The Refugee Camps of Twentieth-Century Britain—Historian Jordanna Bailkin Discusses Her Groundbreaking New Book "Unsettled"

by Robin Lindley

The policies giving rise to these refugee camps were critical in shaping today’s multicultural Britain and also served as antecedents to the treatment of immigrants and refugees now.

The Afterlife of the British Empire

by Robin Lindley

Imperial student at the London School of Economics in 1946. Credit: Imperial War Museum.Most historical scholarship on the decline and fall of the British Empire deals with the diplomatic and political aspects of this transformation and ignores how imperial collapse affected everyday life in Britain after the Second World War. And historians have subscribed to the idea that “postwar” and “postimperial” themes are unrelated.In her new book The Afterlife of Empire (University of California Press), historian Jordanna Bailkin offers an original assessment of postwar Britain that interweaves “postwar” and “postcolonial” concerns while focusing on how the end of empire changed social relations and individual routines in the emerging welfare state.