Where Was Welfare? Decolonization and the Making of the Global Welfare State

Welfare has often stood in an uneasy relationship to empire. In some sense, welfare was the empire’s most powerful justification, its reason for being. The claim that empire improved the moral and material lives of its subject pervades imperial history, with widely varying accounts of the costs and benefits of these schemes. The proponents of metropolitan welfare had a long history of thinking imperially. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, welfare depended on the denial of local difference, mingling imperial and metropolitan sites in order to promote universal categories of “the child” or “motherhood.”[1]

Yet the prevailing assumption seems to have been that after the Second World War, welfare was severed from the world and became a pristinely metropolitan story. Here, I argue that the transnational and the local continued to be intertwined in welfare’s history after 1945. The distinctive forms of welfare that took shape in1950s and 1960s Britain – in the domains of mental health, education, child welfare, and criminal law – were shaped by decolonization and its perceived demands.

The welfare state was thus not a “pure” domestic creation. Rather, it was shaped by global forces ranging from the experiences and expectations that individual migrants brought with them from their countries of origin to the construction of new legal regimes in Africa and Asia. Thus, I seek to disrupt monocausal accounts of both decolonization and welfare by illustrating that there are multiple histories of each, and that some of these histories are intertwined.

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[1] I am indebted to Seth Koven for this point. See, e.g., Abosede A. George, “Feminist Activism and Class Politics: The Example of the Lagos Girl Hawker Project,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35 (2007): 128-43.

See more of: De-Centering the Welfare State: The Gendered and Imperial Politics of Social Reform in the Twentieth Century
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