We're Here Because You Were There

Immigration and the End of Empire

Ian Sanjay Patel

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781839767999
• eBook ISBN: 9781788737685
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

What are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today.

In a series of post-war immigration laws from 1948 to 1971, arrivals from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa to Britain went from being citizens to being renamed immigrants. In the late 1960s, British officials drew upon an imperial vision of the world to contain what it saw as a vast immigration 'crisis' involving British citizens, passing legislation to block their entry. As a result, British citizenship itself was redefined along racial lines, fatally compromising the Commonwealth and exposing the limits of Britain's influence in world politics. Combining voices of so-called immigrants trying to make a home in Britain and the politicians, diplomats and commentators who were rethinking the nation, Ian Sanjay Patel excavates the reasons why Britain failed to create a post-imperial national identity.

Chosen as a BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 2021 and shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022

PART I. We’re Here

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Immigration and Empire

1

Immigration and the White Man’s World

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The docking of the Empire Windrush, the passenger ship that surprised British officials by carrying at least 500 people from Jamaica to Britain in June 1948, should be resisted as a moment of origin. It is increasingly accepted by British institutions that Asian and African peoples have long had a presence in Britain, centuries before the famous Windrush docked at the port of Tilbury on England’s eastern shoreline. If the arrival of the Windrush belonged to a new phase in British policymaking on immigration, its moment of arrival does not stand out in the wider history of migration to Britain.

To take one example from a longer history, an infant born in 1614 in the Bay of Bengal was brought to Britain by a chaplain attached to the East India Company. On 22 December 1616, this infant became the first recorded Indian to be baptised in Britain – at St Dionis Backchurch in the City of London – and was given the Christian name Peter. Little is known about his subsequent life, but it was intended that Peter would be instructed in Christianity and later repatriated to India to serve as a Christian missionary there.

Other parish registers provide tantalising clues of South Asian lives in Britain: ‘26 May 1769. Flora an East Indian (buried at Woolwich)’; and: ‘5 October 1730. John Mummud a Larskar Indian died at Ratclif (St Anne’s Limehouse)’.¹ There is evidence that a very small number of black people were living in England in the sixteenth century. These included a man named ‘Anthonye’, mentioned in a will made out in 1570 in Barnstaple, Devon. Around the year 1598, the parish register of All Hallows (near Billingsgate, London) records two black women, Clare and Maria, among its residents.²

Despite the Naturalization Act of 1870, which gave the Home Secretary discretionary powers over immigration in the name of the ‘public good’, there was no statutory framework barring aliens from entering Britain until the twentieth century. The first piece of British legislation on immigration was the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to curb the impact of huge numbers of east European, mostly Jewish, migrants moving westwards from central and eastern Europe. Up to 150,000 of these east European Jewish migrants had entered Britain by 1914, settling largely in London’s East End, with smaller communities in Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham; they found work in shoe-, cabinet-and cigar-making, tailoring, market trading, and peddling (itinerant petty trading).³

But the origins of Britain’s twentieth-century immigration laws were forged not in Britain itself, but thousands of miles away in the British empire. These first immigration laws appeared just before the advent of the contemporary passport regime, when states seized control of the legitimate means of movement, regulating the flow of people across borders as never before. The age of empires saw more freedom of movement than today’s rigidly bordered world of nation-states. Forced migration also abounded. The nineteenth century is thought to have been the most intensive migratory phase in world history, with some 50 million Europeans, 50 million Chinese and 30 million Indians migrating globally over long distances.⁴ Destinations for these migrants included the Americas, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Australasia and the Pacific nations. Huge numbers of people from Russia also migrated to Manchuria.

The pre-1900 British imperial world was implicated in this great age of migration, itself a part of the history of modern globalisation. The migration flows in this period – stretching into the first decades of the twentieth century – included white Britons leaving British shores (including white settlers) and colonised peoples moving, or being moved, between different imperial destinations (indentured labourers or those working in imperial trade, administration or military service).⁵ Migration was broadly fuelled by difficult circumstances at home (in imperial China and colonial India as much as in Europe) and the promise of opportunities abroad (in the pursuit of commodities such as gold). After the abolition of slavery, first in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) in 1793, and during the 1830s in Britain, and its subsequent decline in French, Dutch and Spanish colonies, the European colonies experienced labour shortages.

One type of migration within the British empire involved a system of indentured labour – a contract-labour model that originated in Europe and the Americas. It had begun in earnest after the British parliament revoked slavery in 1833, causing colonial planters to look to India for replacement labour. Put simply, indentured labour involved moving colonial labourers from one part of the empire to another in order to sustain plantation economies (mostly sugar) and infrastructural demands (such as the building of the imperial railway in British East Africa, running from Mombasa to Lake Victoria). Indentured labourers within the British imperial world migrated to locations including British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Mauritius, Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, East Africa, Natal and Fiji.⁶ Thousands of Indians were also moved to Dutch and French colonies, principally Surinam and the island of Réunion.

One historian has calculated that throughout the nineteenth century almost 750,000 Chinese and 1.5 million Indians were formally indentured to European employers for use in their colonies.⁷ Many Indian women migrated under the system of indenture, some accompanying their husbands and others impelled by social and economic circumstances, particularly to parts of the Caribbean, Fiji, Natal and Mauritius. A 1901 census of the British empire – capturing the movements of colonised people in Africa, the Pacific and India – recorded that some 1,467,275 people born in British territories overseas had now migrated to other parts of the empire.⁸

If you include additional forms of technically non-indentured labour, labourers from India alone moved to work in various plantation economies (not only sugar but also tea, coffee, rice and rubber) in their tens – and sometimes hundreds – of thousands. In addition to the so-called sugar colonies like Trinidad and Mauritius, there were rubber plantations in Southeast Asia and rice fields in Burma, while in Ceylon rice, tea and coffee were cultivated.⁹ The overwhelming majority of indentured labourers in the age of empires were from India, but they included smaller numbers of Pacific Islanders, Javanese, Japanese, Europeans, Africans and Chinese. The horizons of indenture were vast, and saw Chinese labourers being moved to Peru, Cuba and Hawaii and Pacific Islanders being moved to Queensland.¹⁰

As a system that worked in parallel with the history of slavery (one historian went so far as to call it a ‘new system of slavery’), indentured labour has an important place in the history of immigration and race. In many cases, an indentured or contracted labourer on a long-term (usually five-year) agreement for work on a plantation was referred to as a ‘coolie’ – a term probably adapted from the Telugu word kuli, meaning ‘wages’. By the late nineteenth century, ‘coolie’ was used pejoratively by Europeans to refer collectively to Asian (Indian and Chinese) labourers. Ironically, the European agent who met the incoming ‘coolies’ at their imperial destination was termed a ‘protector of immigrants’.¹¹

There also emerged in this period a pattern of white British emigration – the creation of an Anglo-world of sorts – that had important consequences for the pre-1945 British empire and for Britain’s post-war identity and policies on immigration. The extent of this emigration, fitfully encouraged and endorsed by British governments, was vast. Some 20 million people left British shores between 1815 and 1914, mostly to the United States, but also to Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa.¹² After the 1880s, fewer white Britons left for the United States, choosing instead to migrate to British white-settler colonies.¹³ These out-flows extended in equal proportions during the 1920s, when just over 1.8 million Britons chose to migrate. Between 1925 and 1929, some 576,146 emigrants left for ‘empire destinations’ – 35.3 per cent of this total leaving for Canada, and 28.8 per cent for Australia and New Zealand.¹⁴

The empire-wide census in 1901 recorded that 2,786,650 ‘Natives of the United Kingdom’ were now living overseas in other parts of the British empire.¹⁵ White British people migrated to the so-called ‘colonies of white settlement’ in today’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as to Southern Rhodesia and East Africa. Others in colonial service who had been born in Britain were resident for long periods in places like Gambia, Sierra Leone, Hong Kong, Malta, and of course India.

The British White-Settler World

The significant migration of people from Britain to various white-settler colonies reveals their nascent importance. In developments that at first glance may seem peripheral to British constitutional history, a crucial distinction within the British empire emerged in this period. The British empire was now formed of a constitutional amalgam of crown colonies, protectorates and white-settler colonies, plus India.

Despite their respective indigenous communities, British white-settler colonies (in today’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) were often championed as ‘other Englands’ – as the Oxford historian J. A. Froude rather longingly called them.¹⁶ A number of permanent white settlements gained from London a grant of ‘responsible government’ – effectively full self-government over their internal affairs, with Britain retaining control of their foreign policy – in the nineteenth century and beyond. These included Ontario (1839), Quebec (1839), Nova Scotia (1848), New Brunswick (1848), Prince Edward Island (1851), Victoria (1855), New South Wales (1855), Tasmania (1855), South Australia (1855), New Zealand (1856), Queensland (1859), Manitoba (1870), British Columbia (1871), Cape Colony (1872), West Australia (1890), Natal (1893), Saskatchewan (1905), Alberta (1905), the Transvaal (1906), Orange River Colony (1907), Newfoundland (1907) and Southern Rhodesia (1923). These self-governing white-settler colonies would go through a process of federation. The five Canadian provinces merged to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867 (others joined later); a similar federation occurred to produce the Commonwealth of Australia in 1900, the Dominion of New Zealand in 1907, and the Union of South Africa in 1909.¹⁷

It is in the legislative histories of these white-settler colonies that immigration as we know it today was born. The settler colonies tended to have an ‘urgent want of labourers’, as one early settler-colonial politician put it.¹⁸ Needs in agriculture, mining and infrastructure in the fledgling countries could be met, in particular, by the labour of ‘Asiatics’ (a catch-all term for Japanese, Chinese and Indians). Yet, at the same time, white racial exclusivity in these settler colonies helped forge the first immigration laws. What might be seen as the very first modern immigration law was passed in the colony of Victoria, in today’s southern Australia.

Gold had been discovered along the banks of the Bendigo Creek in the heart of the colony of Victoria. An 1853 census of the colony recorded 2,000 resident Chinese. Two years later, these goldfields had attracted a further 8,000 Chinese hoping to improve their circumstances; in March 1855 alone, four ships brought an additional 1,400 Chinese. The small group of Europeans in Victoria felt themselves to be overrun. In June 1855, Victoria’s colonial government passed ‘An Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants’. The Act defined an immigrant as ‘any male adult native of China or its dependencies or of any islands in the Chinese seas or any person born of Chinese parents’. It also declared that a ship arriving in a port of Victoria could only bring one Chinese person for every ten tons of the ship’s overall cargo. Moreover, the captain of a ship containing any immigrants would have to pay an entrance tax of £10. In the event, the law proved useless; ships began to dock instead further west, at Guichen Bay, and make their way to the goldfields overland. By mid 1857, there were between 30,000 and 40,000 Chinese migrants in the colony of Victoria.¹⁹

Similar acts restricting immigration ensued in the following years. Thousands of miles away, in British Columbia, the colony was inundated with people seeking gold amid the Caribou Mountains. British Columbia passed its own Chinese Regulation Act in 1884. As the Vancouver branch of the Dominion Trades and Labour Congress wrote to its colleagues a few years later, ‘Chinese immigration is still the burning question of the day; and the more we see of them the more we are convinced of the great curse they are to this country. Incapable of improvement, they are nothing better than the filthy harbingers of disease. Morality, they have none.’²⁰

The 1880s saw new immigration-restriction acts in Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, New Zealand and California. These Anglophone immigration laws were highly synchronised, often repeating phrasing verbatim. Race-based discrimination was not the only kind of discrimination at stake in these immigration laws; their criteria for entry also set in place medical, political, financial and moral thresholds.²¹ Non-white immigrants were styled as an economic threat to standards of living, just as their perceived unfair business practices were a threat to commercial life.

The protection of Anglo-Saxon integrity in many of these colonies was a paramount motivation of the new immigration laws. As the settler-colonial politician Henry Parkes, born in Birmingham, England, declared to his white audience in Melbourne in 1890: ‘The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all. Even the native-born Australians are Britons, as much as the men born within the cities of London and Glasgow … we know that we represent a race for the purposes of settling new colonies, which never had its equal on the face of the earth.’²²

Immigration was further discussed among representatives of Australia’s various colonies at a conference at Sydney. In 1896, the colony of New South Wales passed a more expansive piece of legislation, the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Act, designed to inhibit entry to ‘[a]ll persons belonging to any coloured race inhabiting the Continent of Asia or the Continent of Africa, or any island adjacent thereto, or any island in the Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean’.²³ The colonies of South Australia and Tasmania passed similar legislation. This expanded type of immigration legislation was significant because it implicated British subjects who were ‘coloured’. Brushing over the question of the rights of British subjects, the Sydney Daily Telegraph declared that the expanded immigration law was simply designed to free Australia from ‘coloured aliens’. ‘If we want a homogenous Australia’, it declared, ‘we must have a white Australia … It is not much use … to shut out Chinamen, and leave the door open to millions of Hindoos, Arabs, Burmese, Angolese, and other coloured races which swarm in British Asia....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: We’re Here: Immigration and Empire
• Part II: You Were There: International Voices
• Part III: Here and There: South Asian Migration at the End of Empire
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index