At the end of the Second World War, thousands of visa-less Jewish refugees desperate to escape the horrors of Nazism, embarked on clandestine journeys to the British Mandate of Palestine. In response, the British government continued to uphold its restrictive immigration measures by transhipping Jewish refugees to detention camps in the colonial territory of Cyprus. In the years 1946-49 approximately 53,000 Jews, mostly Holocaust survivors, were detained. Across the mediterranean in East Africa, from 1947 Jewish political detainees were imprisoned in Kenya’s Gilgil camp following Jewish terrorist activity in Palestine. These groups, although different and thousands of miles apart, were intricately related. As Whitehall officials attempted to manage British imperial interests, the labelling of Jewish groups, whether detainee or refugee as ‘illegal expert criminals’ revealed the complexities of questions of race, migration and empire in the war’s aftermath.
This paper will focus on the history of these camps and how Britain’s use of its colonial empire in the mid-twentieth century as sites of detention for migrants, particularly Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, came to define global responses to forced displacement. What can these historical pasts tell us about the evolution of contemporary immigration policy? How do legacies of the Holocaust beyond Europe and its borderlands further our understanding of global histories of migration and detention?