ROBERT J. C. YOUNG, The Idea of English Ethnicity.

Abstract

THE summer of 2010 saw the brief flaring (and the despairing collapse) of overt English nationalism that invariably accompanies the England football team’s participation in a World Cup. In this impressively wide-ranging and thoughtful study, Robert J. C. Young recognizes the importance of sports such as football and cricket to ideas of Englishness, both because they function as affirmations of a shared cultural identity, very often through the national teams’ re-enactment of a narrative of ‘heroic failure’ (19) that seems quintessentially English, and because they show how Englishness as a concept and as an experience resists easy definition, how it inevitably overlaps with and rubs against other models of identity, particularly ‘Britishness’. As Young notes, ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the only country on earth allowed to field four national teams in international football’ (12). The Idea of English Ethnicity focuses primarily on the shaping of English ethnic identity during the Victorian period. The book forms part of the ‘Blackwell Manifestos’ series, and Young takes advantage of the ‘manifesto’ rubric to put forward a bold, and upbeat, argument concerning English ethnicity. He suggests that, over the course of the Victorian period, conceptions of Englishness moved away from ‘Saxonism’, which had its historical roots in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and which defined the English as an exclusively Germanic (and, by implication, Protestant) race, and towards a more open and ‘inclusive’ (172) approach, which was as much cultural and linguistic as it was racial. Challenging the view that the mid-to-late-nineteenth century was a time of increasingly rigid and restrictive theories of race, Young claims that ‘the liberal achievement of the nineteenth century was that the ethnicity of Englishness was transformed from a Saxonist doctrine of racial singularity and exclusivity’ (241) into a flexible discourse which in the twentieth century proved to be, on the whole, tolerant of racial difference and accepting of immigration and ethnic diversity.