Postwar pioneers of modern mobility: the 1940s to the 1960s

Abstract

This chapter examines features of the first generation of postwar British emigrants which foreshadowed the later rise of modern global mobility. The drive of Anglophone immigrant countries to attract skilled employees, coinciding with the spread of higher education and social mobility in Britain, opened the way for aspiring migrants to use migration as a means to social advancement and entrepreneurship. Continuing global mobility, once the preserve of elites, was becoming democratised, and young travellers seized on the facilities to pioneer new forms of serial migration. At the same time the shadow of the British Empire continued to exert its influence on potential migrants with backgrounds in the military and imperial administration. Some faced the threat of downward social mobility, but, comfortable with global transience, turned to continuing migration as a means of comfortable survival. ‘Nomad daughters of the Empire’ describes women’s adaptation to new forms of mobility, and ‘the empire of the imagination’ explores ways in which the power of the ‘colonial dividend’ worked to stimulate thoughts of ‘wanderlust’ and serial migration, setting powerful precedents for the next generation of mobile Britons.