The idea that the English nation had a mixed racial origin goes back to the political controversies of the 17th century, when parliamentary rule was linked to Anglo-Saxon tribal democracy and royal prerogative was seen as an imperial, continental-European import brought by the Norman-French conquerors after 1066 (the “Norman yoke”). In addition, a nomenclature established since the early 18th century grouped the Welsh- and Gaelic-speaking populations of the British Isles as “Celts”, and a Danish-Norse-derived cultural presence was generally acknowledged as a remnant of the Viking incursions and settlements of the period 800-1000. Antiquarians, early Anglo-Saxon philologists, and historical novelists evoked these varied ethnic lines of descent, most often in order  to explain aristocratic-popular tensions or regional-cultural curiosities. Especially influential in this regard was Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1820), with its evocation of Anglo-Saxon vs Norman tensions in medieval England, which on the Continent would inspire Thierry’s ethno-characterological view of deep historical patterns.

Within Britain, the question of race and identity revolved largely around the unassimilated Celtic heritage, which led some Saxonist antiquaries (a tradition starting with the 18th-century Scotsman Pinkerton, and becoming dominant after Carlyle) to deny any degree of relatedness between the Saxon and Celtic “races”. This “Saxonism”, which was dominant in the mid-19th century, and which informed views on the ethnic roots of the English nation among Victorian historians as well as anthropologists (J.R. Green, A short history of the English people, 1874; H.M. Chadwick, The origin of the English nation, 1907) coincided with the decline of the Bible as an explanatory model for the early history of mankind and the rise of Aryanism (applied in an imperial, India-to-Ireland frame by historians like E.A. Freeman and Sir Henry Maine) and anthropological polygenism. This polygenism found an influential advocate in the anatomist Robert Knox (1793–1862), whose The races of men (1850) applied comparative zoology to humankind. In the process, then-current ethnic/characterological stereotypes were affixed to the “races” thus systematized; these in turn played into the general discourse of Saxonism. Polygenism was to become a burning ethnographical issue with the work of Charles Darwin (whose Origin of species appeared in 1859), contentious as it was in its irreconcilability with a religious world-view. The work of James Cowles Prichard (Natural history of man, 1843) provided a rallying-point for the monogenists.

Two societies explored these thorny ethnographical issues. The Ethnological Society, which first met in 1843, by and large supported Darwinism, while the Anthropological Society of London (founded in 1863) was a refuge for monogenists in the Prichard tradition. After initial, unsuccessful efforts by the famous Darwinist Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) to merge the societies in 1866, the two eventually united in 1871 to form the Anthropological Institute. Its president from 1889 until 1891 was John Beddoe (1826–1911), whose The races of Britain: A contribution to the anthropology of Western Europe (1862, often reprinted) tried to register the descendants of the ancient races of the British Isles in the contemporary population with the help of eye/hair colour and cranial features. For Beddoe, the Celtic populations were closer to Cro-Magnon and “Africanoid” types and scored higher on a scale of “negrescence” than the Anglo-Saxon-descended inhabitants, whose jawbone structure (less heavy than the “prognathous” Celts) was also correlated with a higher degree of intelligence.

Darwinism found its most ideological expression in eugenics, which was developed by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton applied Darwin’s observations on animal breeding to a theory of the heredity of human abilities and in 1883 published his Inquiries into human faculty and its development, which contained the newly-coined term “eugenics”. Eugenics was launched as a public programme when Dalton gave the second Huxley Lecture at the Anthropological Institute in 1901. By 1909, a Eugenics Education Society had been founded, with its Eugenics review. The first International Eugenics Congress was held in 1912; among those in attendance was Winston Churchill.

British racial thought flourished mainly outside Europe, in the racism of the colonial Empire. Here, the cult of the world-civilizing mission of the English “race” and its superior status vis-à-vis the “lesser races” of the Empire’s colonial possessions found expression, not only in the institutional racism ingrained in the fabric of the colonial system, but also in a discourse like that of Rudyard Kipling’s “White man’s burden”. Eugenics was exported, in particular, to the United States, where it became entangled in the ideology of America’s “manifest destiny” and its phobic fear of non-“WASP” immigration, racial dilution and decline.

Within Britain, the older idea of a concord of races and nationalities united in loyalty to the sovereign and to a sense of common purpose (a trope going back to Shakespeare’s Henry V, with its bickering Welsh, English, Irish, and Scottish captains) has re-emerged from the Saxonist supremacism of the 19th century. A “four nations” nationalism, the British equivalent of Reichspatriotismus, is still evoked in television series like Dad’s army and films like Chariots of fire.