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Notes -
Rome was kind of the exception, though, most empires had a clearly dominant ethnic group or small number of groups- Greeks in the diadochi states, white English and Scottish people in the British empire, Japanmen in the Japanese empire, ethnic Russians in modern Russia, Shiite Persians in Iran, etc.
I suspect mixing English and Scottish here as if they were the same thing would be met with significant opposition from both sides at many periods, but in Victorian times, excepting the political issues, I don't see how a person of Spanish or French or German descent would be excluded from British society because of their ethnic origin. Of course, it would be hard for them to become Lord or Prime Minister, possibly, but not harder than for an English commoner without necessary connections, I think.
Ethnic Russian in modern Russia do not have any noticeable benefits compared to ethnic Belorussians or ethnic Tuvanians, for example (or ethnic Ukrainians, before the current catastrophe started, or, in fact, ethnic Jews). With all the horrors that the current fascist regime inflicted on Russia, and while Russian culture by itself is pretty xenophobic, the official imperial bureaucracy is pretty ethnicity-blind, and operates on principles which assign very little importance to genetic traits. It helps that there's no racial division in Russia similar to one characteristic to the US, but in general they have completely different issues.
There were two pre-eminent Prime Ministers during the era when the British Empire was at its height. Gladstone was ethnically British. Benjamin Disraeli, as his name suggests, was not. He came from a Sephardi Jewish background, although his father converted to Anglican Christianity (taking the family with him) when Benjamin was a teenager.
Amusingly, the first and second ethnic minority prime ministers (Disraeli and Sunak) as well as the first, second, and third women (Thatcher, May and Truss) were all Conservatives.
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