The Refugee Colonist: Holocaust Refugeedom in the Third British Empire

Recent interventions by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (2024), Laura Robson (2023), and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (2022) emphasize the Middle Eastern origins of the contemporary international refugee regime. In doing so, they challenge the modern refugee's founding convention in 1951 which places Europe, and European refugees, at the center of international humanitarianism. This paper develops this critical scholarship through an interrogation of the British Empire's response to the crisis of European (predominantly German-speaking) Jewry fleeing the Third Reich in the 1930s. This response, I argue, coalesced in the figure of the "refugee colonist": a vision for Jewish refugee resettlement to serve the goals of the interwar imperial re-entrenchment amidst an international commitment to advancing nationalism. The paper will demonstrate how imperial officials in London and the colonies, League of Nations representatives, and Jewish organizations alike advocated for European Jewish settlement in Britain's Empire as an explicitly colonial endeavour, implicating Holocaust refugeedom in interwar imperial internationalism. In doing so, this paper demonstrates the significance of empire-states and their politics in the administration of European Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Furthermore, rather than locating the origins of our understanding of refugees in any one geographical location, I argue instead for scholars to focus on the nature of states and their sovereignty in shaping our understanding of refugees. Finally, in focusing on the interwar British Empire in which divisions over racial access to citizenship were well-established, I push forward critical scholarship in emphasizing the importance of race and racialization in our understanding of the modern refugee.