Attitude to foreigners

.Attitude to Foreigners
Britain’s first contacts with other nations, England’s identity crisis, rivalries and sense of separateness towards the world – an essay based on Paxman’s “The English – A Portrait of People” (1999)

Project Essay developed by: João Carlos Jesus – nr. 48080
Subject: English c1.1
Teacher: John Walker

Index Introduction……………... Page 3 Essence of Foreign Visits... …… Page 4
The Preservation of English Symbols….. Page 5 The ‘Forever Young’ Rivalry with France... Page 6 The Elite Cultural Mindset of the English……... Page 7 The Foreign Perspective.... Page 8/9 Conclusion………………. Page 10

Introduction

With this essay we will go back to the edification of Britain, to today’s cultural ideal of England. We will see what makes the English “different” from the people from other nations and what historically and geographically engaged them with such a unique cultural mindset.

Essence of foreign visits Since the Beginning of Time, why did Britain receive so many foreigners? Britain is an aggregate of islands near Continental Europe; therefore as soon as Man started travelling through sea, the country began to be constantly visited by travelers from all around the world. Many of those travelers left several written documents that were important contributions to the process of defining a cultural identity and for the evolution of the country; One of these travelers, Greek philosopher and scientist Pytheas, was a pioneer is describing Britain geographically and the people that inhabited it; according to documents by him written, the British had a “strong relationship with religion”, which could be proved by all the work they put on finding valuable resources and sculpting them in order to later on bury those sculptures as “an offering to the God they worshipped”. Pytheas recognized the