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Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history.

Stuart Hall, Old and New Identities,Old and New Ethnicities

‘Western society historically was white, that’s how it works,’ right-wing commentator Melanie Phillips told me during a 2017 BBC Radio 4 debate.¹ In the middle of a live recording, I’d been quietly brought into a small studio to talk to people I had never met but whom I sat with long enough during what was a brief segment for them to quiz me about so-called virtue signalling – a supposed phenomenon where people publicly and smugly say or do something ‘morally good’ for the principal purpose of demonstrating their rectitude. I hadn’t been invited on the programme to debate ‘race’ or the history of ‘the West’, but that’s where Phillips steered the conversation. Caught off guard, I explained why Phillips’s statement wasn’t true, but it seemed she had a point to prove; adamant that it was entirely logical that some people in the UK wanted to defend a Europe that she seemed to believe was once exclusively white.

Other people share Phillips’s anger at the supposed disruptive change that has taken place in Europe. When a BBC children’s cartoon used images of a multiracial family to explain life in Roman Britain, people on social media attacked it as historically inaccurate.² They seemed to believe it’s common sense that racial and cultural homogeneity in this part of the world has been disrupted by migration. Except that has never been ‘how it works’: the UK, for instance, does not have a ‘white’ or monocultural history.

This is not a country unsettled by immigration, it is one made by it. Its first inhabitants came from Southern Europe, and by the time Roman troops and their auxiliaries landed on the southern tip of England in AD 43, this was already a place of diverse traditions and languages. The population was varied; made up of people from the areas that would come to be known as North Africa, Syria, the Balkans and Scandinavia. ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here,’ writes journalist Peter Fryer in the opening to his book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain.³

Throughout the 1800s, people like black radical Chartist leader William Cuffay, businessperson and nurse Mary Seacole and Wu Tingfang, the first Chinese barrister in the UK, were among many who lived in this country. ‘There’s a myth that … pervades the public debate that migration is something that happened in Britain after 1945 or that it’s a modern phenomenon. Actually we have a long, rich and very diverse history of migration,’ historian Sundeep Lidher tells me. She is one of the architects of Our Migration Story, a website that documents the generations of migrants who have come to and shaped the British Isles.⁴

Without detailed public knowledge of these histories, the UK’s understanding of itself will always be narrow-minded, and as Lidher points out, mythical and inaccurate. With the history of migration ‘comes a more accurate insight into our long-standing interactions and entanglements with the wider globe’, Lidher explains. We talk nearly two years after the EU referendum, but the ill-informed debate that shaped the campaigns still hangs over us; she conveys a sense of urgency and frustration that the UK’s migratory past is not better known. Imbued with nostalgia for a return to the Empire that was and is so rarely discussed in detail,⁵ the simplistic calls to ‘take back control’ of ‘our’ borders during the referendum erased a much more complex past.

Britain has never been an independent country since it came into being in 1707, Professor Gurminder Bhambra points out. It has always been stitched together with other entities – the Empire, followed by the Commonwealth and then the EU. ‘There has been no independent Britain,’ writes Bhambra, ‘no “island nation”.’⁶

The UK’s migration history isn’t just about Empire, but the way we talk about immigration now can’t be understood without looking back at recent UK immigration legislation and how it related to race and the colonial project. A cursory look at this country’s past suggests that, if only this history were more widely known, people might think about immigration slightly differently. It might be seen as less of a problem and more as an understandable, neutral reality. Or at the very least, it may make it easier for us to understand anti-immigration sentiment for what it is: as less of a fact of life and more as a product of history.

Still, even when the UK’s migration histories are recognised, they’re presented as rose-tinted pictures that are predictably too celebratory an understanding of the past, fictions in which immigration plays a part, but without the resistance to and exclusions that accompanied it.⁷ In 2013, then prime minister David Cameron did just that. ‘Our migrant communities are a fundamental part of who we are and Britain is a far richer and stronger society because of them,’ he said. ‘This is our island story: open, diverse and welcoming, and I am immensely proud of it.’⁸ We do not need to look back too far into history to find a very different picture of this country and its relationship with immigration.

In January 1955, Winston Churchill, generally lionised as a British hero, made a bold suggestion in one of his cabinet meetings. With a general election likely to happen within the year – one that he would not, in the end, contest – he tried to persuade his colleagues to adopt a campaign slogan that was similar to the rallying cry of the far right in the decades that followed. ‘Keep England White’, he suggested, would be a good message.⁹ The prime minister, who had been heavily involved in the Boer War, Britain’s bloody colonial adventures, and in creating the 1943 Bengal famine – which is estimated to have killed 3 million people – was adamant that restricting Caribbean migration was ‘the most important subject facing this country’.¹⁰ Objecting to people of colour coming to the UK, in 1954 Churchill told the governor-in-chief of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, that their presence would create ‘a magpie society’, adding ‘that would never do’.¹¹

Churchill’s views on matters of race and migration were hardly abnormal. Before and after the 1955 election, politicians from the left and the right complained that people of colour coming to the UK would threaten the very idea of the nation and undermine Britons’ standard of living by taking jobs and housing. Immigration, how it was understood and the legislation that would be introduced to ‘control’ it, was inseparable from race and racism.

‘Race is something we make,’ philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah tells us, ‘it’s not something that makes us.’ Invented to control and govern populations, race has never had any biological basis; it’s racism that gives it meaning.¹² Race hasn’t always existed in the way we understand it now; it was a term used, for instance, to talk about class. Intended for a middle-class audience, one London weekly newspaper described ‘the Bethnal Green poor’ as ‘a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing’.¹³ But over the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the racial hierarchy was solidified. Forming a justification for colonialism and slavery since the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, and then backed up by the scientific racism of eugenicist Frances Galton, as well as academics, politicians and thinkers – in other words, significant sections of the elite – it increasingly came to be believed that visible differences were a sign of much deeper ones. Humans have inherited a biological essence related to skin colour and bodily features, they said, and this biology decides our abilities. ‘Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization,’ scientist Robert Knox declared in 1850.¹⁴

As they plundered, exploited and brutally controlled colonies and the people in them, all to enrich Britain as part of the growth of the capitalist project, colonialists swore by the racial hierarchy. Whiteness was not simply a descriptor; it was used to give anchor to the idea that Europe was the place of modernity and civilisation. White Europeans – in particular white upper-class men – were thought inherently modern and sophisticated; their black and brown counterparts, the opposite. The former, human; the latter, not. These ideas live on, subtly drawing a line between the developed and the developing, the advanced and the backward.

During Empire, the colonised needed to be civilised, and it was the responsibility of white Britons to do just that. ‘Is it not strange to think, that they who ought to be considered as the most learned and civilized people in the world, that they should carry on a traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and that many … are become so dissolute as to think slavery, robbery and murder no crime?’ wrote abolitionist and philosopher Ottobah Cugoano in 1787.¹⁵

Yet, to this day, national myths abound of Britons nobly leading the charge against slavery. In fact, when slavery was abolished in Britain, slave owners were granted, using taxpayers money, £20 million in compensation, or the equivalent of around £17 billion today, the largest public bailout until the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.¹⁶ Conveniently ignored are the facts that slaves and their descendants never saw a penny of compensation and the UK then played a significant role in forcing millions of people into bondage and indentured labour.¹⁷

As working classes at home agitated for and began to win democratic rights in the early twentieth century, the Empire was used to give coherence to a country deeply divided along class lines. People were told it wasn’t just the elite that benefited from the imperial project, but also the country as a whole; white people’s sense of self and of the nation was defined by their relation to the colonised. In one mass marketing campaign, which came in the form of posters, lectures, Empire shops and a library, the public were encouraged to ‘buy Empire’ and made to feel that as consumers they were helping keep the Empire alive. Racial superiority and all its ideas of differing humanity seeped into popular culture: adverts for household goods as mundane as soap or cocoa were marketed on images that showed black people as inferior to whites.¹⁸

But race was not only about skin colour or physical features. After visiting a Warsaw ghetto in 1949 and witnessing the treatment of Jewish people in Poland, the preeminent sociologist and author W.E.B. Du Bois concluded that the global colour line – which he’d understood at the beginning of the 1900s as the way black and brown people were segregated and treated differently because of their skin colour – was ‘not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics’. ‘No,’ he explained, ‘the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.’ The widely disseminated idea that there are ancestral differences between groups of people which determine people’s abilities, instincts and ways of being, then, was not only denoted by skin colour.¹⁹

This thinking shaped the ways migrants have been perceived in recent history. Immigration hasn’t always been top of the political agenda; neither has there been a single, uniform treatment of the diverse groups of migrants, but certain groups have been marked out and racialised as different, unwanted and even threatening. These ideas, targeted specifically at Jewish migrants, formed the backdrop of the UK’s first modern immigration controls.

Escaping pogroms and riots in Eastern Europe and anti-Jewish policies in Russia, at the end of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Jewish migrants were arriving in England. Antisemitism has a long history in this country; Jews, along with Roman Catholics, didn’t have the same rights as Protestants until the nineteenth century.²⁰ But these people, mostly orthodox in their views, were poorer and less anglicised than the existing Jewish population; with their arrival, the Jewish working class grew in size and the existing occupational and cultural profile of Jewish people in England radically changed.²¹

‘Immigrant’ and ‘Jew’ became interchangeable, and ‘concerns’ exploded about the supposed social ills that Jewish migrants brought with them to East London, one of the principal areas where they settled.²² Politicians claimed the country’s identity would be diluted by their presence, and The East London Advertiser attacked Jewish people as incompatible with the English way of life: ‘People of any other nation, after being in England for only a short time, assimilate themselves with the native race and by and by lose nearly all their foreign trace. But the Jews never do. A Jew is always a Jew.’ In 1906, one writer in the weekly socialist newspaper the Clarion described Jewish people coming into the country as ‘a poison injected into the national veins’. ²³

Arriving during economic downturn, in language eerily similar to contemporary arguments that migrants undercut wages and change UK culture, Edward Troup, then Home Office permanent secretary, claimed that ‘large numbers of aliens from Eastern Europe who had settled in east London and in other populous centres had lowered the wages in some of the unorganised trades to starvation point and their habits had a demoralising effect in the crowded areas in which they settled.’²⁴

The UK’s first ever substantial legislation to deal with immigration – the Aliens Act 1905 – was aimed at limiting the number of Jewish people, as well as the number of poor people, coming into the country. And, so, class and race met, as they so often do, in the reasoning behind immigration ‘controls’. Foreign nationals were forced to register with the police and there were limits on where they could live. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 stipulated that people who wanted to become British citizens had to have ‘good character’ and ‘an adequate knowledge of the English language’.

The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1918 then gave the home secretary the right to rescind naturalisation certificates given to German citizens and barred any enemy from being naturalised in the ten years after the end of the war.²⁵ Restrictions that had been applied to certain migrants were extended during what would become the period between the two World Wars; the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919 required all Jewish ‘aliens’ to carry ID cards that prevented them from taking certain jobs, made it illegal for them to promote industrial action, and dictated that they must tell authorities if they would be away from home for more than two weeks.²⁶

It wasn’t only Jewish people who were the focus of government attention. The 1919 Act also legalised different rates of pay for British seamen along the lines of race. Between the First and Second World Wars, the government tried to keep out Asian and black seamen arriving at UK ports. Fears of a mixed race population helped drive the restrictions introduced in 1925: British subjects of colour who landed in ports across the country had to register themselves and clock in with officials if they were going to move; all the while the possibility of deportation loomed over them.²⁷ This signalled what was to come in the following decades; the racial categories created during colonialism underpinned the debate and they would continue to do so for years to come.

Desperate to retain global status as the British Empire was crumbling in front of them and determined to continue an economically exploitative relationship with colonies and former colonies where possible, politicians embraced the idea of the Commonwealth. Through this organisational vehicle they claimed that the Empire was naturally evolving into a multiracial collection of countries.²⁸ In this telling of history, colonial independence could be cast not as a radical change driven by anti-colonial movements but as a planned transformation that signalled the UK’s benevolence and adaptability. The 1948 British Nationality Act was part of this plan.

Clement Attlee’s Labour government cobbled together the legislation that would keep a semblance of imperial unity through open borders. This, the first definition of British citizenship, gave people from colonies and former colonies British nationality rights; they could be known as either British subjects or Commonwealth citizens. It didn’t hand out any new privileges, but wrote into law the rights these people already had and created a check against any withdrawal of them.²⁹ What the government really wanted was to make it easy for people to move between the euphemistically named ‘old Commonwealth’ countries – otherwise known as the ‘white dominions’ – to come to the UK even if they were developing their own forms of citizenship laws. That is, to allow white people from Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to move to the UK.³⁰

And so despite the supposed ‘open door’ policy, people of colour from the colonies and former colonies weren’t welcome in the UK. Politicians outsourced the border regime. Through the 1950s, Labour’s official position was opposition to ‘controls’, but at the beginning of the decade, Attlee’s government brought together a cabinet committee to look into how the immigration of ‘coloured people from the British Colonial Territories’ could be checked.³¹

By 1952, both Tory and Labour governments had implemented clandestine processes to keep out people of colour. They intervened in the market to raise the price of low-cost tickets on transatlantic crossings and they pressured colonial governments to limit who they issued passports to – a practice used even during the height of Empire, when the government was working with agencies abroad to make it harder for people to get the travel documents they needed to enter the UK.

When Jamaica refused to fall into line, the UK government made a film to be aired in the Caribbean, which took footage from the bitterly cold 1947–48 winter edited with images of out-of-work immigrants living in poor accommodation, to discourage people from coming. In India and Pakistan, the UK High Commissioner publicised the supposed difficult conditions of life in the UK in newspapers.³²

So, when Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Essex, in 1948, eleven Labour MPs wasted no time in registering their unhappiness. ‘An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impact the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned,’ they wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Attlee soon after the boat’s near 500 passengers from the Caribbean disembarked on British shores. Neither brought nor invited by the government to work, the sight of this number of people deciding themselves to make journey to the UK alarmed some politicians. While some people welcomed new arrivals, who were able to carve out a life for themselves in the UK, these MPs demanded ‘control’: ‘we venture to suggest that the British government should, like foreign countries, the dominions and even some of the colonies, by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people.’³³

One of the reasons ‘controls’ weren’t introduced in these years was that politicians and different parts of government were divided over the best policy to adopt. Some, like those in the Colonial Office, worried controls would undermine the idea of the multiracial Commonwealth and the remnants of Britain’s imperial power along with it. But there were other parts of government, such as the Ministry of Labour, that kept advocating for overtly controlling immigration. Conservative MP Cyril Osborne was one of the most vehement in his opposition, claiming that people of colour coming into the country had a ‘different standard of civilisation’.³⁴

The Second World War had left the UK in economic decline; it lost one quarter of its wealth and plummeted from being the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. Post-war reconstruction required workers, and the official line was that the country at the centre of the Commonwealth would take anyone willing and able to work, regardless of colour. This wasn’t how it played out. Industrial giants like Ford, Vickers, Napiers and Tate and Lyle, in large part supported by the trade unions, implemented a colour bar.³⁵ But at the end of the 1940s, through the European Volunteer Workers (EVW) scheme, the government brought in Eastern Europeans, and though they were met with hostility, not least from some trade unions, they were thought to be racially suitable in a way that Jewish people, who were intentionally excluded, weren’t.³⁶ An independent research institute declared in a 1948 population report ‘the absorption of large numbers of non-white immigrants would be extremely difficult.’³⁷ Empire might have been caving in on itself, but its organising principles – race and its hierarchy of humanity – stubbornly persisted.

But as Windrush showed, people of colour who lived in colonies and former colonies decided to make the journey to the metropole anyway – and although most other Britons were not and might still not be aware, these new arrivals to UK shores came as citizens, not migrants. Some made the choice to take a chance and move with no definite job waiting for them; others came as part of certain company’s recruitment drives, like the kind that existed in the NHS.³⁸

Prior to the war, nurses and hospital workers from the Caribbean were recruited to work in the health service, and this policy continued when the NHS was established in 1948. Even Enoch Powell – Tory health minister from 1960 until 1963, who would become notorious for his virulently racist views – appealed to doctors in India and Pakistan to come to the UK as part of a plan to expand the NHS.

The catch was, they weren’t necessarily expected to stay long. ‘They thought we would come in, run the buses … do the nursing and all the other things that we did and we would go home at night,’ former nurse Maria Layne-Springer, who came from Barbados, remembered. ‘And somehow miraculously wherever we came from we would fly back in the following morning to continue our shifts … How we lived in the interim was of no concern to them.’