Diasporic connections and the making of “Global Britain”

What Britain’s entanglements with (post)colonial diaspora can tell us about the politics of “Global Britain” and its imperial legacies.

This new project, led by Dr. Catherine Craven, will examine the politics of British state and nation building in the era of “Global Britain”, showing how it is shaped by “Imperial Britain” and its legacies.

Since its launch in 2018, the UK’s Global Britain strategy has been subject to much contestation, yet it remains misunderstood in the scholarship. While some problematise “Global Britain” in analyses of geopolitical relations or the UK’s post-Brexit immigration regime, most fail to consider that it is an imaginary forged through empire that goes beyond contemporary nation-state relations. Instead, this project will build on Global Historical approaches which point to the persistent colonial logic of racial exclusion as the driving force of British migration politics, demonstrating the enduring impact of capitalism and empire. However, where this scholarship tends to underestimate the power of diaspora and migrant populations, this project will develop a relational approach, which regards states as constituted through the mobile populations they seek to govern.

It will do so by centring relations between the British state and three specific diasporic formations that are presently negotiating their position in the Global Britain project: Tamils, Hongkongers, and Chagossians; three communities that have emerged through Britain’s imperial history and broader postcolonial politics. The study will combine analysis of contemporary global political connections and entanglements between diaspora mobilisations and the British state, with re-readings of historical accounts to reveal previously hidden connections. In doing so, the project intends to make “Global Britain” meaningful as a way of reading how the UK deals with the political consequences of its past.

The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship scheme and will run from October 2023 until September 2026.