Exploring the historical antecedents to present day nationality and immigration restrictions in the UK, Sara Cosemans brings together burgeoning neoliberal ideology and nostalgia for empire in the 1960s and 1970s to explain how race and…
This is the first piece in a series titled Moving People. In exploring how people on the move are labelled, remembered, and constrained, it offers new understandings of the experiences (and inconsistencies) underpinning issues of…
What does rap tell us of social change and conflict in the French Republic? Paroma Ghose explores how its themes reveal a socio-political conversation with the state.
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
In the latest from our series on "Radical History after Brexit", Peter Leary asks how we can think beyond borders in an age of both globalisation and national retrenchment.
In the first of a series on 'Radical History after Brexit', John Gallagher highlights how monolingualism is historically strange, and calls for a greater focus on multilingualism and language learning.
The oldest surviving book owned by English speakers was a book made in North Africa. Alison Hudson traces how these radical fragments reveal that immigrants and cultural exchange have always been fundamental to British economies, culture,…
Tensions about the rights of native and foreign-born workers in Britain, and attempts to deal with them, are not new but have been the subject of public debate for centuries. Even during the later Middle Ages, the influx of alien workers…
While drawing direct parallels to the modern day might be misleading, present-day Germany’s migration debates shares strong underlying themes with the fall of East Germany. The impact of push and pull factors, as well as the role that…
Citizenship 'stripping' laws have expanded the idea of a failed citizen, a boundary shaped by racialised and Islamophobic 'moral panic'. May Robson examines what it means to be an illegal immigrant in Britain.
The current Canadian federal election campaign has given rise to heated debates over veiling and anti-Muslim attitudes. We asked a group of Canadian graduate students and their professors at the University of Victoria in British Columbia to…
As the centenary approaches of the outbreak of the First World War, Simon Buck of Eastside Community Heritage invites support for a local initiative in London's East End to remember the treatment meted out to the tens of thousands of German…
John Rennie writes about the East London History website, whose brief is to cover the history of the East End of London, from when the Romans arrived to the present day
The 1911 Sidney Street siege in London marked a particular juncture in the history of British immigration, tying together Victorian concerns about the urban environment, along with modern fears surrounding immigration and the supposed…
