Foreword

Summary

It should go without saying that it is always a dangerous predictions game to label something a “classic” upon its first publication. This is a judgement for people to make in the future, once they have seen the lasting impact that the book has made. I say all this now because I want to escape the charge of being wise after the event when classic status is subsequently ascribed to Robbie Shilliam’s Race and the Undeserving Poor. Hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing, but its benefits are unnecessary to spot the potential legacies that this book might leave. They will, I am sure, be as clearly evident in other readers’ first encounter with Shilliam’s text as they were in mine.

The text itself rockets along at action-packed pace. This makes Race and the Undeserving Poor that academic rarity, because it has all the feel of a genuine page-turner. Yet the rush to find out what happens next only ever occupies part of the mind. The other part becomes increasingly fixated on unsettling questions that the reading experience throws up. The first one I kept coming back to as I made my way through the chapters was “why did I not know this before now?” The second elicited much more personal emotions. It felt as though I was being taken on a journey through my family’s past and that I was being prompted to join the dots where my family’s oral history draws a frustrating blank. That journey is from a racialized “other” to working-class “respectability” in what is now the archetypal Brexit county of small-town Lincolnshire. The second uncomfortable question accompanying my reading was therefore “why did I not know this about me before now?”

There might be a fairly straightforward answer to the first of these two questions. It is well documented that historians have generally been very slow to situate race at the heart of analyses of the British national past. It is as if a national society had formed – imperfectly and incompletely as all such processes necessarily are – that nevertheless asserts unproblematically an essential whiteness as its template.