What role did migration play in the making of modern Britain? We now have a good sense of the way ethnicity, class, religion and gender structured immigrants’ experience and what impact they had on Britain’s culture, society and economy. But as Nancy Green pointed out almost two decades ago, scholars of migration must focus on exit as well as entry. Such a call to study ‘the politics of exit’ is especially apposite in the case of the UK. For in every decade between 1850 and 1980 (with the exception of the 1930s), the UK experienced net emigration year on year. This article analyses this outflow of migrants to give a new account of the UK as an 'emigration state'. With this concept in mind, this paper offers a new account of the formation of migration policy in the UK and seeks to transform our sense of the chronological and geographical boundaries of modern Britain.
Emigration state: race, citizenship and settler imperialism in modern British history, c. 1850-1972