GUESTDave wrote "Which is because England is not a country in the same sense that Scotland and Wales are, it is an amalgam of regions, created by Aethelstan and reinforced by the Norman invaders."
(How do you get it to go into italics, by the way?)

This statement astonished me. I would have thought that England, of all countries, with its history of colonisation and its colonists harking back to England, would very much be a country.

Were/are English emigrants more likely to go by choice? I don't think so; what's that famous painting - ah, Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England - with the emigrants looking longingly back to their homeland. And in every country where English people have settled they have retained their culture and customs with great care.