760-768). However, a great divergence in the 18th century does not mean that Europe was a backwater in the centuries prior to this, and it’s only the most tendentious elements of the California school who make the case that it was. As we will see from a historical survey of the technology of the period, this rhetoric cannot be supported.

Technology in Europe and Asia in 1500

If we were to go back further to the year 1000 AD, and conceive of Europe as Latin Christendom (i.e. excluding the Byzantines) then there would be some truth to the backwater idea, at least compared to the most advanced areas of Asia. But the period to 1500 saw Latin Christendom come to fruition as a new civilisation, one which in many ways was on humanity’s technological frontier. Carlo Cipolla’s Before the Industrial Revolution (1993) provides a good overview of the changes over this period, below is a partial summary drawing on this and other sources.

Initially little of this transformation involved innovations that were not found elsewhere. Some, like gunpowder, paper or the compass, originated in China and were then transmitted to Europe via the silk road or middle east. Others involved the further development of longstanding technologies, like the spread of the water mill into new industries. Others may have been independently developed, like the blast furnace or movable type, but had also previously been invented in China. Towards the end of the period though Europe began to produce innovations of its own.

There had already been an increase in the use of water mills for several centuries; the Domesday book in 1086 recorded 6,082 of them in England (Holt 1988: 8). In the high middle ages they began to be used for other purposes, not just for milling grain as had been the case before, but also for brewing, fulling cloth, sawing logs, turning lathes, and in iron and paper production (Cipolla 1993: 140 - 141). Additionally the vertical windmill – which turned its blades on a horizontal axis (i.e. in the classic Dutch style) – was developed in north west Europe in the 12th century. This type was not found elsewhere in the world where they continued to use the less efficient vertical axis (panemone) windmill. The blast furnace, in which iron ore is completely melted into liquid iron, had long been used in China, but the rest of Eurasia, including Europe, used the bloomery, in which iron ore could only be heated until it was malleable but not liquid. From the 13th century though, the blast furnace began to replace the bloomery in Europe, increasing the availability of iron tools.

In construction, there was the development of more advanced architectural techniques used in gothic cathedral building from the 12th century (the spire of Lincoln cathedral, to give one example, made it the tallest building in the world from its construction in the early 14th century until its collapse in 1548). Canal locks in the modern sense with double gates (‘pound locks’) appeared in Europe in the 14th century; they only otherwise existed in China.

The most advanced part of Europe in this period remained northern Italy. City states like Venice and Genoa had grown their initial wealth as conduits to Asia, but their own industries had begun to become more impressive in this period. Silk first became known to Europeans via the Arab world, who had ultimately acquired it from China, and the European silk industry first developed here from the 11th century. Glassmaking was notably advanced: Venetian glass from the island of Murano became the industry leader, displacing Syrian glass (Findlay & O'Rourke 2007: 129). Vision-correcting glass spectacles were first invented in northern Italy at some point in the late 14th century, and were not known elsewhere in the world.

Europe’s population expanded greatly over this period, more than doubling from around 32 to 71 million and growing faster than any other area of the world according to Maddison’s estimates (Maddison 2003: 376). The growth was particularly strong in northern Europe, the population of which roughly trebled between 1000 AD and the black death in 1348. Broadberry et al. (2011, Table 6) estimate that England’s population grew from around 1.7 million in 1086 to 4.8 million in this period. This increase was enabled in large part by the adoption of new agricultural technologies. The timelines of exactly when these became widespread are disputed (see Roland 2003), but two examples are the heavy mouldboard plough which brought new land into cultivation, particularly in the heavy soils of northern Europe, and three-field crop rotation, which increased agricultural productivity. Agriculture in large parts of south and east Asia remained more productive, though aside from in China (for example with their ploughs and seed drills), there’s not much evidence that this was due to more advanced technology rather than a more favourable climate.

The black death in the mid 14th century killed huge percentages of the population (nearly half in England according to Broadberry’s estimates), but in some ways this accelerated Europe’s transformation. One effect was hastening the replacement of feudalism with a market economy in Western (but not Eastern) Europe, due to the increased bargaining power of labourers (Jedwab et al. 2022). This was also the period that saw the beginning of the rise of North West Europe over the Mediterranean. Unlike most of Europe for example, Britain in particular did not see a decline in per-capita incomes after the initial boost caused by the black death (Bisin & Federico 2021: 766).

The development of the printing press using movable type saw the spread of a print culture with no parallel outside east Asia (where a well developed woodblock printing industry existed in China, and also to an extent in Korea and Japan). Movable type (but not the printing press) had also been invented in China and Korea earlier than in Europe, but had not become widespread, likely due to the large number of characters in East Asian scripts. Outside of East Asia and Europe, there was little printing at all.

An area that was genuinely pioneering was clockmaking. China and the Muslim world had sophisticated water clocks (Su Song’s 11th-century water-powered astronomical clock in Kaifeng and the Jayrun Water Clock in 12th-century Damascus are some well-known examples), as did Europe. But the mechanical clock powered by weights and with a verge escapement that converted the continuous force of the weights into the regular ‘tick’ was a European innovation developed around the late 13th century. These clocks soon became common in public places such as cathedrals and town squares. Later on, in the 15th century, spring-driven clocks appeared, which allowed them to be made smaller and thus more widespread.

These developments in clockmaking had no parallel elsewhere in the world, and as we will come to later, clocks were one of the innovations that most impressed the Chinese once Europe made direct contact in the 16th century. European advances in clockmaking also later became crucial to the industrial revolution (Allen 2009, ch. 8 – Cotton). For more on the development of clockmaking in Europe during this period, see Cipolla’s Clocks and Culture 1300 - 1700 or Landes’s Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World.

The result of all this was that by 1500 Europe’s relative backwardness compared to the other advanced civilisations of Eurasia had largely been eliminated. The Islamic world and India remained sophisticated civilisations, but by this point they did not seem to possess any particular advantages over Europe, except for in things that could not be produced in Europe for climatic reasons like cotton textiles. The only possible exceptions I am aware of are in some aspects of metallurgy, e.g. the production of wootz/Damascus steel using a crucible process originating in India, which was admired by Europeans long after 1500. Meanwhile Europe saw innovations that were not found in India or the Islamic world – in mechanical clocks, printing, glass manufacture, and naval firearms. As we will see later, international trade balances are not a sufficient measure of civilisational advancement in this period, but it is noteworthy that in areas such as the manufacture of glass and some textiles, the historic relationship of Europe as importer of manufactured goods from the Arab world had reversed by 1500 (Findlay & O'Rourke 2007: 127-129).

China though still remained exceptional in various ways. Chinese agriculture had long used ploughs with curved iron moldboards, which were more efficient than European ones. This type of plough was only developed in Europe (in the Netherlands and Britain) in the 17th and 18th centuries, and may have been influenced by Chinese examples. Chinese agriculture also used the seed drill, while evidence of a seed drill in Europe does not exist before the mid 16th century (a patent in the Venetian senate) and it did not become widespread until much later. Chinese iron production was also advanced, using coke driven blast furnaces from the 11th century (for comparison, Abraham Darby I’s novel-for-Europe coke driven blast furnace of the early 18th century was a key technology in the British industrial revolution). And as we will come to shortly, China manufactured porcelain more advanced than European earthenware. However as I will describe in the next section, Europe did possess several technological and scientific advantages over China by 1500.

Overall, technological differences between the advanced civilisations of Eurasia were relatively minor at this point compared to what came later, though Europe and China seem to have been somewhat more sophisticated than the others. In particular, Europe’s edge in mechanical objects, optics, and some aspects of (particularly naval) firearms would prove crucial in later centuries and ultimately to the industrial revolution.

Europe’s early encounters with Asian civilisations after 1500

One of the leading arguments of the ‘anti-Eurocentrists’ is that once Europeans did succeed in sailing around Africa and encountered Asian societies, they found themselves in the position of powerless and backward barbarians who had nothing to trade. This is a core argument of the works of Frank and Hobson that I mentioned earlier.

It’s true that Europeans were generally not able to exert military power on land over Asian societies in the 16th and 17th centuries (the Spanish conquest of the Philippines being an exception), though this is hardly surprising given the vast distances involved and relatively small differences in levels of technology. It is also true that there was much more demand in Europe for products from Asia than vice versa, and that Europeans paid for Asian products predominantly with (American) silver rather than with European goods, for which there was little demand. But using this idea of a balance of trade as a measure of civilisational advance or backwardness is misleading.

As Kees Terlouw points out in his review of Frank’s ReORIENT, international trade was, given high transport costs, such a tiny percentage of output anywhere that it cannot tell us all that much about economies at the time. International trade in 1500 is estimated at a maximum of 2.5% of world GDP in 1500, growing only to a maximum of 5.5% in 1600 and 1700, and 8% in 1800, compared to 50-60% today.

More importantly, the vast majority of these internationally traded goods were ‘non-competing’ goods. Things such as spices and tea could not be grown in Europe, and nor could the cotton that was the input to India’s textile export industries. Spices, for example, made up nearly all of Portuguese imports from Asia in 1518, and these ‘non-competing’ goods, deriving from natural sources that only occurred in Asia, always made up a majority of European imports from Asia into the 17th and 18th centuries (O’Rourke & Williamson 2002: 6). The European climate meanwhile did not produce similarly attractive non-competing goods for Asian markets. Wool, for example, is not as useful a raw material for making most fabrics as cotton is, especially for Asian climates.

The only real manufactured ‘competing goods’ that were imported from Asia to Europe were Chinese porcelain and Chinese silk. European pottery producers could make earthenware and stoneware, often in imitation of Chinese styles (e.g. Delftware), but could not produce porcelain itself until the 18th century (first made in Meissen, near Dresden, in 1710). Europe also still imported Chinese silk despite having a domestic silk industry (centred in Italy and France).

Again we can see the difference between China and the other civilisations of Asia. China, on which the most convincing works of the California School focus, is the only place where there are grounds for claiming that it was more advanced than Europe around 1500. Early European travellers of the 16th century certainly considered China to be more advanced than the other societies they were coming into contact with in the Indian Ocean. See the Technology - Perceptions of Backwardness: Qualified Praise section in part 1 of Michael Adas’s Machines as the Measure of Man.

However, China was not more advanced in all areas. A Chinese fleet defeated a Portuguese one at the battle of Sincouwaan in 1522 but China subsequently adopted the Portuguese breech-loading cannons, which were later used on the northern frontier. Europeans, together with the Ottomans, generally played the role of diffusing the most advanced firearms technology to the rest of the world in this period (Di Cosmo 2001).

Once the Jesuits led by Matteo Ricci entered the Chinese imperial court in the late 16th century, they found that European astronomical knowledge was more advanced than that of China. For example the Jesuits could predict solar eclipses better than the Chinese, and they found that Chinese cartographers still conceived of the world as flat. They also found that European clocks were more advanced than the water clocks in China, and that they made impressive gifts for officials and to the imperial court. European clocks began to be exported to China, marking an exception to the general rule of Europe importing Chinese goods (Cipolla 1977: 80 - 90, Bevan 2017).

There is a famous line from the letter sent from the Qing dynasty’s Qianlong emperor in response to the British 1793 Macartney Embassy’s request for trade liberalisation: “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders.” But China had been importing European clocks for centuries, and the Qianlong emperor himself (an early exponent, at least officially, of the ‘Europe as backwater’ thesis) possessed a large collection of them (Bevan 2017: 3).

How has the belief become so widespread?

The ‘Europe as backwater in 1500’ narrative is one that’s pretty far from reality. You can definitely make an argument that China in particular remained more advanced than Europe at this point in several important ways, though not in all. But you can’t make the same claims for any other Asian society. You could also argue that as overall differences across Eurasia at this point remained small, Pomeranz’s ‘world of surprising resemblances’ is the best way to describe things. If you were looking for differences though, the evidence seems to show that the world’s most advanced technologies were found either in Europe or in China, and that the mechanical, nautical and scientific areas where Europe excelled were those that would become increasingly important in the succeeding centuries. You certainly cannot support an argument that Europe was a backwater. So how has the belief become so widespread?

The period from the mid 90s to the mid 2010s was when the “rise of Asia”, and of China in particular, really started to impinge on the Western consciousness. As The Economist put it in 2012, “It is not exactly news that the world's economic centre of gravity is shifting east”, and as the map they included in the article demonstrated, it was not just shifting but returning to the east. This shift was reflected in the academic discourse too: a central strand of California School works like The Great Divergence and Roy Bin Wong’s China Transformed (1997) was to rehabilitate late Ming and Qing dynasty China from the view, dating back to Marx and Weber, that they had been nothing but stagnant oriental despotisms. The idea that Asia, particularly China, had always been the world’s economic centre except for a brief period in the 19th and 20th centuries, became popular.

Concurrently this period saw a change in approach of the tendencies on the left that downplayed or attacked the achievements of Western civilisation. Traditionally this had been done in a Marxist or dependency theory framework where Europe was seen as exploitative, but central (for example Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory or Andre Gunder Frank’s earlier work in dependency theory). The California school though aimed to decentre or provincialise Europe entirely, as we see in its most extreme versions such as Frank’s or Hobson’s work.

The rhetoric of Europe as a backwater also spread into more popular historical works such as the bestselling ones by Niall Ferguson and Peter Frankopan that I mentioned in the introduction, which undoubtedly did more than the less well-known California school ones to influence mainstream discourse. We could add the continuing influence of an older misunderstanding of European history, of the middle ages as a static world of knights, castles, and unchanging agricultural drudgery which was swept away by the dynamic modern era that followed, missing the huge advances that happened over this period.

The intellectual and geopolitical context of the time therefore was ripe for the belief of ‘Europe as a historical backwater’ to become widespread. Like so many intellectual trends, this one grew out of a need to counter a perceived narrative of eurocentrism which many of the authors mentioned (e.g. Pomeranz, Frank and Hobson) considered to be dominant at the time they were writing. But as so often happens, this counternarrative has now become accepted wisdom and itself needs to be corrected.

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The value of the word ‘yookay’ is that it reveals the reality behind the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Those who employ this rhetoric are most comfortable talking about new varieties of food and music, learning from other cultures (though exactly what is being learnt is never specified), and vague notions of communities coming together. Multiculturalism as an ideal has always derived from think tanks and editorials, but insofar as the vision is based on real places, they are the fashionable areas of cities like London; places like Brixton or Hackney, for example.

These neighbourhoods have the food and the music and the diverse communities living in close proximity. These communities though do not, of course, really come together, the diversity here serves primarily as a backdrop to the lives of those who create our narratives of multiculturalism. Despite representing a very small proportion of the ethnically diverse areas of the country, these places hold an outsize importance because of how influential they are in the official discourse of what multiculturalism is. The demographics of TV adverts, for example, owe much more to the streets of Brixton than to somewhere like Birmingham (i.e. black people are more represented than Asians), even though the latter is more representative of what ethnically diverse Britain actually looks like.

The opposing vision of multiculturalism has been one of impending doom and collapse that draws on the worst pathologies of the new Britain, of grooming gangs, crime, Islamism, terrorism, and the looming spectre of civil war. Multiculturalism’s advocates generally dismiss this vision as non-representative, as a catastrophising viewpoint only taken seriously by overly online Americans. Regarding its most hyperbolic forms, they are right to do so.

The yookay, though, is something else: it is neither the vibrant vision that advocates are thinking of when they use the word ‘multiculturalism’, but nor is it one of societal collapse and ethnic conflict. The yookay is grotty, banal, and above all real, it is the emerging Britain that is generally unseen and unrepresented, precisely because it is not especially compelling either in a positive or a negative way. The more yookay a place is, the less likely it is to be on the cultural radar. If somewhere like Brixton represents the imagined multicultural community, the yookay represents the real one, and every year it becomes more representative of the country as a whole.

One way to visualise its growth is the ONS’s 2021 Ethnicity dot-density map, likely already out of date, but showing the change with a statistician’s regular neutrally-coloured dots. The yookay though is a more visceral and aesthetic concept, so I want to give my own personal (and therefore necessarily incomplete) account.

There are some parts of Britain which have, if anything, gone through the yookay stage and out the other side. Southall or Upton Park in London, Bury Park in Luton, or Westwood in Oldham genuinely do feel a bit like being in India. Here it is a rarity to see a white person or indeed anyone who does not look subcontinental (I should use the more technical term South Asian, but this has always smacked too much of international NGO-speak to me). These places were the original destinations during the first wave of 20th-century immigration, and the combination of this early start, continued inflows, and the undesirability of their locations for gentrification has meant that they have come to be, once again, relatively homogenous - just with different people. As an illustrative example, while in most parts of the yookay (such as Slough, as we’ll come to) the pubs are the last holdout of the English, so complete has the replacement been in these places that even this role has disappeared. The one I visited by the station in Upton Park, for instance, had an atmosphere reminiscent of the sort of downscale male-only bars you find in an Arab city like Tunis.

What does remain though is the characteristically British built environment of the 19th and early 20th century. The red brick buildings, rows of terraced houses, occasional Victorian churches, town halls and war memorials (and in somewhere like Oldham or Rochdale, textile mills) are juxtaposed with the new demographics in a way that defines the yookay aesthetic. Even the mosques often look like they have been built by Barratt Homes. Aside from the shopfronts (and the mosques), the architectural signs of change are generally more subtle: the black trimmings and front doors with a crescent-shaped set of windows on the terraced houses, for example.

Then there’s the places that are on their way to being somewhere like the above but are not quite there yet - central Slough for example. Recently I was walking down the high-street there where nearly everyone was Asian, and then walked into The Moon and Spoon at the end. It is one of those cavernous Wetherspoons that seem to go on forever inside, and it was full of what must have been hundreds of white English people, whose presence had been almost completely absent in the town up until this point. Standing outside, a sight I’ve seen in many similar places, were a few men warily observing the surroundings, appearing as if they were on some sort of guard duty. In the yookay, geography starts to lose its coherence.

Then there’s Dagenham in East London, which before visiting I’d expected to be a place full of Cockney exiles from places further east like Barking. In fact, I found that they had already abandoned it to the yookay. The only ones left gave the unfortunate but inescapable impression of Australian aborigines, drinking in the street, seemingly lost in a world that had left them behind. It was actually a few stops further along the district line in Upminster where the Cockney exiles had settled. Upminster is the final stop on the line, and it left me wondering what will happen when the yookay, already present in Upminster but at a lower level than Dagenham, becomes dominant here too.

Across the river from Dagenham is Thamesmead. Originally developed in the 1960s for working-class families moving from inner London, its brutalist housing estates were used as a setting for the filming of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It’s not all tower blocks though, the newer bits are the standard type of red-brick housing estates you see everywhere in Britain. The distinguishing feature about Thamesmead though is that it is the place with the highest proportion of Africans in Britain: walking around it is a strange mix of British suburbia and West Africa. Anthony Burgess’s 1960s vision of youths speaking a Russian-influenced argot turns out not to have been imaginative enough.

The yookay aesthetic is grubby and downscale, but it would be a mistake to think of the yookay as universally impoverished. Many parts - Reading for example - are relatively prosperous, and are the sort of place that The Economist has cited as an example of an immigration success story. Reading does work, in the sense that it does not, as the Economist says, have the pathologies of somewhere like Rochdale, and the traditional sights of provincial England: teenage goths and pasty young men selling a communist newspaper, are still there alongside the burgeoning yookay.

Travelling towards London from the west, Reading station feels like the current border in this part of the country between Britain and the yookay. Around the station, as you will also find in places like Stratford or Ilford in London, are new international-style flats rising over the red-brick that houses both Britain and the yookay. Developments like these, together with shopping malls like Westfield in Stratford, are the sort of buildings that, if I were so politically inclined, I might describe as representing the ‘relentless march of global capital’. The yookay too, architecturally at least, is at risk of replacement.

More stereotypically yookay-like is somewhere like Ipswich, with its combined American-candy-and-vape shops on the high street next to the Ipswich Bazaar urging you to get your sacrificial sheep order in for qurbani. Places like this are what I think really defines the yookay, right on the transition line. David Goodhart talked of somewheres and anywheres. He was referring to people, but the dichotomy can also be applied to places. Southall, or Bury Park in Luton, is a somewhere (else) of a sort, while ‘anywhere’ implies a sort of rootless and aspirational global cosmopolitanism. The places that are most yookay though are not really either of these things; we could, at the risk of stretching Goodhart’s system too much, describe them as ‘nowheres’.

Finally, there are many places that are currently outside of the yookay but that are starting to feel its presence: Horsham in West Sussex is one example. Only a few miles from Crawley, a much more yookay sort of place, Horsham still feels quite traditionally English, though the Deliveroo riders and new dessert cafes show the direction of travel. Gay men have often been termed ‘the shock troops of gentrification’, if we could designate a similar group for the growth of the yookay today, it would be the Deliveroo riders.

Thanks to the Boriswave, we live in a moment when the yookay is expanding into Britain at an ever faster rate. This change on the ground, plus voters’ growing realisation that this is what the Tories chose to do with Brexit, is doubtless a big driver behind Reform’s surge. Starmer’s rhetoric on immigration is stronger than expected, but wedded fundamentally as he is to the existing paradigm, there is little he can really do to change things.

Yet this does not mean that we should blindly follow those who confidently and even hungrily predict an imminent catharsis, a civil conflict that would at least clarify things. People have an amazing capacity to find ways to keep on living in their own little worlds, even if they are increasingly tangled up physically in another. I remember staying in Beirut and being surprised at how the Maronite Christians lived their European-style lives, seemingly untroubled by the presence of Hezbollah a few miles away in the southern suburbs. Since then Lebanon has continued its decades-long descent into crisis, but I would bet that this particular separation persists. There is indeed a great deal of ruin in a nation, even in Lebanon.

Most people tend to quietly adjust to new realities, moving to areas they feel more comfortable in - regardless of their stated ideology - without really admitting the reasons even to themselves. While it is possible that Britain could devolve into conflict, it could also, as the multiculturalism advocates are so fond of saying, just continue to muddle along. Under this scenario its transformation into the yookay would continue to cause disquiet, but not enough to actually make anything happen, although I would say that the faster the pace of change, the more likely it is that something does happen. Regardless of the outcome, what we can say for sure is that the future of Britain is going to be very different from the country its people grew up in. And in predicting what this future will look like, the idea and aesthetic of the yookay will be a far more accurate guide than the idealised one of vibrant multiculturalism.

Related articles:

1. ”National identity is just about citizenship”

2. “Nations are Modern Creations”

3. “Europe was a Backwater Before Colonialism”

4. “Climate change will lead to human extinction”

5. “Your ancestors had kids in their teens”

6. Anti-Essentialism

See the introduction to the first article for the full idea of the upper normie and their folk beliefs: below is an abridged version.

I have always liked the concept of the upper normie. An upper normie is someone who holds conventional mainstream opinions but is a bit more intelligent than the average and thus considers themselves to be more sophisticated than the normal normies. Common examples of the upper-normie worldview in Britain are the #FBPE movement, James O’Brien and the Rest is Politics.

Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact, and I have come to think of much of the upper-normie worldview as a collection of these folk beliefs. These are not the old sayings about health and wealth that might be passed down via your grandmother, but somewhat muddled and simplistic ideas about history, nationhood, economics, colonialism, race etc. that originated from academia, the media, the cultural industries, governments and NGOs.

“Nations are modern creations”

In my previous article in this series I discussed the belief that national identity is merely a matter of citizenship. This article is about a related belief - that nations are modern creations. Readers familiar with the upper-normie worldview will surely have encountered this belief before; one example I saw recently was from journalist Mike Stuchbery, who asserted that “Germany didn't exist until 1871”.

Holders of this belief generally claim that nations are recent creations, combined with a vulgar Marxist explanation that they were created to persuade people to do things like fight in wars instead of engaging in revolution. Other examples I have come across are that English identity did not really exist until the Elizabethan era, or that Frenchness was created only with the mass education of peasants in the 19th century. The holders will also try to prove their artificiality, that traditional national symbols are invented traditions or that they are not ‘really national’, e.g. ‘St George was Turkish’ or ‘the Windsors are German’.

These arguments are not applied with much intellectual honesty, nor do they draw on any deep historical knowledge. They are of course never applied to the histories of non-Western nations or peoples (Palestine for example). Their purpose is generally to bolster the idea that Western nations were artificially ‘made’ and therefore that it is not an issue if they are remade or unmade too.

Insofar as they are intellectually grounded though, they derive from what has come to be known as the modernist approach to the study of nations and nationalism, and the ‘nationalism studies’ field it spawned, which have been especially prominent since the 1980s.

The modernist school’s approach to nations and nationalism

The modernist school holds that both nationalism and the nation itself are phenomena that only came into existence with modernity from the late 18th century onwards, often symbolised as beginning with the French revolution. The approach originated in the early and mid 20th century with works such as Carlton Hayes’s Essays on Nationalism (1926) and Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism (1944), but its most well-known ones today, and the idea of nationalism studies as a discipline, date from the 1980s and 90s. Particularly well-known examples from this era include Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990).

The modernist approach holds that the attributes enabling nations were absent before modernity. These include mass culture (facilitated by literacy in the vernacular language, or print capitalism as Benedict Anderson terms it), mass education, the direct relationship and identification between citizen and state, and indeed the modern state itself. Previously, identity was more likely to be tied to things like locality, feudal lord or church, while elite culture was communicated via trans-national script languages like Latin or Persian. The nation was therefore impossible.

The approach also emphasises how the principle of national self-determination - the idea that the nation-state was the right and proper political form for people to aspire to - was absent or at least far weaker in earlier periods. In previous eras, other principles took precedence in deciding what sort of rule there should be, like dynastic succession, the divine right of kings, or the ideal of universal empire (such as Dante offers in his early 14th-century work De Monarchia). The ideal of national self-determination came to supplant these earlier ideals over the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, redrew its map after WW1, and then spread worldwide after 1945.

Finally, the modernist school focuses on the role of invention and political construction in the development of nations. As Gellner claims in Nations and Nationalism: "It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round”.1 This engendering is done by inventing traditions such as Scottish Tartanry, as analysed in Hobsbawm’s co-produced volume The Invention of Tradition, also dating from the nationalism studies annus mirabilis of 1983.

Nations and peoples in premodern history

However, in any reading of history you will find contemporary sources talking about nations or peoples as fundamental divisions of humanity, which strike the reader as expressions of substantially the same sentiments as modern nationalism. In the next section I will describe how the modernist approach deals with this fact and why overall it is an insufficient way of studying nations, peoples, and nationalism. But first I’ll give a few examples; for a fuller account, the best overview of this I have read is Azar Gat’s 2012 book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, which also deals more fully with the problems of the modernist approach.

Looking to the ancient world, the native Egyptian king Kamose (ruled c. 1555–1550 BC), offers an early example. Kamose fought against the Hyksos, the first foreign (Semitic) rulers of a large part of Egypt. An inscription from the time, recorded on the original stelae and later on the Carnarvon tablet, describes his victory over the Hyskos thus:

“I should like to know what serves this strength of mine, when a chieftain in Avaris, and another in Kush, and I sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his slice of Egypt, and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis... No man can settle down, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics. I will grapple with him, that I may rip open his belly! My wish is to save Egypt and to smite the Asiatic!"

You can see similar sentiments in the Babylonian chronicles and in the Torah. In the ancient world you can also see how even when politically divided, there is often a sense of shared political identity among related peoples, as in Herodotus’s Histories, in which the Athenians speak of “the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech” as to why they will not ally with the Persians. This is especially relevant to the common false belief that political disunity precludes a coming-together and shared political identity in times of crisis.

This sense of shared identity despite political divisions can also be seen in the writings of Bede, Gildas and others during the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, as I wrote about in a previous article. A few centuries later, after the Norman conquest, William of Malmesbury wrote in his 12th-century Gesta Regum Anglorum that:

“England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbott, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England.”2

The desire to avoid foreign rule is also clear in the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, a letter from Scottish nobles to the Pope justifying Scotland’s existence as an independent kingdom:

“But if he [Robert the Bruce] should cease from these beginnings, wishing to give us or our kingdom to the English or the king of the English, we would immediately take steps to drive him out as the enemy and the subverter of his own rights and ours, and install another King who would make good our defence. Because, while a hundred of us remain alive, we will not submit in the slightest measure, to the domination of the English. We do not fight for honour, riches, or glory, but solely for freedom which no true man gives up but with his life.”

In imperial China, often seen solely in terms of the universalist Middle Kingdom, we can see in native Han Chinese ruler Zhu Yuanzhang’s overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1368 a sense of the restoration of Chinese rule and customs over those of the northern barbarians. He issued this proclamation:

“Since ancient times rulers have governed the empire. China resided in the centre and brought order to the barbarians. The barbarians resided outside and submitted to China. It was never the case that barbarians resided in China and governed the empire. After the Song throne was overthrown the Yuan northern barbarians entered and ruled China.”3

The Ming legal code, created at his direction, specified policies of forced assimilation for the Mongol and Semu people who had previously ruled China:

“Mongols and Semu shall marry with Chinese persons. (It is essential that both parties be willing.) They are not permitted to marry within their own kind. Violators shall be punished by eighty blows of the heavy stick and both men and women shall be enslaved by the state.”4

In early modern Europe states were starting to coalesce, but modern nationalist movements were not yet present. Here Machiavelli wrote The Prince (published 1532), commonly thought to be a dispassionate manual for taking and wielding power. But his final chapter, Exhortation to liberate Italy from the Barbarians reveals the real reason he wrote it. Machiavelli was writing amidst the Italian wars of the early 16th century which saw the increasing involvement, and later domination, of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in the military and political affairs of the northern Italian city states. As he wrote:

“It is therefore necessary to prepare such forces in order to be able with Italian prowess to defend the country from foreigners […] This opportunity must not, therefore, be allowed to pass, for letting Italy at length see her liberator. I cannot express the love with which he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered under these foreign invasions, with what thirst for vengeance, with what steadfast faith, with what love, with what grateful tears. What doors would be closed against him? What people would refuse him obedience? What envy could oppose him? What Italian would rebel against him? This barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of every one.”

And finally, on the aforementioned claim that Germany didn’t exist until 1871 as it was merely a collection of duchies and cities within the Holy Roman Empire. The identity of the Kingdom of Germany within the empire was established by the 11th century, and by the time of Martin Luther the empire itself was often referred to as the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. Luther wrote the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation) in 1520, in which the existence of this German nation is treated as an established and meaningful fact:

“Now, although the Pope has violently and unjustly robbed the true emperor of the Roman empire, or its name, and has given it to us Germans, yet it is certain that God has used the Pope's wickedness to give the German nation this empire and to raise up a new Roman empire”.

The concept of a nation in Luther’s time was doubtless not identical with that of the Germany of 1871, but the sense of identification between a people and their country is clearly substantially the same.

How modernists define nations and nationalism

In contemporary common usage, examples like the above would often be called nationalism or at least be recognised as substantially the same phenomenon, but modernist authors prefer terms like ‘national sentiment’ or ‘proto-nationalism’. As modernist John Breuilly writes in Nationalism and the State:

“I do not quarrel with historians who claim that national consciousness existed in medieval Europe or that there were patriots active in the sixteenth century. I would simply argue that such phenomena should not be labelled as nationalism.”5

Nationalism according to the modernist approach is conceived of solely in the 19th-century ideological sense: in Gellner’s formulation “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent”.6 This principle, which indeed did not become dominant before the 19th century, was that the proper form of political unit was the nation-state and that older forms were illegitimate. In the modernist approach nationalism is therefore seen as another -ism, like socialism, as an intellectually defined political programme.

Given that the word ‘nationalism’ does indeed only date from the late 18th century, this is a relatively easy argument for the modernists to make. The word ‘nation’ is much older, originating with the Latin natio, which the Romans used along with others like gens to mean ‘a people’, and making its way, with the same meaning, to English via old French in the middle ages. The modernists however argue that the idea of what a nation was, before modernity, so different from what it later became that it is an entirely different thing. As Hobsbawm writes in his chapter ‘The nation as novelty’:

“Whatever the ‘proper and original' or any other meaning of ‘nation', the term is clearly still quite different from its modern meaning. We may thus, without entering further into the matter, accept that in its modern and basically political sense the concept nation is historically very young […] Given the historical novelty of the modern concept of ‘the nation', the best way to understand its nature, I suggest, is to follow those who began systematically to operate with this concept in their political and social discourse during the Age of Revolution, and especially, under the name of ‘the principle of nationality' from about 1830 onwards.”7

Given that this older concept of a nation, of ‘a people’, is, allowing for the different modern political context, pretty close to the modern concept of a nation (even if in some cases more as ideal than reality), we can see that the modernist approach at its base depends on how we choose to define words.

How the modernist approach is misleading

Modernist arguments are valid when using their own own definitions of nations and nationalism. However these definitions, with their sharp distinctions between modern nations and those that came before, are not ones that seem to make much sense when reading historical primary sources, even from the age of modern nationalism itself. As Hobsbawm writes:

“[W]e encounter, in nineteenth-century liberal discourse, a surprising degree of intellectual vagueness. This is due not so much to a failure to think the problem of the nation through, as to the assumption that it did not require to be spelled out, since it was already obvious.”8

I would argue that the 19th-century liberals were more correct than the modernists, that the idea of the nation, though transformed from its premodern form, was obvious to them because it was so fundamental to how they thought about the world. The passions and loyalties it engendered were substantially the same as in any older idea of nation or people. The modernist focus on invented traditions also misses the point. Inventing traditions is just what human groups do; clearly the identity of the ancient city of Rome was not made false just because the Romans did not really descend from the Trojans.

The idea that we should take the approach of ‘the nation as novelty’ therefore, is the wrong way to study the subject academically and even more so as a way to educate the public. Better is an approach like Azar Gat’s which instead focuses on the broader concept of what he terms ‘political ethnicity, of which nations and nationalism are one expression. In this approach, the new idea in the modern era was not that of the nation itself but of popular sovereignty, which “released, transformed, and enhanced” nationalism rather than creating it, in particular in the way it “substituted the people for the monarch as the nation’s sovereign, and by that act it also charged the nation with popular energies and allegiance."9

So why the determination from the modernists to prove the recency and artificiality of nations, and why has their approach become so dominant? Many of the most prominent modernists were Marxists (Anderson and Hobsbawm), and/or Jewish refugees from mid-century central Europe (Kohn, Gellner and Hobsbawm), for whom nationalism had clearly proved to be a hostile force. More broadly, they embodied the intellectual reaction to the more ahistorical nationalist rhetoric of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But what has happened over the last few decades is that this rather particular approach to the subject has percolated through the more educated part of the public, i.e. the upper normie, and crowded out all others. Imagined Communities in particular was, as of 2016, the fifth most cited book in all of social science, mostly for its title alone. In reality though, Anderson’s argument is more nuanced; he emphasises that ‘imagined’ does not mean ‘false’, and that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined."10

Most people do not use the words ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in their strict academic modernist sense, but in a looser way to talk about national consciousness and identity in general. Once they have learnt modernist arguments like ‘the nation is fundamentally modern’ or ‘nationalism creates nations, not the other way round’, they start to take these arguments out of their academic context and make claims far more extreme than even the modernist approach could support. Thus, upper-normie discourse comes to confidently assert that nations can simply be made and unmade by political processes regardless of the underlying ethnic reality, a belief that is both false, and dangerous.

I’ve been thinking about these different forms of power regarding the Trump administration’s moves over the last few months. In its rhetoric about making America’s allies pay their share of military spending and on using ‘reciprocal tariffs’ to eliminate trade deficits, the administration feels like a patriarch or wealthy company boss who is failing to see the bigger picture, determined not to pay any more of the restaurant bill than they have to. With its foreign policy, like the move to annex Greenland, it feels like a desire to abandon the headteacher role - that shapes the system - in exchange for that of the biggest kid in the playground who can only dominate within it.

There can, of course, be situations in which the person who seems to have power is just being taken advantage of. For the restaurant bill case, there is the somewhat implausible theory beloved of elements of the manosphere of women using dinner dates to get a free meal. A more plausible case would be a family or group of friends who exploit the bill payer’s generosity and give nothing in return. And in the case of the school, one could easily imagine an institution where formal authority structures are so ineffectual that the biggest kid in the playground really does exert more power than the headteacher.

American international power up till now has consisted of promoting a liberal free-trade system, constructing international institutions to shape it, and guaranteeing it militarily. American governments have generally believed that American power is best enhanced within this system and that the costs they pay to maintain it are worth it. The Trump admin, as we have seen over the last few months, does not - it sees the system as enabling other countries to benefit at America’s expense and that upholding it is no longer worth it, if it ever was. In this view, there is not really any ‘system’ at all, merely an anarchic world where American power means getting the best deal from other countries.

The logic of American empire

The system is not one in which the US extracts direct tribute but one within which, it is assumed, the US will thrive and implicitly dominate. The US anchors it economically: as Trump has long pointed out, it has historically (in the postwar period) been less protectionist than its allies and rivals; having had an average tariff rate in 2023 of 3.3% vs the EU’s 5%, Japan’s 3.7% and China’s 7.5%. The US dollar serves as the world’s reserve currency, keeping its value higher than it would be otherwise, allowing America to borrow more cheaply, boosting its status as the core of global demand - though also contributing to its trade deficit. The US guarantees the system militarily by spending a relatively high percentage of GDP on military spending compared to its allies (3.4%, vs 2.3% in Britain, 1.5% in Germany and 1.2% in Japan).

Many countries have thrived under this system and the US itself has more than most. It remains far richer than its allies and is in a far better relative position now than in the 1980s when Americans worried about being overtaken by Japan, and when Europe’s economy was relatively much larger. American multinationals dominate much of the world, from fast food to tech, complicating simplistic calculations about the balance of trade. For example consider the ‘Chinese exports’ due to Apple making iPhones in China, or the Irish subsidiaries of US tech companies selling their products throughout Europe.

It is true that both manufacturing as a percentage of GDP and of employment has fallen in the US over the last few decades. Yet US manufacturing as a whole continues to grow, pulling away from Germany and Japan, two countries which have kept manufacturing as a larger percentage of their economy. China of course has outpaced the US in manufacturing though, which I will come to later.

On the military side, the real point of paying to be the final military guarantor to its allies has always been to prevent them rising as challenger powers. US military spending, while higher than that of most, is still near historic lows as a percentage of GDP. Having extricated itself from the expensive and pointless wars in the middle east of the 2000s, the US’s most notable military commitment is now in Ukraine, which despite Trumpian rhetoric, is easily affordable in financial terms. The US has spent roughly $122 billion supporting Ukraine over the last three years, on an annual basis equivalent to only around 5% of its defence budget of $850 billion. This relatively small expenditure, requiring no boots on the ground, allows it to tie down a major geopolitical adversary indefinitely.

The supposed burdens of empire therefore do not seem to trouble the US very much, and American elite consensus has historically seen the country’s role as both beneficial and eminently sustainable. I should note though that it’s overly simplistic to see the growth of the liberal international system as just an American project. NATO originated as the European-only Western Union in 1948, bringing in the US and others in 1949 (to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” in the words of Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General. The original version of the WTO, the International Trade Organization, fell apart because the US Congress refused to ratify it in 1950. And Eastern European leaders and populations were in general enthusiastic about joining NATO after the end of the cold war.

There have also been times when American leaders have seen the US as losing out from the system and have successfully sought to change its terms. The closest thing we’ve seen to Trump before was the Nixon shock when dollar overvaluation and fears of a run on the US’s gold reserves caused Nixon to suspend dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, leading to the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Another was the Plaza Accord in 1985 between the US, Japan, West Germany, Britain and France where it was agreed to depreciate the unprecedentedly strong dollar due to its negative effects on American industry. In general though the US has led in creating and maintaining the system, from the creation of the World Bank and the IMF, to the expansion of NATO and the creation of the WTO in 1995.

The only real threat to American hegemony is China, which while not part of the US system of military alliances, has been part of the global trading system since its WTO accession in 2001. Until now, attempts to counter China have also been done within the system, beginning with Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, Trump did raise tariffs on China in his first term but this was not combined with an overall attempt to drastically reorder the system. The tariffs were kept by Biden, who also introduced more targeted measures on high-technology sectors like chip-making equipment. The general strategy was to maintain the international order as it was but to try and maintain the US system of alliances and head off the rise of China specifically. As Noah Smith points out, while China outmanufactures the US on its own, the US and its allies as a whole outmanufacture China. Recent US policy has been to try and maintain its system of alliances and ‘friend-shore’ production away from China towards countries like Vietnam and Mexico.

Under this traditional way of thinking about US hegemony then, the costs are easily worth the benefits, and countering China was best achieved via maintaining and strengthening the system. With his complaints about military spending and trade deficits, Trump was missing the point about how it works. Yet the benefits of the system to the US are not immediately obvious, and Trump’s attacks resonate with many. So why does Trump differ so profoundly from elite consensus?

Trump as elite-outsider

The origin of Trump’s political success is that he is an elite-outsider with a distinctly non-elite worldview. Trump is more characteristic of what has been termed America’s gentry class, the wealthy but unfashionable owners of physical assets like car dealerships, fast food franchises and agribusinesses. By virtue of how they make their money, this class is tied to specific locations and is therefore dispersed across the country, unlike the group normally thought of as elites who cluster in a few coastal cities. Due to this, they are influential in local politics and in national lobbying but less so in the policy areas relating to international institutions.

What distinguished Trump from an average member of the gentry class is that his physical assets - commercial real estate - happened to be located in New York City where the real elite lives. He was therefore more plugged into national politics, and has a long history of opposition to the form the US’s international role takes, paying for newspaper ads in the 1980s claiming that Japan and other countries had been taking advantage of the US, and that it should make them pay more for its military protection. Likely partly due to his working life in New York City real estate, and partly due to his personality, Trump has also always been a notably zero-sum thinker. As this Slate Star Codex review from 2016 of The Art of the Deal puts it:

“The world is taken as a given. It contains deals. Some people make the deals well, and they are winners. Other people make the deals poorly, and they are losers. Trump does not need more than this. There will be no civilization of philosopher-Trumps asking where the first deal came from, or whether a deal is a deal only by virtue of its participation in some primordial deal beyond material existence. Trump’s world is so narrow it’s hard to fit your head inside it, so narrow that on contact with any wider world it seems strange and attenuated, a broken record of deals and connections and hirings expanding to fill the space available.”

Zero-sum thinking is not how the US liberal empire works, but it is the way many people think about the world. This style of thinking together with other aspects of his elite-outsider worldview was what enabled Trump to identify and exploit a large underserved market in American politics. These are people who are nationalistic, opposed to (at least illegal) immigration, and protectionist - America first in other words. Despite his wealth, Trump shares this perspective with millions of voters, and to some extent his second administration does too, reflected in the fact that only 35% of his cabinet attended elite universities, the lowest in at least 30 years (over which the percentages from elite universities have ranged from 50-62%). It is therefore an administration with a radically different view of where power and interest lies.

The logic of Trumpism

The least generous perspective on the Trump admin is that it, as a collectivity, is simply stupid. That it cannot understand the logic of the American empire and how America benefits from it. That it takes trade deficits and military spending figures to mean simply that America is being taken advantage of by other countries without seeing the bigger picture. That the only way it can understand ‘advantage’ is in crude video game-like metrics like increasing the size of your country on the map or selling more to foreigners than they sell to you.

I think there is a lot of the above which is true, but the elite consensus could also be wrong in its own way, holding to an ideology that does not or no longer maps onto realities on the ground. Under this way of thinking, US liberal empire would merely be a hollow shell that no longer means anything real and is best dispensed with. History is not short of examples of once meaningful systems that lingered on long after they had ceased to matter, take the Holy Roman Empire in the 18th century, the Ottoman Caliphate in the late 19th and early 20th century, or the British Commonwealth in the late 20th and 21st.

On Russia-Ukraine, despite the relatively low cost of US support, Vance was right to point out at the Munich Security Conference that the US should be focusing not on Ukraine but on East Asia. For American liberals, Russia and Putin serve as the indispensable ideological enemy, but in raw power terms, there is no particular reason why Russia has to play this role, considering that, unlike China, it is not a major geopolitical threat to the US. Improving relations with Russia and attempting to thereby peel it off from China in a ‘reverse Nixon’ makes sense. The US liberal elite have talked about the pivot to Asia since Obama: its involvement in Ukraine, while low in cost financially, shows it is unable to actually do this in practice. Furthermore its perpetuation of the hugely damaging war, without a way for Ukraine to actually win it, is deeply immoral.

The 19th-century style expansionism though, like the attempt to acquire Greenland, is pointless. It is alienating to European allies and comes with negligible tangible economic or military benefit. Denmark already subsidises Greenland, and any future US attempts to exploit its natural resources would run into the same problems that have already met Danish ones. If the US requires more bases to counter some hypothetical rise of China in the arctic, it already has the Pituffik base and could surely get Denmark to agree to more if needed. The same, of course, applies to rhetoric about annexing Canada, which has achieved nothing except to stimulate a nationalist reaction and to harm the Canadian right via association.

On tariffs, the idea behind the now paused ‘reciprocal tariffs’, that trade deficits mean that other countries are ripping America off, is stupid. More reasonable is the concern with the decline in manufacturing, which the executive order mandating the new tariff regime focused on heavily. It is true that China’s dominance of manufacturing leaves America potentially vulnerable in a future conflict. As J D. Vance said last year: “We are still, right now, the world’s military superpower, largely because of our industrial might from the ’80s and ’90s. But China is a more powerful country industrially than we are, which means they will have a more powerful military in 20 years.”

But it depends on what sort of manufacturing we are talking about. China and increasingly other countries like Vietnam do make most of America’s clothes and consumer electronics, but it is not products like these that would be crucial in a future military conflict. The US has not exported its production of things that would be, like aircraft or cars, and in sectors that would be crucial, like computer chips, the Biden administration was already making a successful effort to reshore. There is little benefit to bringing home Nike trainer production to the US from Vietnam for example, and even if there were, the originally intended tariffs of 46% would be unlikely to offset Vietnam’s labour cost advantage.

So who understands power better?

Throughout his whole career, Trump has proved adept at gaining power within the system he finds himself in. The US’s postwar position has been not only to act within the system but to shape it too, and it is in this way that the Trump administration’s understanding of power is deficient. In abdicating the role as the system-maintaining hegemon, it does allow the US more leeway in exercising a cruder form of power within it. But this form of power is ultimately a lesser one. The Trump approach would only make sense if, like the analogies I gave in the introduction, the system itself had broken down so much that leading it no longer provided anything positive for America. But this is not the case, and therefore the actions of the Trump admin are not only a premature abdication of responsibility, but of power too.

I’m not normally one for using phrases like ‘regime propaganda’, but having just finished Adolescence, it’s hard to resist. It’s a heavy handed morality tale that clearly wants to ‘shape the conversation’, but it’s so obviously designed with this in mind that it doesn’t portray the subjects it’s talking about accurately at all. As a result, it’s hard to take it as seriously as it wants to be taken, in particular the idea that it is of such insight that it should be shown in schools and in Parliament.

The tone is set from the opening, an absurd SWAT team style dawn arrest of the 13 year old suspect Jamie in an unidentified northern suburb, probably of Doncaster. Our police officer main characters, the black, MLE accented DI Bascombe paired with the no-nonsense northern female sergeant, makes the viewer feel like they’re in one of those modern TV adverts where an implausibly constituted family settles down to have a lovely British cup of tea together.

In contrast to the blinking confusion of the family of the accused, the procedural British state is lovingly presented, with all its required safeguarding procedures meticulously carried out. The sense is of a weary but knowing institution grinding its way towards justice. Compensation is duly offered for the destruction of the family’s front door in the arrest, while once at the station DI Bascombe dispatches their accusations of unreasonable force being used in the arrest by confirming the proper procedures: chastened, the family sit down and await the next steps of the process.

Once Jamie has been properly processed and CCTV evidence of him carrying out the murder produced, we switch in episode 2 to the search at his school for the motive and murder weapon. The school, interestingly, is treated with far less reverence than the police, being portrayed as a chaotic place staffed by incompetents. While at the school, DI Bascombe’s son Adam reveals to him what he’s been missing, the importance of the manosphere to the murder. He goes on to tell his dad about the manosphere, the red pill and the 80-20 rule - that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men - sounding a lot more like the way a TV producer who had been searching the internet would describe things than how a teenage boy would. The police then describe this to a teacher as the ‘involuntary celibate stuff. It’s the Andrew Tate shite’.

Episode 3 is where we see Jamie being interviewed seven months later by the psychologist Briony - this is the scene which has generated such a rich set of memes. Jamie is asked what he thinks about masculinity, what being a man feels like, and what he feels about his dad and granddad. He reveals he doesn’t like sport, that he believes his father was ashamed of him for not performing on the football field, that his mum can cook a roast but not much else. After an altercation with him Briony leaves but then returns and continues with the same line of questioning, asking whether he, or his dad, have any female friends and whether he follows models on Instagram. Eventually Jamie reveals that he had asked Katie, the murder victim, out after seeing a topless picture of her, thinking her to be weak and desperate. While still denying the murder, he admits that her rejection of him and humiliation on Instagram is what drove his anger towards her: “she’s a bitch, I should have killed her but I didn’t.”

The final episode follows Jamie’s family as they struggle with the stresses his actions have caused them and deal with the news that he has decided to plead guilty. They wonder if they could have spent more time with him and whether they should have prevented him from spending too much time in his room on his computer. Here we have a couple more clunkily inserted moral warnings. Jamie’s father Eddie encounters an intense young man in a DIY store who doesn’t believe Jamie did it - clearly he has been encountering dangerous misinformation on the internet. Eddie later reveals that he too has been served woman-hating manosphere content on his phone when searching for gym routines. The message all wrapped up, the series then ends in tears and regret.

The overall message of Adolescence is that you, you nice normal parents watching this, could be harbouring a potential murderer if your son reads too many problematic ideas about masculinity online. But the show is guilty of conflating different phenomena: incels, Andrew-Tate style manosphere influencer culture, and knife crime. Jamie is portrayed as a cherubic 13 year old who spends too much time in his bedroom but who has a loving family and no previous criminal or violent history. But the two real life cases the series were based on were utterly different. 17 year old Hassan Sentamu, who stabbed 15 year old Elianne Andam to death in Croydon 2023, had been in foster care and had been in trouble with the police since age 12 for carrying knives and being violent towards girls. The unnamed 14 year old who murdered 12 year old Ava White in Liverpool in 2021 had been involved with the police so many times that he knew exactly what to expect on his arrest: “they always take my phone. I have had a few phones took when I was in the police station.”

Teenage boys inherently act pretty horribly, and doubtless Andrew Tate style manosphere content influences some to behave even worse; the Instagram bullying and the nude pictures of the victim making their way round the school rang truer than the murder did and would have made a more realistic basis for the drama. But this sort of stuff is not the same phenomenon as knife crime, and nor, really, of incels.

This sort of conflation is characteristic of commentary on the manosphere more generally. This Guardian article of a few days ago: Beyond Andrew Tate: the imitators who help promote misogyny online is one example. It bizarrely lumps Jordan Peterson (due to his advocacy of ‘traditional masculine values of courage, self-discipline and order’) in with those like Sneako who espouse views like Tate himself. One striking thing evident in the article (and perhaps this is the reason that Peterson was included, to balance things out), is how non-white manosphere influencers are. This is another difficult thing for the sorts of people who are lauding Adolescence to accept, given their tendency to believe that the things that they like (diversity, respect for women) all come as one package, and all the things they dislike (racism, sexism, homophobia) do too. But all the evidence is that the manosphere is disproportionately non-white and that Andrew Tate is more popular among black and asian men than white men.

None of this is likely to interest those calling for Adolescence to be treated as a documentary and to be shown in schools and in Parliament. As with so many other examples recently, such as the way that David Amess’s murder was used to justify the Online Safety Bill, we are seeing the prioritisation of preconceived ideas over the real causes.

If you get into any debate around Englishness or Anglo-Saxon history you’ll encounter a lot of misconceptions around how people thought about their identity. You’ll hear arguments that people didn’t think about themselves in terms of their nation or people but mainly in terms of their religious identity, their locality, or their loyalty to their king or feudal lord, and that nations only arose much later as a result of modern political processes.

Following on from my previous article on the idea of purely civic nationalism, I am going to write a follow-up looking more deeply into this idea that nations are purely modern creations. But first I’m going to address this question regarding the early history of England and Britain in particular.

Whenever I’ve read original sources from the time, I’ve always been struck by the disconnect between how important nations or peoples were to writers at the time versus how this is downplayed in much of modern discourse. This is not to deny the importance of other forms of identity like religion and the civilised/barbarian distinction, nor to argue that a nation or people of the middle ages was the same as a modern one, but to demonstrate how foundational they were the understanding of the world at the time.

Sources covering the Anglo-Saxon period are not copious, but those that do exist give the impression of a desperate struggle between Romano-Britons, Anglo-Saxons and others like Picts and Scots which was seen in exactly these terms - as between peoples. Modern commentators who want to downplay this often talk instead of things like cultural fusion and diffusion and the malleability of identity. These processes did occur, but it’s certainly not how writers of the time thought about things.

Gildas

One of the earliest accounts of the Anglo-Saxon settlement and invasion of Britain is that of Gildas, a Brythonic monk living in the 5th/6th century. He later emigrated to the Brythonic refuge of Brittany where he wrote De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), castigating the rulers of the Romano-Britons for their failures. Gildas regards his people as Britons but also as Roman citizens, and the distinction between civilisation and barbarism is clearly an important one in his work. The enemies of the Britons, while sometimes just described as barbarians, are also specified as clearly defined peoples.

Gildas recounts the departure of the Romans from Britain, how they urged the Britons to learn to defend themselves against the attacks from the ‘tetri scottorum pictorumque gentes’ (terrible peoples of the Scots and Picts), and describes the famous appeal Gemitus Britannorum (‘The Groans of the Britons’) sent to the Romans seeking military aid with the wonderfully evocative:

“The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us upon the barbarians; by one or other of these two modes of death we are either killed or drowned.”

He then describes the fateful invitation by a native king to the ‘Saxones deo hominibusque inuisi’ (Saxons, hated by God and man) to Britain, to help defend against the Picts and Scots, and how the Saxons eventually turned against the Britons and started devastating the the country. Gildas concludes the chronology with the Battle of Badon between Britons and Saxons in the early 6th century, which he regards, rather too hopefully, as having halted the invasions, and with a description of the devastated country and continuing civil wars:

“But not even at the present day are the cities of our country inhabited as formerly; deserted and dismantled, they lie neglected until now, because, although wars with foreigners have ceased, domestic wars continue.”

Bede

Bede, the English monk who wrote Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) (Latin / English) around 731, describes the same events from the other side’s perspective. Bede’s sympathies are with the Angles and the Gentis Anglorum more broadly; his work is sometimes concerned with the Angles specifically but also encompasses the history of the related peoples that would become the English.

He begins with a description of the inhabitants of Britain as ‘quinque gentium linguis … Anglorum uidelicet, Brettonum, Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum’ (five languages / peoples … of the English, Britons, Scots, Picts and Latins), how the Britons were the first inhabitants, later being joined by the Scots and Picts. He goes on to repeat Gildas’s narrative of the departure of the Romans and the attacks on the Britons by the gentibus transmarinis uehementer saeuis, Scottorum a circio, Pictorum ab aquilone (‘savage foreign peoples, the Scots from the west, the Picts from the north’).

Bede’s account of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, unsurprisingly, puts a different spin on it from Gildas’s. Gildas described the Saxons as ‘hated by God and man’, while for Bede, the arrival of the Saxonum gentem or the Anglorum siue Saxonum gens (Angle or Saxon people) ‘appears to have been done by the appointment of our Lord Himself, that evil might fall upon them [the Britons] for their wicked deeds’. One example:

“At this time, Ethelfrid, a most worthy king, and ambitious of glory, governed the kingdom of the Northumbrians, and ravaged the Britons more than all the great men of the English, insomuch that he might be compared to Saul, once king of the Israelites, excepting only this, that he was ignorant of the true religion. For he conquered more territories from the Britons, either making them tributary, or driving the inhabitants clean out, and planting English in their places, than any other king or tribune.”

Bede’s conception of an English people did not mean that there was a united English kingdom. But in his work there’s clearly an idea that the Gentis Anglorum, though divided politically, shared something unifying that distinguished them from the other peoples of Britain.

The unification of England and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The united English kingdom was forged in the 9th and 10th centuries, during the reconquest of the country against the Danes started by Alfred the Great and completed by his grandson Æthelstan. The unified people became known as Angelcynn, a concept promoted under Alfred and his successors.

Alfred had Bede’s history translated into English, as well as sponsoring the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Old English / English), which would record Anglo-Saxon and English history for the next few hundred years. A couple of examples:

A. 473. Her Hengest ⁊ Æsc gefuhtan wið Wealas ⁊ genaman unarimedlicu herereaf, ⁊ þa Wealas flugan þa Engle swa swa fyr. (This year Hengest and Esc fought with the Welsh, and took immense booty. And the Welsh fled from the English like fire.)

A. 901 Her gefor Ælfred Aþulfing .vi. nihtum ær Ealra Haligra mæssan, se wæs cing ofer eall Angelcynn butan þam dæle ðe under Dene anwealde wæs (This year died Alfred, the son of Ethelwulf, six days before the mass of All Saints. He was king over the whole English people, except that part which was under the dominion of the Danes.)

By the 11th century the people became known as Englisc and the country as Engla-Lond in Old English or Anglia in Latin.

On the other side, we have the 10th century Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales) which talks always in terms of Britons and Saxons: ‘Gildas Britonus sapientissmus obiit‘ (Gildas, wisest of the Britons, dies), and ‘Bellum inter Brittones et Saxones’ (war between the Britons and the Saxons). Or the early 10th-century Welsh poem Armes Prydein (The Prophecy of Britain) (Welsh / English) which anticipates driving the Anglo-Saxons out of Britain: “Kymry a Saesson kyferuydyn … A mal [bwyt] balaon Saesson syrthyn”. (“The Cymry will meet the Saxons … And like the budded blossoms the Saxons will fall.”)

Legal Codes

Contemporary works of history by literate monks cannot necessarily be used to illustrate how the mass of the people thought. But we can look at the legal codes that governed everyone’s lives and see that English and Welsh living under the same ruler were treated very differently.

The Laws of Ine from the late 7th century specify different punishments for Welshmen and Englishmen: “A Welshman, who has been reduced to penal slavery, shall be compelled to submit to a scourging, as a slave, by [an oath of] 12 hides; an Englishman, by [an oath of] 34 hides”. The mid-10th century Norðleoda laga (Laws of the Northumbrians) similarly specifies different wergilds: that for the lowest ranked free Englishman (Ceorls) was 200 shillings, while for the lowest ranked free Welshman it was 70 shillings.

In Welsh law, we have the mid 10th century Laws of Hywel, which distinguish between the rights of a Cymro (Welshman) and that of an Alltud (foreigner): an alltud’s word was not equal to that of a Welshman in law, and if a Welsh woman married an alltud, their descendants did not gain full inheritance rights until the third generation.

Identity does not stem purely from political processes

This unified kingdom of England, and its English identity, survived both Danish and Norman rule, assimilating the latter by the end of the 12th century (Hugh M. Thomas’s The English and the Normans is a good book on this process). But as we have seen, the idea that this and other identities derived only from there being a unified kingdom, let alone from a modern state, is not true. Even in a situation of political chaos and disunity, the distinctions between different peoples, and groups of related peoples, mattered hugely to writers (and lawmakers) at the time, and were a fundamental way in which they thought about the world.

Other articles you might like:

1. ”National identity is just about citizenship”

2. “Nations are Modern Creations”

3. “Europe was a Backwater Before Colonialism”

4. “Climate change will lead to human extinction”

5. “Your ancestors had kids in their teens”

6. Anti-Essentialism

A version of this article was originally published in The Critic on the 23rd March.

I have always liked the concept of the upper normie. An upper normie is someone who holds conventional mainstream opinions but is a bit more intelligent than the average and thus considers themselves to be more sophisticated than the normal normies. Common examples of the upper-normie worldview in Britain are the #FBPE movement, James O’Brien fans and the Rest is Politics listeners.

Because the upper normie is more conventionally-minded than they think they are, they tend to believe the conventional high-status wisdom of their age. Today this looks like a mix of the establishment liberalism that became hegemonic in the West after WW2 (which N. S. Lyons has called the open society consensus) combined with, depending on how left-wing the upper normie is, elements from postcolonialism and wokeness (or cultural socialism as Eric Kaufmann calls it).

Today, with the Trump administration and the fraying of the establishment liberal consensus, there is an idea that we are in the midst of a vibe shift. More ambitiously, as N.S. Lyons puts it above, we are seeing the end of the long 20th century and the birth of a new world order, based on the return of the “strong gods” which were repressed by establishment liberalism. I believe that this shift he describes is indeed happening, yet the conventional wisdom persists. While the White House - and elements of the tech right - are trying to replace the old consensus, it will take time for the consensus and thus for the upper-normie worldview to change.

Folk Beliefs

Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact, and I have come to think of much of the upper-normie worldview as a collection of these folk beliefs. These are not the old sayings about health and wealth that might be passed down via your grandmother, but somewhat muddled and simplistic ideas about history, nationhood, economics, colonialism, race etc. that originated from academia, the media, the cultural industries, governments and NGOs over the long 20th century.

As an example, one way upper-normie folk beliefs manifest is that their favourite, and in many cases only historical analogy is to the Nazis: in the establishment liberal worldview the Nazis serve as the representation of what is bad, while ‘not the Nazis’ represents what is good. Thus topics as varied as Putin (‘Putler’), Hamas (‘worse than the Nazis’), Elon Musk (‘Swasticar’) or pictures of happy blond families (‘like something out of Nazi Germany’) are not understood on their own terms but because they are deemed to be reminiscent of the Nazis.

However the folk beliefs which I am particularly interested in are those that make specific historical claims in the service of a liberal or cultural socialist worldview relating to nationhood, ethnicity, western economic development and colonialism. These often originate in academia but generally simplify or distort the original work, or are highly selective of it. Thus in a very upper-normie way, they purport to be the smart, expert view, while actually being far from this.

The specific beliefs I want to look at include “national identity is just about citizenship”, “nations are modern inventions” and “Europe was a backwater before colonialism.” The first of these I am going to discuss here, and the others in future articles.

“National Identity is just about citizenship”

This folk belief holds that national identity is purely a matter of legal citizenship, and that beyond this it can only consist of an adherence to vague liberal universal values (e.g the idea of “British values”) or twee national characteristics like queuing and drinking tea. I discussed liberal universalist patriotism previously in Liberal patriots and most Christian Kings, and the prosaic conception of culture in Against the ‘ethnic food festival’ conception of culture. 

Recently this belief has held the status of the Current Thing, kicked off by the question of whether or not Rishi Sunak (and subsequently Suella Braverman) is English, to which many commentators responded with somewhat performative outrage that such a question would even be considered - Owen Jones providing a good example here:

Jones is displaying the characteristic obtuseness of the upper normie here, in contending that the answer to a complex question is actually so obvious that any alternative view can only be treated with derision. This style of take on substantive questions is characteristic of the upper-normie view on many questions. An example is the classic Redditism “just be a decent human being” as the only answer to moral issues, as if the idea that there might be something more to morality than Millian liberalism is incomprehensible.

The corollary to the ‘civic-only’ conception of national identity is that, against all evidence of lived experience, there can be no ethnic identity separate from the civic one, as epitomised in this other recent tweet on the ‘who is English’ controversy:

Beliefs like this are only really possible to hold either as a polite fiction or by those who are either highly unreflective or highly mendacious (or both). Unreflective members of the ethnic majority (i.e. the upper normie) are particularly prone to holding them due to the common ‘the fish can’t see the water it swims in’ psychological tendency they fall prey to. For ethnic minorities in supposedly civic nationalist countries like England or France it is much more instinctively obvious that there is a concept of ethnic Englishness or Frenchness distinct from the national one, though those of them who fall into the highly mendacious category can still deny it for self-interested or political reasons.

Therefore I don’t feel there’s any need to spend much time proving that the civic-only conception of national identity does not reflect how things are in reality, or how people think about it if they truly reflect on the question. There have been a few good articles recently addressing this, e.g. Chris Bayliss’s What does it mean to be English?, which discusses the widespread reluctance today to concede that there is an English ethnicity and the reasons this came to be so. Instead, here I want to look at the intellectual history of the civic nationalist idea and how it came to predominate as upper-normie conventional wisdom.

The Idea of Civic Nationalism

Many have observed that a division in national identity arose during the age of nationalism from the late 18th century onwards, between the so-called civic form of Western Europe and its American offshoots, and the ethnic form of Central and Eastern Europe. The argument goes that national identity in Western countries like Britain, France and the US was defined by citizenship of the state and was imbued with the progressive and egalitarian political ideals of the age. In Central and Eastern Europe however, national identity was based on ethnic communities deriving from a romantic connection to the medieval past, and was a force that was oppositional to the existing states and empires of the day (as in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires).

Many writers have tried to define what makes a nation over the centuries, but the explicit civic/ethnic distinction originates with Hans Kohn’s 1944 book The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background, an idea which became highly influential in subsequent decades. The distinction makes sense on a surface level for the nationalism of the late 18th to early 20th centuries, especially relating to its two primary archetypes of France and Germany. The nationalism of post-revolutionary France had the state and citizenship as its object and promoted the same status as ‘citizen’ for all who held it. The German nationalism of the same period developed in the absence of a single, overarching German state and was defined by German language and culture, distinguishing the Germans from the other peoples that surrounded and lived amongst them.

However the civic/ethnic distinction is mostly a false dichotomy. ‘Civic nations’ grew around strong ethnic cores that anchored the state, even if this fact was not emphasised explicitly (and often in fact it was emphasised explicitly). It was this underlying ethnic identity that allowed them to build a civic identity which outlying minority groups could assimilate into. ‘Ethnic nations’ looked to the state just as civic nations did, it was just that in most cases the state they envisaged did not currently exist, therefore their national movements had to use non-state markers of identity or the memory of their historical states or kingdoms. The states they aspired to would then, ideally, assimilate their remaining minorities just as was happening in the civic nations. A good book which deals in depth with these processes is Azar Gat’s Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism - but I’ll briefly talk about the development of a few supposedly civic nations.

Civic Nations are also Ethnic Nations

Post-revolutionary France was the archetypal civic nation, but the French state and people developed over a period of hundreds of years before this. We can observe a 500-year process where the kings of France, beginning with Philip II in the late 12th century (the first to style himself King of France, not King of the Franks), steadily expanded their own power, constructing the apparatus of the future state in the process.

It is often emphasised that pre-revolutionary France was made up of many non-French speaking areas with their own identities, laws, and fiscal and political privileges, including Brittany, the Germanic provinces in the east (which became Alsace-Lorraine), and the Occitan-speaking ones in the south. The basis of the kingdom though was the large area of north-central France centered on Paris that contained the oldest provinces. The core French people developed here, a fusion of Franks and Gallo-Romans speaking the langues d'oïl which became the modern French language. You can see from maps of pre-revolutionary fiscal zones and the Parlements that there was a distinction made between core France and the outlying ‘provinces considered foreign’ which correlates quite well with where the langues d'oïl were spoken. Based on this core region of political and ethnic Frenchness, from the revolution onwards and into the 19th and 20th centuries the French state carried out a highly successful assimilative project of these outlying regions.

The development of England as a national state was well established by the 10th century, forged under pressure from the invading Danes. By the late medieval period, once the long process of assimilation of the Normans was complete, England had become one of the most centralised and ethnically homogenous kingdoms in Europe. The formation of Britain by the Acts of Union of 1707 joined England to Scotland, another long established state centered on the lowland Scots, creating a more civic national identity, but one still defined by specific peoples with a shared language family and protestant religion.

The idea that the US’s identity has always been one of a nation of immigrants is an invention of the 1960s. Before this, the country’s identity had been defined not by Ellis Island, but chiefly by its Anglo-Protestant heritage, by Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the revolutionary and civil wars and the winning of the west. The Statue of Liberty stood for the political liberty achieved in these wars, not for the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ that it later came to represent. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw America as continuing the Anglo-Saxon tradition of freedom, while Founding Father John Jay wrote in 1787:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs”.

Indeed a large majority of white Americans were of British origin at the time of the revolution and for a long time after. Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America is a good source to read about this.

In the late 19th and early 20th century too, civic nations were also ethnic nations. In Britain and America this was the age of Victorian Anglo-Saxonism, when historians straightforwardly talked of the Anglo-Saxon race and traced the origins of both nations back to this original ethnic stock. Since the Immigration Act of 1924 the USA had explicitly employed the national origins formula with the goal of maintaining its ethnic identity. In France, the revolution had been seen in one sense as having finally released the Gauls from the oppression of the Franks (analogous to the idea of the Norman yoke in England). As Emmanuel Sieyès, leading political theorist of the French revolution, wrote in his 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate:

“Why not, after all, send back to the Franconian forests all those families still affecting the mad claim to have been born of a race of conquerors and to be heirs to rights of conquest? Thus purged, the Nation might, I imagine, find some consolation in discovering that it is made up of no more than the descendants of the Gauls and Romans.”

The popular 19th-century school textbook by Ernest Lavisse on the history of France continued this emphasis when it recounted that:

 “The Romans who came established themselves in Gaul in small numbers. The Franks were not numerous either, Clovis only had a few thousand with him. The basis of our population has thus remained Gaulish. The Gauls are our ancestors”.

The Postwar Idea of Purely Civic National Identity

In the second half of the 20th century the civic-only conception of national identity triumphed in Europe and America, at least officially. While Nazi Germany and WW2 did a lot to discredit ethnic forms of nationalism, the transformation was not a direct reaction to the war, which after all was viewed at the time as a victory for the still both civic-and-ethnic English-speaking peoples. In 1949 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas Macarthur, while clearly seeming increasingly like a man of a fading age, could still be reported as saying that the Pacific was now an “Anglo-Saxon lake.”

The real transformation only took place from the 1960s onwards, when a new moral paradigm took root in the Western world that interpreted its own history as fundamentally negative. This was symbolised by the new rise to prominence of the Holocaust as the ultimate lesson of WW2, rather than the fight against tyranny as had been emphasised at the time. The Holocaust, and fascism more generally, were now cast in works such as Adorno’s highly influential The Authoritarian Personality as being caused by newly-pathologised tendencies in the population such as ‘ethnocentrism’. The only non-negative things that could be salvaged from Western history were abstract anti-strong god principles like tolerance, liberalism and universal human rights, and it was these that became the basis of the new official forms of purely civic national identity.

In Germany, even after 1945 the traditional ethnic model of citizenship based on descent, not residence, persisted for some decades. Initially the Turkish and other foreign guest workers of the 1950s and 1960s were not granted German citizenship and nor were their German-born children. This distinction broke down, as Christian Joppke makes clear in his 1998 book Immigration and the Nation State, not via the democratic political process but due to a succession of court cases in the Constitutional Court that ruled against government policies on immigration. (This is one of many historical examples where the cause of establishment liberalism was advanced via the legal process against the intentions of the executive). The old system of nationality law was finally ended in the 90s when naturalisation of immigrants and dual nationality became permitted and jus soli was introduced for children of long-term resident immigrants. The traditional German conception of identity was thus replaced by the idea of ‘constitutional patriotism’ promoted by thinkers like Dolf Sternberger and Jürgen Habermas.

In the 60s, the USA saw its traditional identity that had been defined by the original Anglo settlers, the revolution and the westward expansion transformed to the ‘nation of immigrants’, symbolically initiated by the 1958 ADL-sponsored book “A Nation of Immigrants”, written by John F. Kennedy. The 1965 Immigration Act removed the national origins formula, paving the way - against the expectations of the congressmen who voted for it - for large-scale immigration from non-European countries. In countries like Britain and France, where the civic conception had long been balanced by a sense of ethnic identity, the latter was de-emphasised and banished from polite discourse.

‘Purely Civic’ Nations Cannot Ignore Ethnic Realities

As a result of these historical developments the more balanced idea of national identity as a mix of civic and ethnic elements has been lost. We now have a widespread belief that there are two distinct forms: the good, inclusive, civic sort that we supposedly have, and the bad, exclusive, ethnic sort belonging to the past. It is this belief that is at the root of the upper-normie worldview on the question.

In a sense the advocates of purely civic nationalism have started to believe their own propaganda. In reality, civic nationalism is a kind of a fiction that allows for the tolerance of minorities and, if things go well, the forging of a new core ethnicity out of old and new elements. It has never really meant, and does not mean today, that national identity is purely a civic matter divorced from ethnicity, nor that nations do not have a core Staatsvolk or dominant ethnicity.

Civic nationalism can work successfully but only if the underlying core ethnic identity of a country is not threatened too much. In the US, despite recent political conflict over the issue, the predominantly Hispanic and Asian immigration of recent decades has proved more compatible with the historic core white ethnic majority than immigration to European countries over the same period has. Its model will not necessarily continue to work forever, but the political discontent in Europe shows far more starkly what happens when the civic idea is taken too literally and ethnic realities are ignored. The error that the upper-normie civic nationalists make is to assume that the civic model will necessarily succeed regardless of the underlying ethnic situation. But this is little more than an article of faith, or folk belief, coming into increasing conflict with reality.

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One characteristic claim made by those who don’t think very deeply about our immigration system is that current levels must continue because the NHS, or the care system, would otherwise collapse. This argument ignores actual policy and history and is generally made in the same way whatever current immigration levels actually are, even when they have risen to unprecedented levels as they have in recent years. As an argument it is also highly parochial, as British commentary on the NHS so often is: those who make it never think to compare Britain with the situation of our closest neighbours and to ask why we are so much more reliant on this form of immigration than they are.

The situation in Britain

The NHS is indeed highly reliant on immigration. As of September 2024, 36% of its 156,000 hospital doctors and 30% of its 400,000 nurses are non-UK nationals. Our high rate of foreign medical staff is hardly a new trend, but neither is it some constant law of nature divorced from political decisions. The figures from recent years have been unprecedented: what happened over the last 15 years was a slower level of change until 2020, then an accelerated one once the government introduced the Health and Care visa in August 2020. This is when the Boriswave really got going.

The change in adult social care is even more marked. The balance between British, EU and non-EU staff had been relatively static until 2022/23, when it started to shift strongly towards non-EU workers due to the addition of care workers and home carers to the Health and Care visa in February 2022.

Much has already been written about the failures of the Boriswave. Its huge future fiscal costs due to the low wages of the visa holders, the large number of accompanying dependants it initially permitted, the lack of an age limit, and more broadly the acceleration of the already fast-advancing demographic transformation of Britain. But here I want to talk about the question of inevitability or system collapse which so often accompanies discussion of this topic. Importing foreign healthcare workers is a growing trend globally, but why are we so much more extreme than other European countries?

European comparisons

If we look at the OECD’s statistics for 2024, we can see that Britain, along with Ireland, is a massive outlier in the percentage of foreign-trained doctors and nurses. Norway, Sweden and Switzerland appear to be outliers too but their situation is not really comparable. In Norway and Sweden large numbers of foreign-trained medical staff are native students who studied for their medical qualifications abroad before returning home, while in Switzerland nearly all the foreign-trained doctors and nurses come from neighbouring countries. Other European countries range from having half the UK rates of foreign doctors and nurses (e.g. Germany) down to a third or less (e.g. France, Italy and Denmark).

So why is this? We often hear of the large numbers of British (and Irish) doctors moving abroad, requiring us to replace them from other countries, but the numbers are not as great as are often suggested. Britain trains around 9,500 graduate doctors per year, of which in 2022 1,403 left to practise abroad (around 15%), while data from 2012-2017 indicates that 43% of those who do work abroad later return, generally within three years. This indicates that less than 10% of British graduate doctors are lost to the NHS over the long term.

Doctors leaving for abroad then cannot fully explain the high rates of foreign trained doctors in Britain and Ireland. Given that comparable European countries like France can run a health service that is by many accounts superior to the NHS with far lower rates of foreign workers, the way we do things is evidently not the only choice available. Neither is it the case that Britain gets its healthcare on the cheap via importing lower paid medical staff; looking at the percentage of their GDP different countries spend on healthcare, Britain, though spending a bit less than Germany or France, spends more than most comparable European countries.

International comparisons for care workers are harder to find, though even in the pre-Boriswave days of 2019, Britain was one of the few European countries along with Luxembourg, Malta, Ireland and Austria where the share of migrants among care workers exceeded 10%.

Given these international comparisons, the reality seems likely to be that Britain and other English speaking countries simply can recruit from abroad due to the international availability of English-speaking workers, rather than that they must do so to the extent that they do. Policy changes though can still make a massive difference to the numbers and to the outcomes, fiscal and otherwise. Indeed in spring 2024 the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak belatedly restricted the ability of holders of Health and Care visas to bring dependants. This change, coupled with increased Home Office scrutiny, led to an 81% decrease in visas granted to main applicants in 2024 vs 2023. No one today thinks that the NHS or the care system is functioning well exactly, but neither are they ‘collapsing’ in a way that they were not collapsing in 2023, as a result of this large decrease in visa grants.

I am not trying to argue that these are easy issues to solve: increasing reliance on foreign workers for health and care work is rooted in ageing populations and resulting workforce and financial constraints. It is an increasing trend worldwide, but as with many aspects of immigration, Britain is an extreme case and has handled it especially poorly particularly over the last few years. In this context, lazy claims of inevitability and collapse are not just evidence of a serious lack of knowledge and imagination, but are especially pernicious.

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Clarkson’s Farm has recently been renewed for its fifth series, having become Amazon Prime’s most watched show ever in Britain. In May 2024, the month of season three’s release, it was streamed more than any other show, with 10 million viewers.

Others have written giving some of the reasons for the show’s success. Its characters fit various popular and familiar archetypes: the blundering but likeable lord of the manor (and fish out of water) Jeremy Clarkson, the apparently unsophisticated but in reality astute local boy Kaleb, the number-crunching, rule-obsessed killjoy Charlie, and the old man of the land Gerald. The characters battle together, and with each other, to overcome various challenges both natural (the vagaries of livestock, crops, and the weather) and human (West Oxfordshire District Council). All of this together with the rural setting provides a strong sense of groundedness and authenticity.

Clarkson’s Farm is also, importantly, almost completely English in an England that is rapidly becoming less so with every passing year. Most TV and advertising portrays this transformation as being even more drastic than it is in reality, and part of the appeal of Clarkson’s Farm is that its setting is one of genuine, deep continuity with historical England, not one of rupture or of astroturfed continuity like, say, Bridgerton.

The experience of watching the show when the adverts come on is quite arresting. Contemporary British advertising could be pretty accurately described as an excessively twee, accelerated and improbably constituted version of the great replacement. Implausible racial combinations and levels of representation, all overlaid with a somewhat cloying ‘have a nice cuppa tea’ faux-cosiness; watching a few of these and then being suddenly transported back to Clarkson’s Cotswolds farm is whiplash inducing.

From Top Gear Clarkson to Clarkson’s Farm Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson has traditionally been pretty clearly identified with Tory Britain in its Thatcherite guise. Born and brought up near Doncaster to upwardly mobile parents he moved south, lost his accent and made his career in journalism based on cars and an un-PC blokeishness.

Yet like most British people (perhaps people in general) Clarkson is conservative but in a non-ideological, idiosyncratic and often sentimental way, representing the average person far more closely than more explicitly political right wingers do. I mean this more in his approach to political questions than in his actual opinions, though these too generally do not stray too far from the centre ground, even when he is representing the minority position.

He is pro free market and anti regulation, against PC, wokeness and left-wing activism, and valorises common sense and plain speaking. He was a soft Remainer for both emotional and practical reasons, as with the British public in general he wears his anti-Americanism with pride and has an emphatic distaste for Trump. He writes against the death penalty and expresses confusion about, but some sympathy for transgenderism. He mocks climate change but is concerned for the natural world.

In general he likes to shock but is also keen to be normal and to stay inside the Overton window of respectability, exemplified by his climbdown after his column expressing the desire for Meghan Markle to be given the Cersei Lannister treatment led to more outrage than even he was expecting.

Top Gear’s Clarkson was younger and due to the nature of a show travelling round the world and driving cars, he was freer too. Restrictions on his activities were an irritant but he could always just move on to the next location if they became too onerous.

Clarkson’s Farm’s Clarkson has come home and has become tied to a specific place: he has thus found himself restricted in innumerable and frustrating ways, both natural and artificial. He cannot control the weather, how his animals behave, the law or the decisions of local governments which hem him in; he cannot just up and leave but has to make things work the best he can where he is. This new iteration is much closer to the life experiences of ordinary people than the one of globetrotting motoring journalist was.

This Clarkson is also softer. In a role reversal from Top Gear Clarkson, many scenes have him playing the role of the somewhat effete liberal, displaying his ignorance of practical farming matters and blanching at realities like castrating lambs and porcine cannibalism. He also starts getting into some of the great enthusiasms of the British middle classes. He tries his hand at ‘wilding’ his land, creating a natural idyll out of previously farmed or waste areas. He develops a farm shop and restaurant to sell local produce and he converts part of the farm to regenerative agriculture to improve soil health and biodiversity.

Clarkson’s Farm as an intersection between Tory Britain and Lib Dem Britain

As one early review of Clarkson’s Farm noted, ‘Clarkson’s gone soft’. In some ways, he has even become a bit Lib Dem, in the sense that Lib Dems are Tories gone soft.

Here a distinction must be made between Lib Dems as a party and Lib Dems as voters. As ‘The Right mustn't give up on Yellow England’ points out, while Liberal Democrat policies are about as left wing as those of Labour, among voters a large part of the party’s appeal is that it is seen as an alternative to the Tories that is not left wing, or at least not as left wing as Labour is.

It was these Lib Dem-Tory switchers that drove the party’s wins in previously Tory seats at the last election. These voters are not particularly left wing: in Onward’s post election report for example, Tory-Lib Dem switchers cite reducing immigration as the top thing the Tories could do to win back their vote, with 53% of them wanting immigration to be cut a lot and 22% cut a little.

Clarkson’s Farm’s physical location fits this intersection: situated as it is in West Oxfordshire, part of what has been termed ‘lovely Britain’ by the Economist. While technically just inside the constituency of Banbury, which switched to Labour for the first time this election (due to most of the constituency’s population living in Banbury the town), it is surrounded by a patchwork of Tory and Lib Dem constituencies which were all Tory in 2019. This location is where Lib Dem (or Lib Dem curious) Britain merges into Tory Britain, the Severn-Wash line, or the point where the South meets the Midlands. There are a lot of Lib Dem constituencies just to the south of this line, and few above it.

This Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm has a large and cross-cutting appeal, reaching beyond his traditionally blokeish right wing constituency to Tory / Lib Dem ‘lovely Britain’ types who prefer a somewhat more sensitive, bucolic brand of conservatism. Taken together this is a large group: it is no wonder that Dominic Cummings has reportedly been targeting Clarkson for his startup party.

Clarkson himself is quite politically astute, having recognised, despite his advocacy for Remain, that the political class can become so out of touch with public opinion that they can be taken unawares by political events: Brexit in 2016 and, he posits, mass immigration now. There are currently incipient rumblings about Clarkson as a political figure: Clarkson’s Farm has given him an unlikely role as a spokesman for British farmers and he is due to speak at the protest in London against the inheritance tax changes on the 19th of November. I could easily see him being able to develop this into something more if he is willing to give up his current comfortable position.

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