Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World

This groundbreaking study opens up new avenues of research into the history of imperial mobility and migration, while also engaging with the contemporary debates generated by immigration, globalisation and transnationalism. The chief aim of the volume is to introduce the reader to new and emerging research in the broad field of 'imperial migration', and, in so doing, to show how this 'new' migration scholarship is helping to deepen and enrich our understanding of the concept of a British World. Based upon far-reaching primary, secondary and oral-based research in Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, the United States and Zambia, the volume provides a more integrated and comparative approach to histories of migration and mobility within a British imperial world. The key focal point is the analysis of different types of imperial migration, its shifting patterns and processes, its socio-economic bases, and the transfer of ideas, identities, racial constructs and investment capital along the various networks established by British migrants throughout the empire, both formal and informal. The essays also explore the tensions between the national and imperial, and the transnational and global. In doing so, they reflect on notions of 'Britishness' as contested forms of identity. What emerges is a subtle yet far-reaching investigation of competing forms of empire and nation-building. This book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in British imperial and migration history. It also offers important insights for students interested in the comparative dynamics and overlapping vectors of global, transnational and British World history.