Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era - Softcover

Paul, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801484405 ISBN 13: 9780801484407

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Paul uses parliamentary debates, official documents, speeches, and memoirs to demonstrate successfully how British emigration and immigration were controlled and manipulated by the post-WW II governments to preserve the 'Britishness' of the dominions and the 'whiteness' of Britain.... This cogently argued, well-researched book provides valuable insights into British politics of race. It ranks with other pathbreaking works.... Highly recommended. ― Choice

Kathleen Paul challenges the usual explanation for the racism of post-war British policy. According to standard historiography, British public opinion forced the Conservative government to introduce legislation stemming the flow of dark-skinned immigrants and thereby altering an expansive nationality policy that had previously allowed all British subjects free entry into the United Kingdom. Paul's extensive archival research shows, however, that the racism of ministers and senior functionaries led rather than followed public opinion.

In the late 1940s, the Labour government faced a birthrate perceived to be in decline, massive economic dislocations caused by the war, a huge national debt, severe labor shortages, and the prospective loss of international preeminence. Simultaneously, it subsidized the emigration of Britons to Australia, Canada, and other parts of the Empire, recruited Irish citizens and European refugees to work in Britain, and used regulatory changes to dissuade British subjects of color from coming to the United Kingdom. Paul contends post-war concepts of citizenship were based on a contradiction between the formal definition of who had the right to enter Britain and the informal notion of who was, or could become, really British.

Whitewashing Britain extends this analysis to contemporary issues, such as the fierce engagement in the Falklands War and the curtailment of citizenship options for residents of Hong Kong. Paul finds the politics of citizenship in contemporary Britain still haunted by a mixture of imperial, economic, and demographic imperatives. 

About this title

About the Author

Kathleen Paul is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and Editor of The Historian.

Reviews

This work offers an exhaustively researched account of the development of British immigration policy in the post-war period. In a break with the conventional assessment of British policy, Paul (history, Univ. of South Florida) finds that government ministers and civil servants were the driving force behind opposition to immigrants from Commonwealth nations in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, rather than "racist" popular opinion. She neatly summarizes her thesis in the opening pages: "Facing the fact that successive governments did not want them and tried to reclassify them as something other than British, British subjects of color still have to fight to identify themselves as British. They do so within a domestic community many of whose members, thanks to successive legislative acts, have come to understand race as a natural divider and nationality as an accidental commonality." The author revisits postwar policy-making in part to cast fresh light on contemporary debates over nationality and citizenship. This robust work of scholarship should find readers in British and Commonwealth studies as well as migration and citizenship studies. Recommended for academic libraries.?Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801484405
• ISBN 13: 9780801484407
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272