Britain spent decades trying to prevent its own citizens – of colour – from entering the country. And its efforts were the direct fallout o...
Britain spent decades trying to prevent its own citizens – of colour – from entering the country. And its efforts were the direct fallout of spectacularly misguided policies instituted midway through the 20th century that sought to preserve Britain’s imperial ambitions and its place in the world, even as dozens of countries were throwing off the colonial yoke.
Ian Sanjay Patel’s new book, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire, tells the story of the United Kingdom’s struggle to situate itself after World War II, and how its attempts to insist that the Commonwealth was simply the latest iteration of the British Empire led directly to the discriminatory policies and immigration debates of the 1960s and 1970s.
Along the way, Patel, an LSE Fellow in Human Rights in the Department of Sociology at London School of Economics and Political Science, reminds us that the British Empire and imperial thinking lasted much longer than is generally understood, somewhat encapsulated in the treatment of Indian-origin people in British East African colonies.
I spoke to Patel over e-mail about his insightful new book, how India’s relations with the UK played out against this backdrop, and why remembering the treatment of non-white British citizens...
