Unsettled: refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain

Why do many of the books on punk rock and hardcore punk come with punk attitude? Why are a good number of the books written from a personal perspective? What kind of value do the diary entries of Nils Stevenson in 'Vacant: A Diary of the Punk Years 1976-79' have compared to an article on the rhetoric of class by David Simonelli in the journal 'Contemporary British History'? In some respects scholarly writing on punk rock seems like a contradiction. How can music so rooted in anti-establishment sentiment be appropriated into an institutional setting? The auto-ethnographic approach found in many of the studies of punk might be an answer to this question. The writers have used their own experiences as musicians and fans to reflect on and analyse the music and scenes which arguably provides the reader with a more immediate insight. This paper argues for an auto-ethnographic approach to the writing of punk and hardcore punk and suggests that this style of writing about music offers the reader an ‘authentic’ insight into these particular music scenes.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Battle of the Consumer in Postwar Britain*Peter GurneyPeter GurneyUniversity of Essex Search for more articles by this author University of EssexPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 77, Number 4December 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/499831 Views: 631Total views on this site Citations: 17Citations are reported from Crossref ©2005 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sean Kippin The Co-operative Party and New Labour: a study of policy entrepreneur influence, British Politics 32 (Oct 2021).https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-021-00196-2Shoshanna Griver, Itay Fischhendler The Social Construction of Food Security: The Israeli Case, Food Security 79 (Apr 2021).https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-021-01169-5Peter Gurney Voice of Civilisation : advertising and its critics in austerity Britain, Contemporary British History 32, no.22 (Dec 2017): 190–208.https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2017.1410436D. C. H. Watts Building an alternative economic network? Consumer cooperation in Scotland from the 1870s to the 1960s†, The Economic History Review 70, no.11 (Jun 2016): 143–170.https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12340Matthew Kerry Representations of the family in postwar British amateur film: family histories in the Lane and Scrutton collection at the East Anglian Film Archive, The History of the Family 21, no.22 (May 2016): 231–242.https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2016.1163274Julia Laite Immoral Traffic: Mobility, Health, Labor, and the “Lorry Girl” in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, Journal of British Studies 52, no.33 (Jul 2013): 693–721.https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2013.118Espen Ekberg Confronting three revolutions: Western European consumer co-operatives and their divergent development, 1950–2008, Business History 54, no.66 (Oct 2012): 1004–1021.https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2012.706894Peter J. Gurney Co-operation and the ‘new consumerism’ in interwar England, Business History 54, no.66 (Oct 2012): 905–924.https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2012.706896Anthony Webster, John K. Walton Introduction, Business History 54, no.66 (Oct 2012): 825–832.https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2012.706897Mary Hilson A Consumers’ International? The International Cooperative Alliance and Cooperative Internationalism, 1918–1939: A Nordic Perspective, International Review of Social History 56, no.22 (May 2011): 203–233.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859011000150Sean Nixon ‘Salesmen of the Will to Want’: Advertising and its Critics in Britain 1951–1967, Contemporary British History 24, no.22 (Jun 2010): 213–233.https://doi.org/10.1080/13619461003768306Lawrence Black ‘Consumers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your illusions’: The Politics of the Consumers’ Association, (Jan 2010): 14–45.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250475_2Lawrence Black Shopfloor Politics: Co-operative Culture and Affluence, (Jan 2010): 46–74.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250475_3Peter Gurney, Catherine Laurent Une remise en question de l’« opulence » : le mouvement coopératif britannique après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Revue internationale de l'économie sociale: Recma , no.318318 (Jan 2010): 71.https://doi.org/10.7202/1020852arSean Nixon Apostles of Americanization? J. Walter Thompson Company Ltd, Advertising and Anglo-American Relations 1945–67, Contemporary British History 22, no.44 (Dec 2008): 477–499.https://doi.org/10.1080/13619460802439374DAVID PRATT, P. R. SCHOFIELD, HENRY FRENCH, PETER KIRBY, MARK FREEMAN, JULIAN GREAVES, HUGH PEMBERTON Review of periodical literature published in 2005, The Economic History Review 60, no.11 (Feb 2007): 136–189.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2007.00382.xFrank Trentmann Coping with Shortage: The Problem of Food Security and Global Visions of Coordination, c.1890s–1950, (Jan 2006): 13–48.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597495_2

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...

The internet is now a useful research tool for historians of contemporary Britain. This article reviews on-line resources that can aid in planning research and in conducting research on-line in post-1945 British history. It offers resources that will be helpful to scholars, and emphasises especially on-line information for Americans and other foreign scholars travelling to Britain. It concludes with speculation about the likely future usefulness of the commercialised internet in this field of history.

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.

Reassessing 1970s Britain was edited by Lawrence Black (professor of modern British history, University of York); Hugh Pemberton (reader in contemporary British history, University of Bristol); and...

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