England needed race-thinking as a unifying theory for distant colonies

Evidence

Very much as in Germany, English nationalism was born and stimulated by a middle class which had never entirely emancipated itself from the nobility and therefore bore the first germs of race-thinking. But unlike Germany, whose lack of unity made necessary an ideological wall to substitute for historical or geographical facts, the British Isles were completely separated from the surrounding world by natural frontiers and England as a nation had to devise a theory of unity among people who lived in far-flung colonies beyond the seas, separated from the mother country by thousands of miles. The only link between them was common descent, common origin, common language. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 478

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes ‘Saxondom’ and ‘race-thinking’ as unifying ideologies not physical or historical facts.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s scaffolding for Orientalism and imagined communities of nation.