Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain - Hansen, Randall

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Résumé :
In this contentious and ground-breaking study, Randall Hansen draws on extensive archival research to provide a new account of the transformation of the UK into a multicultural society through an analysis of the evolution of immigration and citizenship policy since 1945. Against the prevailing academic orthodoxy, he argues that British immigration policy was not racist but both rational and liberal.
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Biographie:
Randall Hansen holds a Research Chair at the University of Toronto. He was director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies for eleven years and Research Director of the Joint Initiative on German and European Studies for fourteen years. He has had visiting fellowships at the Institute of Contemporary History, Berlin, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna, the Free University of Social Studies (LUISS), Rome, Trinity College, Dublin and the Department of History, UCLA. Before taking up his current position, he was a Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Merton College, Oxford. He is author of Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance in the Last Year of WWII and Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan....

Sommaire:
In this ground-breaking book, the author draws extensively on archival material and theortical advances in the social science literature. Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain examines the transformation since 1945 of the UK from a homogeneous into a multicultural society. Rejecting a dominant strain of sociological and historical inquiry emphasizing state racism, Hansen argues that politicians and civil servants were overall liberal relative to the public, to which they owed their office, and that they pursued policies that were rational for any liberal democratic politician. He explains the trajectory of British migration and nationality policy - its exceptional liberality in the 1950s, its restrictiveness after then, and its tortured and seemingly racist definition of citizenship. The combined effect of a 1948 imperial definition of citizenship (adopted independently of immigration), and a primary commitment to migration from the Old Dominions, locked British politicians into a series of policy choices resulting in a migration and nationality regime that was not racist in intention, but was racist in effect. In the context of a liberal elite and an illiberal public, Britain's current restrictive migration policies result not from the faling of its policy-makers but from those of its institutions....