How the Home Office does history: empire, time and the making of Britain's mass deportation regime
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Amis, Bobby Phe. 2024. How the Home Office does history: empire, time and the making of Britain's mass deportation regime. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (How the Home Office does history: empire, time and the making of Britain's mass deportation regime)
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Abstract or Description
Since the Immigration Act of 1971, Britain’s Home Secretary has had executive administrative powers to detain and deport non-citizens from the United Kingdom. These powers are the statutory foundation of Britain’s contemporary mass deportation regime. This thesis maps the connected histories through which this regime has emerged. It examines how deportation, criminalisation, and citizenship functioned in British colonial governance, and explores how colonial forms of deportation informed Home Office policies in the long twentieth century: both before, during, and after decolonisation.
The thesis argues that it is useful to understand the Home Office as 'doing history.' In other words, the Home Office can be understood as an agent that imagines and acts upon normative views as to how history should progress, how change should be managed, how events should be remembered, and how the past should be recorded and consulted. The Home Office does history in two overlapping ways. First, it entrenches the patriality clause at the heart of the 1971 Immigration Act not only in its immigration control work but also in wider approaches to managing, measuring and pacing change over time. Secondly, the Home Office does history through an expanding labyrinth of documentation regimes that embed racist burdens of proof, notions of criminality, and legal categories – forged during empire – into present-day systems of criminalisation and migration control.
The thesis contextualises the administrative violence meted out by the contemporary Home Office’s so-called broken system with archival research into the making of bureaucratic power, social facts about race, and legal privilege in a range of colonial mobility regimes. Through these explorations, this thesis offers a new lens with which to view histories of deportation, foregrounding how historical narratives, archival processes and the everyday politics of time get folded into the banal routines of administrative state power.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
deportation; empire; Home Office; border regime; abolition; British history; migration |
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| Date: |
2024 |
| Item ID: |
37218 |
| Date Deposited: |
04 Jul 2024 16:27 |
| Last Modified: |
04 Jul 2024 16:33 |
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URI: |
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