Review of 'Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain'

Reviewed by: Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain by Jordana Bailkin Lucy Mayblin Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain By Jordana Bailkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Contemporary studies of migration have increasingly been criticised for their lack of attention to history. Equally, in the British public sphere, there has tended to be a highly selective orientation to history, with only those which paint the country in a favourable light being popularly remembered. Unsettled contributes both to the scholarly agenda of re-historicising our understandings of migration histories, in this case the vast historical architecture of refugee encampment across the British Isles, and has the potential to also shift popular imaginaries of encampments past and present. As Bailkin explains: "This book is about camps in Britain, but also about their erasure from public memory. This amnesia is selective" (12). In this way, through putting refugees at the centre of the national narrative, this fabulous work of painstakingly detailed archival research is also deeply, though quietly, political. Empirically, Bailkin has drawn on a range of sources including documents from the (British) National Archives, the archives of camps in East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Surrey, a range of oral histories (including from the British Library's Sound Archive, the North West Sound Archive in Lancashire, and the BBC Asian Network's Millennium Memory Bank Interviews), as well as her own interviews with people who lived or worked in refugee camps. Memoirs, photographs and poems are also woven through the book to add "fuller expression to refugees themselves" (13). While Bailkin does discuss the early life of British camps, starting from concentration camps in South Africa, and the troubled categories of the encamped, such as the blurred line between British citizen, subject and refugee, the focus of the book is on camps in the British Isles. This is sensible considering the vast scale of encampment within Britain; Bailkin identifies 96 camps across England, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man. This impressive body of data would be hard for anyone to discipline into a singular narrative for the purposes of a book, and one of the joys of this text is that it sits with the inevitable complexity and only loosely disciplines it for the purposes of discussion. What are presented, then are a complex set of stories which often unsettle what we thought we knew about refugee camps in the past. Structuring chapters thematically into "Making Camp" (everything you ever needed to know about Nissen huts in one place), "Feeding and Hungering" (on the vital role—symbolic, cultural, religious, nutritional—of food and eating in camps), "In Need" (on refugee care and the kinds of subjects produced by it), "Happy Families?" (on the definition of a family and how encamped families related to contemporaneous ideas about families), "Mixing Up" (on how the encamped interacted with and were responded to by local communities) and "Hard Core" (on those refugees that were deemed difficult to settle after encampment) offers just enough of a scaffold around which to organise this vast body of historical data. The title Unsettled, then, is multi layered in that it refers to more than the unsettling of peoples across borders. Many aspects of the book unsettle easy narratives which seek to simplify experiences of encampment. For example, the camps that Bailkin discusses housed both British nationals and refugees, often mixed together. Many "refugees" were, furthermore, British subjects—citizens of the British Empire. The idea that camps represent the division of citizens and non-citizens therefore does not stand up to historical inspection, even if it is the case today. Bailkin writes "at different moments, camps could signal either the unity of citizens and refugees or their segregation" (1), and rather than taking citizen/non-citizen as her key distinction, it is the settled/unsettled distinction that she focusses her analysis upon. While Bailkin is a historian, and therefore less concerned than a social scientist might be with theorising and generalising from the historical materials that she has found through her research, she explains that "'unsettled' became a way to make sense of—and bring together—the variety of people whose mobility was perceived...

Today, no one thinks of Britain as a land of camps. Instead, camps seem to happen “elsewhere,” from Greece to Palestine to the global South. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of British refugee camps housed hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. “Refugee camps” in Britain were never only for refugees. Refugees shared space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty, as well as thousands of civil servants and a fractious mix of volunteers. Unsettled explores how these camps have shaped today’s multicultural Britain. They generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate—“citizens” and “migrants,” but also refugee populations from diverse countries and conflicts. As the world’s refugee crisis once again brings to Europe the challenges of mass encampment, Unsettled offers warnings from a liberal democracy’s recent past. Through anecdotes from interviews with former camp residents and workers and archival research, Unsettled conveys the vivid, everyday history of refugee camps, which witnessed births and deaths, love affairs and violent conflicts, strikes and protests, comedy and tragedy. Their story—like that of today’s refugee crisis—is one of complicated intentions that played out in unpredictable ways. This book speaks to all who are interested in the plight of the encamped, and the global uses of encampment in our present world.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz, called the twentieth century “the century of the refugee.” In Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, Jordanna Bailkin demonstrates that in Britain it was the century of the refugee camp. These camps are at the center of her fine study, which sets them in the wider context of the history of encampment and its colonial origins and traces their history from the Belgian refugee camps of the First World War through to the camps for Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. The voices of refugees thread their way through the book, speaking from the camps or speaking about them after moving on. Sometimes, as these voices testify, moving on—at least initially—was to another camp, and some refugees never moved on. This is a thought-provoking book that raises many questions—about the role of empire in this history, the freedom of refugees, the blurring of boundaries between refuge and detention and between migrants, citizens, and refugees at different moments, and who counted—or counted themselves—as a refugee. It challenges the pervasive forgettings of refugee camps in Britain and the tendency to remember only those aspects of this history that reflect well on the British. Organized thematically, it covers the physical structure of camps and their widespread locations, the organization of mass feeding, the impact camps had on people’s ethnic, religious, and gender identities and on their family life, refugees’ activism—from petitions through refusal to accept the label “refugee” to violence—and the mixing of people of different religions, ethnicities, and social class.

"Unsettled: refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain." Contemporary British History, 33(3), pp. 454–455

Review of 'Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain'

Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. By Jordanna Bailkin

Jordanna Bailkin<i>, Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain</i>

Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. By Jordanna Bailkin

Unsettled: refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain