What is migration history and what has it looked like in Britain?

My name's doctor Dan Renshaw.

I lecture in modern British and European history at the

University of Redding.

And in this series of interconnected lectures,

I'm going to be discussing migration to Britain and

responses migration to Britain,

between Edwardian period and the election of Margaret

Thatcher as prime minister in nineteen seventy nine.

And in this opening lecture,

I'm going to be discussing migration history,

as a discipline,

and also providing an overview of migration to the United

Kingdom over the last, four centuries.

So migration history, is often presented as peripheral

to a wider, British narrative

And in this respect, it's, profoundly different,

from the foundational myth of, say, for example,

the United States, which very much

stresses the,

fact that the society has been created by the arrival of

migrants fleeing persecution, not hunger,

or destitution and arriving in America to

build a new society, and you have the iconography,

the statue of liberty,

and migrants arriving at LS Island and literally creating

new identities for themselves.

And you don't really see this to the same extent in the way

British history is often presented.

However, the contribution migrants have made,

two British culture and society over the last few centuries is

profound And at certain points,

some of which we'll discuss in the next in the following few lectures,

discussion and controversies about migration in particular

restricting entry into United Kingdom have shaped British political.

Discourse But although migration,

has been presented as peripheral to a wider

overarching British historical narrative, is, of course,

also timely and relevant.

If we look at today's newspaper headlines,

there's this continued debate and controversy about migration

in the United Kingdom and the role that migrants play in

British society.

So migration,

and and the presence of,

people who've traveled from other parts of the world in

Britain goes back a very long time indeed.

Indeed, if we view Britain as an island, at some point,

everyone had to make a journey from somewhere else to settle here.

The term refugee is first used in a British

discourse in the seventeenth century.

To refer to French protestants fleeing religious persecution

in France.

And the huguenots, these religious,

refugees

arrived in often traumatic circumstances

crossing the English channel.

If we look at the history of migration over the last three centuries,

we can see the arrival of grapes from different parts of the world.

In the late eighteenth century in Britain,

there are substantial communities of African and

South Asian heritage in British cities,

particularly London and Bristol,

And then in the nineteenth century,

migration from different parts of Europe,

including from Ireland, particularly during the famine years,

when hundreds of thousands of Irish migrants leave

particularly Southern Ireland and settle in British cities,

and at the end of the nineteenth century,

particularly the arrival of Jewish refugees from Eastern

Europe fleeing institutional discrimination and also the

sporadic violent pogroms unleashed by the Russian state.

So migration has been occurring for a very long time.

And these debates about the role of the migrant and,

allowing people into the United Kingdom have a very,

a long antecedence.

For this series of lectures, as I said,

I'm going to be discussing migration to Britain in the

twentieth beginning in nineteen hundred

with a populist anti migrant campaign gathering pace in the country,

and then looking at the profound impact of the two world wars,

both between nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen and

nineteen nine and nineteen forty five,

very large numbers of people from around the world end up in

Britain for one reason or another And as we'll discuss,

after nineteen forty five,

that wartime experience proves crucial in the arrival of large

numbers of people from what then are still parts of the

British empire.

In particular, the Caribbean, the West Coast, of Africa,

and also the Indian subcontinent.