‘This Land of Promise’ and ‘Multicultural Britain’ review

In 1959, as part of the United Nations’ ‘World Refugee Year’ campaign, the British humanitarian Francesca Wilson published They Came as Strangers: The Story of Refugees to Great Britain. Wilson had worked in refugee relief for more than 50 years, and by highlighting the life stories of prominent refugees from the medieval period to the 20th century, she hoped to convince her compatriots, then adjusting to the arrival of tens of thousands of Hungarians escaping the Soviet occupation of 1956, that Britain had ‘gained greatly’ from welcoming refugees through the ages.

Some 65 years later, the salience of the themes that Wilson addressed has hardly abated. In the West, debates over immigration and asylum have become ever-more contentious, while the historical profession has seen the emergence of a distinct sub-discipline in migration history. Two new entries to this field, by Matthew Lockwood and Kieran Connell, broadly follow Wilson’s model of attempting to make sense of major demographic movements and their social and political consequences by focusing on a set of case studies. In doing so, both hope to address the politics of the present.

Lockwood’s This Land of Promise examines the memoirs and biographies of a selection of prominent refugees from the 16th to the 20th centuries. These are organised into a series of ‘stories’ that serve as entry points for the wider communities from which they are drawn. This format makes for an exciting narrative, and the collection of figures covered is interesting in itself. Few readers are likely to have previously connected Ugandan president Edward ‘Freddie’ Mutesa and the Queen singer Freddie Mercury, ‘two Freddies’ that Lockwood uses to illustrate late 20th-century postcolonial exile.

But if This Land of Promise succeeds in showing that there is a long history of refugees in Britain, it struggles to establish why. Interested more in narrative than analysis, Lockwood’s occasional explanations of Britain’s historical moments of openness to refugees are insufficiently developed. Why did Edward VI, who in 1550 chartered ‘strangers’ churches’ for foreign Protestant refugees to worship according to their own non-Anglican rites, have a sense of Christian duty so ‘far from the norm’ in Europe? And why, in Shakespeare’s time, when Protestant refugees might also find asylum in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and several German cities, were the English ‘different’ in their empathy for exiles? Lockwood does not say. Nor does he adequately explain moments of restriction. He claims that the ‘lessons’ England learned in welcoming the Huguenots of the 1680s and 1690s were ‘forgotten’ by 1709 when the ‘Poor Palatines’ were dispersed throughout Britain and the Empire. The reader is left to wonder how this national forgetfulness could have set in so quickly. In truth, British asylum has waxed and waned over the centuries because of complex interplays between political, constitutional, legal, cultural, social, economic, and international factors. Were the book’s stated ambition – to shape debates ‘that rage today’ by looking to ‘Britain’s long history as an island refuge’ – to have been fulfilled, that history needed to be explained with much more rigour.

These shortcomings are exacerbated by the book’s shallow grounding in source material. Lockwood uses virtually no unpublished sources, so is on shaky ground when venturing beyond the biographical details of the memoirs he has read. This hampers analysis, and leads to factual errors. Lord Palmerston, for example, is depicted raising funds for Jewish refugees from Russia in 1881, 16 years after his death. Groundbreaking work by other historians is sometimes ignored. This Land of Promise contains arguments – that escaped slaves in late 18th-century Britain helped create a new multiracial British identity; that in the mid-Victorian era support for American slaves was linked to support for European political refugees – made in other books that are uncited.

All of this does suggest that the book was written in a hurry. Lockwood’s ‘stories’ vary widely in their scope. The Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen has one ‘story’ virtually to himself while others embrace tens of thousands of refugees. The 15 years from 1930 to 1945 get more coverage than the more than 250 from the Reformation to the French Revolution.

Kieran Connell’s Multicultural Britain: A People’s History is more modest in chronology, but is a more compelling book. Focusing on 1945 to the present, Connell’s goal is to track what he calls Britain’s ‘drift’ to multiculturalism by dissecting the social history of several cities. Avoiding London, which has received significant attention and which stands apart for its size and demographic fluidity, Connell takes the reader to Cardiff, Nottingham, Bradford, and his own neighbourhood of Balsall Heath, Birmingham.

Connell defines ‘multiculturalism’ not as a state policy of promoting or managing ethnic diversity, but as a social reality. It is formed through what he calls the ‘pluralistic historical process’ of innumerable individual choices and relationships causing slow but unmistakeable change. The individuals and communities that forged change are the people in this ‘people’s history’. Thus, the book explores social clubs in 1940s Cardiff, the race riots of 1958 and their aftermath in Nottingham, campaigns for educational reform in 1980s Bradford, and the rise and fall of the sex trade in Balsall Heath from the 1960s to the 1990s. In each case, Connell argues that a consistent dynamic has unfolded. After immigrants have established communities, there has been a backlash, usually racially charged, to their presence. Often, the British government has sided with anti-immigrant sentiment and passed restrictionist legislation, ranging from the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968 to the ‘hostile environment’ policy of the 2010s. Nevertheless, ‘street-level multiculturalism’ has proceeded apace, producing new forms of mixed, or ‘syncretic’, culture. The music of UB40, from Connell’s native Birmingham, is an example he describes with genuine affection.

Connell has delved into the archives of all the cities he examines, read the papers of the sociologists that have studied his selected communities, conducted oral interviews, and achieved a complete command of the relevant historiography. His interest in diverse sources pays off: his chapter on 1960s Birmingham is illustrated with striking pictures by the American social photographer Janet Mendelsohn. The book’s deep familiarity with these communities allows Connell to bring to light lives that will be entirely new to the reader, from Bill Douglas, one of the first Black players for Cardiff Rugby Club, to Kathleen, an Irish woman in a mixed-race relationship in 1960s Birmingham whom Connell interviewed in 2016. That Multicultural Britain investigates Balsall Heath in two chapters (the best in the book) means that it is able to show cultural change there – Connell’s ‘drift’ – very effectively.

The book would be stronger if it thought more comparatively about British history. Connell attributes an overestimation of Birmingham’s population of colour in the 1960s to the theory that Britain was undergoing ‘unprocessed trauma caused by decolonisation’. But overestimations of minority populations of all types are very common in polls, and not only in Britain. Similarly, the ‘remarkable durability’ of Enoch Powell’s style of anti-immigrant politics might have been easier to dissect if the dynamics that have led to similar movements in other countries were taken into account.

One wonders what insights a further chapters on Eastern European migration since the EU’s expansion in 2004 could have yielded. What is not in question, though, is that migration history will continue to be politically potent for the foreseeable future. It should continue to be treated with the same skill that Multicultural Britain displays in illustrating the messy and contradictory processes of cultural exchange that have shaped many immigrants’ lives.

• This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain
  Matthew Lockwood
  William Collins, 600pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
   

• Multicultural Britain: A People’s History
  Kieran Connell
  Hurst, 395pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Thomas C. Jones is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Buckingham.