Doctoral Dissertation Research: Nation-Making and the Politics of Difference

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

This project analyses the formation of the British nation state within the context of racial politics. While current scholarship views this history as a struggle for rights, British colonial subjects were being excluded from holding these rights. The formation of civil, political and social rights within Britain took place at a time when British settlers built a slave-empire in the Caribbean, implemented forced labor regimes across four continents, and controlled immigration. The purpose is to understand the politics of racial exclusion. The study seeks to find the historical roots of the nation state's hostility towards immigrants and refugees. Analyzing the legacies of empire involved in the construction of the British nation state aims to shine a light on the deep-seated racial politics linking Europe and its former colonial others. Even though historical sociology has long studied the formation of the modern nation state, existing explanatory mechanisms are largely endogenous to Europe and a spatial break between "the nation" and "the empire" has seeped into sociological analytical frameworks. The project addresses this analytical shortcoming and examines the making of modern Britain in interaction with the colonial British West Indies. It asks: How did the British nation state form amidst a context of colonial empire? Specifically, research focuses on three historical moments in metropolitan and colonial British politics: The formation of civil rights amidst settler rights claims and slavery abolition; the formation of working class political rights amidst indentured labor regimes in the empire; and the formation of social rights during a time of colonial immigration. The study draws on government archival documents, colonial office communications and newspapers, and it has two objectives: First, it seeks to explain how and why the British metropolitan body politic came to be defined against colonial populations and created a citizenry that was imagined as white, normalizing the color line. Second, following the consolidation of the nation state, it aims to show how immigrating colonial subjects challenged the nation-building project and how a struggle over difference came to threaten the isomorphism between people, race and nation.