An Afterthought: Why we should tell stories of the British World

According to the Royal Mail, Britons post approximately 10 million Christmas cards to Australia every year.1 This extraordinary volume of seasonal felicitations is a reminder that at its core the British world is a corporeal system. It is easy to forget the magnitude of the British Diaspora over the past 400 years. Between 1600 and 1800 more than one million people emigrated from England, Scotland and Wales, mainly across the Atlantic to North America.2 In the 60 years between 1853 and 1913 just under 13 million British citizens left the United Kingdom as migrants headed for extra-European ports; a further 7.3 million migrated in the period 1951 to 1998.3 Britons at home and abroad have long understood that the British world was a thing of flesh and blood. ‘Thousands of us, home-staying people in England’, wrote Richard Acton in 1881, ‘have been called by family duties or friendships, perhaps more than once in our lives, to come down to Gravesend, to bid farewell to those whom we love.’ ‘There are so many people’, he continued, ‘who have a son or a brother in our colonies.’4 The ties of kinship have persisted despite the fact that Britain has long since turned its gaze to Europe and, in turn, the ‘better Britains’ of the southern seas look increasingly to Asia and the Pacific. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example, nearly 1.2 million Australians reported to the census collectors that they had been born in the United Kingdom; many more could point to one of their parents or grandparents who had been born in ‘old Blighty’.5 Over the past two decades the related ideas of ‘Britishness’ and ‘the British world’ have undoubtedly breathed new life into the study of Anglophone societies. Thankfully now fewer historians refer to Britain when they mean England, or worse, write of England when they mean Britain.6 Moreover, those who study ‘other’ Britons — people that were on or outside the political and cultural margins due to their gender, race, income or religion, that lived far from the imperial capital in the provinces or in the colonies of settlement — have, in particular, benefited from (and contributed to) what is often called the ‘new British history’. There is a greater understanding of the way in