Studies in Imperialism Settlers at the End of Empire

Bringing together histories of immigration and emigration in the era of decolonisation, Settlers at the end of empire is an essential new study highlighting the connections between the racial politics of migration in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Rhodesia in the second half of the twentieth century. This ground-breaking study integrates the history of both emigration from and immigration to the United Kingdom. Drawing attention to the volume and longevity of British emigration, Settlers at the end of empire analyses the development of racialised migration regimes in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), from the Second World War to the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994. White emigration from the United Kingdom and the arrival of increasing numbers of Commonwealth migrants of colour were both cast as signs of national decline. In fact, many emigrants cited the arrival of migrants of colour as a factor in their decision to leave. Meanwhile,South Africa and Rhodesia moved from selective immigration policies in the 1940s and 1950s to an intensive recruitment of white migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an attempt by these increasingly embattled settler regimes to increase their white populations and thereby defend minority rule. Though such efforts bore limited results in war-torn Rhodesia, South Africa saw a dramatic increase of European and especially British migrants from the 1960s to the early 1980s, just as the United Kingdom implemented immigration restrictions aimed at Commonwealth migrants of colour. As this book shows, though migration policies took different forms in all three countries, they were intended to defend nations imagined as white in the wake of imperial collapse. Settlers at the end of empire traces the development of racialised migration regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and the United Kingdom from the Second World War to the end of apartheid in 1994. While South Africa and Rhodesia, like other settler colonies, had a long history of restricting the entry of migrants of colour, in the 1960s under existential threat and after abandoning formal ties with the Commonwealth they began to actively recruit white migrants, the majority of whom were British. At the same time, with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the British government began to implement restrictions aimed at slowing the migration of British subjects of colour. In all three nations, these policies were aimed at the preservation of nations imagined as white, revealing the persistence of the racial ideologies of empire across the era of decolonisation.