Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (original) (raw)

2014, Australian Historical Studies

argue in the introduction to their edited collection Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World, the processes and histories of empire, migration and the British world are closely enjoined. The transfer of 'Britishness' beyond the British Isles was contingent on the mass migration of people from those islands, of 13.5 million British people settling across Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States between 1815 and 1930 (p. 6). Settlers and migrants maintained connections with Britain which were emotional (based both in affective personal and kinship relations and on an emotional affiliation with a British 'home'); economic (in the sense of extensive remittance networks and the generation similar systems of labour and capital to new locations); cultural (most strikingly illustrated through the dissemination of the English language) and political. But, as is apparent throughout the collection's chapters, these changes were by no means limited to the diffusion or dissemination of people or ideas but were also about creating an integrated or globalised world in which economic relationships, family networks and political practices were materially and conceptually linked, and which, as Fedorowich and Thompson put it, 'engendered new, more transnational, ways of thinking' (p. 6). The 11 chapters, arranged roughly chronologically, do testament to the exciting and emerging scholarship in this field.