How the British working class became white

Introduction In the nineteenth century, the notion that all Britons were white was asserted with considerably more force and conviction outside Britain than within it. From a colonial distance it was a commonplace to accord a white, and hence elite, identity to every inhabitant of the United Kingdom. On home soit however, the assertion that everyone was equally white was more problematic. The British working class, for example, were marginal to the symbolic formation of whiteness and sometimes, as Lord Milner's remark implies, actively excluded from it.