This Land is My Land
My grandparents were Canadian, Scots, Irish, English and Dutch, but at one point, they were all British. This news would be of no small annoyance to my maternal grandfather who was born in County Mayo and was an Irish nationalist as well. So, too, for Nellie Jacobs, my paternal grandmother, whose family came to the Colonies from Holland in the 1700s - making them subjects of His Majesty. There’s a lot of navel gazing in the UK these days as to exactly what it means to be a Briton. This is occasioned by sweeping historical and geopolitical forces, much of them the result of empire.