United Kingdom Population

1. Population

Britain has a diverse population that includes people with connections to every continent of the world. The ethnic origins of this population have been complicated by immigration, intermarriage, and the constant relocation of people in this highly developed industrial and technological society. Nevertheless, a few particulars about the historical formation of the population are noteworthy.

Early Ethnic Groups

Roman Britain Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 bc to conquer the native peoples, called Britons. The native tribes resisted subjugation for several decades, and annihilated a Roman garrison, at what is now York, in the 2nd century ad. Roman Emperor Hadrian began building a wall to keep the warlike northern tribes out of Roman territory. Many ruins exist of the wall, called Hadrian’s Wall. The Antonine Wall was constructed farther north 20 years later.© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Britain’s predominant historical stock is called Anglo-Saxon. Germanic peoples from Europe—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—arrived in Britain in massive numbers between the 5th and 7th centuries ad. These people tended to be tall, blond, and blue-eyed. Their language became the foundation of the basic, short, everyday words in modern English. These groups invaded and overwhelmed Roman Britain, choosing to settle on the plains of England because of the mild climate and good soils. Native Britons fought the great flood of Germanic peoples, and many Britons who survived fled west to the hill country. These refugees and native Britons were Celts who had absorbed the earliest peoples on the island, the prehistoric people known as Iberians. Celts tended to be shorter than Anglo-Saxons and have rounder heads. Most had darker hair, but a strikingly high percentage of Celts had red hair.

United Kingdom Population

After the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the Celts remained in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the West Country (the southwestern peninsula of Britain), where Celtic languages are still used to some extent and Celtic culture is still celebrated. This geographic separation between the Germanic Anglo-Saxons and the Celts has broken down over the centuries as people have migrated and intermarried.

A substantial number of Scandinavians raided and settled in Great Britain and Ireland during the 9th century. By then the Anglo-Saxons had established agricultural and Christian communities, and eventually they succeeded in subduing and integrating the Scandinavians into their kingdoms. In 1066 the Normans, French-speaking invaders of Norse origin, conquered England, adding yet another ethnic component. Although the Normans were the last major group to add their stock to the British population, waves of other foreigners and refugees have immigrated to Britain for religious, political, and economic reasons. Protestant French sought refuge in the 17th century, sailors of African ancestry came in the 18th century, and Jews from central and eastern Europe immigrated in the late 19th century and during the 1930s and late 1940s.

Immigration After World War II

Most British people attribute their origins to the early invaders, calling themselves English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or Ulsterites. The Ulsterites are an ethnically controversial group—some claim they are Scottish and others identify themselves as Protestant Irish. The remaining share of the population are minorities who arrived, for the most part, in the decades following the end of World War II in 1945.

These minorities—Chinese, Asian Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Caribbean people of African ancestry—came to Britain in substantial numbers after 1945. Immigration from the South Asian subcontinent (India and Pakistan) stabilized in the 1990s, but immigration from African countries continued to rise. By the late 1990s more than half of the people in these categories had been born in the United Kingdom. These newer ethnic groups tend to live in the more urban and industrial areas of England, especially in London, Birmingham, and Leeds. It is estimated that 60 percent of black Britons live in the London area, along with 41 percent of the Asian Indian population.

Although population censuses have been taken in the United Kingdom every decade since 1801, the 1991 census was the first to include a question on ethnic origin. More than 94 percent of the population is described as white. According to the most recent estimates, based on 1994 statistics, Asian Indians make up 1.5 percent of the British population; Pakistanis, 0.9 percent; Bangladeshis, 0.3 percent; Chinese, 0.3 percent; Caribbeans, 0.08 percent; and Africans, 0.03 percent.

Irish immigration to Britain is un