Migration and the Ends of Empire

Jordanna Bailkin will discuss "Migration and the Ends of Empire." She considers how postcolonial migrants and decolonization are often juxtaposed, but the precise nature of the connection between them has rarely been fully investigated - rather, they tend to be mentioned in the same breath, and a temporal connection is simply assumed. She will investigate the ways that decolonization shaped the social history of migration and also, perhaps more compellingly, helped to create the taxonomies of population transfer that labeled only certain kinds of movements and diasporas as "migrations." She focuses here on particular case studies, such as European Volunteer Workers, West African students, and Irish laborers, and considers the genealogy of how social scientists and government officials classified the movements of these groups in relation to their evolving understanding of "migration."  She discusses the ways in which decolonization became caught up in the metropolitan transformation of postwar welfare, as the status and perceived needs of disparate migrant groups in Britain and France shaped the resources that were available to all citizens.