Ethnic and Racial Studies: an outline history of forty years of publishing the research agenda on ethnic and racial issues
Christopher T. Husbands
ABSTRACT
Ethnic and Racial Studies (ERS) began publishing in 1978. Over the following forty years it developed in terms of its editorial arrangements, its format, the types of contribution published, the characteristics of its author contributors, the characteristics and methodologies of its articles, the topics that they described, and the countries whose circumstances they covered. The article describes these developments, mostly analysed by quinquennia; one issue of particular salience has been the increased feminization of the Editorial Board and of the corpus of authors. The article also discusses how book reviewing has been an important part of the journal’s history, leading to the establishment in 2014 of ERS Review.
When in January 1978 the first issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies [hereinafter ERS] was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, it did not quite hit the newsstands with any éclat, but it did provide the first major academic journal in the UK that was devoted from an international and cross-national perspective specifically to the issues described in its title. True, there were already two journals covering the same general subject matter. New Community, the journal of the then-existing Commission for Racial Equality (formerly of the Community Relations Commission) had existed since 1971, but this was devoted far more to domestic issues and had largely UK contributors. Race and Class (formerly Race as founded in 1959) was produced from 1974 by the Institute of Race Relations but, since the earlier change of character of this organization, this had an explicitly Marxist emphasis (Mullard 1985). January 1978 was certainly a sensitive time in the UK in terms of the intended themes of the journal: the National Front, though by then well past its prime, was still capable of having an effect on domestic politics. The arrival of displaced Kenyan Asians in 1976, after the arrival of Ugandan Asians in 1972 and 1973, had certainly heightened inter-ethnic tensions, aggravated by Margaret Thatcher’s now infamous “swamping” metaphor, delivered in a television interview that was given, coincidentally, in January 1978.
Over the course of the full forty years ERS published 262 individual issues, including in this number also the eleven ERS Reviews since April 2014 and counting as two issues the two bound into one hard-copy volume since 2016. From 1978 to 1997 there were four issues per year, from 1998 to 2007 six per year, then eight in 2008, nine in 2009, ten in 2010, twelve from 2011 to 2013, fourteen in 2014, and fifteen from 2015 to 2017. The ability to sustain this momentum must reflect both the centrality of the journal in its field and its ability to attract authors, but also the growth of academic interest in the topics that it covers.
For the record, 1,815 standard articles were published in the forty years from 1978 to 2017, to which should be added forty-eight introductions to Special Issues/Sections and one introduction to a Themed Issue that were of a length and content sufficient for their qualification as articles.1 Also published were twenty-one research notes and twenty-one research reports, though in both cases almost wholly before 1998. Including the eleven issues of the ERS Review published since 2014, there have to date been 3,048 book reviews and eighty review articles, reviewing between them 3,406 individual books. There have also been twenty-five published discussion or debate articles.
ERS’s life had begun with John Stone, then of St Anthony’s College Oxford, as its Chief Editor, Norman Fainstein of the Department of Urban Affairs and Policy Analysis of the New School for Social Research in New York City as its American Editor, and Henri Giordan of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris as its French Editor. By the second issue the editors were listed as equals and the journal had acquired an additional American editor, Susan Fainstein of the Department of Urban Planning at Livingston College, Rutgers University in New Jersey, and also a board of so-called editorial advisors of thirty-one persons. This board was disproportionately American with fifteen members from the USA, and there were nine from the UK, three from France, and one each from Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, and South Africa. There was just one woman among the thirty-one; by 1981 a further member was added – another man.2
The first issue’s editorial statement said that the journal’s purpose would be to discuss “the relationship between ethnic and ‘racial’ groups in Western, Communist and Third World societies”. It was to be an international forum and the editorial invited c...
