Lord Gowrie said:
the British education system had rendered most of the mainly Protestant cultures in the British isles into subsets of the Greater British culture.
There was no "British" education system for a start; the Scots at least had their own education system.
Moreover, Scotland and Ireland are legislated for separately. The UK was never a unitary nation-state, and never conceptualized nationality the way continental Europe did. Examine the historiographyof the period. You won't find many histories of "Britain", only England, Scotland, Ireland, etc. The English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay writing of the peoples of Europe couldn't even conceptualize that the Scots, English and Irish might be one people, and lists them separately. When national soccer sides were first created in the Vic period, it never occurred to the British to have a UK team, but an English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh team (and they remain separate to this day!). Look at the history of British propaganda. John Bull, used to represent to the British state, frequently occurs along side Sawney Scot, more often than not with derisive results for the Scots. These are just a tiny number of examples, from what is an inexhausible quarry compared with notions of "Britishness," which were confined to the elites of Scotland and Ireland, and the entrenched protestants of Ulster and Meath.
Lord Gowrie said:
Lowland Scots were considered pretty much the same as English, and (except for a few differences), their lifestyle was similar to that of the English and the commonly spoken language was a dialect of English.
Lowland Scots were mostly just Gaels who had been speaking English for varying numbers of generations. Scots, of course, besides about (for beggining of vic period) 20-25% keeping the native tongue, spoke a variation of English which differed from English to about the same degree as Portuguese from Castilian or Dutch from "North German." Whereas Yankees, Anglo-Canadians and southerners spoke English virtually identical to English-English. Here is a quote from the first draft of the American declaration of Independence which is sufficiently close to the period to illustrate the point:
"At this very Time too, they ["our British Brethren"] are permitting their Chief Magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common Blood, but Scotch and foreign Mercenaries, to invade and deluge us in Blood."
The Scots sung their own songs, had their own names, their own values, and a different religion from the rest of the British, as well as their own national identity. In all this, it is much more reasonable to have a "Scottish" tag, than Ukrainian, Norwegian, Flemish, and South German tags, never mind Yankee, Texan and Anglo-Canadian tags.
Frankly, it's just silly to have Scottish (gaels) and Welsh with the same culture as the English, but to hover over the low countries and find Flemish, Dutch and North German distiguished
Lord Gowrie said:
their lifestyle was similar to that of the English and the commonly spoken language was a dialect of English. ... Same for the Welsh.
I'm not sure what you know about the Welsh. Their language is nothing like English (which is closer to German and French), and ignoring the political events Victoria is designed to simulate, deserve their own tag much more than the Irish (over 50% of the people were Welsh monolinguals at the tuirn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and 80% of the land mass had Welsh majorities).
Lord Gowrie said:
Anglo-Irish is pretty much the same as English, though, and we'd have to then create a separate tag for Anglo-Australian, etc., whose colonial lifestyle was far more in relation to the English than the Anglo-Irish.
Well, there's already an Anglo-Canadian tag. I merely suggest an Anglo-Irish tag because there'd be no British ones with these changes. The Irish tag as used does not represent the Irish language. If it did, they would only be a small minority on the island for most of the Vic period.
.png){kind=avatar}
