Caroline Shaw's excellent new book, Britannia's Embrace, takes the all too topical story of refugee crises and care and gives it a compelling new genealogy. Charting the history of British aid to persecuted foreigners from the late seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth century (instead of the more familiar terrain of the late twentieth century), Shaw shows how refugee relief became a critical element of Britain's identity. As she notes, although other nations also provided aid to refugees, it was the British who first and most powerfully incorporated provisions for refugee relief into their national and imperial raison d'etre. For British activists and officials, making a commitment to refuge was a point of national pride, a crucial part of what it meant to be liberal on the global stage.

Shaw begins by tracing the term “refugee,” which entered the English language in the aftermath of Louis XIV's persecution of Protestants in France. At this time, offering aid to the Huguenots provided a way for English Protestants to depict their country as a bastion of the Protestant Diaspora at a moment when in fact the religious loyalties of the English state were far more insecure. Philanthropic aid to the Huguenot refugees served as a useful means of Protestant propaganda. The British category of refuge was further elaborated by offering shelter to the (Catholic) victims of the French Revolution. These new refugees transformed the category of refuge in Britain into a potentially universalist one, as the persecuted foreigners were not fellow Protestants; they were worthy of relief only because of their shared humanity.

Following this compelling “prehistory” of refuge, Shaw focuses the rest of the book primarily on the creation of new refugee narratives in the nineteenth century. As Shaw notes, the refugee was increasingly depicted as the ideal liberal subject, possessed of courage, liberal principles, and a strong sense of honor and justice. Such narratives focused on the harrowing details of the refugee's flight from his or her country of origin, and the bourgeois work ethic that would ensure the refugee's success in Britain. Shaw astutely points out that these narratives were well suited to galvanize sympathy for new arrivals. They were considerably less useful in meeting the considerable challenge of caring for refugees in the longer term. What, Shaw asks, would happen when refugees began to look more like paupers than independent freedom fighters (99)?

By the 1850s, the morality tale of British rescue of refugees and the provision of refugee relief was so “powerful and pervasive that it developed a life of its own” (2). Shaw describes this new liberal era of refuge as one that “projected an expansionist vision of Britain's power onto the international stage and made the earlier logic of refuge as a component of national defense increasingly obsolete” (43). At this point, the notion of who deserved refuge was expanded. Those who were entitled to British assistance now included the victims of foreign revolutions, but also sometimes the revolutionaries themselves—along with foreign slaves and persecuted minorities more generally. Support for refugee care was a cross-class endeavor, extended not only to the traditional Tory and Whig elites, but also to many radicals.

Throughout the book, Shaw demonstrates how aid to persecuted foreigners served as a way to support political causes when more direct forms of intervention, such as military sanctions, seemed improbable. Many British officials viewed refuge as an alternative to diplomacy. If they could not enforce liberal justice on foreign powers (as in the slave trade, for example), then they could at least succor the victims of injustice. As she notes, refuge was “a consolation prize,” an admission that oppression could not be brought to an immediate end and that there were limits to British influence on the world stage (55).

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Shaw suggests, Britons ceased depicting refugees as revolutionaries and looked increasingly for victims. In a prototype that is still very much with us today, the iconic refugee shifted from the male freedom fighter to the helpless woman, child, or aged person. Shaw also examines important legal shifts in the status of refugees and considers the mixed legacy of legal codification in 1905, which enshrined broad exemptions for foreigners in immigration law. Here Shaw offers a particularly insightful analysis of what the law on refugees did and did not achieve. Crystallizing refugees' rights in law had the unintended consequence that decisions about refugees were increasingly moved out of the public eye. As Shaw concludes, “Shifted out of the public arena into the world of bureaucrats, refuge was no longer the proud act of a morally demanding public. The moral force of refuge, which fed on public mobilization, thus faded into the background” (235).

One of the many important contributions of this exceptionally well-argued volume is Shaw's careful analysis of how refugee relief was intertwined with imperial history. As she notes, any troublesome refugees could be easily dispatched to imperial locales. When these opportunities for imperial transmigration diminished, so, too, did British sympathy for refugee aid. At the same time, the empire generated refugee crises of its own. If refugees had typically served as symbols of despotism overseas, then what happened in the case of those who were fleeing British violence?

Today, Britain is confronting a global refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale. Shaw's nuanced history is a vital reminder of the twists and turns that intervention in refugee care has taken in the past and the varied effects such intervention has had. Much has changed since the days depicted in Shaw's meticulous account, not least the legal frameworks through which refugees and migrants interact, and Shaw is rightly cautious about drawing any easy parallels between past and present. Still, all historians of refuge and refugees have much to learn from this smartly told origin story.