Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain by Jordana Bailkin

English Landscapes

The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens (BNSA) Act stated that “the wife of a British subject shall be deemed to be a British subject, and the wife of an alien shall be deemed to be an alien.” By this reenactment of an 1870 law, a British woman who married an alien became an alien herself, losing the rights and privileges accorded to British nationality. During the 1920s and 1930s, British feminists from around the Empire worked to change this regulation, but only in 1948 were women in the United Kingdom granted the right to their own nationality regardless of their marital status. The House of Commons largely supported the feminists' efforts to reform the laws so that women would not automatically lose their nationality on marriage. Members of Parliament introduced several bills to equalize the nationality laws that were read without division. The Government, however, consistently blocked the bills, citing the imperial nature of the nationality laws and Dominion disagreement with the change. This contest over nationality has been a neglected topic in the study of twentieth-century British history. Legal historians have, by and large, only described changes in the laws regarding married women's national status. While some historians of the women's movement in the British Isles have noted the equal nationality campaign, most have not realized how it can contribute to our understanding of interwar Britain and British feminism. Pat Thane, however, has seen in this topic an example of the way the Empire has influenced British culture.

Current studies of British citizenship and nationality neglect the development of legal frameworks prior to the Second World War. A growing body of literature, invigorated by the 2017 Windrush scandal, charts the collapse of imperial citizenship as a dimension of British decolonisation from the 1960s onwards. In contrast, this article analyses how the British empire’s framework of national belonging became strained during the early 1920s, as Dominion leaders increasingly asserted their own sense of statehood and the League of Nations mandates system introduced new forms of imperial rule. The article considers General Jan Smuts’ decision to afford British naturalisation to 7,000 German colonists residing in the mandate of South-West Africa. League officials argued that Smuts’ scheme undermined the anti-annexationist ‘spirit’ of the Covenant, because mass naturalisation represented a practical declaration of South African sovereignty in the mandate. Meanwhile, British mandarins in the Home, Colonial, and Foreign Offices believed Smuts’ policy would destabilise the empire’s constitutional distinctions between territorial zones of formal and informal imperial governance. They also feared it would inspire subaltern inhabitants of other British-protected foreign spaces, especially mandatory Palestine and the Indian princely states, to similarly demand naturalisation in order to claim stronger legal rights for themselves as British subjects. Ultimately, Smuts leveraged his political stature to secure British and League consent for his plan. To maintain a façade of constitutional coherence and metropolitan control, Whitehall mandarins recast Smuts’ naturalisation scheme as an imperial anomaly. Non-European inhabitants of the British mandates, and the wider informal empire, were granted the uncodified, indeterminate status of ‘British Protected Persons’ (BPPs). Recent scholarship has recognised BPP status as a form of de facto statelessness. Inter-war policymakers in the Home and Colonial Offices drew similar parallels, this article shows.

This chapter discusses the British Nationality (General) Regulations 2003, which came into force on 1 April 2003. Any application for registration as a British citizen, British Overseas citizen or British subject, or for a certificate of naturalisation as a British citizen shall be made to the appropriate authority specified in regulation 4. For persons not of full age or capacity, an application may be made by their father or mother or any person who has assumed responsibility for their welfare. Subject to regulation 7B, where an individual makes an application for registration or naturalisation as a British citizen, an authorised person may require the individual to provide biometric information. The chapter then looks at the process for renunciation of British citizenship, British Overseas citizenship, or the status of a British subject.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.-J. C. Beaglehole, of the Victoria University of Wellington, was until his death in 1970 the doyen of New Zealand historians and-together with J. W. Davidson of the Australian National University, who died in 1973-a leader in developing historical consciousness and historiography in the South Pacific world area. His editions of the journals of Captain Cook and his Life of Captain James Cook (published in 1974 by Stanford University Press) are not only masterpieces of scholarship and insight into the eighteenth century but unrivaled in their penetration of oceanic, as well as merely maritime, history. The New Zealand Historical Association maintains an annual lecture in his memory, and the essay which follows was originally delivered as the first Beaglehole Memorial lecture when that association met at the University of Canterbury in May 1973. It was subsequently printed in the New Zealand Journal of History (vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974) and is republished here with minor alterations by the generous permission of that journal's editors. What follows is a modified version of an essay in historical restatement, which owes much to John Beaglehole's own vision and his understanding of what vision is.

The refugee camp today has been naturalized as a product of failed international idealism and political expediency that serves as a timeless reminder of the plight of displaced peoples. This article explores the refugee camp’s origins as a product of a late Victorian imperial and military legacy and the contingencies of World War I. The use of the concentration camp as a tool to provide refuge and control displaced populations began during the war as a humanitarian measure. Part of a larger world of camps that interned civilians, prisoners of war, and refugees during World War I, the refugee camp in the Middle East existed at the crossroads of Allied military objectives and the Western-led humanitarian movement. In the wake of victory in the east, the army of occupation, aid workers, and local actors fashioned the concentration camp as a site of refuge as part of an emerging international order. American relief efforts led by Near East Relief and later the League of Nations have been well studied. Less understood is how and why Britain, due to the central role it played in combat operations and eventually in dividing up the Middle East with its French ally, guided and shaped norms and conditions for dealing with displaced peoples. Ultimately, the experience of total war shaped Allied war strategy regarding civilian populations during the humanitarian crisis that engulfed the east. It produced the refugee camp as an ostensibly temporary solution to what became for many a permanent problem of statelessness.

IT is now some fifteen years since Sir Alec Douglas-Home's government passed the Continental Shelf Act, bringing the sea bottom resources of the British continental shelf under government ownership and initiating the first period of exploration for offshore energy resources-a period which seems for the time being to have come to a temporary halt, or at least a slowdown compared with the high fever of the mid-1960s or early 1970s. In that fifteen years the whole pattern of British energy resources has changed out of all recognition. Town gas, coal gas, after more than a hundred years of lighting Britain's streets, heating its homes, cooking its meals, and driving its industry-and incidentally polluting its air-is, temporarily at least, a thing of the past. Natural gas from the great fields of the southern North Sea, carried by a national grid all over Britain, has replaced it. Not only that, whereas only twelve years ago the Arab oil boycott, imposed on Britain at the end of the Six Days War, could threaten petrol rationing and seriously damage the British economy, Britain is now approaching self-sufficiency in oil supplies. Each turn of the price screw by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) adds to the potential of Britain's North Sea oil province, bringing more and more of the forty or more smaller oil fields already discovered closer to profitability. In fact, Britain's oil wealth has already become a political embarassment when contrasted with the energy-deficient economies of our principal partners in Europe: France, Germany, and Italy. Voices are heard calling for a more intensive exploitation of North Sea oil resources, alleging that the present policies of the oil internationals are grossly under-representing the scope of these resources and producing an artificial scarcity. Disputes over the division of revenues embarrass government-oil company relations, while the presence of the oil itself exacerbates all kinds of particularism: Shetlands against Scottish nationalism; Scottish nationalism against British or Whitehall nationalism; British nationalism against the European Community. In the last six years developments at sea stemming from the general international framework which gave rise to the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) have extended the division of the

Crazy Rich Asians

What have I done for you, England, my England? What is there I would not do, England, my own? William Ernest Henley's poem certainly fits Anderson's dating for a surge of English nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. We may note in passing that it was still England, not Britain, that Henley hailed as ‘chosen daughter of the Lord’, but while his poem, like many others, certainly shows that English nationalism was alive and well in the 1880s, it does not at all show where it began, and that is the question which must concern us now. One can find historians to date ‘the dawn of English national consciousness’ (or some such phrase) in almost every century from the eighth to the nineteenth. If Anderson puts it in the heyday of late Victorian imperialism and Greenfeld in the early years of the Tudor monarchy, others see it as a product of Foxe's Book of Martyrs , the Hundred Years War, the reign of Stephen, the Saxon monarchy in the age of Athelstan and Edgar, or even the Venerable Bede for whom a decisive ‘role in defining English national identity and English national destiny’ has been claimed by Patrick Wormald. There is, I suspect, a fairly widespread willingness even among modernists to admit that late Elizabethan England was already becoming a genuinely national society, with tinges of nationalism strongly fed on Protestantism.

This chapter considers why English nationalism has been absent for so long, achieved by taking an historical approach to consider how English national identity has been constructed, and the role it played alongside a cosmopolitan British identity. It examines the development of an English political identity in the 1990s, and how this has shaped British politics in the decades since. It makes the case that the conflation of English and British identities contributed to the absence of English nationalism, and whilst no political party has fully embraced English nationalism yet, there is clear evidence that the Conservatives have played on English political grievances to great effect. It also examines nationalist terrorists who have committed acts of violence in England (such as David Copeland and Thomas Mair) but makes the case that they conceive of their nation as Britain rather than England. The chapter finishes with a discussion of Cornish nationalism and the limited terrorist violence that was witnessed in Cornwall. As with Scotland and Wales, it is shown that a handful of actors have gained publicity far beyond others in the national movement for carrying out low-level act of violence.

Recent scholarship has paid too little attention to English national identity in Romantic literature and culture. A key reason is no doubt the continuing influence of Linda Colley’s Britons (1992), which focuses on the period between the Acts of Union of 1707 and Queen Victoria’s Coronation in 1837. Although Colley acknowledges that ‘the Welsh, Scottish and the English remain[ed] in many ways distinct peoples in cultural terms”, she emphasises how Britishness was ‘superimposed over an array of internal differences’ (Colley 1994: 6). Similar claims are made by Krishan Kumar in The Making of English National Identity (2003), which (citing Colley) identifies ‘the rise of an overarching British identity’ during the long eighteenth century (Kumar 2003: xi). Kumar believes that it is anachronistic to refer to English nationalism during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century (178–84), and finds only a cultural (rather than political) ‘moment of Englishness’ around 1900, which was linked to decreased confidence in British imperial and industrial supremacy (176). Although he conclusively refutes Gerald Newman’s claims in The Rise of English Nationalism (1987) that a fully-fledged English nationalism had formed by the end of eighteenth century, the historical range of Kumar’s argument means that some nuance is inevitably lost.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyEnglish LiteratureRomantic PeriodLiterary CultureEnglish WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

STATISTICS on the overseas-born population of the British Isles are both meagre and inadequate, despite the need at all levels of administration for reliable and comprehensive data for policymaking in the social, economic and political fields. The most obvious deficiency, though not the most important, is the variability in the data given in the General and County Reports of the 1961 Censuses. Thus there is insufficient material to enable one to discern the spatial pattern of the overseas-born population within the administrative counties of Ireland (Fig. 12). The Census of England and Wales and the Census of Scotland, on the other hand, record the number of males and females born outside the British Isles residing in each administrative area down to the level of the Rural District in England and Wales and the County District in Scotland. Even so, the most detailed information relates only to those administrative areas of Great Britain which contain no fewer than 2000 persons born outside the British Isles (Fig. 13). There are more fundamental limitations. First, no census authority in the British Isles records information on the pigmentation and social composition of its population. Consequently it is not known, for instance, how many indigenous West Indians, Indians or Pakistanis were resident in the British Isles at the time of the 1961 Censuses. It would be incorrect to assume that the 188,172 persons then recorded as being born in India and Pakistan, but resident in England and Wales, were Indians and Pakistanis. In fact, Table 2 of the Birthplace and Nationality Tables (Census, 1961, England and Wales) reveals that no fewer than 81,748 of these persons were citizens of the United Kingdom and its Colonies 'by birth and descent'. By using such additional evidence on nationality, it would be possible to gain a more realistic picture of the spatial distribution of Indians and Pakistanis. Unfortunately, this particular evidence is available only for England and Wales together, though the aggregate of persons born in specified countries who were citizens of the United Kingdom and its Colonies (whether by 'birth or descent, by registration or marriage, by naturalization or by a mode of acquisition not stated') is given for the Standard Regions. Even if such information were available for Counties, County and Metropolitan Boroughs and other administrative areas lower down in the hierarchy, the use of nationality as a criterion for the definition of categories of persons born overseas would create formidable problems of interpreting the precise meaning of citizenship and complex constitutional relationships. For example, there were Ioo,05I Jamaican-born persons resident in England and Wales in 1961. Of these, 88,896 were classified as citizens of the United Kingdom and its Colonies, a further II,o2I failed to state their nationality on their returns, 52 were citizens of Commonwealth Countries and the Irish Republic, and only 82 were classified as aliens. In fact, there is little or no evidence in the 1961 Census to indicate how many of the immigrants were indigenous West Indians and how many were the offspring of Britishborn parents. Similarly, the composition of the immigrant population from India and Pakistan

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

ABSTRACT: This article examines how British and/or Irish nationality is currently acquired and lost, first under the law in Northern Ireland and then under the law in Ireland. It looks at some of the rights that Irish citizens currently have in the UK and that UK citizens currently have in Ireland, paying particular attention to the impact of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998 on those rights. It then considers what rights British nationals in Northern Ireland who do not wish to be Irish nationals should acquire if Northern Ireland were to become part of a united Ireland. It posits that in such a new constitutional dispensation it would be inappropriate to continue to deny to these 'British-only' citizens the rights to vote in presidential elections and in constitutional referenda and the rights to stand for election to the presidency and to either of the houses of the legislature.

The contemporary forms of English identity and nationalism have received sustained attention since the late 1990s. Much of this attention has been framed in terms of English responses to recent constitutional changes in the UK, particularly Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997. In this paper, I try to understand contemporary sentiments towards Englishness less in terms of political change, and more in terms of its relationship to class. Drawing on qualitative interviews with the ethnic majority respondents, I demonstrate the associations people make between class, inequality and exclusion and being English. In particular, I identify both a decline in social deference and an increase in contempt towards a so-called underclass in people’s talk about being English. In reflecting on this, I suggest that part of the explanation for why people are uneasy about identifying with ‘being English’ relates to an absence of an equal sense of English national membership.