Chapter 22 - Britain as the ‘Asylum of Nations’

Summary

This chapter traces the rise and decline of the conviction that Britain was a nation uniquely hospitable to refugees and especially proud of its longstanding traditions of asylum. In fact, social attitudes and state policies towards migrants fluctuated dramatically throughout the modern era, triggered by a variety of controversial or destabilizing events ranging from dynastic royal marriages to continental revolutions and international conflicts. By 1905 Britain had passed its first general immigration control act, providing a framework governing who could be permitted to enter the country and under what conditions, regulations that have continued to be refined and extended to this day. Yet this legislation also took up issues about statehood and citizenship that can be traced back to the French Revolution in 1789 and which reverberated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, issues that have been represented and explored in a wide range of literary and cultural genres by writers and artists including Charlotte Smith, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Agatha Christie, and Iris Murdoch. By 1960 a new post-war recognition of the scale of what was increasingly recognized as a fully global migration crisis had changed these insular local debates forever.