Book Review--We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire

“We’re here because you were there,” the words of a migrant in Britain explaining their presence in the heart of a declining empire in the mid-twentieth century, represent perhaps the most obvious and least interesting insight of Ian Sanjay Patel’s compelling account of Britain’s attempts to define citizenship and belonging in the nation amidst decolonisation. By those words, of course, the migrant meant that the presence of people from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in Britain was the result of British imperialism.

In We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021), Ian Sanjay Patel tells not just a story of migrants arriving to Britain in the twentieth century, sometimes fleeing crises of British making in new nations, but the manner in which decolonization sparked British attempts to define for nearly the first time the meaning of citizenship. Patel’s brilliant book is still more than these things, and serves as a fresh narrative for the trajectory of the British Empire after the Second World War.

Before the 1960s, British citizenship included many people in Britain’s colonies, even if in those colonies people were vulnerable to the extraordinary violence of the British colonial state. As Patel puts it, “the 1948 [British Nationality] Act turned out to be an explosive piece of legislation. The number of non-white people aroudn the world who had a right to migrate to Britain in the 1950s far outstripped the number of white British people already resident in Britain” (6). This was the moment when Britons were finally compelled to confront the rhetoric that had long served as a justification for empire-building: that they were created a global British family. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the physical and structural violence that defined daily life in that empire, much of it underpinned by deep racism, this “homecoming” of the rhetoric of empire was an unhappy one.

Of interest to a growing body of scholarship on settler colonialism, Patel documents how the innovations that led to British attempts to define citizenship in increasingly exclusive terms, came originally not from the British government in London, but from Britain’s settler colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Through race-based immigration quotas, and through mechanisms like apartheid in South Africa, these settler colonies began the process of defining membership in the political community in racial terms. And it was to their example that the British government itself turned from the 1940s onward. Originally its attempts to delimit Britishness so narrowly were frustrated or limited, but the pressures of decolonization, the ascendance of immigration as a political issue, and disenchantment with a Commonwealth that was less pliant than British elites had hoped, led to successes.

Patel rightly observes that Britain’s 1948 legislation “went against the trend of the post-1945 world towards national citizenship models in which membership was defined in more bounded ways (ethnicity, territory) around an imagined nation-state” (58). And so defining Britishness anew in response to populism and racism called for a retreat to the standard model of citizenship, using “immigration law rather than nationality law” to define belonging (79).

In developing this history, Patel explodes the widely popular and frequently cited myth that population, or the needs of the economy, rather than racism, were the driving forces behind the manner in which Britain sought to regulate immigration in the 1960s and beyond. His broad, analytical narrative of decolonization is matched by careful use of the archival record, which clearly demonstrates how British elites by turns responded to and stoked demands for the dramatic changes in the meaning of British citizenship (168-185, 193, 197, 204).

In the final chapters of the book, Patel focuses in particular on the fates of South Asians in Kenya and Uganda, where the trajectory of national-era politics rendered those communities vulnerable, respectively in 1968 and 1972. These “crises” exposed the fragility of British narratives about empire. Firstly, because the mechanisms national governments in Kenya and Uganda used to expel Asians were those bequeathed to them by colonial rule: so much for representative democracy and the treasured Westminster model being the primary governmental legacies of a supposedly benevolent British rule. And secondly because many of those being pushed from their homes laid claim to the British citizenship they had retained at independence. 

The agonizing frustrations of people rendered stateless, or illegally blocked from entry to Britain, and their convoluted paths across Europe or through the Commonwealth, which only sometimes ended with their settlement in a crueler, harsher Britain than that of their imaginations, are moving to hear recounted, and are one of many strengths of Patel’s book. I can easily imagine assigning this text when I next teach a course on the British Empire. We’re Here Because You Were There is a careful, compelling, and urgent book. Not least because the simplest of truths embodied in its title remains one about which a considerable number of Britons inhabit a state of denial today.