Anglo-Saxonism

Anglo-Saxonism is a cultural and racialist belief system developed by British and American intellectuals, politicians, and academics in the 19th century. Racialized Anglo-Saxonism contained both competing and intersecting doctrines, such as Victorian era-Old Northernism and the Teutonic germ theory which it relied upon in appropriating Germanic (particularly Norse) cultural and racial origins of the Anglo-Saxons.

This myth originated in the 16th and 17th centuries as a non‑racial tradition, with some proto-racial elements, that broke from the Matter of Rome and Matter of Britain dominant medieval legends tracing England's origins to Troy and King Arthur and instead built a separate English identity on Anglo-Saxon heritage, culture, language, laws, and the Anglican Church of England independence from the Roman papacy. By the 19th century, this tradition had developed into a racial doctrine legitimizing an empire based on Anglo-Saxon roots, and in particular in America was used to justify colonization, racism, manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine and slavery.