After the Empire: Diversity and Integration in Britain

Faculty details: Dr James Heartfield [email protected]

Class time: Monday 2:00 – 5:00 Wednesday 9:30 – 12:30 See calendar for details and make up classes

Office Hours: 30 minutes either side of the class or by appointment

Course Description: Britain’s social make-up today owes a lot to the way that the country related to the wider world, not least the expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, though, Britain withdrew from Empire, under pressure from anti-Colonial movements and the United Nations. Once the ‘workshop of the world’ in the nineteenth century, when the Empire covered so much territory that the sun never set upon it, Britain in the twentieth century struggled to find a role in the post-colonial world. The country that sent so many of its citizens out to colonize America and Australia, and to rule over India and Africa, received millions of migrants from its former colonies in the latter half of the twentieth century. The British identity that was formed through domination gave way to an identity based upon a rich racial and cultural diversity – but not without problems and conflicts. This course examines Britain’s post-colonial make-up by examining the many strands that make up Britain today, focusing on the capital London. Through talks and visits students will look at the many strands that make up the world city that is London.

Learning Outcomes: A broad understanding of the economic, social and cultural trends at work in the history of London; a command of the modern history of Britain and its engagement with Empire, decolonization and immigration.

Method of Study

The course will include a variety of resources including relevant site visits, guest speakers and student presentations.

‘After the Empire’ – a collection of readings to be prepared

Assessment

Class presentation or report (20%) Essay 1 (20%) Essay 2 (20%) Exam (30%) participation punctuality, and attendance (10%)

A Note on Academic Dishonesty: Regardless of the quality of work, plagiarism is punishable with a failing grade in the class and possible dismissal from the program. Plagiarism may be broadly defined as copying of materials from sources, without the acknowledgment of having done so, claiming other’s ideas as one’s own without proper reference to them, and buying materials such as essays/exams. If you have questions about what constitutes plagiarism, please ask your instructor.

Class Schedule

Session 1 The English language came with the Saxons, Britain’s Manorial system with the Romans, its original inhabitants were Basques, its first legally-founded government was the ‘Norman Yoke’, the ancient Celtic lands of Ireland, Wales and Cornwall were settled and conquered, the Scottish ruling classes joined in a dynastic union in 1707. Since then British culture and language has been enriched and disturbed by its encounter with other populations from the West Indies, the Indian sub-continent and colonial outposts across the world. Visit: The Tower of London, West Smithfield and City of London

Session 2 Trading on the Margins: London the Imperial City As the centre of international trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, London tied Britain to the world, from the Americas and West Indies over the Atlantic to the Africa and East India Trade. We can situate the emergence of Britain as a world power in the mercantile trade in luxury goods that laid the basis for the ‘Africa trade’, trade liberalisation, and then the colonial era. Visit: Museum of Docklands

Session 3 Colonising the Empire: the great white migration Britain’s advance was often interrupted by reaction, and cycles of economic distress, sloughing of great numbers of the ‘surplus population’, dispossessed cotters and peasants of Ireland and Scotland, the ‘residuum’ and the criminalised ‘deportees’ who were exported to the colonies, along with bankrupts, political exiles and second sons to found the colonies. Over time the white colonies challenged Britain’s rule, making new settler societies from New Zealand to America. Visit: British Museum

Session 4 From Slave Trade to the Brixton Riots: Afro-Caribbean dimension The West India interest dominated Britain in the Georgian Era – but that was a planters’ lobby in favour of slavery, which according to some is the original source of Britain’s capital, from Barclays to Cadbury’s. As white sugar barons settled the West Indies in the eighteenth century, the descendants of African slaves there came to Britain to work in the 1950s. Race relations in Britain in the second half of the twentieth when London saw race riots in Peter Rachman’s tenements, its own black power movement led by Michael X, and more rioting in Brixton in 1981.

Session 5 The Irish in Britain Britain’s oldest colony was also the source of its industrial workforce as Irish men and women migrated to Britain’s industrial centres in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and London. The story of the Irish in Britain combines that of the development of the labour movement, the importance of religious sectarianism in the cities like Liverpool and Glasgow, and the fight over Irish independence that dominated British politics in the eras of Gladstone and again at the end of the twentieth century.

Session 6 ‘These curly-headed men’ – Britain’s Jews, from Cromwell to the present ‘Now and then, We persecute these curly-headed men’, wrote Hilaire Belloc. Jews were expelled from Britain in the Middle Ages, but welcomed back by Oliver Cromwell. In the nineteenth century David Ricardo wrote banking law, Rothschild financed the Empire and a converted Benjamin Disraeli could be Prime Minister. The immigration of Jews from and Russia at the turn of the century was opposed by British labour unions, giving rise to the first laws against immigration. Anti-Jewish sentiment coloured the Ripper investigations and the Siege of Sidney Street. When Britain’s Jews migrated from the impoverished East End to the wealthier suburbs, former Prime Minister despaired ‘out go the Etonians, in come the Estonians’. Visit: Jewish Museum

Session 7 The Empire Strikes Back – the Indian Sub-Continent in British history With the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians, Indians and Pakistanis secured a place in Britain’s mill towns and cities, so that Southall, Tower Hamlets, Leicester and Birmingham today are some of the main centres of Asian Britain. India has been a feature in British life since the East India Company and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, with Indian Lords and MPs, like Shapurji Saklatvala in the 1920s, and Keith Vaz in the 1990s. Visit: Brick Lane and East London Mosque

Session 8 ‘Overpaid, over-sexed and over here’: British attitudes to America The history of Britain and America have been intertwined since the settlement in Virginia. Cooperation and conflict have shaped the history of both states, with the moral collapse of the British establishment after the War of Independence, British elite hostility to the Union in 1861, the loss of Empire and America’s aid to Britain in the Second World War.

Session 9 Citizenship and Identity The debate over British citizenship focuses on its immigrant populations, but is perhaps more to do with Britain’s own questions of identity.

Session 10 ‘Londonistan’ – Muslims in Britain After the 7 July bombings in London, Britain’s civic leaders have worried about the role of the Muslims in Britain. In the 1990s, Britain welcomed asylum seekers from Algeria and elsewhere – but later struggled with the dissident believers at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Have we nurtured an ‘enemy within’, or is this the affirmation of the policy of cultural diversity? Should British law accommodate Islamic sensibility

Session 11 From Cockneys to Mockneys, the making of multi-cultural London London is a multi-cultural city… or is it? The cockney’s came from Birmingham, but the name itself was an insult – a ‘Cock’s Egg’ – that no-one would have embraced until the mid-twentieth century. The East End of London has gone from being the site of the weavers to a refuge for Hugenots and Jews, to a place for Sylehtis

Bibliography

The Adventures of English, Melvin Bragg Scotland’s Empire, TM Devine Albion, Peter Ackroyd Neglected British History. Flinders Petrie, FRS. Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume VIII, pp 251-278. Paper presented to the Academy on November 7, 1917. David Kynaston: The City of London The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Nick Robins Merchants and revolution: commercial change, political conflict, and London's overseas traders, Brenner, 1993 Foreign Mud, Maurice Collis Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, James Belich The Aborigines’ Protection Society, James Heartfield Poverty and Compassion, Gertrude Himmelfarb Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams Staying Power, Peter Fryer Michael X, John L Williams C.L.R. James: A Life by Farrukh Dhondy, 2002 Nothing but the Same old Story, Liz Curtis Confessions of an Irish Rebel, Brendan Behan With Breast Expanded, Brian Behan The Damnable Question, George Dangerfield East End Jewish Radicals, Bill Fishman E. Digby Baltzell, the Protestant Establishment ‘Britain’s Last Anti-Jewish Riots’, Daniel Trilling, New Statesman, 23 May 2012 Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Anthony Julius The Asians in Britain, Rozina Visram, London, Pluto Press, 2002 Hugh Wilford, ‘Great Britain’, in Alexander Stephan, The Americanisation of Europe, Bergahn Books, 2007, p 23-43 H Spiro, ‘Anti-Americanism in Western Europe’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 497, Anti-Americanism: Origins and Context (May, 1988), pp. 120-132 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain The Empire Strikes Back, Paul Gilroy Londonistan, Melanie Phillips From Fatwa to Jihad, Kenan Malik Outcast London, Gareth Stedman Jones The Likes of Us, Michael Collins London in the Twentieth Century, Jerry White ‘Rethinking Race’, Munira Mirza et al, Prospect, October 2010