It's going to be almost impossible to get a completely unbiased source for such a charged subject. My understanding is that White as a grouping for Europeans in the mid 1600's when the British empire was expanding and contact with non Europeans was becoming much more common and a need for an ingroup/ outgroup differentiation appeared. It's possible that it was much earlier than that but the important thing is it had nothing to do with the American melting pot.
Ignatiev was not one to hide his beliefs "under a bushel", and I cannot rule that out.
I checked your reference, and https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/1/STATUTE-1-Pg189.pdf does indeed use the expression "free White persons". So use of that term as an ethnonym certainly predates the earliest sources cited by Ignatiev.
I still find his book to be (whilst admittedly rabidly biased) the most authoritative work on the popularisation of the White as an ethnonym.
If you know a better one, please share it!
Discussion
The mid 1600s had sectarian "total wars" in continental Europe, the English Civil War, and an openly genocidal seven-year campaign to subdue (Catholic) Ireland.
Ethnic identities were very much second to sectarian identities in the 1600s, and tbf the 1700s were not THAT different.
Not exactly fertile cultural soil for chummy pan-European "Whiteness"!
Happy to be wrong, but I'm going to need a source or three! Extraordinary claims and all that.
Violent conflict has been and continues to be a constant throughout all of human history. If war prevented these definitions they never would have occurred at all:
https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473
The lack of a pan European project does not preclude the need/ desire to sort different groups *within* the British Empire.
Totally agree with your first point. Its also central to Ignatiev's argument.
That theconversation article is revisionist verbiage, both more Woke and less scholarly than Ignatiev. The early-1600s date for first use of "White" as an ethnonym surprises me, will follow up the source. The rest of the argument is unreferenced bilge. The West Indies in particular were defined by free/unfree identities, even between people of the same skin tone. The first slaves sold in the West Indies were Irish, you know. And many plantation owners were black.
"Whiteness" may or may not have been circulating as a concept among playwrights, but it was conspicuous in its absence from public life until the 1800s in America, and even later in the British Empire.
Theconversation article gets better (took a while to finish loading here), and includes more references. But if you can read that without throwing up you'll like Ignatiev more.
I agree. My previous post said it will be almost impossible to find sources that aren't biased, but you demanded one anyway. The important thing is that White people were defined in the 1600's.
Sorry I missed your last post. I already showed you that literally in *America* it was defined in legal code before the 1800's.
I didn't demand unbiased references, I asked you to share one if you had it. That last article's references have potential :)
"White people" was a recognised expression earlier than I'd been led to believe, thank you.
But as to when it became a dominant self-definition ("I am White like other White people" supplanting e.g. "I am Calvinist" or "I am a man of Kilkenny") I defer to Ignatiev's rather extravagantly well-researched hate tract. (I mean, book.)
The level of special-pleading and reaching for any excuse to dismiss the suffering of "White" slaves in that The Conversation article is chilling, and the author seems personally obsessed with "reparations for slavery", and wants to reserve them for one politically-useful clique.
That author hates as well or better than Ignatiev, but is only 10% the scholar. IIRC Ignatiev is quite willing to admit death rates were higher for slaves under "indentured servitude" compared with those under African chattel-slavery laws. He minimises, but he doesn't lie.
Srsly, you might like the work, whatever you think of the man.