The transition to ‘Commonwealth’ was not the end of empire but its most evolved stage: Ian Sanjay Patel

The years after World War II saw a huge wave of migration from colonies and former colonies into Britain. London-based academic Ian Sanjay Patel, who specialises in historically grounded approaches to human rights, justice, and migration, says in his new book that Britain’s stance on the immigration of non-white people is one reason why it failed to carve for itself a post-imperial identity. We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire, published by Verso, draws on archival material to reveal how racial anxieties actively shaped the country’s post-war immigration policies, with Britain drawing upon an imperial vision of the world to pass legislation that blocked entry to certain immigrants, as a result defining British citizenship itself along racial lines. Excerpts from an interview:

What role does racism play in your story about post-war Britain?

It is intuitively obvious that the end of the British empire (1947-1973), post-war migration to Britain, and the question of race are all connected. In 1948, British lawmakers had granted citizenship (and rights of entry and residence in Britain) to those born in British colonies and Commonwealth states such as India.

But when these non-white people started to exercise their legal right of entry, British officials deemed that ‘too many coloured persons were settling here’, and passed immigration laws (in 1962, 1968 and 1971) to block citizenship rights stipulated in their own nationality law. My book discusses in particular the immigration legislation in 1968, which blocked over a hundred thousand Indians in Kenya with British citizenship from migrating to the U.K. amid Kenya’s Africanisation policies.

Foreign Office officials in 1967 saw the British citizens in East Africa in terms of race — the ‘white Britons’ in Kenya should be helped to ‘return’ to the U.K., but not the ‘Asians’, despite both having the same legal citizenship. ‘The European British have an obvious and definite connection [to the U.K.] that the Asians have not’… ‘in practice, there is bound to be separate treatment for the British and for the Asians,’ they wrote privately in now declassified documents.

The language of ‘connection’ and ‘belonging’ was the preferred euphemism used by British officials to split British citizenship along racial lines. In 1973, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968 was a form of ‘discrimination based on race’.

One thing we know for certain if we look at Britain’s school syllabus is that this is a country that has chosen to forget its recent past, unlike, for example, Germany. The colonial period, with its high intellectual points as well as the utter cruelty and exploitation, has vanished from textbooks, and thus the Indian has been reduced to ‘the corner shop man,’ devoid of history. In writing this book, who was your imagined audience?

I remember once reading a BBC article that declared that ‘Patels are traditionally linked with corner shops’. If not untrue (at least for U.K.-based Patels), it is hardly a statement that brings the past to life. My greatest hope is that the book will provide an important source of education on the end of the British empire and the Indian diaspora (among other diasporas) in Britain. I wanted anyone interested in the fate of the British empire after 1945, post-war migration, the Indian diaspora after 1947 or the age of decolonisation more generally to be able to pick up the book and gain a wide understanding from just a single volume written clearly and at a fast pace. The story of the British imperial world is vast and in this sense relevant to anyone resident in Nairobi or Kampala or Delhi.

In going through the Acts and laws passed over the last century, I was struck by the similarities and echoes of the past in today’s laws regarding citizenship and immigration. In Brexit, in particular, in its laws and enactments, do you see the ghosts of past acts?

It is said that Brexit tells us a lot about modern British identity. Rather than centring on a ‘nation’ or a ‘state’, British identity has instead long been closely associated with Britain’s legal constitution, its political institutions, and the rule of law. It has always been hard, for example, to identify post-war Britain as a nation-state rather than a Commonwealth-centric power, which joined Europe in 1973 for ad hoc economic benefits rather than as a consequence of a fundamental change in identity.

The British monarch remains to this day attached to various ‘Commonwealth realms’, and the perceived vitality of Commonwealth links and ‘shared history’ was often connected to the apparent good sense of Brexit in the national debates of 2016. The transition from ‘Empire’ to ‘Commonwealth’ was not the end of empire but its latest and most constitutionally evolved stage — simply the latest iteration of a liberal British imperialism designed ultimately to vouchsafe full self-government to its possessions. We’re told that Brexit is an expression of ‘national sovereignty,’ but this wider history of the constitution of the Commonwealth, an extension of the empire, keeps British identity notionally non-national.

If we take Standpoint theory as a starting point to enter your work, how much does your family’s history stand as inspiration for this book?

Certainly in the first instance, this was a deeply personal story. My family migrated from Gujarat to Kenya and then to the UK. I had known for many years the strange fact that the British had created an entire law to keep out Kenyan Indians, and I wanted to know as much as I could about this.

But as the research drew on, this became a far larger story, implicating many more communities, and an entire generation of British officials. As it turned out, my family history was implicated in crucial episodes in the history of British citizenship, decolonisation, and human rights, and moved outwards in almost all directions from its central point, the Indian Ocean.

What do we learn in the book about the relationship between Britain and India after 1947?

The 1948 British Nationality Act, one of the constitutional pillars of the Commonwealth and the source of post-war migration, was created among other reasons in order to make sure that soon-to-be-republican India would remain a member of the Commonwealth and appease Indian diplomats calling for a ‘Commonwealth citizenship’.

Britain’s relationship with India after 1947 also overhangs the story of post-war migration. In the 1950s, Britain sought to outsource the control of migration of Indians to Britain by relying on Indian state control of the issuance of passports. By the late 1960s, British officials became extremely worried about the preponderance of Indians among non-white British nationals resident overseas in various parts of the world who still held British citizenship despite the independence of former colonies.

There followed many diplomatic attempts by British officials to foist British citizens and British Protected Persons — in particular, these were the Indians in East Africa — on Indira Gandhi’s government for permanent settlement in India. Gandhi’s government took in thousands of Indians from Kenya, and later Uganda, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite the fact that most of them held British nationality. The Indian government chose not to publicise this, since it might look like a capitulation to Britain’s attempt to forsake responsibility for its own nationals.

The journalist, academic and writer teaches at SOAS, London, in the Centre for Global Media and Communications.