Not significant ones. Until about 1950 the only South Asians in Britain were stranded (or deserting) lascars (contract sailors). There were a few thousand of them in the Docklands area and Southampton; certainly no more than 20,000 at any time. There was a roughly equal number of blacks, who were mostly Afro-Caribbean slaves (emancipated and not).
That seems more reasonable. The quoted poster was positing a few dozen, which didnt seem right.
Obviously there weren’t any non-emancipated slaves in England in 1950, lest my poor sentence construction confuse anyone.
She’s ex.
I was responding to someone who said there were none. Zero. So, “plenty” means significantly more than zero. The Africans who were present in Britain in the earliest days probably interbred such that one could show up there in the 1400s and remark that there were no Africans in Britain.
As for numbers at later dates, estimates range from 1 - 3% of the population of London was black in the 18th Century. Link. That’s more than “a few dozen”. And that was well over 100 years ago.
Because none of their cousins are black or Asian.
What statistics and what are the divisions available? Take into account that in many countries, someone from Magreb or most of the population of India would be considered white.
According to the office of National Statistics, 91% of the UK regard their ethnicity as white. This is self-assessed, although Indian, Pakistani etc are listed as separate options. The Asian subcontinent accounts for 4.6%, Afro-Caribbean or black British 2.3%, mixed race 1.4%, East Asian 0.8%.
Actually, the OP presents an interesting question. For many centuries it was the custom of European royalty of all countries to marry foreign royalty. This not only seemed proper, but could be used for purposes of diplomacy and dynastic politics. But only European royalty. Because only fellow Euros were Christians, of course; no political/dynastic advantage to be gained by putting your princess-daughter in the Sultan’s harem. But after the Age of Exploration opened, Euro royals did not intermarry with the royal families of the countries they colonized, or of any nonwhite countries at all – not even if the royals in question had converted to Christianity. Why not, eh?
Because those countries had no power, I would guess.
No political advantage. They married into other Royal families to create allies within their most important territory - Europe. They don’t need an alliance with people they had conquered. And of course feelings of European superiority over other races played a part. You’re not going to marry your subordinate.
Of course, that’s history, they did things differently there. I don’t think it’s just to judge the current royal family by the actions of their ancestors. We would ALL be racist if we had to live by the opinions of our great grandparents.
Perhaps not, but there are ways the Brits might have strengthened their rule in India or Africa by intermarrying their royal and peerage families with Indian or African princes, and similar possibilities for other empires on other continents. But, they didn’t.
If they had . . . that might lead to an interesting alternate history scenario, a world of peasant-commoners of all nations ruled by a multicultural, multinational, multiracial, and perhaps even multireligious class of traditional landowning royalty/aristocracy/gentry, the ruling class (but not the lower classes) being knitted together by a global network of marriage alliances.
Or in Ireland, come to think of it.
In fact, that appears to be exactly what is emerging (on a continental but not yet global scale) in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series.
I don’t think equating treatment of people with animals eve goes across well, so bad example I think.
(Plus this would be coming from a country that still allows hunting with bow and arrow so…yeah, cultural perspective is a strange beast.)
The better example for you to use would be that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until relatively recently (See the current Alan Turing thread) and I can’t reconcile the fact that the same country that recently waived through full gay marriage equality with barely a public murmur is the same one that outlawed it a scant few decades ago.
Both of our countries were “primitive and backwards” in many aspects and we shouldn’t be shy of admitting it. The most important thing to me is how far and how fast we all progress (and that progress is being made at all). I hear some of the political debates coming out of the USA and have to scratch my head at how barmy some of these discussions are and remind myself that it really isn’t a single country at all and re-calibrate my expectations accordingly. New England is not New Mexico and all that.
My own thoughts are that a mixed-race royal family or PM (and family) would be worthy of remark, but ultimately perfectly acceptable to the public. As would be a gay prime minister or head of state. Of course we’ve had powerful female leaders for centuries so that hurdle is well past.
But that wouldn’t make Britain seem backwards from the perspective of the US. 1967 is positively radical compared to the US, where it was illegal in some states until 2003.
Depends on your definition of “interesting”. It’s not really a great debate, is it?
In the past: A mix of religion, racism, and little to gain.
In the present: It just hasn’t happened yet. We haven’t exactly had a lot of weddings since religion and racism stopped being factors.
Actually a decent portion of States never passed anti-miscegenation laws (Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont) and many had repealed their laws before the end of the 19th century (New Mexico, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Washington.)
While most of the west eventually had miscegenation laws, they actually came late there. Interracial marriage was a common and widely accepted thing on the frontier, in fact a good example is Confederate General Pickett. While on the frontier prior to the Civil War he had a native wife and even fathered a son with her. It would not have been considered scandalous at all where he lived at the time. (Later, his white wife he married later on who lived in the Southeast took pains to hide the relationship, because in the post-Civil War South such a thing was scandalous.) It was actually a shift (and a relatively brief one) when anti-miscegenation laws became the norm in the frontier/western states.
Partly, but the British would have said that lack of power is due to innate inferiority, or conversely that the British could succeed in taking power because they were superior.
I used to teach English in Japan, and one of my teenaged students joked that her reason for wanting to learn English was so she could attend a British university, meet and marry either Prince William or Prince Harry (she said she’d wait until she actually met them to decide which one she liked better), and thus become a princess and perhaps someday queen. I can’t find the thread now, but I remember this inspired me to ask on here if there would be any legal barrier to one of the princes marrying a Japanese citizen. IIRC, the answer was that the Japanese bride’s religion and not her nationality would be the real issue, but that if she converted to the CofE then that would be fine.
My student was of course a commoner, but if the British royal family wanted to marry its sons off to foreign royalty then it seems to me that some of the Japanese princesses would be pretty good choices. There are several unmarried princesses in their 20s and early 30s, and one of them (Princess Akiko) even has a degree from Oxford. Perhaps most importantly, the Japanese Imperial family makes the Windsors look like a bunch of hippies. Handling the media might be a different story, though – the Japanese press is pretty restrained and respectful when it comes to their royal family.