With all the respect and admiration I have for vast swathes of the population of that fair and noble land, one could nonetheless answer this title-question in a historically accurate and quite pithy manner, by stating simply:
"The English".
"The English".
Since seeing your comment, I thought oh no, maybe I missed some context or something, so I went and read the article. It's a fine article, but as I expected, nothing new to me.
My guess is that you thought I was posting my cheeky response as a "counter" to the article - I wasn't, and I see the article agrees (in more words, of course) with what I said.