One of the occupational hazards of writing comparative history is that authors are forced to climb over fences into other historians’ tiny backyards, picking up this and that, hoping to avoid drawing fire from the back porches. Jean Smith’s book, Settlers at the End of Empire: Race and the Politics of Migration in South Africa, Rhodesia and the United Kingdom, is an ambitious and provocative new comparative history that challenges many popular conceptions of Britain and southern Africa in the era of decolonization. Throughout the book, Smith displays an impressive command of a broad thematic topic spread across three countries and over a long period of time. It is the product of extensive archival research in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Britain, as well as interviews and oral accounts of migrants. Because it is bold, it will draw fire, including a little in this review, but her book ultimately succeeds because it disturbs settled understandings in a smart and fresh way, and is a stimulating and important addition to the existing literature on race and post-imperial migrations in the Anglo-world.

Smith’s study draws out commonalities and continuities in the politics of migration of two minority settler states—South Africa and Rhodesia—as well as metropolitan Britain. Because of their proximity, entangled histories, and, by the 1960s, their increasingly aberrant racial policies, Rhodesia and South Africa have long been associated with one another. Smith dedicates one chapter to the shared migration dilemmas faced by just these two regimes. With her focus on the role that race played in postwar migration politics in the wider Anglo-world, other former British settler colonies, particularly Australia and New Zealand, might have seemed natural points of comparison, but were not included. Of the three states that Smith does compare, Britain is the obvious outlier. While Britain’s inclusion is the book’s major analytic innovation, it is undoubtedly a looser fit than the other two and to make it work it requires a higher plane of abstraction in their commonalities to loop it in. By associating these three in this way, Smith is forthrightly placing Britain on the shelf next to two infamously racist minority settler states that are typically set aside. This is her point.

Settlers at the End of Empire emerges from a British political context of the pulling down of statues of slave traders, as well as the seventy-fifth anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush Generation, which both inspired reevaluations of the histories of racism in Britain. Smith is clear from the start that she sets out to confront longstanding British historiographic traditions which place postwar Britain in opposition to and apart from its wayward former colonies in southern Africa. Positioning Britain in such a way, she writes: “operated as a kind of alibi, minimizing and obscuring racist policies, attitudes, and discrimination in the United Kingdom as well as ongoing connections to Rhodesia and South Africa throughout the second half of the twentieth century” (192). However, an undoubtedly unintended consequence of the placing of Britain’s history of racism alongside the other two is not just that Britain gets taken down a notch, something Smith argues for quite convincingly, but the risk is that it might inadvertently work to pull up apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, as it implicitly questions the fairness of those southern African states being singled out for unique opprobrium.

In her book Smith urges her readers to reexamine the easy state-based moral categories at the end of empire. On her opening page, Smith explains that while there have been numerous studies of Britons emigrating abroad in earlier eras, as well as of Commonwealth people of color migrating to Britain, little has been written about postwar British migration to southern Africa. Smith skillfully connects these migrations of white Britons to southern Africa with the racial tensions brought about by non-white immigration into Britain, and argues that these crisscrossing migrations were linked to the racial politics of migration of all three states. These migrations formed a sort of circulatory system for an imperial body that no longer existed.

Smith argues that over the period she examines the politics of migration of the governments of each state, of whatever political stripe, were all driven by an overriding aim of maintaining an older imperial racial order. While some aspects of her arguments here are convincing, I think that for all three the changes of governments were sometimes more important than she describes. This certainly was the case for Rhodesia. For instance, the elevation of Ian Smith to the premiership, UDI, and later the declaration of republic status, all caused and were caused by significant shifts in the politics of race that had tangible effects on migration policy. She does acknowledge this shift in Rhodesian migration politics but devalues its significance (156). At least in so far as Rhodesia is concerned, it is only at a high level of abstraction that these longitudinal changes fade into a consistent aim.

Since the migration problems identified by British policymakers were always quite different from those problems identified by the settler states of southern Africa, the commonality that horizontally adheres all three in Smith’s story is also necessarily rather abstract. For instance, unlike the other two states, Britain never formed a polyethnic migration policy designed to increase white racial numbers, a point Smith makes in the final paragraph of the book (193–4). Nor did British policymakers ever share southern African settlers’ existential fears of a white exodus, as their concerns over a brain drain were not borne from anxieties about losing white numbers per se. And while nonwhite immigration caused political and social spasms, Britain never approached a tipping-point of racial demographics. Only by zooming out can these significant differences in contexts be blurred into a common vision shared among all three states. Even so, the three-way comparison is intriguing and thought-provoking.

Without naming it, Smith does identify a sin that was unique in this story to Britain: hypocrisy. While publicly presenting itself as a racially tolerant state, Smith shows us that Britain was often secretly acting out of racist intentions in its migration policy. Policymakers were consistently concerned with the “appearance of racial discrimination” even as they acted with discriminatory intent (55). And this deception largely worked at the time and since, making Smith’s book an important corrective. Nonetheless, as pock-marked by hypocrisy as Britain might have been, the white minority regimes in southern Africa had racist political structures and policies that were of a different kind and many degrees worse than Britain’s. As desultory and unenthusiastic as Britain sometimes was in moving against these regimes, the norm-enforcing impact of its anti-racist rhetoric and its efforts to politically isolate these regimes were still influential factors in eventually winning the global war of ideas over apartheid and minority white rule. This can be seen as a tribute paid to virtue by vice, but then, as now, virtue needed every penny.