British Americans

I

Introduction

British Americans, residents of the United States who trace their ancestry to Britain. Britain, also known as the United Kingdom, is composed of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. According to the 2000 U.S. census, as many as 41 million people in the United States are of British descent. The 28.3 million people who claim English ancestry constitute the largest subgroup of British Americans. Scots-Irish Americans, descendants of Protestants from what is now Northern Ireland, number 5.2 million. Approximately 5.4 million Americans claim Scottish ancestry, and 1.9 million report Welsh ancestry. About 12.4 million people, primarily in the Southeast, claimed American ancestry in the census. Experts believe that most people in this category are of British descent.

II

British Immigration During the 17th and 18th Centuries

The United States traces its roots to a series of English colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America. The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. In Virginia, the English settled in low-lying fertile areas around Chesapeake Bay and along the rivers of the coastal plain. Immigration to Virginia expanded quickly after 1640 as the cultivation of tobacco for export to Europe became increasingly profitable. In 1634 the colony of Maryland was established on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay. Between 120,000 and 130,000 people, the great majority of whom were of English origin, immigrated to Virginia and Maryland during the 17th century.

English Puritans, members of religious groups opposed to the established Church of England, colonized New England (see Puritanism). In 1620 a Puritan group known as the Pilgrims founded the first permanent English settlement in New England, known as the Plymouth Colony. The Plymouth Colony was soon overshadowed by the more populous colony of English Puritans established by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629. The most significant wave of Puritan settlement in New England, known as the Great Migration, brought about 21,000 settlers to the region between 1629 and 1640. The deeply religious Puritan colonists of New England valued hard work, self-discipline, and education. The Puritan culture of New England strongly influenced the culture of other American colonies and later that of the United States.

After the English seized the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664, the mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were established in the former Dutch territory. As many as 23,000 English colonists settled in eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, and western New Jersey between 1675 and 1715. Many of these settlers were members of the religious groups known as the Society of Friends, or Quakers.

---

---

During the 18th century, immigration from the outlying areas of the British Isles—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—increased dramatically. Among the most important British immigrant groups of this period were the Scots-Irish. According to a strict definition, the Scots-Irish are descendants of Presbyterian settlers from the lowlands of Scotland who had colonized the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland in the early 17th century. However, in the American colonies, they tended to intermix with lowland Scots and Anglo-Irish immigrants from southern Ireland. In the 18th century, about 200,000 Scots-Irish immigrants settled in the inland valleys of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Later generations of Scots-Irish established settlements throughout the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains from New England to Georgia.

Many British immigrants in the 17th and 18th centuries came to the North American colonies as indentured servants, legally bound to work for an average of four or five years to pay for their passage across the Atlantic. During the 17th and 18th centuries, British courts often gave convicted petty criminals the choice between the death penalty and transportation to the American colonies. About 50,000 British convicts were sent to the American colonies during the colonial period.

By the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783), between 800,000 and 900,000 British colonists had settled in North America and the Caribbean. The first U.S. census in 1790 counted about 4 million Americans. Based on the analysis of surnames, scholars estimate that British Americans constituted about 80 percent of the population in 1790.

III

British Immigration in the 19th and 20th Centuries

During the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution—the rapid transition from a predominantly agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy—displaced many Britons. Between 1820 and 1900, more than 3 million British immigrants resettled in the United States. Almost two-thirds of these immigrants arrived between 1860 and 1890. English immigrants outnumbered settlers from other parts of Britain throughout the 19th century.

More than 1 million British immigrants arrived in the United States in the first three decades of the 20th century. Despite continued immigration from Britain, the proportion of British Americans in the U.S. population has steadily declined.

In 1900 British Americans constituted approximately 60 percent of the population of the United States. By 1920 the proportion of British Americans had declined to 41 percent. In 1980 British Americans constituted less than 20 percent of the total population. Despite the decline in their numbers relative to other ethnic groups, British Americans have continued to exercise a strong influence on the economic, political, and cultural life of the United States. In the mid-20th century, the term WASP, referring to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, became a common designation for Americans of British heritage. American writers often equated WASPs with the dominant class in the United States.

British immigrants have continued to come to the United States during the second half of the 20th century. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 613,000 Americans were born in Britain. In the 1990s British people accounted for about 2 percent of all immigrants to the United States.