Refugees and Cultural Transfer to Britain by Stefan Manz Panikos Panayi

Author:Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi [Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138945593
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

The British, Persecuted Foreigners and the Emergence of the Refugee Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Caroline Emily Shaw

Department of History, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, USA

For most of the nineteenth century, there were no barriers to immigration into Britain, and hence little need for the British to distinguish one foreigner from another. Despite this fact, philanthropists, officials and public commentators identified some foreigners as ‘refugees’, a designation that called for national sympathy. How and why did this category emerge? What were its inclusions and exclusions? This essay traces the expansion of the refugee category in the context of British commitments to European liberals and foreign slaves in the second quarter of the century. It argues that, by the 1840s, would-be refugees and their British supporters established a standard narrative from which audiences were meant to recognise particular foreigners as refugees and respond accordingly.

This study asks simply: what made refugees a distinct category of foreigners among so many other foreigners in Great Britain? And, given that refuge to this particular type of individual would be considered a national-cum-moral responsibility by the close of the nineteenth century, what was the relationship between foreign refugees and British national identity? There were no laws that distinguished one foreigner from the next. Liberal border policies made distinction seemingly unnecessary. Then why – and how – did foreign refugees become a reputedly British concern?

In the pages that follow, I argue that the development of a distinct refugee category was the product of a mutual process in which certain foreigners and their British supporters established a narrative of persecution and need. In this narrative, the refugee was understood to be a heroic individual who, despite great valour, had been forced to flee his or her homeland. The story about a refugee’s persecution was also a narrative of responsibility. The British, I argue, came to recognise their part in the relief of these persecuted foreigners because they saw in the cause of persecution thoroughly un-British forms of governance.

There would be no more classic rationale for recognition of refugees as such than that which tapped into liberal Britain’s global commitments forged in the wake of the Congress of Vienna. In the event, the British public seemed to incur a dual responsibility to the trafficked slaves of foreign nations, on the one hand, and to European liberals who fought for national sovereignty and liberal constitutions, on the other. As this essay will demonstrate, the refugee could be European or African, so long as the persecuted exemplified British ideals. This mutually constitutive narrative would become standardised by the mid-nineteenth century. It taught British audiences who refugees were and how to treat them, providing a template for the discriminating treatment of subsequent influxes of foreigners. Its importance would be recognised from the political fringes to the heights of imperial governance.

The contribution is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the context out of which an expanded refugee category emerged, and why the British would have been interested in these foreigners’ affairs. The second

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