Unification of a colonizer state was achieved through racial identity rather than ethnic culture

Evidence

Regional unification into a common country cohered under one government was effected through race. Racial cement collected settler Europeans and their legacy into a wall of common whiteness, notwithstanding ethnic sub-division and different emphases in racial conception. British, Dutch boers, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Germans, East European Jews, and later Portuguese largely lost their emphatic ethnic heritage. Together they became much more firmly and unambiguously, even unambivalently, vested in the religiosities of whiteness and its sources of wealth and privilege than in the US case, notwithstanding the long-simmering and long-lingering contest between British and boer legacies. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1473

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the generalizability test of threatened-privilege mobilization: whiteness here functions as the unifying axis absorbing erstwhile ethnic rivals — compare how perceived threat to white privilege has unified diverse European-ethnic groups in US political history. Relevant to The Reluctant Fundamentalist and relations of privilege. — connects to: Colonized nationalists engaged with, rather than ignored, imposed imperial racial categories; Colonized elites adopted the colonizer’s racial category while contesting its political meaning; Colonial liberal assimilation differed fundamentally from later racialized exclusion — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 63 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Author claims settlers were ‘much more firmly vested in the religiosities of whiteness than in the US case’ — is that contrast empirically supportable, or rhetorical flourish?

Broader Connections

• Colonized elites adopted the colonizer’s racial category while contesting its political meaning #complicates (0.80)
• Colonized nationalists engaged with, rather than ignored, imposed imperial racial categories #complicates (0.75)
• Colonial liberal assimilation differed fundamentally from later racialized exclusion #qualifies (0.70) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 63