Diaspora, culture, and identity were the original themes that animated the “British world” idea when it first emerged in the 1990s. In this volume, published within the reputed Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series, Kent Fedorowich, Andrew Thompson and their contributors seek to nuance and substantiate the notion of a British world by attending to questions arising from new migration scholarship (1). Migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was certainly a massive global phenomenon and one that demands much more historical attention. It is estimated that 50 million Europeans, 50 million Chinese, and 30 million Indians migrated globally in the nineteenth century alone (129).
British migrants figured prominently in this exodus, with 13.5 million leaving the Isles in the years between 1815 and 1930 (6). But as with other work that has taken up the concept, exactly what is meant by “the British world” is not in this volume always entirely clear, as the editors themselves seem to acknowledge (25). Some of the contributors appear to understand the concept as essentially a territorial one, using it to refer to the settler colonies of the “Old Commonwealth”: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (the place of Britain itself is unclear). Others use it to refer to identity and examine various forms of “Britishness” abroad. Focusing on migration should complicate both these usages because although many British migrants traveled to the settler colonies, not only did they also migrate to other destinations and in especially large numbers to the United States, but the settler colonies themselves became home to migrants from a range of other places, including Europe and Asia. As Fedorowich and Thompson suggest, “[T]he clarion call is for migration historians to cast aside the narrow and exclusive confines of ethnocentric analyses and embark on bolder comparative studies” (16). Indeed, the challenge is to examine the interplay and interconnections between various migratory movements and between the systems, structures, and societies that facilitated them.
Some chapters in this collection take up this task more successfully than others. Lisa Chiltern's contribution on the construction of British privilege during the onward travel of arriving migrants in Canada is particularly impressive for the way it attends to the complex interplay of transport networks, sites, and expectations in the context of not only British but also Asian and European migration. The spatial ordering of migrant transit involved, she argues, “schooling Britons in their own superiority” (186). Chiltern's chapter is noteworthy for the attention it pays to the journey. Many of the millions of European, Chinese, and Indian people who migrated globally in the nineteenth century did so via sea—traveling for long periods of time via ship in conditions that were frequently far from comfortable (129). As Eric Richards's chapter on the limitations of Thomas Malthus's ideas on migration recognizes, these journeys began when migrants left their village for cities and then—often some years later—for ports. They included trips overland via train and foot and horse and weeks spent in depots such as Birkenhead near Liverpool and Gravesend near London. Chiltern's chapter reminds us that these were journeys that also continued after disembarkation, as migrants spent time in quarantine stations, hostels, train carriages, and—as we see in Stephen Constantine's piece—temporary housing, before making some kind of permanent settlement. Thinking about what it meant to migrate requires linking departures to arrivals and considering these journeys as a whole.
Rachel Bright's examination of racially exclusive immigration policies in Australia, South Africa, British Columbia, and California prior to the First World War is also a stand-out contribution. Her expansive examination teases out the tensions that developed between the British and settler governments over the issue of Asian migration and the circulation of immigration restrictions between settler polities. She identifies the hardening of racial exclusion as a defining feature of policy in the 1890s. A. James Hammerton's chapter turns to post-1945 British migrants and their adoption of what he calls “light cosmopolitan” identities. It is striking that many of his subjects, who he describes as “eschew[ing] political identity or patriotism of any kind,” were white members of the lower middle class for whom migration led to social and economic mobility (238). Hammerton suggests that the British exodus of which they were a part represents a “genuinely globally dispersed ‘diaspora’” (236). Yet although some of his subjects reported affinities to Spain and France as well as Australia and Canada, the “world” of these migrants nonetheless remained very much a white one. Perhaps what their stories, and their eschewal of national identity, reveal is not so much a “global” diaspora as the way late twentieth-century migration continues to be shaped by the historic structural (and often racial) asymmetries evidenced in Bright's piece. Hammerton's chapter, together with Bright's and Chiltern's, thus raises larger questions that might be considered by nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration scholars more broadly. Who gets to move, where? What are the material and infrastructural conditions that enable or force them to do so? Who needs identity? What work does it do?
One of the strengths of this volume is that its chronological ordering helps to demonstrate both the past manufacture and the long-term consequences of migration policy and practice. That the impact of migration polities continued into the later part of the twentieth century is made evident not only by Hammerton's piece but also by Eleanor Passmore and Andrew Thompson's final chapter, which offers a comparative analysis of postwar migration in the context of decolonizing British and French empires. Their piece sits well alongside Bright's, turning the lens on the metropole as a migrant destination and examining the ways the British government's multiculturalism policy was shaped by its hands-off approach to welfare and its older commitment to migrants from the “Old Commonwealth.” Given that race-based policies were so central to shaping demographic geographies, it is disappointing that, with the exception of Chiltern's piece, the growing area of “whiteness” studies—which seeks to challenge the assumption that whiteness is the norm against which other color designations are measured by interrogating it—attracts little mention from contributors who similarly seem reluctant to engage with the large body of work on settler colonialism. Although the existence of “subaltern” forms of Britishness and the particularity of local identities are phenomena noted by the editors, as they also remark, on these topics “more systematic investigation” is needed (4).
In their introduction Fedorowich and Thompson tell us that the British world was not a world simply of sentiment, but rather one “whose peoples were connected by a series of interlocking networks, webs and information flows” (2). This call to attend to the mechanics of imperial and global connection is welcome and important, and the study of migration must be central to it. The role of the professions, technologies of transit, and “biopolitics” all remain rich fields for investigation. But the question for those scholars taking up this task must surely center on the ways Fedorowich and Thompson's two foci connect: how did networks and flows—which linked some places and not others, and included some people but sought to exclude others—create worlds of sentiment and subjectivity? How did sentiment in turn shape and condition the workings of networks? And how did migrants of all shapes and persuasions seek to mold both to their own individual and to collective needs?
