Cultura, civilizzazione e Istituzione dell'Inghilterra

Country and people

There are a different number of national teams which might be described as ‘British’; there are two large islands —> The largest is called Great Britain; the origin of the adjective ‘great’ in the name Great Britain was not a piece of advertising like modern politicians tried to use. It was first used to distinguish it from the smaller area in France which is called ‘Brittany’. The other is called Ireland and there is no agreement about what to call all of them together, even if during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were generally called “The British Isles”; but most people in Ireland calls to mind the time when Ireland was politically dominated by Britain.
Great Britain, Ireland and all those smaller islands belong together was named “The north-east Atlantic archipelago”, “the north-west European archipelago”, “IONA” (Islands of the North Atlantic) or “The Isles” but non of them was accepted.
In truth The most common term “Great Britain and Ireland” is not strictly correct because it ignores all the smaller islands —> there are two small parts, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which have special political arrangements are ‘crown dependencies’, self-government, own parliament and its own tax system so these are not officially part of the UK.

Politically speaking and four nations

Politically speaking there are two states, the island of Ireland called The Republic of Ireland known as “Eire” while The other state has authority over the rest of the area, its name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain shorted to “The UK” —> the normal everyday adjective, when talking about something to do with the UK, is “British”.
People often refer to Britain by “England” but is not correct because England is only one of the four nations —> the others are Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; their political unification was a gradual process that took several hundred years, it was completed in 1800 when the Irish parliament was joined with the parliament for England, Scotland, and Wales in Westminster, so that the whole area became a single state, even if in 1922, most of Ireland became a separate state.
Culture and lifestyle varied enormously across the four nations, for example, the dominant culture of Ireland, Wales and Highland Scotland was Celtic while people in England was Germanic (this difference was reflected in the languages they spoke, so people in the Celtic areas spoke Celtic languages and people in the Germanic areas spoke Germanic dialects). Moreover, the nations had different economic, social, and legal systems, and they were independent of each other.
Today, these differences have become blurred but not completely disappeared because there is only one government for the whole of Britain and many aspects of government are organized separately in the four parts of the United Kingdom.

The dominance of England

There is an excuse for the people who use the word ‘England’ when they mean ‘Britain’; the dominant culture of Britain today is English.
The system of politics that is used in all four nations today is of English origin, and English is the main language of all four nations. Many aspects
of everyday life are organized according to English custom and practice —> the political unification of Britain happened because England was able to assert her economic and military power over the other three nations.
Today, English domination can be detected in the way in which various aspects of British public life are described and it can also be detected in the way that many English people don’t bother to distinguish between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ = England does not make up the whole of the UK.
There has been a long history of migration from Scotland, Wales and Ireland to England; there are millions of people who live in England but who would never describe themselves as English, for example, we can find the largest category called ‘white other’ to point out these people who are from a variety of places and many are only temporarily resident in Britain. This mean that they do not form a single identifiable community.
Moreover, there are other ethnic group formed by people whose ethnic roots are in the Indian subcontinent (2 million people) and the other established, recognizable ethnic group in Britain are black Caribbeans etc.. Since the 1980s, more people immigrate to Britain than emigrate from it every year, at the same time, emigration is also very high.
These categories of people who populate the UK do not mind being described as ‘British’ but many of them would not like to be called “English” —> There is a complicated division of loyalties among many people in Britain, especially in England.
This crossover o f loyalties can work the other way as well. English people do not regard the Scottish, the Welsh or the Irish as “foreigners”.

Geography

The land and climate in Britain have a notable lack of extremes, for example, Britain has mountains, but none of them are very high, it also has flat land but with hills, it has no big rivers, it doesn’t usually get very cold in the winter or very hot in the summer.

The climate

The climate in Britain is more or less the same as that of the north-western part of the European mainland. The mild winters mean that snow is a regular feature of the higher areas only.
The winters are in general slightly colder in the east of the country than thev are in the west, while in summer the south is warmer and sunnier than the north.
There is a saying that Britain doesn’t have a climate, it only has weather due to the bad reputation that England has about weather.
The lack of extremes is the reason why, on the few occasions when it gets genuinely hot or freezing cold, the country seems to be totally unprepared for it.

Land and settlement

Britain has neither towering mountain ranges nor impressively large rivers, plains or forests. Overall, the south and east of the country are comparatively low-lying, consisting of either flat plains or rolling hills. Mountainous areas are found only in the north and west, although these regions also have flat areas.
Human influence has been extensive, the forests that once covered the land have largely disappeared; even if Britain has a greater proportion of grassland than any other country in Europe except Ireland. At the same time, much of the land is used for human habitation and this is not only Britain is densely populated in most areas but partly because of their habitual concern for privacy and their love of the countryside. As a result, cities in England and Wales have been built outwards rather than upwards; despite this there are areas of completely open countryside everywhere and some of the mountainous areas remain virtually untouched.

The environment and pollution

It was in Britain that the word ‘smog’ was first used. As the world’s first industrialized country, its cities were the first to suffer this atmospheric condition —> the situation in London reached its worst point in 1952 and water pollution was also considered a problem. For this during the 1970s, laws were passed which forbade the heating of homes with open coal fires and which stopped much of the pollution from factories.
However, as in the rest of Europe, the great increase in the use of the motor car caused an increase in a different kind of air pollution —> this problem is serious enough for weather forecasts to have an “air quality section”.
Now that the reduction of greenhouse gases has become a pressing global need, how to provide for Britain’s energy needs and/or reduce its energy consumption has become a national issue, there is a possibility that new nuclear power stations will be built because they do not emit greenhouse gases. Also, various attempts at using ‘green’ energy sources are being made; one of these is solar power and others are tidal power, wave power and above all wind power (wind farms are now quite a common feature of the British landscape).

London

London, the largest city in western Europe (seven times larger than any other city in the country and a fifth of the total population of the UK lives in the wider London area), dominates Britain; it is home to the headquarters of all government departments, the country’s parliament, its major legal institutions, and the monarch, also it is the country’s business and banking centre and the centre of its transport network, in which contains the headquarters of the national television networks and all the national newspapers.
Two well-known areas of London are the West End, known for its many theatres, cinemas and expensive shops, and the East End known as the poorer residential area of central London.
There are many other parts of central London, some of them quite distinctive in character, and central London itself makes up only a very small part of Greater London.
The most recent trend has been an expansion of London to the east, down towards the Thames Estuary.
London is in some ways untypical of the rest of the country in that it is so cosmopolitan; although all of Britain’s cities have some degree of cultural and racial variety, the variety is by far the greatest in London (more than 300 languages are spoken there). In fact, nearly a third of the people in London were born outside Britain.
This popularity is probably the result of its combination of apparently infinite cultural variety and a long history which has left intact many visible signs of its richness and drama.

Southern England

The area surrounding the outer suburbs of London has the reputation of being “commuter land”; so this is the most densely populated area in the UK which does not include a large city, and millions of its inhabitants travel into London to work every day.
Further out from London the region has more o f its own distinctive character, for example we can find:
The county of Kent known as “the garden of England” because of the many kinds of fruit and vegetables grown there.
The Downs, a series of hills in the south of London, used for sheep farming. The southern side of the Downs reaches the sea in many places and form the white cliffs of the south coast (many retired people live along this coast).
“the West Country” has an attractive image of rural beauty in British people’s minds. Some parts of the West Country are well-known for their dairy produce and fruit.
Exmoor and Dartmoor,the most popular holiday area in Britain, it’s in the south-west peninsula, with its rocky coast, numerous small bays.
East Anglia, to the north-east of London, where there are large expanses of uniformly flat land where this flatness, together with the comparatively dry climate, has made it the main area in the country for the growing of wheat and other arable crops.
Employment in the south-east of England has always been mainly in trade, the provision of services and light manufacturing; so it did not suffer the slow economic decline that many other parts of England experienced during the twentieth century.

The midlands of England

Birmingham is Britain’s second largest city; during the Industrial Revolution is developed into the country’s major engineering centre and despite the decline of heavy industry in the twentieth century, factories in the Birmingham area still convert iron and steel into a vast variety of goods.
In the midland of England we can find:
the Black Country and Manchester known as the Potteries
Derby, Leicester, and Nottingham
Grimsby, one of the world's greatest fishing ports, has become the country's major fish processing centre.

Northern England

The Pennine mountains run up the middle of northern England like a spine whose sides occupied by quantity of coal and iron ore enabled these areas to lead the Industrial Revolution. In the north we can find:
the Manchester area which became, in the nineteenth century, the world's leading producer of cotton goods.
Bradford and Leeds became the world's leading producers of woollen goods.
Sheffield became a centre for the production of steel goods.
Newcastle, shipbuilding was the major industry.
The achievements of these new industrial towns induced a feeling of civic pride in their inhabitants and an energetic realism even if the decline in heavy industry in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century hit the industrial north of England hard; for this for a long time, the region as a whole had a level of unemployment significantly above the national average.
The pattern of settlement in the north of England is often different from that in the south; the typically industrial landscape and the very rural landscape interlock. Further away from the main industrial areas, the north of England is sparsely populated.

Scotland

Scotland has three fairly clearly marked regions. Just north of the border with England are the southern uplands, which consists of small towns, quite far apart from each other, whose economy depends to a large extent on sheep farming. Further north, there is the central plain. Finally, there are the highlands, consisting of mountains and deep valleys and including numerous small islands off the west coast.
It is in the central plain and the strip of east coast extending northwards from it that more than 80% of the population of Scotland lives.
Scotland’s two major cities have very different reputations:
Glasgow, the larger, is associated with heavy industry and some of the worst housing conditions in Britain but it has a strong artistic heritage.
Edinburgh, smaller than Glasgow, has a middle- class image; it is the capital of Scotland and the seat of its parliament. It’s called “the Athens of the north”.
Tourism is important in the local economy, and so is the production of whisky.

Wales

Despite its industry, no really large cities have emerged in this area; it is the only part o f Britain with a high proportion of industrial villages.
Most of the rest of Wales is mountainous. As a result, each part of Wales has closer contact with its neighbouring part of England than it does with other parts of Wales.

Nothern Ireland

Here, we can find:
Belfast, which is famous for the manufacture of linen and like the rest of Ireland, largely agricultural.

Identity

Ethnic identity: the four nations
National (‘ethnic’) loyalties can be strong among the people in Britain whose ancestors were not English. For many people living in England who call themselves Scottish, Welsh or Irish, this loyalty is little more than a matter of emotional attachment.
For people living in Scotland, there are constant reminders of their distinctiveness like several important aspects of public life, such as education and the legal and welfare systems, are organized separately, and differently, from the rest of Britain. It has many features which are different from other forms of English and cannot usually be understood by English or Welsh people; this is partly because of the historical cultural split between highland and lowland Scotland.
While people of Wales do not have as many reminders of their “welshness” in everyday life and the organization of public life is similar to that of England. In addition, a large minority of the people in Wales probably do not consider themselves to be especially Welsh at all.
As a result, a feeling of loyalty to Wales is often similar in nature to the fairly weak loyalties to particular geographical areas found throughout England; it is regional rather than nationalistic.
The question of identity in Northern Ireland is a much more complex issue while regarding to the english identity most people who describe themselves as English have made little distinction in their minds between 'English’ and “British’.
However, as part of the growing profile of ethnic identity generally the English part, distinct from British, is becoming clearer.
Nevertheless, exactly what makes English and British distinct from each other is not at all clear.

Other ethnic identities

The peoples of the four nations have been in contact for centuries. As a result, there is a limit to their significant differences while the situation for the several million people in Britain whose family roots lie elsewhere in the world is different (there are hundreds of different ethnicities represented in Britain). Two major groupings may be identified:
the black Caribbeans in which most members of this community were born in Britain and his cultural practices are nearest to those of the white majority (the Notting Hill Carnival, was started by Caribbean immigrants). Black Caribbeans today often take pride in their cultural roots.
Like the children and grandchildren o f Irish, Scottish and Welsh immigrants to England before them, this pride seems to be increasing as their cultural practices, their everyday habits and attitudes, gradually become less distinctive.
those whose cultural roots lie in and around the Indian subcontinent, known in Britain like “asians” that masks some significant cultural differences. Indian origin are above the British average, and many fill professional roles in society.

The family

With regard to family life, Britain is overall a fairly typical northern European country; in comparison with most other places in the world, family identity is rather weak and the notion of family has a generally low profile. In fact, family gatherings of any kind beyond the household unit are rare or it is unusual for adults of different generations within the family to live together (the average number of people living in each household in Britain is lower than the European average).
The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen dramatically and now accounts for more than 40% of births —> There is much talk in Britain of “single-parent families” as a social problem.

Geographical identity

A sense of identity based on place of birth is, like family identity, not very common or strong in most parts of Britain. People are just too mobile and very few live in the same place all their lives; in some cases, there is quite a strong sense of identification with a city, and other with a county.
Although they have little administrative significance these days, they still claim the allegiance of some people.
At the larger regional level, there is one well-known sense of identity.

Class

Historians say that the class system has survived in Britain because of its flexibility.
As a result, the class system has never been swept away by a revolution and an awareness of class forms a major part of most people’s sense of identity (people in Britain regard it as difficult to become friends with somebody from a different ‘background’).
The different classes have different sets of attitudes and daily habits; an interesting feature of the class structure in Britain is that it is not just relative wealth or the appearance of it, which
determines someone’s class, also accent, type of language tec..
The English grammar and vocabulary used in public speaking, radio and television news broadcasts, books, and newspapers is known as "standard British English”; most working-class people, for example, use lots of words and grammatical forms in their everyday speech which are regarded as ‘non-standard’.
Therefore, the clearest indication of a person’s class is often his or her accent, which most people do not change to suit the situation, for example, in England and Wales, anyone who speaks with a strong regional accent is automatically assumed to be working class.
In general, the different classes mix more readily and easily with each other than they used to; the lower and middle classes have drawn closer to each other in their attitudes and the relation between wealth and perceived social class seems to be even looser than it used to be.

Religion and politics

In comparison to some other European countries, with the exception of Northern Ireland, neither religion nor politics is an important part of a person’s social identity in modern Britain —> this is partly because the two do not, as they do in some other countries, go together in any significant way. It may form a very important part of their own idea of themselves as individuals, but even for these people it plays little part in determining other aspects of their lives.

Identity in Northen Ireland

In this part of the UK ethnicity, family, politics, and religion are all inter-related, and social class has a comparatively minor role in establishing identity.
Northern Ireland is a polarized society where most people are born into, and stay in, one or other of the two communities for the whole of their lives.
On one side of the divide are people whose ancestors came from lowland Scotland or England —> they are self-consciously Protestant and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.
On the other side are people whose ancestors were native Irish —> they are self­ consciously Catholic and would like Northern Ireland to become part of the Irish Republic.
Although the two communities live side by side, they live in different housing estates, listen to different radio and television programmes, register with different doctors, take prescriptions to different chemists, march to commemorate different anniversaries and read different newspapers. Their children go to different schools etc..

Prehistory

Celts had intermingled with the peoples who were there already; we know that religious sites that had been built long before their arrival continued to be used in Celtic times.
For people in Britain today, the chief significance o f the prehistoric period is its sense of mystery —> because its focus easily in the astonishing monumental architecture of this period, the remains of which exist throughout the country.

The roman period

The Roman province of Britannia covered most of present-day England and Wales, where the Romans imposed their own way of life and culture, making use o f the existing Celtic aristocracy to govern and encouraging them to adopt Roman dress and the Latin language.
This division of the Celts into those who experienced Roman rule (the Britons in England and Wales) and those who did not (the Gaels in Ireland and Scotland) may help to explain the emergence of two distinct branches of the Celtic group of languages.
The remarkable thing about the Romans is that, despite their long occupation of Britain, they left very little behind (the only lasting reminders of their presence are place names like Chester, Lancaster and Gloucester, which include variants o f the Latin word castra (a military camp)).

The germanic invasions

The Roman occupation had been a matter of colonial control rather than large-scale settlement.
During the fifth century, a number of tribes from the European mainland invaded and settled in large numbers —> two of these tribes were the Angles and the Saxons (Anglo-Saxons) which soon had the south-east of the country where their advance was temporarily halted by an army of Celtic under the command of the legendary King Arthur.
Celtic culture and language survived only in present-day Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.
The Anglo-Saxons had a great effect on the countryside, where they introduced new farming methods and founded the thousands of self-sufficient villages which formed the basis of English society.
Britain experienced another wave of Germanic invasions in the eighth century.

The medieval period

The successful Norman invasion of England brought Britain into the mainstream of western European culture. Unlike the Germanic invasions, the Norman invasion was small-scale.
Norman soldiers who had invaded were given the ownership of land and of the people living on it —> strict feudal system (the peasants were the English-speaking Saxons while the lords and the barons were the French-speaking Normans.This was the start of the English class system).
The cultural story of this period is different —> years after the Norman Conquest, it was a Germanic language, Middle English, and not the Norman (French) language, which had become the dominant one in all classes of society in England. Furthermore, it was the Anglo-Saxon concept of common law, and not Roman law, which formed the basis of the legal system.
Despite English rule, northern and central Wales was never settled in great numbers by Saxons or Normans. As a result, the (Celtic) Welsh language and culture remained strong.
The political independence of Scotland did not prevent a gradual switch to English language and customs in the lowland (southern) part of the country.
It was in this period that Parliament began its gradual evolution into the democratic body which it is today —> the word ‘parliament’, which comes from the French word parler (to speak), was first used in England in the thirteenth century to describe an assembly of nobles called together by the king.

The sixteen century

Bubonic plague of this period killed about a third of the population of Great Britain —> the shortage of labour which it caused, and the increasing importance of trade and towns, weakened the traditional ties between lord and peasant. Both these developments allowed English monarchs to increase their power —> The Tudor dynasty who established a system of government departments staffed by professionals who depended for their position on the monarch. Of the traditional two 'Houses’ of Parliament, the Lords and the Commons, it was now more important for monarchs to get the agreement of the Commons for their policies because that was where the newly powerful merchants and landowners were represented.
The immediate cause of the rise of Protestantism in England was political and personal rather than doctrinal. The King (Henry VIII) wanted a divorce, which the Pope would not give him. Moreover, the country had finally lost any realistic claim to lands in France, thus becoming more consciously a distinct 'island nation’.
It was therefore patriotism as much as religious conviction that had caused Protestantism to become the majority religion in England by the end of the century —> it took a form known as Anglicanism, not so very different from Catholicism in its organization and ritual.

The seventeen century

When James I became the first English king of the Stuart dynasty, he was alreadyJames VI of Scotland, so that the crowns of these two countries were united. The glamour of the English court where the king now sat caused modern English to become the written standard in Scotland as well.
In the seventeenth century, the link between religion and politics became intense —> this was the context in which, during the century, Parliament established its supremacy over the monarchy.
In addition, ideological Protestantism, especially Puritanism, had grown in England; puritans were anti-Catholic and suspicious of the apparent sympathy towards Catholicism of the Stuart monarchs —> this conflict led to the Civil War, which ended with complete victory for the parliamentary forces.
James’s son, Charles I, became the first monarch in Europe to be executed.
The leader of the parliamentary army, Oliver Cromwell, became ‘Lord Protector’ of a republic with a military government which, after he had brutally crushed resistance in Ireland, effectively encompassed all of Britain and Ireland.
However, the conflict between monarch and Parliament soon re-emerged in the reign of Charles II’s brother, James II; again, religion was its focus (James tried to give full rights to Catholics, and to promote them in his government).
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ (‘glorious’ because it was bloodless)—> in which Prince William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, and his Stuart wife Mary accepted Parliament’s invitation to become king and queen; so parliament immediately drew up a Bill of Rights, which limited some of the monarch’s powers.

The eighteenth century

In 1707, the Act of Union was passed so the Scottish parliament was dissolved and some of its members joined the English and Welsh parliament in London and the former two kingdoms became one ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’. Politically, the eighteenth century was stable because monarch and parliament got on well together.
The bitter divisions were echoed:
the Whigs, were the political ‘descendants’ of the parliamentarians and supported the Protestant values, in add, they believed in government by monarch and aristocracy together
the Tories, had a greater respect for the idea of the monarchy and the importance of the Anglican Church
This was the beginning of the party system in Britain.
Britain gradually acquired an empire in the Americas, along the west African coast and in India; the greatly increased trade that this allowed was one factor which led to the Industrial Revolution and other factors were the many technical innovations in manufacture and transport.
In England, the growth of the industrial mode of production, together with advances in agriculture, caused the greatest upheaval in the pattern of everyday life, so millions moved from rural areas into new towns and cities; most of these were in the north of England, where the raw materials for industry were available —> in this way, the north, which had previously been economically backward, became the industrial heartland of the country.
In the south of England, London came to dominate, not as an industrial centre, but as a business and trading centre.

The nineteenth century

Britain lost its most important colonies in a war of independence.
Soon after the end of the century, it controlled the biggest empire the world had ever seen, one of this was Ireland —> during this century, it was part of the UK itself, and British culture and way of life came to predominate in Ireland.
The growth of the empire was encouraged by a change in attitude during the century —> previously, colonization had been a matter of settlement, commerce, or military strategy while by the end of the century, colonization was seen as a matter of destiny.
During the century, Britain became the world’s foremost economic power, this gave the British a sense of supreme confidence, even arrogance, about their culture and civilization (british came to see themselves as having a duty to spread this culture and civilization around the world) = being the rulers of an empire was therefore a matter of moral obligation.
There were great changes in social structure, most people now lived in towns and cities.
Slavery and the laws against people on the basis of religion were abolished, and laws were made to protect workers from some of the worst excesses of the industrial mode of production.
From this time on, most British people developed a sentimental attachment to the idea of the countryside.

The twentieth century

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain ceased to be the world’s richest country; the first 20 years of the century were a period of extremism.
The British empire reached its greatest extent in 1919, it was already becoming less of an empire and more of a confederation at which under the Treaty of Versailles, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all represented separately from Britain.
The real dismantling of the empire took place in the 25 years following the Second World War.
It was from the start of the twentieth century that the urban working class (the majority of the population) finally began to make its voice heard in Parliament so the Labour party gradually replaced the Liberals (the ‘descendants’ of the Whigs) as the main opposition to the Conservatives (the 'descendants’ of the Tories).
Since then, the working class has faded as a political force.