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…
Why, since Brexit, have working class people in Britain come to be thought of as not just white but also male? Laura Schwartz suggests to understand this, we must look at history.
The NHS has long relied on immigrant personnel, and restrictions to migration have an impact on its staffing. In the third piece for the Moving People feature, Anna Caceres writes about the fallacy of the 'good' migrant narrative.
Following the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's apology for the non-commemoration of Black and Asian soldiers in the First World War, John Siblon explores how and why their memory was deliberately hidden by Britain.
How should historians respond to acts of violence in the official archive? Catherine Phipps considers the life of Samia, an Algerian-French teenager, arguing that the epistemic attacks she faced highlight the urgency of historical work…
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.
Barbara Taylor review's Tessa McWatt's 'Shame On Me: an anatomy of race and belonging'. Her review considers the discovery and rediscovery of friends, and how important this process is in order to understand disparities of power and…
Analogies to the Second World War are a recurring theme in modern British history. The seeming orthodoxy in Britain in 2020 is that the nation is at war, on a scale not known since the Second World War. The enemy, this time the coronavirus,…
The last fortnight has seen many statues associated with racism and colonialism torn down. When were they originally put up, and what can that tell about the history of whiteness and empire? Peter Hill explores.
As debate about Obeah - spiritual and healing practices - erupts in Jamaica, Diana Paton argues that laws against obeah have historically worked to uphold colonial power and to harass poor people.
Alaya Swann explores connections between white supremacy and Dungeons and Dragons online communities, focusing on the perpetuation of the myth of a white medieval Europe.
Kieran Connell takes us through his personal journey on what brought him to researching Handsworth, an inner city locality in Birmingham, and what it might tell us about multiculturalism in modern Britain.
Radhika Natarajan argues that the work of decolonisation is to 'address the relationship between the forms of knowledge we value in the classroom and the inequities and violence that exist on our campuses and in the world.'
Following the ground-breaking Royal Historical Society report on Race, Ethnicity & Equality, one of the Report's co-authors, Jonathan Saha, responds to criticism and calls for change.
At a moment when pundits continue to pronounce that multiculturalism has ‘failed’ in Britain and across Europe, this symposium will explore the role and responsibilities of anti-racist scholarship.
In the second of our History Workshop World Cup series, Charlotte Lydia Riley explores England football fans' relationship to national identity, white masculinity, and post-imperial melancholia.
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.
