Northwestern European people are a pan-ethnic group, or multi-ethnic regional grouping, and the inhabitants of Northwestern Europe. Northwest or Northwestern Europeans can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Great Britain and Ireland, Northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Northern France, Belgium, and other places connected to Northwestern Europe geographically or culturally.
As the pan-ethnic group is also a cultural category, rather than exclusively geographical; it often can include peoples with ancestry from bordering regions such as Austria, Finland, Southern Germany, and Switzerland. Other subgroupings of Europeans include Eastern European people and Southern European people.
There is a large Northwestern European diaspora, with significant numbers within North America (Northwestern European Americans and Northwestern European Canadians). There are also considerable concentrations of Northwestern European Australians and Northwestern European New Zealanders in Oceania.
The national ethnic classification systems of Australia and New Zealand catalogue "North-West European" (New Zealand: "North-West Europe") ancestry and origins. Both the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Statistics New Zealand denote five subcategories to the grouping, including: North-West European, British, Irish, Western and Northern European (NZ: North-West Europe, United Kingdom, Ireland, Western and Northern Europe).
Northwestern European people have been identified as a distinct pan-ethnic grouping. They have been researched in academia in historical, cultural, linguistic and anthropological studies. [1] [2] [3] A number of genetic research studies have been conducted with the group. [4] [5] The panethnicity has also been referenced in journalistic works. [6] [7] [8]
Although Northwestern Europeans are often defined by ancestry from the geographic northwest extremities of Europe, the identification also has cultural context, and often includes other related subgroups. For example, Finns may be ethnoculturally considered as Northwest Europeans, while the broader grouping of Baltic Finns may be, at times, identified as northerly Eastern Europeans, depending on certain contexts. In this regard, the Swiss or Austrians and other peoples native to bordering regions are variously described as part of the grouping, particularly when a diasporic people (such as Swiss Americans or Austrian Canadians), or may be identified as Central Europeans. Dr. Virgil F. Fairbanks has summarized the history of the pan-ethnic group: [5]
More than a thousand years ago, northwestern Europeans invaded what had been the Roman Empire by land and by longboat, colonizing areas now included in southern Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Portugal, northern Italy, Sicily, and the British Isles. They also ascended the rivers that enter the Baltic Sea and colonized present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. In the past few hundred years, their descendants have colonized much of North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
The government departments responsible for statistics and ethnic classification in Australia and New Zealand record Northwestern European ancestry or origins. [9] With similar classification systems, a "North-West Europe" origin (birthplace) in New Zealand, or "North-West European" ancestry in Australia, are the second listing (2.) in both the Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG) and within the New Zealand equivalent Classification Coding System (CCS). [10]
As catalogued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the 2011 census in Australia recorded the following population figures for the group by ancestry: [11]
Category | ASCCEG | Group / national ancestry | Population | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
North-West European | 20 | North-West European, nfd | 1,043 | <0.1% |
North-West European | 21 | British | 9,166,372 | 42.6% |
North-West European | 22 | Irish | 2,087,758 | 9.7% |
North-West European | 23 | Western European | 1,427,140 | 6.6% |
North-West European | 24 | Northern European | 138,349 | 0.6% |
Australia | Not applicable | Not applicable | 12,820,662 | 59.6% |
ASCCEG = Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups
nfd = not further defined
As classified by Statistics New Zealand, the 2013 New Zealand census recorded the following population figures for the group by birthplace: [12]
Macro group | CCS | Micro group | Population | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
North-West Europe | 20 | North-West Europe, nfd | 0 | 0% |
North-West Europe | 21 | United Kingdom | 256,164 | 6% |
North-West Europe | 22 | Ireland | 9,042 | 0.2% |
North-West Europe | 23 | Western Europe | 41,811 | 1% |
North-West Europe | 24 | Northern Europe | 3,840 | 0.1% |
New Zealand | Not applicable | Not applicable | 310,857 | 7.3% |
CSS = Classification Coding System
nfd = not further defined
A multitude of scholars have identified Northwestern Europeans as an observable anthropological, historical and demographic group. This includes notable academics who have used the grouping of Northwest Europeans, Northwestern European people, and other variations, to identity the group in scholarly works and scientific research, including genetic studies.
Professors James Morris Blaut, Ian Morris, and Deirdre McCloskey have referred to the grouping in analysis of The Great Divergence concept, and related causal economic developments in Northwestern Europe. [14] [15] [16] [17] In this regard, scholar Mary S. Hartman has researched the group's history of state formation and industrialisation. [18] Historians Seymour Drescher, Herbert S. Klein and Jared Diamond have studied the grouping's historical intersection with, and participation in, European colonialism. [19] [20] [21]
Sociologist Arland Thornton and historical demographer Steven Ruggles have observed the social and familial behaviours of "Northwest Europeans". [22] [23] In genetic research, biological psychologist Dorret Boomsma, clinical epidemiologist Albert Hofman and bioinformatician Professor Laurence Hurst have studied the genomes of, what they have defined as, Northwestern European people. [24] [25]
Northwestern Europeans utilized outcrop coal, especially in Great Britain, during the Bronze Age (3000–2000 BC), where it was used as fuel for funeral pyres. [26] [16] A notable critic of Eurocentrism, professor James Morris Blaut detailed some of the historical cultural and civilisational aspects of Northwestern European peoples, which have been posited as explanatory, contributing factors for the "European miracle": [14]
A great many present-day historians believe that Europeans long ago acquired an ability to resist the Malthusian disasters which supposedly blocked development in every other culture, some of the arguments starting with the ancient Iron Age folk, some with an amalgam of Germanic and Christian elements, some with medieval Northwest-Europeans (see Mann 1986; Macfarlane 1986; Jones 1981; Stone 1977; Crone 1989 and many others).
During the late Middle Ages the group developed a pattern of late marriage (relative to other groups) due to, [14] among other factors, customs of land inheritance and agriculture. Scholar Mary S. Hartman has proposed these changes greatly contributed to the development of state formation and industrialisation in the Western world. She argues that "the unstable households that late-marriage patterns fostered obliged Northwestern Europeans to devise new institutions to perform services that extended families offered in early-marriage societies." [18] In his 2013 book The Measure of Civilization , historian Ian Morris proposed that development in agriculture had raised "energy capture per capita" up to 26,000 kilocalorie for the group in the late Middle Ages. By 1700, Morris estimates that Northwestern Europeans were capturing up to 35,000 kcals a day per person via advanced farming. [15]
After the success of other Europeans groupings, such as Portuguese and Spanish colonists, Northwestern Europeans competed for land and resources in what became known as the Age of Discovery. According to historian Herbert S. Klein, in North America "settlement patterns of the northwestern Europeans" were influenced by the "distribution of the pre-columbian Amerindian population". Klein has noted that French, British and Dutch colonists began to establish their presence, in what was thought of as the New World, by the 17th century. [19] Historian Seymour Drescher has observed the shifting patterns of Nortwestern Europeans' behaviour during this progression of European colonialism and early modern slavery: [20]
In the sixty years before 1640 more than seven out of every eight people shipped across the Atlantic by Northwestern Europeans were Europeans. In the sixty years after 1700 the proportion was exactly reversed. Seven out of every eight people shipped to the Americas, under French, Dutch and British flags, were from Africa.
During the early 17th-century Dutch and British traders and colonists, outmatched by Iberian transatlantic power and limited by the "naval politics of the north-western Europeans", operated opportunistically with regards to land and material gains. [27] Expeditions of Dutch, Irish, French and English people, at first, prioritized gold prospecting, later establishing trading links and gaining territories in the Americas. [28] Around this time, and perhaps partially due to economic gain of colonization, Northwestern Europeans viewed themselves as developmentally superior to other peoples, and attempted to justify their expansion and conquests into other continents. Sociologist Arland Thornton has written: [23]
It is not surprising that ethnocentrism encouraged northwest Europeans to place themselves, especially their middle and upper classes, at the apex of development. The idea that northwest Europe was developmentally superior may have also been enhanced by Europe’s military, economic, and political ascendancy at the time and by the motivation of Europeans to legitimize their territorial expansion and colonization (Jennings 1975; Berkhofer 1978; Pagden 1982).
Anthropologist Jared Diamond and his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel , which attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, has been described as demonstrating "how the interplay of ecology and technology enabled Northwest Europeans to dominate the world." [21] Professor Deirdre McCloskey has approached the topic of economic growth in Northwestern Europe in her 2011 book Bourgeois Dignity , which suggests that a change in rhetoric regarding the value of business, innovation, and entrepreneurship is responsible. McCloskey suggests that "for largely noneconomic reasons, the prestige of a bourgeois prudence rose around 1700, in the way northwest Euopean people talked, within an economic conversation still honoring a balance of virtues." [17]
In 2012, it was reported that between 2 and 6 percent of the group had red hair, compared with 1 to 2 percent of the world population. This was found to be disportionately the case in Great Britain and Ireland, with 13 percent of Scots, 10 percent of Irish people and 6 percent of English people being redheaded. [8] In 2016, religious scholar Martin E. Marty noted that Northwestern Europeans living in Germany constituted the largest proportion of Lutherans in any one territory. [29] A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that a minority of the group held negative views regarding Islam, in comparison to the populations of the Eastern European nations Hungary and Poland, and Southern European Italy, Greece and Spain, where the majority of respondents "harboured hostile attitudes to Islam". [30]
In 2018, professor Laurence Hurst detailed how natural selection had led to over 80 percent of Northwestern Europeans being able to produce the enzyme lactase, and thereby able to break down milk sugars. In contrast, Hurst wrote that East Asian people were mainly lactose intolerant. [25] In 2020, University of York's professor Oliver Craig wrote: "Today, the genetic change that allows adults to digest the lactose in milk is at much higher frequency in Northwestern Europeans than their southern counterparts”. [31]
In a 2009 study by professor Steven Ruggles, which contrasted Northwestern European families in Europe and North America; Ruggles attempts to reconsider the widely held academic position that the pan-ethnic group have been predominantly nuclear family-orientated. [22] Professor David Kaminsky has written that expressions of the group's musical heritage (such as Celtic music) has declined in the 21st-century. This has been replaced by an imagined pan-European "bricolage of Romani, klezmer and Balkan styles" which, Kaminsky argues in his 2015 research, have been "claimed by northwestern Europeans as part of a wider project of reimagining their own identities in the post-Cold-war era". [32]
A 2009 study, published in Human Molecular Genetics , studied the physical height of the group in relation to genetics. The research, conducted by Karol Estrada, Albert Hofman, Dorret Boomsma and others, analyzed natriuretic peptide precursor C in Northwestern European genomes and its correlation with human height. [24] 2015 research published in Scientific Reports journal, studied gene flow between Asian people and Europeans, noting East Asians and Northwestern Europeans as two geographic-extremity subgroupings in the study. [33]
There is a large diaspora of people with Northwestern European ancestry. Significant concentrations of the group are in North America, representated by Northwestern European Canadians and Northwestern European Americans, as well as Northwestern European Australians in Oceania.
Between 1608 and 1760, as a significant part of the European colonization of the Americas, Northwestern European peoples settled lands extensively in North America. [34] In lands that would become the Thirteen Colonies (later the United States) and Canada, the group created farms and plantations. [35] Their mixed farming techniques, according to geographer Cole Harris, facilitated the settlement of valley areas along the Saint Lawrence River. [36] Harris noted that "remarkably homogeneous and egalitarian rural societies of subsistent farmers emerged quickly" in North America. Among Northwestern Europeans this fostered their "strong sense of the nuclear family supported by a desire for the private control of land". [37]
Early modern slavery, and the Atlantic slave trade itself, "juxtaposed west and central Africans with northwest Europeans in the Americas." [38] Subgroupings of Dutch, French and British settlers, competed for resources and land. There was also intragroup prejudice between them and varied means of operating colonies. For example, British colonists expeditiously imported Northwestern European peoples to populate their settlements, while French colonists in Canadian settlements, such as Acadia, maintained a self-replacing population. [39] During this frontier era, almost all colonists had a Northwestern European ancestry in North America. [40]
Writing in pre-independence America, Benjamin Franklin express racial concerns in 1751, regarding German immigration to the United States. Historian Thomas Borstelmann wrote how, after a few decades, "the idea of Germans having a different complexion than other northwestern European Americans came to seem peculiar". [41] By the 1790s, most of the populace of New York City were of Northwestern European ancestry. [42]
The "Northwest European Wave", as described academically, was an period of immigration between 1821 and 1880 in the US. Irish, French, Germans and British people arrived in large number to the East Coast of the United States. [43] Professor Vincent N. Parrillo, wrote that: "By 1890, the "mainstream American" ingroup did not yet include many other northwest European Americans. Although some multigenerational Americans of non-British ancestry had blended into the mainstream, millions of others had not." [44] Between 1880 to 1920, immigration to the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe increased greatly. Despite relatively outsider status, historian Paul Spickard noted that "Northwest Europeans continued to come and stay in very large numbers" during this period. [45]
From 1886 to 1926, about one quarter the Northwestern Europeans that had settled on the Canadian Prairies, were born outside Canada. In comparison, around one half of Eastern and Southern Europeans were born abroad. [46] By the 1901 census, most of Canadians expressed a preference for WASP immigrants from the United States and Great Britain. As a second option, general ancestry from Northwestern Europe, such as Scandinavia, was preferred. [47] Similarly, by 1914, "terms denoting a common northwest European consciousness, such as 'American race stock'" became increasing common in the United States. A broad Northwestern European heritage was gradually utilized by nativists to denote "northwest Europeans who shared the common racial 'stock' of 'our forefathers'". [48]
Northwestern European immigration had reduced to 41 percent of all arrivals between 1901 and 1920 in the United States. Meanwhile by 1921 the pan-ethnic group represented almost all immigration to Canada. [49] This period of immigration coincided with the popularization of eugenics in North America, and particularly the United States. Figures, such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, [50] harnessing the ethnic category for racial supremacism, [51] and publishing theories about Northwestern Europeans becoming genetically diluted. [52] This included suggesting that, alongside public figures such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, that a race suicide was a credible threat to, what they defined as, the grouping. [53]
Much of the racial climate and prejudice of this era had fed directly into the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924, which significantly favored Northwestern Europeans, with its 1890 United States Census-led "National Origins Quota". [54] The Act all but ended any further significant immigration from any region other than Northwestern Europe. [55]
Psychologist John W. Berry's 1977 study observed that, in terms of immigrant groups, Northwestern European people were viewed the most favorably by Canadians citizens. This was followed up by Central and Southern Europeans. [56] A 2011 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics analyzed genetic data for the pan-ethnic group. Conducted by Dr. Evan E. Eichler with multiple other scientists, the research compared genome copy-number variation in multiple ethnic groups, including Northwestern European Americans, Yoruba people, Maasai people and the Han Chinese. [57]
French Canadians, or Franco-Canadians, are an ethnic group who trace their ancestry to French colonists who settled in Canada from the 17th century onward. Today, people of French heritage make up the majority of native speakers of French in Canada, who in turn account for about 22 percent of the country's total population.
White is a racial classification and skin color specifier, generally used for people of European origin; although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, and point of view. This term has at times been expanded to encompass persons of South Asian, West Asian, and North African descent, persons who are often considered "non-white" in other contexts in the United States. It has also been alleged that, in the United States, people of Southern European and even Irish descent have been excluded from this category, although this idea has been contested. The usage of "white people" or a "white race" for a large group of mainly or exclusively European populations, defined by their light skin, among other physical characteristics, and contrasting with "black", "red", "brown", "yellow", and other "colored" people or "persons of color", originated in the 17th century. Prior to this, Europeans also described people from East Asia as being "white". It was only during the 19th century that this vague category was transformed in a pseudo-scientific system of race and skin color relations.
European Americans are Americans of European ancestry. This term includes people who are descended from the first European settlers in America as well as people who are descended from more recent European arrivals. European Americans are the largest panethnic group in the United States. because of shared culture of Western European Americans and assimilated more recent immigrants.
White Latin Americans, or European Latin Americans, are Latin Americans who are considered white, typically due to European descent. Latin American countries have often encouraged intermarriage between different ethnic groups since the beginning of the colonial period.
Brazilians are the citizens of Brazil. A Brazilian can also be a person born abroad to a Brazilian parent or legal guardian as well as a persons who acquired Brazilian citizenship. Brazil is a multiethnic society, which means that it is home to people of many ethnic origins. As a result, a majority of Brazilians do not identify their nationality as not being necessarily directly related to their ethnicity; in fact, the idea of ethnicity as it is understood in the anglophone world is not popular in the country.
European emigration can be defined as subsequent emigration waves from the European continent to other continents. The origins of the various European diasporas can be traced to the people who left the European nation states or stateless ethnic communities on the European continent.
Argentina has 35 indigenous groups according to the Complementary Survey of the Indigenous Peoples of 2004, the Argentine government's first attempt in nearly 100 years to recognize and classify the population according to ethnicity. In the survey, based on self-identification or self-ascription, around 600,000 Argentines declared to be Amerindian or first-generation descendants of Amerindians, that is, 1.49% of the population. The most populous indigenous groups were the Aonikenk, Kolla, Qom, Wichí, Diaguita, Mocoví, Huarpe peoples, Mapuche and Guarani In the 2010 census [INDEC], 955,032 Argentines declared to be Amerindian or first-generation descendants of Amerindians, that is, 2.38% of the population. Many Argentines also identify as having at least one indigenous ancestor; a genetic study conducted by the University of Buenos Aires in 2011 showed that more than 56% of the 320 Argentines sampled were shown to have at least one indigenous ancestor in one parental lineage and around 11% had indigenous ancestors in both parental lineages.
The English diaspora consists of English people and their descendants who emigrated from England. The diaspora is concentrated in the English-speaking world in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and to a lesser extent, South Africa, South America, and continental Europe.
The English people are an ethnic group and a nation native to England, who speak the English language of the Germanic language family and share a common history and culture. The English identity is of early medieval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Angelcynn. Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Great Britain around the 5th century AD. England is the largest and most populous country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
European Canadians, also known as Euro-Canadians, are Canadians with ancestry from Europe. They form the largest panethnic group within Canada with roughly 73 percent of the population.
European Australians or White Australians are citizens or residents of Australia whose ancestry originates from the peoples of Europe. They form the largest panethnic group in the country.
Argentines are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, several of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Argentine.
Eastern European people are a pan-ethnic group, or multi-ethnic regional grouping, and the inhabitants of Eastern Europe. East or Eastern Europeans can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and other nations bordering with or otherwise ethnoculturally related to the region.
Eastern European Canadians are Canadians of Eastern European ancestry. Eastern European Canadian people can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and other nations in, bordering with, or otherwise culturally connected to Eastern Europe.
Southern European Canadians are Canadians of Southern European ancestry. Southern European Canadian people can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Southern France, Yugoslavia, and other nations in, or ethnoculturally connected with, Mediterranean Europe.
Northwestern European Americans are Americans of Northwestern European ancestry. Northwestern European American people can usually trace back all or some of their heritage to Great Britain, Ireland, Northern Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Northern France, and other nations connected to Northwestern Europe geographically or culturally.
Southern European people are a pan-ethnic group, or multi-ethnic regional grouping, and the inhabitants of Southern Europe. Mediterranean or Southern Europeans can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, as well as nations bordering with, or ethnoculturally related to, the region.
Northwestern European Canadians are Canadians of Northwestern European ancestry. Northwestern European Canadian people can usually trace back full or partial heritage to Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Belgium, Northern France, and other nations related with the region geographically or culturally.
Northwestern European Australians are Australians of Northwestern European (Celto-Germanic) ancestry. Northwestern European Australian people may trace full or partial heritage to Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, German-speaking Switzerland, Scandinavia, the northern regions of France and/or other nations or territories within Northwestern Europe or culturally related.
A majority-minority or minority-majority area is a term used to refer to a subdivision in which one or more racial, ethnic, and/or religious minorities make up a majority of the local population.
This also explains why bargaining spans tend to be so great at the outset: this should by no means be interpreted (as many Northwest European people would probably do) as lack of empathy or concern with the other party's standpoint, but rather a tension-creating device
"In a variety of surveys, the American population ranked Northwestern Europeans highest, then the South-Central-Eastern Europeans, in turn the Japanese and Chinese, and finally blacks." A year after the decision in Thind, Congress responded to this popular prejudice with immigration quotas
Among the immigrant groups from cultures whose religious practices and perceived appearance were distinct from those of northwestern Europeans, the Turks are most important.
In a comparison of three genetic marker systems, Wilson et al. (2001) showed that northwestern Europeans could be clearly distinguished from both Basques and Near Easterners on the basis of both mtDNA and X chromosome microsatellites.
Additionally, this analysis revealed an independent association with the SNP rs2523822, a known tag for the class I HLA allele A*02:01 among Northwestern Europeans. ... These findings likely reflect LD patterns, as it is known that rs2523822 and HLA-A*02:01 exist in strong LD among Northwestern European populations but not among Southern Europeans.
Dr. Susan Harlap, now a professor of epidemiology at New York University, led that Israeli study ... "The incidence of prostate cancer is different in Israeli Jews than in northwestern Europeans," Harlap said. "It may be a different disease, and there may be a different set of causes. We do know there are genetic causes of prostate cancer, and there could be different sets of genes in Israeli Jews than in northwestern Europeans."
Instead of engineering a population of highly educated, northwestern Europeans, the authors of the legislation created new immigrant communities that persist to this day.
Provisional statistics indicate that between two and six per cent of northwest Europeans are redheads, compared to an average of one or two per cent in the world population. But in the UK the numbers are much higher, with 13 per cent of Scots, 10 per cent of the Irish, and six per cent of individuals in England having red hair.
2. North-West European 20. North-West European, 21. British, 22. Irish, 23. Western European, 24. Northern European.
Appendix 4: Macro geographic country groups - Macro group: North-West Europe; Micro group: North-West Europe, United Kingdom, Ireland, Western Europe, Northern Europe
Table 5: Birthplace - North-West Europe: no. 2000 - 2407Cite journal requires
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(help)This then becomes a general theory explaining what some call the "European miracle," by arguing that the (mythically unique) European family, nuclear, late-marrying, companionate, led to population control (Hall [1985: 131] speaks of "the relative continence of the European family"); led also to a capitalist mentality (Macfarlane 1986; Laslett 1988); even led unmarried European men to go forth and conquer the world because of their sexual frustration (Stone 1977: 54).
The advanced agriculturalists of the late Middle Ages were already capturing 26,000 kcal/cap/day, early modern Northwest Europeans around 1700 CE must have been consuming somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 kcal/cap/day.
Fossil-fuel society is the product of two innovations. The first, which some northwest Europeans had already made two thousand years ago, was the discovery that coal could be burned to release heat.
The consequences of this change in marriage patterns were enormous, Hartman contends, and underlay many of the most momentous developments in Western history, such as the growth of state power and industrialization. The unstable households that late-marriage patterns fostered obliged Northwestern Europeans to devise new institutions to perform services that extended families offered in early-marriage societies.
The distribution of the pre-columbian Amerindian population would have as much influence on the settlement patterns of the northwestern Europeans who would colonize the Americas as did the Iberians who had preceded them ... The English and French were next to arrive ... unsuccessful in their efforts to establish North American colonies until the early 17th century ... Only the Dutch had the resources to challenge the Iberians directly ... The first third of the 17th century also saw a determined effort of the French, English, and Dutch to establish permanent colonies in the lesser Antilles.
Jared Diamond (1997; 2002), an apparently magisterial social scientist, demonstrated how the interplay of ecology and technology enabled Northwest Europeans to dominate the world. In this chapter I compare infant diet in foraging, hoe, herding, and plow societies in order to show how ecology and technology have affected beliefs and behaviors concerning the feeding of human offspring.
The results show that with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, comparable measures of the living arrangements of the aged show little systematic difference between nineteenth-century Northwest Europe and North America and twentieth-century developing countries. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that Northwest Europeans and North Americans had an exceptional historical pattern of preference for nuclear families.
Studies also show that natural selection favouring a mutation allowing adults to produce lactase – the enzyme that breaks down milk sugars – is why some groups of people can digest milk after weaning. Over 80 per cent of northwest Europeans can, but in parts of East Asia, where milk is much less commonly drunk, an inability to digest lactose is the norm.
It was only in the course of the seventeenth century that two new Atlantics - the Dutch and the British - asserted themselves, playing a growing role in the European economy and, in some degree, to the detriment of Seville's Atlantic. They nevertheless remained strictly dependent on the latter and hopes of the treasures to be captured or even dominated remained an essential element of the naval politics of the north-western Europeans.
The plans of Northwest Europeans most focused on organizing expeditions to finding gold ... French, Dutch, Irish and English expeditions began to establish trading links with the area around the turn of the century.
What is the current status of the Reformation as it lives on among those Christians who call themselves “Lutheran” and/or “Protestant”? To update Whitehead’s cramping observation, we look at statistics in atlases. Yes, northwest Europeans in Germany still head the list.
A poll by Pew Research, an American think-tank, found that a majority of people in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Greece and Spain harboured hostile attitudes to Islam while only a minority of northwestern Europeans held similar views.
We identified recent gene flow between Europeans and Asians in most populations we studied, including East Asians and Northwestern Europeans, which are normally considered to be non-admixed populations.
Rather, in the New World as in Africa, the north-western Europeans would demonstrate new ambitions to dominate trade and to set up their own areas of colonization ... Another Atlantic took form in the seventeenth century with the colonization and peopling of North America, from French Canada to the English colonies on the mainland.
In the New World, however, the Northwest Europeans were able to duplicate the Iberian policy of founding settlement colonies. As in Spanish America, the settlers in British, French, and Dutch North America were mainly interested in subsistence farming and interregional trade ... In addition to trade and settlement, the Northwest Europeans also developed a plantation zone, situated in the southeast of North America
Agricultural Capability: (for the mixed agriculture practised by northwestern Europeans)
The structure of northwestern European societies overseas had more to do with the nature of access to land in colonial settings than with the particular backgrounds of emigrating Europeans. The crucial European inheritance -a strong sense of the nuclear family supported by a desire for the private control of land-was common to most northwestern Europeans. When these assumptions were introduced to areas where land was cheap and markets were poor, as in early Canada, South Africa, and New England, remarkably homogeneous and egalitarian rural societies of subsistent farmers emerged quickly.)
The model of imperialism that the Iberians introduced took advantage of existing populations and grafted onto it ... This model influenced the northwestern Europeans but it was one that they could not follow utterly. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the English relied on emigration to (re)populate the territories they claimed. France was reluctant to do the same and it lacked the resources and the will to build much more than a replacement society along the St. Lawrence and a few outposts in Acadia and Louisiana.
Canada and Australia were, like the United States, settler colonies that hived off from Britain. Frontier areas were occupied almost entirely by northwest Europeans, and other European ethnies immigrated later.
Benjamin Franklin’s warning that colonial Pennsylvania was becoming “a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” But just as the idea of Germans having a different complexion than other northwestern European Americans came to seem peculiar, so, too, did mainstream public attitudes about race and discrimination
For example, we know that in New York City two centuries ago, the people were largely of northwestern European origin. ... We know that the vital rates have changed over these two centuries. But have the original northwestern European people changed their behavior?
Table 1.1 Immigration Periods ... 1821-1880 Northwest European Wave. Heavily Irish, German, British, French, and other northwest Europeans, together with a complement from Canada, China and the West Indies.
Although many histories of immigration describe this period from the 1870s to the 1920s as one when the sources of migrants shifted from Northwest Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe - “Old Immigration” versus the “New Immigration,” Northwest Europeans continued to come and stay in very large numbers.
The Prairie born constituted the largest single element in the population in 1926 and with those from other provinces comprised 62.75 per cent of the total. With respect to "origin," about one-half of those from Central, South, and East Europe and less than one-fourth of those from Northwest European stocks were foreign born.
Although changed by immigration, Canada's population remained overwhelmingly white, Anglo, French and Western European. The 1901 census indicated that Canada was 96.2 per cent Caucasian. Most Canadians expressed a clear preference for white, Protestant British and American newcomers, viewing them as easiest to assimilate, followed by northwest Europeans and Scandinavians.
1914 ... Now, within Anglo-America and under the impress of an increasingly racialized nativism, there arose terms denoting a common northwest European consciousness, such as “American race stock”and “old stock.” ... Groups such as the Americanization Committee of Germantown drew on the language of racialized nativism to cast their members—including those of German background—as northwest Europeans who shared the common racial “stock” of “our forefathers.” ... During the 1940s ... Chicago’s working-class and Catholic Germans thereby helped to create a common ground that necessarily influenced the identities of their Irish and new immigrant collaborators. Similarly, when middle-class Germans took refuge in a racial nationalism, they cooperated with other northwest Europeans and echoed the behavior of such other “Nordic” groups as Norwegian Americans.
Northwestern Europeans were the majority group as well among immigrants to Canada. However, the demographic shift away from northwestern Europe as an immigrant source occurred earlier in the United States in comparison to Canada and the degree of this shift was noticeably greater. The period from 1901 to 1920 saw northwestern Europe decline to 41% ... By contrast, as late as 1921 the Canadian immigrant population continued to be dominated by northwestern Europeans in general, British immigrants particularly.
Unfortunately, in the American version of the eugenics argument, articulated by Madison Grant in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race , the gene pool of descendants of northwestern Europeans was considered strong and worthy, while the southern and eastern Europeans were considered a threat to the gene pool and a source of overpopulation.
At the same time, eugenics was gaining populariy, and scholars such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant were publishing books on the superiority of northwestern Europeans and the potential problems caused by the increased immigration of other groups to the United States
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American eugenicists worried that immigrants of “inferior stock” from Southern and Eastern Europe would dilute the old stock of Northwestern Europeans, and argued for sterilization.
Okrent enlivens his narrative with vivid portraits of Aldrich, Lodge and other prominent figures active in the campaign to avoid the “race suicide” said to follow from allowing the northwestern European population of the United States to be overwhelmed by ostensibly inferior groups.
The 1924 act also sought to curtail the large number of eastern and southern European migrants who began entering the United States in 1890. Through the National Origins Quota formula, the act pegged future immigration at up to 2 percent of the number of foreign-born persons from a particular country already in the United States as of the 1890 census. Through race-neutral in language, the formula favored northwestern Europeans by using the 1890 census as its referent
The 1924 Immigration Act in effect restricted the immigration of people other than north-western Europeans.
In their national attitudinal study, Berry, Kalin, and Taylor (1977) found that respondents in general reacted very favorably to English and French Canadians ... Specifically, northwestern Europeans were judged most favorably, central and southern European groups next, and nonwhite groups least favorably, except for Japanese.
The samples studied are cohorts of Northwestern European Americans from the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain collection (CEU), Yoruba from Ibadan, Nigeria (YRI), Han Chinese from Beijing (CHB), Japanese from Tokyo (JPT), and Maasai from Kinyawa, Kenya (MKK) (Table 1).