Laurence Brown (ANU): Imperial Brexit: The Global Politics of Border-Making at the End of the British Empire

This paper explores how the global relationships between the British State and its former colonies in the Caribbean, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific were transformed during the 1950s and 1960s through overlapping negotiations on decolonisation and migration control. While migration policy has largely been seen in national histories as constructed within the domestic politics of the nation-state, increasing research is exploring how states engaged with global networks, relationships, and diplomacy to shape migrant flows (Gabaccia 2012). Drawing on state archives from the Caribbean, Britain, and Australia, this research emphasises the multi-polar nature of border-making through exploring a series of inter-government delegations that were deployed by British authorities and post-colonial states to mobilise support or opposition to migration-control projects. Culminating with the 1965 Mission of Inquiry to Commonwealth Countries on Immigration led by Lord Mountbatten, these diplomatic efforts were shaped by the limits of border-making projects, debates over imperial ‘soft power’, and the transition from old colonial relationships to new international engagements with the United States and Europe. Revisiting the migration diplomacy of the1960s is particularly timely given the current Brexit crisis as it provides a long-term vision of the international transaction costs of border-making that is rarely visible in the current debates.

Laurence Brown is Director of the Australian National Internships Program (ANIP) at ANU. He has taught migration history at the University of the West Indies, the American University of Paris and the University of Manchester. In Manchester, he was co-Director of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre and a member of the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). Laurence has published on Caribbean migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the construction of racial statistics in Britain and the global history of indentured migration. He edited the CoDE Dynamics of Diversity policy briefing series on the UK's changing ethnic demography published at http://www.ethnicity.ac.uk/.

 

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Date & time

Wed 09 Oct 2019, 4.15–5.30pm

Location

McDonald Room, Menzies Library

Speakers

Laurence Brown (ANU)

School/Centre

School of History

Contacts

School of History

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