Anglosphere

(ANG.gloh.sfeer)

n.

The collection of English-speaking nations that support the principles of common law and civil rights.

— anglospherism n.

— anglospherist adj.

Example Citations:

Recalling that the English-speaking nations led the world in the last century in confronting and defeating illiberal threats, some commentators have started to refer to the Anglosphere: an alliance of nations centred on the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, dedicated to confronting the 21st-century threat of terrorism.

— John Ibbitson, "Canada, be warned: A new alliance is taking shape," The Globe and Mail, February 24, 2003

To be part of the Anglosphere requires adherence to the fundamental customs and values that form the core of English-speaking cultures. These include individualism, rule of law, honoring contracts and covenants, and the elevation of freedom to the first rank of political and cultural values.

Nations comprising the Anglosphere share a common historical narrative in which the Magna Carta, the English and American Bills of Rights, and such Common Law principles as trial by jury, presumption of innocence, "a man's home is his castle", and "a man's word is his bond" are taken for granted. Thus persons or communities who happen to communicate or do business in English are not necessarily part of the Anglosphere, unless their cultural values have also been shaped by those values of the historical English-speaking civilization.

The Anglosphere, as a network civilization without a corresponding political form, has necessarily imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa and India constitute the Anglosphere's frontiers.

— James C. Bennett, "An Anglosphere Primer," Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2001

Earliest Citation:

The answer is what the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has called the Anglosphere. The US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and much of the West Indies, it is pointed out, enjoy a common language, a common culture, common legal traditions and, above all, common entrepreneurial instincts. Can these countries create a loose association of some kind?

— John Lloyd, "The Anglosphere Project," New Statesman, March 13, 2000

First Use:

After a simple dinner of beer and pasties in a pub on the fringes of the City, they rode south across the Tower Bridge, pierced a shallow layer of posh development along the right bank of the river, and entered into Southwark. As in other Atlantan districts of London, Feed lines had been worked into the sinews of the place, coursing through utility tunnels, clinging to the clammy undersides of bridges, and sneaking into buildings through small holes bored in the foundations. The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers.

— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, Spectra, February 1995

Notes:

Anyone looking to learn what the Anglosphere is all about and what its historical background is, would do well to read James C. Bennet's The Anglosphere Primer, part of which appears in the second example citation, below:

http://www.pattern.com/bennettj-anglosphereprimer.html: http://www.pattern.com/bennettj-anglosphereprimer.html

Related Words:

a-geographic

blogosphere

BRICs

Chindia

Chindonesia

Denglish

stans

Categories:

Economics

Culture (General)

Geography