Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
2d ago
Yes, to the point where "British citizen" (as distinguished from "British subject", which included anyone in the Empire/Dominions) is a fairly recent concept. Americans of a certain age (80+) will sometimes use "British subject" to mean "British citizen", maybe because the latter was not actually a thing when they were young.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
That's not really 'Irish,' though.
They were in the eyes of Americans at the time, specifically Scotch-Irish. Also, Scots are Celts, though views about that at the time were sometimes complex.
Aside from their Catholicism, there was little to distinguish a typical Irishman from a typical Protestant Highlander. (Their languages would have been slightly different, but equally alien to an English American in 1850.)
Harlequin5942
2d ago
The Pope officially renounced it along with the entirety of mainstream Catholicism
Well, it wasn't just a single Pope who completed that process after WW2! ;)
Harlequin5942
2d ago
I’ve always been taught that anti-Catholic sentiment in America went hand-in-hand with nativism. The Catholics were from strange lands with strange customs like Ireland, Italy, and Poland.
Strange customs like the Irish? Three 19th century American Presidents were Irish, but they were Protestant Irish.
The main issue was that Catholics were seen as having a supra-nationalist loyalty to the Pope. Even in the 1960 election, Protestant figures like Billy Graham argued that JFK would take orders from the Pope. (The Pope couldn't even restrain JFK's sex life, let alone his policies.) There was also fear of Catholic schools and other sectarian institutiins, which even sought funding from Protestant taxpayers. The Catholic Church was also seen as too anti-black in the North (due to its silence on slavery) and too pro-black in the South (especially by the KKK).
Harlequin5942
2d ago
You need to consider demand for relocation as well as supply in the analysis. The expected gain in 1500 AD from moving from e.g. West Africa to Europe, given the risks and the relative differences in quality of life, were pretty small compared to the expected gain from moving in 2024. It wasn't like Europeans were fighting off hoards of African immigrants. And in 1900, what would the average African villager going to do in places where they don't speak the language, don't have much marketable skills, don't have immunity to local diseases, and don't have a welfare state to use?
In the Imperialist period, the transfer was the other way: hordes of European economic migrants swarming to the Americas and Africa.
In the UK, a lot of the black immigration was driven by things like African nurses coming over for work after 1945, during a period of labour shortages in the UK.
I would say that the key factors were (a) the Great Divergence in economic prosperity between the West and the Rest, due to the rise liberal capitalism in the former; (b) differences in population growth, and (c) better information transfer, so that even poor Africans could know that the poor in the West enjoyed a better standard of living.
Restrictions on immigration, with a few exceptions (like the White Australia policy) were less important than the above factors, I think.
Harlequin5942
3d ago
Then it wasn't something that men had as men, whereas women had their immunity from conscription as women. Different from today, but not that different, and no solace for an unmarried man who was conscripted (as many young, unmarried men were, sometimes violently e.g. press gangs).
Harlequin5942
3d ago
men had authority over women in return
That's vague. Men had a higher legal status in some respects and in some situations, but a typical man in a typical historical society had absolutely no authority over any women, except his wife and daughters if he had any.
Harlequin5942
4d ago
That they'd later turn into vaguely anti-western, mixed political system basket case anyway wasn't really a concern.
There was also a lot of confidence that liberal capitalist democracy was the natural state of countries, as long as there wasn't some special interfering factor. I think that didn't really start to fade until the Iraq War.
True to some extent, but people will tolerate terrible treatment if the price is right. Just look at migrant workers in the Gulf States.
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