Northwestern European people
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. There is a large Northwestern European diaspora, with significant numbers within North America, and Northwestern European Australians in Oceania.
Other subgroupings of Europeans include Eastern European people and Southern European people.
Background
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. A number of genetic research studies have been conducted with the group. The panethnicity has also been referenced in journalistic works.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, or may be identified as Central Europeans. Dr. Virgil F. Fairbanks has summarized the history of the pan-ethnic group:
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.
History
Northwestern Europeans utilized outcrop coal, especially in Great Britain, during the Bronze Age, where it was used as fuel for funeral pyres. 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":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.
Late Middle Ages
During the late Middle Ages the group developed a pattern of late marriage due to, 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." 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.Northwestern European colonialism
After the success of other Europeans groupings, such as Portuguese and Spanish colonists, Northwestern Europeans competed for land and resources in the 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 established their presence, in what was thought of as the New World, by the 17th century. Historian Seymour Drescher has observed the shifting patterns of Nortwestern Europeans' behaviour during this progression of European colonialism and early modern slavery: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 land and material gains. Expeditions of Dutch, Irish, French and English people, at first, prioritized gold prospecting, later establishing trading links and gaining territories in the Americas. 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:
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.
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." 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."
21st century
In 2012, it was reported that between 2 to 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. In 2016, religious scholar Martin E. Marty noted that Northwestern Europeans living in Germany constituted the largest proportion of Lutherans in any one territory. 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".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. 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”.
Culture
In a 2009 study by professor Steven Ruggles, which constrasted 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. Professor David Kaminsky has written that expressions of the group's musical heritage 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".Academic research
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. 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.Diaspora
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.North America
Early colonisation
Between 1608 to 1760, as a significant part of the European colonization of the Americas, Northwestern European peoples settled lands extensively in North America. In lands that would become the Thirteen Colonies and Canada, the group created farms and plantations. Their mixed farming techniques, according to geographer Cole Harris, facilitated the settlement of valley areas along the Saint Lawrence River. 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".Early modern slavery, and the Atlantic slave trade itself, "juxtaposed west and central Africans with northwest Europeans in the Americas." 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. During this frontier era, almost all colonists had a Northwestern European ancestry in North America.
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". By the 1790s, most of the populace of New York City were of Northwestern European ancestry.
Immigration to US and Canada
The "Northwest European Wave", as described academically, was an period of immigration between 1821 to 1880 in the US.Irish, French, Germans and British people arrived in large number to the East Coast of the United States. 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." 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.
From 1886 to 1926, about one quarter the Northwestern Europeans that had settled on the Canadian Prairies, were born outside Canada. In comparision, around one half of Eastern and Southern Europeans were born abroad. 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. 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'".
Northwestern European immigration had reduced to 41 percent of all arrivals between 1901 to 1920 in the United States. Meanwhile by 1921 the pan-ethnic group represented almost all immigraton to Canada. 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,
harnessing the ethnic category for racial supremacism,
and publishing theories about Northwestern Europeans becoming genetically diluted. 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.
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".
The Act all but ended any further significant immigration from any region other than Northwestern Europe.