Home, Colonial and Foreign: Europe, Empire and the History of Migration in 20th-century Britain

This essay reviews the increasingly rich recent literature on 20th-century transnational movements from empire and Europe to Britain and in the opposite directions, particularly on migration. It suggests that this work offers a way of thinking about British-empire and British-European relations – themes that have been comparatively neglected in 20th-century social and cultural history, especially in the period of decolonisation. While much of the literature on migration treats empire and Europe separately, as well as immigration and emigration, the essay makes connections between them, looking at changing British perceptions of Europe and the world beyond Europe: of home, colonial and foreign. It argues that the second half of the century saw an increasing erosion of distinctions between ‘colonial’ and ‘foreign’ and a reorientation of British world views towards Europe that owed little to its membership of the EU.