Doctoral Dissertation Research: Citizenship Rights and the Politics of Race in Britain, 1948-1968

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project examines the relationship between the rights of citizenship and the politics of race in Britain between 1948 and 1968. It will address three questions. First, how were the unstable boundaries between state and society demarcated along the lines of race after1945, when advocates of minority concerns increasingly defined civil rights in terms of the state's responsibility to prevent discrimination in the private sector? Second, how did members of both anti-racist organizations and the legal profession assess the efficacy of working within liberal and egalitarian framework to advance minority concerns? Third, what criteria were employed to legally define classes of people deserving state protection against discrimination, particularly in the drafting and enactment of the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968? To answer these questions, the Co-Principal Investigator will engage in archival research to examine the specific processes and debates through which egalitarian arguments and the codification of citizenship became linked most explicitly with the politics of race.