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Colonized by Humanity
Colonized by Humanity
Caribbean London and the Politics of
Integration at the End of Empire
R O B WAT E R S
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Rob Waters 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For V.
In order to rebuke his aunt, he may marry my niece. I have not only
been colonised by his humanity, I have been situated most firmly
within the family circle. And everyone knows that families should
not quarrel among themselves. It would be silly of me to raise the
colour predicament with any member of the family, for we all know
that what is wrong is the simple business of the ‘chip’; and we all also
know that we, on the inside, are really different from those, meaning
black and white—who are on the outside. For it must not be forgotten
that white people also have shoulders that are getting more and more
‘chipped’ every day. We are all in the same sea. The tides are treacher-
ous; but our family boat is now seen as a special boat.
GEORGE LAMMING, THE PLEASURES OF EXILE (1960)
Anxious to find some excuse to explain away the daily pin-pricking,

I thought my encounters were limited only to the bad English. There
were good ones. Decent English people. But where were they? I couldn’t
find them, but that they existed I had no doubt. There were journalists,
professional people who sat relaxed and self-assured in their living
rooms with white friends and after a cold and dispassionate analysis
of the situation (a measure of their privilege), condemned in the
strongest possible terms English bigotry and prejudice. And if I hap-
pened to be there – ‘disgraceful’. They said in their sitting rooms,
lighting up their pipes. ‘It’s most outrageous that in a land that professes
to be the cradle of justice and liberty . . . but come on, Ken, your glass
is empty . . .’. My journalist friend would even make a note in his
pocket diary that he had to say something about prejudice in his
newspaper diary at the end of the week—a concession to my presence.
But life went on just the same when I left the gathering, when I was
no longer under the umbrella of (‘disgraceful’, ‘outrageous’) toler-
ant people.
‘KEN, AN INDIAN FROM TRINIDAD’, IN DONALD HINDS,
JOURNEY TO AN ILLUSION (1966)
Come on, now, we must learn to love our neighbours as ourselves. Learn
to be tolerant (good word that! A damn’ good British-made word!).
ANDREW SALKEY, ESCAPE TO AN AUTUMN
PAVEMENT (1960)
Acknowledgements
This book was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust. In
2017 I was fortunate to be awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
It allowed me both to finish my first book, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985,
and to get started on this one. But for this current book I did, I fear, travel some
distance from what I had initially promised to the good people at the Leverhulme
Trust. I was funded to write a study of the development of a black political culture
in London between the time of the Notting Hill white riots and the Black People’s
Day of Action. My wager was that I could reconstruct the development of a dis-
tinctive sense of particular London neighbourhoods as ‘black spaces’ in the
period after the Notting Hill riots. I wanted to demonstrate that the development
of this lived idea of a black neighbourhood had taken shape through far more
than the offices and activities of black activists alone—such that an account of it
must include all manner of phenomena in the nascent black civil society forged in
these years. Much of my initial research for that project ended up finding a home
in Thinking Black, but other questions pressed in on me, questions which could
not be persuaded into the course I had initially set out for myself.
I became fascinated by a group of interracial societies formed in the 1950s,
which had been furiously busy trying to carve out spaces of Caribbean sociability
in the metropolis and to ease the position of black Londoners facing—as it was
called at the time—the ‘colour bar’. Initially, three groups grabbed my attention:
the St John’s Inter-Racial Social and Cultural Club, established in Brixton by the
Jamaican Courtney Laws; the Brockley International Friendship Association,
founded by three West Indians living in South East London; and the West Indian
Standing Conference, an umbrella organization that arose in the late 1950s seek-
ing to provide a wider forum for outfits like the St John’s and Brockley clubs.
These were groups that, initially, seemed to fit the bill for exactly what I hoped to
investigate: groups concerned, simultaneously, with anti-racism and with black
sociability, seeking to reimagine the metropolis in ways that could make black life
there a normal and inevitable part of the scene. And yet, there was something in
the dynamics of their operation that also pulled in a different direction. They were
predominantly middle-class led operations and they saw their social mission as
helping out their poorer, usually darker neighbours. Their attitude towards these
neighbours swung between identification and repudiation: sometimes defending
their rights and embracing the revivified city culture that they appeared to bring
into being, sometimes chastising them and urging them to refine themselves—to
do away, often, with what were cast as the excesses of their own blackness.
x Acknowledgements
Once I became interested in these social workers and activists, I began to see
like-minded people everywhere in the city—a vast network of clubs and societies,
official and unofficial, who busied themselves in the politics of race in the post-
war metropolis. They constituted, as I describe in this book, the city’s integration
infrastructure. This multiracial formation grew continuously in the two decades
after the end of the Second World War, before new policies and legislation from
Westminster began, slowly, to fold its activities into the emerging field of a
government-funded, and more closely directed, race relations ‘industry’ (as it was
so often, pejoratively, called). Integration was a formation that interested me pre-
cisely for the difficulty that it posed for our account of the development of Britain’s
race politics. These integrationists, black and white, were not the forerunners of
anti-racist or black liberation movements like those that I had traced in Thinking
Black. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, they held some links—
often direct—to that later political moment. Their uneasiness around blackness,
however, placed them at other points closer to exactly what anti-racists and black
liberationists railed against: the anti-immigrationists and racists, many of whom
would eventually find a political home in Powellism. How, I wondered, are we to
understand these ambivalent figures, who pushed to realize a new, multiracial,
integrated city but seemed, so often, to fear or to wish to reform away those same
black Londoners whom they sought to defend? Where they have been acknow
ledged, they have often been dismissed as assimilationists, but this seems too
poor a term to cover the complexity of their lives and their mission. Moreover, as
I came to realize, while the numbers formally committing themselves to the busi-
ness of integration were interesting enough, they represented only the tip of the
iceberg: the visible outposts of a far larger culture of racial liberalism that held
sway in Britain in these years. It was not, I repeat, a force of anti-racism, or not in
the way that this term is conventionally used today. But it was a culture that set
store by a commitment to values that were described, at the time, as interracial-
ism, multiracialism, or, perhaps with greater circumspection, tolerance. This
book attempts to give an account of the culture and politics of integration forged
in these years, where it came from, and the legacy that it left.
As with any work of this length, completed over several years and at various
different institutional homes, I have accrued many debts along the way. I began it
at the Department of History at the University of Sussex and continued it while
based at the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. I finish it,
now, at my new home in the School of History at Queen Mary University of
London. Each has provided me with good company: great colleagues, great stu-
dents, invigorating conversations. My particular thanks go to those many who
have gone out of their way, at these various places, to support my work, or to
ask searching questions that have pushed me in new directions: Anne-Marie
Angelo, Hester Barron, Gurminder Bhambra, Ben Bland, Michell Chresfield,
Joanna Cohen, Tom Adam Davies, Sarah Dunstan, Martin Evans, David Geiringer,
Acknowledgements xi
Rachael Gilmour, Rhodri Haywood, Matthew Hilton, Tim Hitchcock, Matt

Houlbrook, Simon Jackson, Leslie James, Jill Kirby, Claire Langhamer, JoAnn
McGregor, Melissa Milewski, Chris Moores, Mo Moulton, Alastair Owens, Hana
Qugana, Sadiah Qureshi, Lucy Robinson, Michael Romyn, Miri Rubin, Robert
Saunders, Gavin Schaffer, Bill Schwarz, Amanda Sciampacone, Robbie Shilliam,
Gareth Stedman Jones, Barbara Taylor, Zoë Thomas, Dan Todman, Frank
Uekotter, Nadia Valman, Kim Wagner, Chloe Ward, and, last but by no means
least, Clive Webb. Thanks also to those who have, in other ways, kept me com-
pany and fed my ideas over the years: the ‘London Reading Group’ (Shahmina
Akhtar, Hannah Elias, Sundeep Lidher, and Anna Maguire); the ‘Marking Race’
group (Nicole Jackson, Marc Matera, Radhika Natarajan, Kennetta Hammond
Perry, and Camilla Schofield); Christienna Fryar; Hannah Ishmael; Florence
Sutcliffe-Braithwaite; Philip Murphy, Juanita Cox, and Eve Hayes de Kalaf; and
my comrades at the Raphael Samuel History Centre, the George Padmore
Institute, and the Institute of Historical Research’s Black British History seminar.
The course of the preceding paragraph may imply that my debts are all to pro-
fessional academic historians and humanities scholars, but of course it is not so.
This book owes an immeasurable debt to the archivists and librarians at the
Black Cultural Archives, the British Film Institute, the British Library, Hackney
Archives, the Institute of Race Relations, Islington Local History Centre,
Lambeth Archives, Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre, the London
Metropolitan Archives, The National Archives, Queen Mary University of
London, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Tower Hamlets Local
History Library and Archives, and the University of Warwick. It was at Tower
Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, just around the corner from my
current place of work, that I first came across Edith Ramsay, whose life was to
inspire a significant portion of my arguments here. My deep thanks to the staff at
Tower Hamlets, not only for directing me through Ramsay’s archive but also for
inviting me to speak on my findings there. Others have been equally generous in
offering me an audience beyond the academy, from which I have learned so
much: my thanks to Tony Warner of Black History Walks, to Paula Royal of
Lambeth Council, to the George Padmore Institute, and to all at What’s
Happening Now in Black British History. Thanks, also, to Claudette Parry Laws,
with whom I have had many illuminating conversations about Courtney Laws and
post-war Brixton. At Oxford University Press, Cathryn Steele, Stephanie Ireland,
Matthew Cotton, and Imogene Haslam have each helped me through the editorial
and production process with patience and enthusiasm; if my endless queries and
anxieties have plagued them, they have had the kindness not to let it show.
I have delivered papers from this project at several seminars and conferences.
For hosting me, I want to thank Aaron Andrews, Ruth Craggs, Tom Hulme, Ben
Jackson, Peter Jones, Alistair Kefford, Diarmaid Kelliher, Jon Lawrence, Anna
Maguire, Helen McCarthy, Naomi Oppenheim, Kerry Pimblott, Nathan Richards,
xii Acknowledgements
and Daniel Warner. Some (the foolhardy) even indulged me so far as reading
drafts of the manuscript, and for their careful attention and patient suggestions
I am much indebted. Thank you to Michael Collins, Hannah Elias, Sundeep
Lidher, Anna Maguire, Camilla Schofield, and Bill Schwarz. Susan D. Pennybacker,
as well as being a meticulous reader and a great source of conversation and, indeed,
critique on the ideas raised in this book, also did me the honour of sharing a
couple of the draft chapters with students in the graduate Department of History
seminar 810 ‘Colonial Encounters’ in spring 2021 at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. For their generous engagement, my thanks go to LaRisa
Anderson, Nicole Harry, Madeleine McGrady, Tess Megginson, Samir Sefiane,
Quinn Shepherd, Julia Short, Pasuth Thothaveesansuk, and Arttu Uuranmaeki.
It goes without saying that none of these generous souls should be held respon
sible for any errors or bad judgements in the final manuscript. That is a cross
that I must bear alone.
Finally, my thanks to my family and friends, particularly to Fay, and to my son,
Vinnie, to whom the book is dedicated.
* * *
Images and epigraphs are reproduced with the kind permission of their copyright
holders. For permission to use extracts from E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, with Love
and Paid Servant, I thank Open Road Media. My thanks to Duke University Press
for permission to use an extract from David Scott’s ‘The Sovereignty of the
Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming’, Small Axe 6. 2 (2002), 72–200.
Thanks to Peepal Tree Press for permission to use an extract from Andrew
Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement. Thanks to Punch Cartoon Library/
Topfoto for permission to use an extract from Elspeth Huxley’s ‘Settlers in Britain:
Some Conclusions’, Punch, 1 April 1964. Thanks to Pluto Press for permission to
use extracts from George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile. Thanks to Aggrey
Burke for permission to reproduce Syd Burke’s photograph of Brixton Market.
Thanks to Howard Grey for permission to reproduce his photographs of Waterloo
station. Thanks to the Evening Standard for permission to reproduce Victor
Weisz’s cartoon ‘Notting Hill’, Evening Standard, 19 May 1959. Thanks to the
Institute of Race Relations for permission to use an extract from their newsletter
of November 1962. Thanks to Getty Images for permission to reproduce the
photograph of Michael de Freitas in Hyde Park.
Contents
List of acronyms and initialisms xv

Introduction1
1. Precarious lives 30
2. The colour bar 58
3. Bad citizens 81
4. Good citizens 107
5. Friends 138
6. Uplifters 171
7. Subalterns 203
8. Erotics 237
Bibliography 271
Index 291
List of acronyms and initialisms
BCWS British Caribbean Welfare Service

BIFA Brockley International Friendship Association
CAB Citizens Advice Bureau
CLP Constituency Labour Party
CPPA Coloured People’s Progressive Association
EWFC East and West Friendship Council
HCWCC Hackney Council for the Welfare of Coloured Citizens
IAC Immigrants Advisory Committee (formerly the West Indian Advisory
Committee)
IFL International Friendship League
KRICC Kensington Racial Integration Co-ordinating Committee
LCC London County Council
LCSS London Council of Social Service
LLP London Labour Party
MCPHA Metropolitan Coloured People’s Housing Association
MSD Migrant Services Division
NCCI National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants
NHHT Notting Hill Housing Trust
WIAC West Indian Advisory Committee
WIFC Willesden International Friendship Council (formerly the Willesden International
Friendship Committee)
WISC West Indian Standing Conference (formerly the Standing Conference of
Organisations Concerned with West Indians in Britain, and formerly to that
the London Leaders Standing Conference)
Introduction
We arrived, I think it was Waterloo or Victoria, I’ve forgotten what

station it was, and in those days there were always English crusaders
of one kind or another looking for such people.
GEORGE LAMMING1
In the summer of 1962, Howard Grey, a young Englishman who, like his father
before him, sought to pursue a career in photography, went to Waterloo station to
capture on film the arrival of a boat-train bringing new migrants to London from
the West Indies.2 Boat- trains, which brought migrants from the ports of
Southampton, Folkestone, and Portsmouth to two of London’s busiest railway
terminals at Victoria and Waterloo, were by this time a well-established spectacle
in the public drama of West Indian migration to the city. At the time that Grey
visited Waterloo, the impending passage of the first Commonwealth Immigrants
Act meant that the flow of migration, which had slowed following the horrors of
the white riots in 1958, was rising again as many migrants, often wives and chil-
dren sent for by their husbands and fathers, sought to arrive before the legislation
came into force.
Grey shot just one roll of film, a beautiful document that depicts these new
migrants dressed in their Sunday best, ‘determined to make a mark, make a
favourable impression’.3 They wrestle with overstuffed trunks. They look out, con-
fident and apprehensive at the same time, surveying the city they have just landed
in but which they have known, imaginatively, since childhood. Some men lounge
against the walls, waiting; mothers nurse their children on the wooden benches of
the station forecourt. These are scenes we are habituated to—scenes that repeat
across the photographic record of the ‘Windrush’ years of migration. Two of Grey’s
photographs, however, show us the moment of arrival from another angle, with
the journalists, video cameras, and photographers foregrounded. In one, as the
boat-train pulls into a platform on which a small West Indian reception party waits,
a cameraman begins shooting as two other journalists ready themselves (Fig. 1). In
the other, the same three men move in on the disembarking migrants (Fig. 2).
1 David Scott, ‘The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming’, Small
Axe, 6. 2 (2002), 72–200, at 104.
2 ‘Howard Grey’, http://autographabp-iadl.co.uk/artists/howard-grey, accessed 28 October 2019.
3 Stuart Hall, ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement’ (1984), in Ben Highmore,
ed., The Everyday Life Reader (London, 2002), 251–61, at 254.
Colonized by Humanity: Caribbean London and the Politics of Integration at the End of Empire. Rob Waters,
Oxford University Press. © Rob Waters 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198879831.003.0001
2 Colonized by Humanity
Fig. 1. ‘West Indian Arrivals’. © Howard Grey, 1962.
Grey’s photographs remind us of the other side of the postcolonial encounter

to that which has been consolidated in the photographic archive. As the ships and
trains of migration rolled in, the historian Bill Schwarz reminds us, the cameras
were trained upon them. We have become so used to watching the disembark
ations that it is easy to forget that, for the most part, we lack shots like Grey’s, in
which we might see, through the eyes of the emigrants, ‘the huddles of journalists
and onlookers, police and social workers, white faces all’.4 The reverse shots
remind us that, to the same degree that the migrants awaited the city, the city
awaited the migrants.
Who, and what, greeted the arrivals? West Indian migrants disembarking from
the boat-trains at London’s railway terminals could be sure of a reception party.
Alongside family, friends, and the curious were journalists from the local papers,
4 Bill Schwarz, ‘Crossing the Seas’, in Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain
(Manchester, 2003), 1–30, at 1.
Introduction 3
Fig. 2. ‘West Indian Arrivals’. © Howard Grey, 1962.
photographers, news anchors, police officers, and not uncommonly representatives

of various anti-immigration and fascist groups.5 There were also the representatives
of organizations tasking themselves with these migrants’ welfare. Some of these
white faces were state-employed, representatives from the Ministry of Labour and
the London County Council. But migrants might as likely expect to be greeted by
a charitable social worker. A memorable scene from the 1956 BBC drama A Man
from the Sun depicts a woman from the Church Army swooping in on lost
migrants at Waterloo station to protect them from pimps and direct them to
sanctuary. The Salvation Army were also present, as were the Women’s Voluntary
Service, the Red Cross, the East and West Friendship Council, the British Council,
and more besides.6 These officials and semi-officials were armed with pamphlets
introducing migrants to the local infrastructure and with lists of welfare service
contacts and explanations of the new institutions of the welfare state. They were,
we might recognize, a social manifestation of the border itself, and one that many
of the migrants may have encountered also at their ports of embarkation in the
5 ‘At 10.30 p.m. 1.9.1960’, as one Metropolitan Police report records, ‘30 members of the British
National Party demonstrated at Waterloo Station on the arrival of 1,200 West Indian immigrants, by
shouting “Keep Britain White” and displaying posters.’ Document 27A, MEPO 2/9854, The National
Archives (TNA).
6 See Ivo de Souza, ‘Arrival’, in S. K. Ruck, ed., The West Indian Comes to England (London, 1960),
51–62; A Man from the Sun (BBC, 8 November 1956); E. R. Braithwaite, Paid Servant (London,
1962), 155.
Caribbean.7 Alongside the white faces were black ones, also offering help. Many
were there in an unofficial capacity. In Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners
(1956), the protagonist Moses Aloetta makes a habit of travelling to Waterloo to
see the boat-train arrive, and before he realizes it he has become ‘like a welfare
officer’ taking new arrivals ‘around by houses he know it would be all right to go
to’.8 Others took a more systematic approach, manning the station concourses to
provide migrants with information on the social organizations of the areas to which
they were headed.9 Black Londoners were also present in official roles, working for
the Colonial Office and the various Commonwealth High Commissions.
The white faces, the black faces, greeting the arriving migrants: these were
representatives of the city’s integration infrastructure, a network of voluntary
associations and welfare bodies that stretched from overseas and interracial clubs
to international friendship societies, racial brotherhood and unity associations,
harmony and goodwill clubs, local council units, East and West Friendship
Councils, Quaker clubs, Methodist clubs, socialist fellowships, Citizens Advice
Bureaux, settlements, and Councils for Social Service. A report in the Scotsman in
1962 estimated that between eighty and a hundred such organizations existed
across the country as a whole, but this was a conservative estimate. In London,
where they were concentrated, there were almost a hundred organizations even
by 1959.10 By 1964, a year before a new Immigration from the Commonwealth
White Paper brought in provisions for funding community relations work that
would substantially change the level and kind of activity being undertaken,
organizations ran to well over a hundred.11 Cumulatively, these organizations
represent a significant but largely overlooked network of social welfare and
7 ‘Bordering’ is described by Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss, and Kathryn Cassidy as the pro-
cesses that ‘construct, reproduce, and contest borders [to] determine individual and collective entitle-
ments and duties as well as social cohesion and solidarity . . . . Processes of bordering always
differentiate between “us” and “them”, those who are in and those who are out, those who are allowed
to cross the borders and those who are not’ (Bordering (Cambridge, 2019), 3, 7). Borders have usually
been studied as sites of repression, places where people are made ‘illegal’ and made vulnerable to vari-
ous forms of state sanction and violence. But border-making practices that appear with a benign face
deserve our scrutiny too. The reception parties at London’s railway terminals were there to mark the
arrival of what they perceived as problematic new citizens and to intervene in those citizens’ lives—
the very presence of the reception party made it clear that, the shared citizenship status of these
migrants notwithstanding, this was a border crossing. It is worth reminding ourselves, always, which
migrations and movements remain unproblematic, devoid of surveillance and interventions, and
which attract attention and intervention.
8 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London, 2006 [1956]), 3–4.
9 Standing Conference of Organisations Concerned with West Indians in Britain, ‘Agenda
for Conference to Be Held at 2.30 p.m. on Sunday, 5 March, at 26 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W.1.’,
ACC/1888/117, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA).
10 ‘A Fair Deal for Immigrants’, Scotsman, 21 August 1962, 8. Cf London Council of Social Service,
‘Welfare of West Indians in London: List of Organisations Active in the Field of Race Relations in
London’, September 1959, ACC/1888/119, LMA.
11 London Council of Social Service, ‘Welfare of West Indians in London: List of Organisations
Active in the Field of Race Relations in London’, July 1964, ACC/1888/036, LMA.
Introduction 5
associational culture that set itself to the task of integrating New Commonwealth
migrants as they arrived in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s.
This book is about these workers for integration. It follows the lives and activ
ities of the integrationists, white and black, who worked to build a harmonious
multicultural society in London in the two decades before the first Race Relations
Act and the state-sponsored race relations infrastructure that it inaugurated.
These were decisive decades in the making of postcolonial Britain. The historical
realities of colonialism had not yet come to an end, but their end had become
historically imaginable.12 What Erik Linstrum has termed the ‘project of disen-
tanglement’ from empire was well underway, even as the question of what came
after remained up for grabs.13 The political stakes, for many, were as high in the
metropole as in the colonial territories, although this might have been recognized
more readily by black and brown colonial migrants than by their white neighbours.14
Amid the turmoil and hope of these years, the integration project certainly appears
conservative and timid. It shared the vocabulary of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘third
revolution’ in the United States,15 but while King and his contemporaries voiced the
demand for integration in terms of ‘a burning need for justice’, seeking to transform
the citizenship rights and social horizons of black America and to end the reign of
white supremacy and white terror, in Britain ‘integration’ was used to describe more
modest ambitions: ‘harmony’, ‘good will’, an end to the ‘colour bar’, and the beginning
of ‘friendship’. Indeed, it was frequently cast as the necessary commitment needed to
avoid the social upheaval witnessed in the United States of America.
To see the integration project as part of Britain’s process of becoming postcolo-
nial, however, draws out a neglected but significant dimension of that story. If we
are asking how integration as a social fact happened in post-war Britain, it was
certainly the social movements that ultimately decided the shape of Britain’s
‘multicultural drift’—a term coined, indeed, as an indictment of the failure of the
British state to develop a coherent and strong vision of a multicultural future,
which left the gains of multiculturalism in Britain to be decided elsewhere.16
12 Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, vol. 2: The Caribbean Comes to England (Oxford, forthcoming).
13 Erik Linstrum in Erik Linstrum, Stuart Ward, Vanessa Ogle, Saima Nasar, and Priyamvada Gopal,
‘Decolonizing Britain: An Exchange’, Twentieth Century British History, 33. 2 (2022), 274–303, at 291.
14 See Kennetta Hammond Perry, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the
Politics of Race (Oxford, 2015). The politics of the end of empire could be all-encompassing in the
metropole. ‘The world of the young Commonwealth immigrant of the early fifties was full of political
talk’, wrote Beryl Gilroy. ‘People slept, dreamt and lived politics. The federation of the Rhodesias, the
independence of the Gold Coast, and British exploitation of the Colonies were burned into our
throats. We were all going to put this world to rights in five or six moves.’ These battles left their mark
on the white English too: ‘Long after the Mau-Mau troubles had died down, the memory still some-
how lingered on in deepest suburbia . . . and a black face was enough to resurrect them’ (Black Teacher
(London, 1976), 103, 121).
15 Martin Luther King, Jr, Why We Can’t Wait (New York, 2000 [1963]), 2.
16 See Runnymede Trust, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the
Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (London, 2000). The term came from Stuart Hall. See his further elab
orations in ‘From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence’, History Workshop Journal, 48 (1999), 187–97; and
Essential Essays, vol. 2, ed. David Morley (Durham, 2019), 290.
But the projects for integration that I chart in this book, developed in the 1950s
and early 1960s, nonetheless enjoyed the support of the state and became incorp
orated into official state policy. It was in large part because integrationism in its
British articulation offered a version of how the metropole could peacefully trans-
form itself into a postcolonial polity that other, more radical challenges of the
postcolonial could be held off: this was integration as a form of Gramscian pas-
sive revolution. And yet, the significance of integrationism was more than simply
its function, in its formal modes, as an attempt to avoid social conflict or to stave
off bigger political transformations. In this book I seek to set out how integration
operated as a political rationality, a form of racial liberalism, which both sought
to create a new kind of citizen—the integrating citizen, imagined as the ideal
subject of this passive revolution—and, in producing that ideal citizen-type,
re-enacted colonial, racialized distinctions between the civilized and the savage,
the modern and the native. In this form, indeed, integrationism as a racialized
rationality of rule was entrenched across the social formation as a whole, operating
far beyond the formal cultures and politics of the integration project itself and
repeated by black and white alike.
From racism to race
Attending to the history of the development of liberal integrationism in Britain,

Colonized by Humanity offers an important counterpoint to the histories of this
era that have emphasized the development of racist and anti-immigration polit
ics. And yet, as my earlier comments must suggest, this book does not offer a
salve for our historical conscience. Rather, as the title, drawing on an essay by the
Barbadian writer George Lamming, indicates, this book identifies the paradox
of that liberal vision of the integrationists, which simultaneously worked by an
appeal to the virtues of common humanity and presented its vision of humanity
in colonial mode: people of colour were to be welcomed into humanity, civilized
for integration.17
To return to this history of integrationism I perhaps lay myself open to the
accusation of indulging what Kennetta Hammond Perry has called the ‘mystique
of British anti-racism’, a phrase Perry uses to explain the endurance of ideas of
Britain as a ‘tolerant, liberal, morally virtuous anti-racist nation’ that stand in the
way of a reckoning with how race and racism operate in Britain. Black activists
had their work cut out dismantling this mystique and necessarily fought their
17 The section of Lamming’s essay from which this phrase is drawn serves as one of the book’s
e pigraphs. In that essay (‘A Way of Seeing’, in George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London, 2005
[1960]), 56–85 ), Lamming evaluates the terms on which he is invited into ‘civilized’ society by English
integrationists. The essay, and Lamming himself, are discussed in greater detail in the final section of
Chapter 3.
Introduction 7
battles ‘in a context where the world imagined that anti-Black racism didn’t
exist’.18 However, pointing to the limits or contraventions of Britain’s self-
proclaimed liberalism risks leaving that liberalism itself unexamined. We have, as
I see it, a number of different options. Firstly, as Perry does, we could question
how ‘liberal’ the British state or British society truly were or are.19 There is cer-
tainly a case to make that, when we turn to questions of race, it is the curtailment
of freedom that dominates, whether in histories of policing, imprisonment,
internment, immigration restriction, deportation, surveillance, or the overturn-
ing of civil liberties. Historians unmasking the ‘illiberal’ state concealed behind
the veneer of liberal democracy have pointed, equally, to the illiberalism of its
populace: the ‘race riots’, the hostilities, and the discriminations which secured
their representatives at the heart of government. A second approach might attempt
to separate out the ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ elements. The historian Panikos Panayi has
urged this method. Noting that the history of ‘official and unofficial racism . . . only
points to one side of autochthonous reactions to migrant communities’, Panayi
insists that we equally recognize both the accommodation of different ethnicities
within the polity, for which he draws a line between Catholic emancipation and
the passage of the Race Relations Acts, and the development of ‘positive attitudes’,
‘tolerance’, ‘welcome’, and a harmonious, if uneven, multiculture.20 A third option
is to focus on how Britain’s liberal democratic structures have actually provided
18 The quotations are drawn from Reena N. Goldthree, ‘Black Britons and the Politics of Belonging:
An Interview with Kennetta Hammond Perry’, Journal of Pan African Studies, 9 (2016), 25–34, at 30.
More widely, see Perry, London.
19 Colin Holmes in 1985 defined the task of the historian of race and immigration in Britain as
confronting what he termed the ‘myth of fairness’. See Colin Holmes, ‘The Myth of Fairness: Racial
Violence in Britain 1911–19’, History Today, 35 (1985), 41–5; Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island:
Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Basingstoke, 1988); Colin Holmes, A Tolerant Country?
Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London, 1991). Tony Kushner credits Holmes as the
historian who ‘demolished the idea that racism is somehow “unEnglish” ’. See Kushner, ‘Colin Holmes
and the Development of Migrant and Anti-Migrant Historiography’, in Jennifer Craig-Norton,
Christhard Hoffmann, and Tony Kushner, eds, Migrant Britain: Histories and Historiographies. Essays
in Honour of Colin Holmes (London, 2018), 22–32, at 26. This, as Kushner’s colleague Ken Lunn notes,
is a founding premise of what is referred to as the ‘Sheffield School’. See Lunn, ‘Uncovering Traditions
of Intolerance: The Early Years of Immigrants and Minorities and the “Sheffield School” ’, in Craig-
Norton et al, eds, Migrant Britain, 11–21. See also Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn, eds, Traditions of
Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester, 1989).
20 Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism (New York, 2014),
quotations at 242, 274, 280. Panayi coins the term ‘multicultural racism’ (318) to describe this ‘contra-
diction’ between the liberalism and illiberalism he sees defining British race and immigration politics.
David Feldman has similarly turned to the history of multiculturalism in Britain to propose that the
story of racialization and racism by which the history of race and immigration in Britain is told by
historians like Paul Gilroy, Wendy Webster, and Bill Schwarz ‘is less wrong than it is incomplete’
because it fails to take ‘into account a history of pluralism’. See Feldman, ‘Why the English Like
Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History’, in David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds, Structures
and Transformations in Modern British History: Essays for Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge, 2011),
281–302, at 285. Versions of this argument have pointed, also, to the ‘Janus face’ of British multicultur
alism, ‘progressive to insiders but regressive to outsiders’. See Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood,
‘Accentuating Multicultural Britishness: An Open or Closed Activity’, in Richard T. Ashcroft and Mark
Bevir, eds, Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth (Berkeley, 2019), 46–66, at 54.
the means for an illiberal politics to gain ground. One such argument sets the
liberal and the democratic ideals of the liberal democratic state against one
another (what happens, in other words, when racism is voted in?).21 Another
points to how immigration and racism ‘pitted liberal principles against each
other: freedom of contract versus anti-discrimination and freedom of speech ver-
sus the protection of minorities’.22
Reading the racial dynamics of liberal integrationism itself, this book instead
seeks to shift the frame through which we understand race as a feature of Britain’s
post-war liberal social democracy. As useful as each of the approaches discussed
in the previous paragraph are, they tend to leave intact a distinction between an
idealized liberalism and its debased or compromised reality, showing us a liberal-
ism defiled by its opposites. It is revealing how often, in many of the works cited
earlier, analysis advances by distinguishing the moments of ‘illiberalism’ by which
‘liberalism’ is undone, contradicted, or revealed to be hollow. Separating out the
liberals from the illiberals is an analytical approach with a long history, and
indeed it was a popular method for understanding race and racism in the 1950s
and 1960s, when attempts to quantify the incidence of liberalism and illiberalism
in the populace—one-third ‘extremely prejudiced’, one-third ‘mildly prejudiced’,
and one-third ‘tolerant’—were common.23 Though the attempts at quantification
have diminished, the tendency to speak of a population divided between the
‘positively inclined’ and the ‘hostile’ has continued into the historiography, while
governments and politicians are likewise divided up.24 And yet, to cast this
21 ‘In a liberal democratic state’, Panayi writes, ‘a groundswell of . . . hostility influences policy
akers, especially during the course of the twentieth century, when Britain has operated upon universal
m
suffrage.’ See Panayi, Immigrant History, 221. A similar argument informs Randall Hansen’s Citizenship
and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 2000). The political scientists Richard T. Ashcroft and
Mark Bevir pose the problem thus: ‘Multiculturalism . . . gives rise to dilemmas for polities such as the
UK, which are committed to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is based on political equality and
traditionally safeguards the rights of individuals and minority groups. Yet it is also committed to some
form of majority rule, and often uses the law to enforce common moral standards.’ See
‘Multiculturalism in Contemporary Britain: Policy, Law and Theory’, Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy, 21 (2018), 1–21, at 4. See also Holmes, Tolerant Country; Desmond
King, ‘Liberal and Illiberal Immigration Policy: A Comparison of Early British (1905) and US (1924)
Legislation’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1 (2000), 78–96; Randall Hansen and
Desmond King, ‘Illiberalism and the New Politics of Asylum: Liberalism’s Dark Side’, Political
Quarterly, 71 (2000), 396–403.
22 Chris Hilliard, ‘Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present, by James Vernon’, Twentieth Century British
History, 30 (2019), 272–5, at 274.
23 See, for example, Anthony Richmond, The Colour Problem: A Study of Racial Relations
(Harmondsworth, 1955), 240. Diana Spearman’s attempt to quantify ‘racialism’ in the letters sent to
Enoch Powell is a famous example (Spearman, ‘Enoch Powell’s Postbag’, New Society, 9 May 1968).
24 The most direct defence of this approach is found in Mica Nava, ‘Sometimes Antagonistic,
Sometimes Ardently Sympathetic: Contradictory Responses to Migrants in Postwar Britain’,
Ethnicities, 14 (2014), 458–80 (see also Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender Culture and the
Normalisation of Difference (Oxford, 2007); Tony Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation, ‘Race’
and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2004), 4). Assessments of government figures,
Whitehall officials, and policy programmes similarly often work by placing them within this liberal/
illiberal grid, for example in Hansen’s Citizenship and Immigration.
Introduction 9
distinction in terms of ‘liberalism’ versus ‘illiberalism’, or ‘tolerance’ versus

‘prejudice’, or the ‘positively inclined’ versus the ‘hostile’, may, as Ali Rattansi has
suggested, reveal both a certain ‘coyness’ to the debate and a ‘discursive deraciali-
zation’ by which a consideration of the central concerns—race and racism—is
either deferred or displaced.25 Deferred alongside this is the question of what the
relations of race and racism are to both illiberalism and liberalism. Precisely by
implying that illiberalism and racism might be in some measure synonymous, the
possibility of a racial or racist liberalism is not confronted. This is an analytical
position that I find unsustainable. Building instead on the work of critics who
have located racial thinking at the heart of the development of liberalism as a
political philosophy and culture, this book offers a reading of what post-war race
politics in its liberal guises might look like once we place the racial dynamics of
liberalism at the centre of our analysis.26
Colonized by Humanity reads integration as a process for making new kinds of
citizens. By attending to the productive ambitions of integration as a politics of
citizenship, I turn from a focus on the failed promises of or alternatives to the
liberal social-democratic settlement to look instead at how integration worked
as a racial dimension of liberal social democracy itself, operating as a civilizing
project that turned on self-reform. My concern here is less with rights withheld or
won than with the cultural- political rationalities within which integrating
25 Ali Rattansi, ‘The Uses of Racialization: Time-Spaces and Subject-Objects of the Raced Body’, in
Karim Murji and John Solomos, eds, Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2005),
271–301, at 277.
26 Race, Amitav Ghosh writes, has operated historically as ‘the ground upon which liberal thought
is built’ (Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe’,
Radical History Review, 83 (2002), 146–72, at 148). Uday Singh Metha offers an extensive analysis of
how race, racism, and racialization became integral to the historical development of liberalism as a
political philosophy in his Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago, 1999). See also David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, 2002); Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2008);
and, with the greatest nuance, Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire
(Princeton, 2016). The decisive role of racial thinking within the wider culture of liberalism in the
nineteenth century is most expertly demonstrated in Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Colony and
Metropole in the English Imagination (Cambridge, 2002). As Goldberg additionally argues, it is not by
accident that the coarticulation of race and liberalism have often escaped attention. This is the para-
dox of liberalism: ‘Race is irrelevant, but all is race’ (David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy
and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford, 1993), 6–7). It is surprising that the readiness with which many
historians of the British empire have understood the racial logics of liberalism, as a philosophy, a
political economy, and a culture, has made so little impact on how race and liberalism have been
studied in histories of the metropole itself. For the twentieth century such concerns have been centred
instead on analysis of late- and post-imperial policy in the areas of ‘development’ and ‘aid’, or the con-
stitutional and institutional dimensions of the transition from empire to Commonwealth (see Emily
Baughan, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire (Berkeley, 2021);
Anna Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire: Decolonisation, Globalisation and
International Responsibility (Manchester, 2018); H. Kumarasingham, ed., Liberal Ideals and the Politics
of Decolonisation, special issue of Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46 (2018); Caroline
Ritter, Imperial Encore: The Cultural Politics of the Late British Empire (Oakland, 2021)).
citizenship was made in the post-war era.27 Focusing on the enduring rationalities of
liberalism as a civilizing project, which formed the background against which
political, civil, and social settlements were negotiated, I propose that this project
reinscribed race even when it aimed at overcoming its discriminations. Thus, this
is not a story about exclusion so much as the terms on which inclusion was
offered, the reforms of the self that were demanded, and the ways in which these
terms and these reforms depended upon discourses of race.28 Race was deeply
27 In this respect, I turn away from the familiar frame through which the history of race in post-
war Britain has been told, which has focused on rights claimed or denied and revolutions promised
but forestalled. Accounts focusing on the issue of citizenship rights have taken several angles. Some
have explained the withholding, de jure or de facto, of social rights of people of colour in the new
social democracy (see, especially, Victoria Noble, Inside the Welfare State: Foundations of Policy and
Practice in Post-War Britain (London, 2009), chap. 4; Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor:
From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle, 2018), chaps 4–5. The black women’s movement long had its fin-
ger on the pulse of this traducing of social rights in Britain, particularly in relation to education and
healthcare. See Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Susan Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s
Lives in Britain (London, 1985)). Critical assessments of the post-war era have also, as we have already
noted, held British liberalism to account, pointing to the refusal of civil rights, particularly through
attention to policing and the courts, and political rights, with attention focusing particularly on the
limits of political representation. The literature is big, but a good summary is provided in John
Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (Basingstoke, 1993). Many of the most effective histories have
emerged from the struggles to confront this denial of rights, for example in Roach Family Support
Committee, Policing in Hackney: 1945–1985 (London, 1989). On political representation, see, for
example, Simon Peplow, Race and Riots in Thatcher’s Britain (Manchester, 2019). The rising interest in
black British political history has seen historians paying greater attention to how this refusal of rights
was challenged (see Perry, London; Lara Putnam, ‘Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories
of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), 162–91;
Matthew Grant, ‘Historicizing Citizenship in Postwar Britain’, Historical Journal, 59 (2016), 1187–206).
Others have pointed to how black Britons pressed for new futures beyond liberal social democracy,
drawing on the revolutionary promises of anti-colonialism and Marxism (see Minkah Makalani, In
the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London (Chapel Hill, 2011);
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham,
2007); Rob Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 (Oakland, 2019)).
28 I take this approach cognizant of the Jamaican anthropologist David Scott’s critique of the idea
of freedom that animates both the denouncements of liberalism’s contradictions and the offer of revo-
lutionary alternatives to it. Following Michel Foucault, Scott refuses that either the contradictions of
liberalism and social democracy or liberal social democracy itself are simply blocks to be overcome on
the path to freedom. He focuses, instead, on how political modernity, in its metropolitan and colonial
forms, transformed the very terrains of the social and the political, altering their rules of engagement.
Working by a reformist drive that demanded ‘a suitably reformed, disciplined, and uplifted popular’,
these political modernities demanded that ‘disreputable, unrepresentable difference[s]’ were left
behind as a condition of entering the public realm. In Scott’s reading, elaborated most effectively in his
numerous essays on Jamaica, the question that must animate our discussion of power in the (post)
colonial politics of race is its point of application, with ‘the government of conduct’ as its ‘distinctive
strategic end’. Rather than focusing on the forms of exclusion from sociopolitical settlements like
Jamaica’s, Scott’s approach allows us to see how the terms on which inclusion operates are themselves
governed by racial logics, demanding forms of racial uplift and reform that rely precisely on the figur
ation of a racialized disorderly excess beyond the comprehension and utility of the social: ‘reform
depends upon a “norm of civilization” and a division between those who are ready for citizenship and
those who have to be made ready for it (blacks, women, the colonized, the working class).’ See David
Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, 1999), 34, 86, 194, 216; David
Scott, ‘On the Very Idea of the Making of Modern Jamaica’, Small Axe, 21 (2017), 43–7; David Scott,
‘Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern’, Small Axe, 14 (2003), 1–22; David Scott, ‘The
Permanence of Pluralism’, in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, eds, Without
Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London, 2000), 282–301. The Jamaican case is useful to
Introduction 11
rooted in the culture of integration, even if this was not always in forms that were
explicitly racist. Race structured the language of integration: supposed racial
characteristics were always an implicit part of its categorizations.29 The racial
grammar of integrationism meant that for its black subjects, it was always ambiva
lent: they entered the integration game under the promise that they were progres-
sively reformable—capable of inclusion in the culture of liberal civility—and yet
simultaneously they were marked out as interlopers in that culture, their very
bodies the signifiers of all that civility was not.30
Although the projects to build an integrated society undertaken in response to
the increasing scale of non-white migration to Britain in the immediate post-war
era have received far less attention from historians than the efforts made to limit
that migration, integrationism was nonetheless a prominent part of both public
and private debates in this era and cause for a great deal of new social and polit
ical organization. Indeed, getting integration right was a crucial matter for the
post-war governing class, many of whom both continued to believe in the special
historical role Britain was to play as a racially liberal nation and were painfully
aware of the diplomatic costs that publicly abandoning a commitment to that lib-
eralism would incur.31 The appeal of integrationism, moreover, was at least in part
its ability to confirm the virtues of a loosely defined British liberalism, the watch-
words of which were tolerance, civility, understanding, and conciliation, and the
idealized forging ground of which was a strong civil society. These were the values
that would continue to define Britain against its elected continental or transatlantic
opposites, in which intolerance, incivility, ignorance, and conflict were seen to
reign, or in which overreaching states attempted to impose social harmony or
division by force.
It was social harmony, above social justice, that concerned integrationists—
and this was to be achieved, as far as possible, with minimal state intervention.
Both the meaning and means of integration differed across the political formation,
consider not only as a model for understanding how integration worked in Britain but also because
integration projects in Jamaica intersected with integration projects in Britain. As Radhika Natarajan
has demonstrated, early post-war projects of integration in Britain drew substantially on late-imperial
community development programmes, from the West Indies and across the British imperial world
(see Natarajan, Empire and the Origins of Multiculturalism: Migrants, Citizenship, and Community in
Britain, 1948–1982 (Oxford, forthcoming)). More than this, as I show in Chapter 6, nation-building
projects in the former colonial territories unfolded in part as dimensions of British integration politics.
29 I borrow directly, here, from Catherine Hall’s description of the liberal cultures of race that
shaped nineteenth-century missionary projects, which I see as important precursors to the integration
project of the twentieth century: ‘Race, it was clear, was deeply rooted in English culture. Not always
in forms which were explicitly racist, but as a space in which the English configured their relation to
themselves and to others . . . . The vocabulary . . . was a racialized vocabulary, for supposed racial char-
acteristics were always an implicit part of . . . categorisations’ (Hall, Civilising Subjects, 8). See also
Goldberg’s conception of ‘racial grammar’ in Racist Culture, 46.
30 My emphasis on the ambivalence generated through this dynamic draws, of course, on Homi
Bhabha’s work. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 118.
31 See Perry, London, 100–4.
but uniting much of it was the common objective to ease the social tensions and
potential political conflicts around Britain’s expanding multiculture. This was
what the philosopher Adrian Favell calls a consequentialist approach to integra-
tion policy, in which the first focus was not on protecting the rights of racialized
minorities but on avoiding the public disorders that were seen to be a likely con-
sequence of their presence.32 Indeed, as Favell and others have noted, it was
because the emphasis was placed on preventing public disorder and political rup-
tures around race that both anti-discrimination legislation and anti-immigration
legislation could, by the mid-1960s, be presented as mutually reinforcing parts of
the same integration policy, a key part of the ‘race relations settlement’.33 The
architects of this approach would describe it as inaugurating a ‘liberal hour’ in
British race relations from the mid-1960s—though how long this hour lasted, and
who was responsible for ending it, remain topics of contention.34 Its history has
received little investigation.35 In this book, however, I make a case for returning
to the liberal cultures and politics of integration that preceded and shaped the
32 Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in Britain and
France (Basingstoke, 1998), chap. 4.
33 This was the policy position captured in the famous words with which Roy Hattersley intro-
duced Labour’s White Paper on Immigration from the Commonwealth in 1965: ‘without integration
limitation is inexcusable, without limitation integration is impossible.’ The 1965 White Paper simul
taneously tightened the terms of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and established a national
coordination body for managing local integration initiatives, the National Committee for
Commonwealth Immigrants (see Michael Banton, Promoting Racial Harmony (Cambridge, 1985),
45). Passing immigration restriction in tandem with integration measures as part of a coherent
‘package’ was, in fact, introduced with the 1962 Act, which included the establishment of the
Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council, but it was the 1965 White Paper, paired with the first
Race Relations Act that same year, which formalized the model (see Nadine Peppard, ‘The Age of
Innocence: Race Relations before 1965’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 14 (1987), 45–55). A
commitment to integration was pursued, to varying degrees, as a policy objective of each of the major
political parties, even as the Conservative Party and, by 1963, Labour both also supported limiting
non-white migration from the Commonwealth. By 1965, this approach—limiting further non-white
immigration while ‘integrating’ those who had already arrived—became the basis of the so-called
‘race relations settlement’, an informal agreement between Labour and the Conservatives to take race
out of the field of political debate and disagreement by committing to a dual policy of limiting non-
white immigration and easing social tensions around race through supporting anti-discrimination
legislation and a locally devolved community relations infrastructure. As Wendy Ball and John
Solomos describe the ‘race relations settlement’, ‘The common thread was an indirect approach to race
issues, tackling them obliquely while maintaining a low political temperature’ (Race and Local Politics
(Basingstoke, 1990), 25). Devolving the management of race relations to a local level was a crucial part
of this approach. See Romain Garbaye, Getting into Local Power: The Politics of Ethnic Minorities in
British and French Cities (Oxford, 2005), chap. 2; Shamit Saggar, ‘The Politics of “Race Policy” in
Britain’, Critical Social Policy, 13 (1993), 32–51; Shamit Saggar, ‘Re-Examining the 1964–70 Labour
Government’s Race Relations Strategy’, Contemporary Record, 7 (1993), 253–81.
34 The key components defining this ‘liberal hour’ are summarized in Banton, Racial Harmony,
69–70. See also E. J. B. Rose, Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (London,
1969); Mark Bonham Carter, ‘The Liberal Hour and Race Relations Law’, Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies, 14 (1987), 1–8; Anthony Messina, ‘Race and Party Competition in Britain: Policy
Formation in the Post-Consensus Period’, Parliamentary Affairs, 38 (1985), 423–36.
35 This tendency is beginning to change. See Brett Bebber, ‘The Architects of Integration: Research,
Public Policy, and the Institute of Race Relations in Postimperial Britain’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 48 (2020), 319–50; Natarajan, Empire.
Introduction 13
emerging settlement of the so-called ‘liberal hour’, which were developed in the
two decades after the end of the Second World War. This prehistory of the race
relations settlement has received even less attention than the settlement itself, but
the associational cultures of integrationism in the 1950s laid the foundations of
the political settlements of the 1960s, defining, even if loosely, what integration
should look like.36 It is in the integrationism of the immediate post-war decades
that the issues of integration became defined primarily as matters of conduct,
character, and citizenly duty, rather than as matters of racism, discrimination,
and structural subordination. The question of racism became individualized and
reduced to the banal territory of ignorance and incivility.
The integrationism forged in these years breathed fresh life into the values and
social structures of older sociopolitical projects, carrying forth a social vision that
was in many respects recognizably Victorian, within the modernizing dynamics
of post-war social democracy.37 In their emphasis on the reform of conduct as the
condition of entry into the public political nation, integrationists rehearsed a
familiar argument of liberal politics in Britain in the transition to mass democracy.38
Indeed, it is part of my argument that the demand for active citizenship and
civic culture long promoted by Britain’s voluntary associations and local political
cultures in the transition to and early decades of mass democracy continued
in the field of integration when it had declined elsewhere. Through the second
half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, associational
cultures served as vehicles for democratic claims and sites where the democratic
transitions inaugurated by political reforms were managed, as reformers sought
to mould new democratic citizens.39 With the advent of social democracy, how-
ever, the commitment of voluntary associations to active citizenship largely
declined and the political class were more likely to look to the voluntary sector as
an instrument to aid the transition to state welfare provision than as a site for
36 See Peppard, ‘Innocence’, 46.

37 Several historians have drawn attention to this continued power of the Victorian past in post-
Second World War Britain. See, for example, Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: The Making of the Permissive
Society (New Haven, 2010), 4; Lynda Nead, Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain
(New Haven, 2017), 8; Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, vol. 1: The White Man’s World (Oxford,
2011), 12; Jeremy Nuttall, ‘The Persistence of Character in Twentieth-Century British Politics’, Journal
of Contemporary History, 56 (2021), 96–116.
38 See Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class,
Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), chap. 2; Peter Mandler, ‘Introduction:
State and Society in Victorian Britain’, in Peter Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain
(Oxford, 2006), 1–21.
39 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987), chap. 10; Frank Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in
Modern Britain (London, 1988); Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual
and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 2000); M. J. D. Roberts, Making
English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004);
Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty (London,
1994); Helen McCarthy, ‘Associational Voluntarism in Interwar Britain’, in Matthew Hilton and James
McKay, eds, The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford, 2011), 47–68.
training in citizenship.40 Integrationism took up this slack. While the voluntary

sector was not significantly diminished by the rise of social democracy, the
uncertain future for voluntary aid in the age of welfare led many into new kinds
of philanthropy, and volunteering in migrant welfare became a boom industry.41
Here, the emphasis on active citizenship and civic culture endured.42 If the transi-
tion to mass democracy was taken up by voluntary associations as a project to
make new democratic citizens, they greeted the transition to a mass-multicultural
society as a new challenge: to mould the integrating citizens of a new multicultural
Britain. Just as for the reformers of Britain’s associational culture mass democracy
required a responsible electorate, worldly-wise and trained in the necessary polit
ical cultures, so for these reformers that tasked themselves with building an inte-
grated citizenry training in sociability, respectability, good neighbourliness, and
civic duty was the necessary precondition to building a successful integrated
multiculture.43
If Britain was able to maintain a mystique of anti-racism, the liberal culture of
integrationism was part of the reason. This was a culture that often reduced
racism to a moral failing, an expression of ignorance or incivility. It saw the best
40 Helen McCarthy and Pat Thane, ‘Commentary: The Politics of Association in Industrial Society’,
Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 217–29, at 227.
41 John Davis, ‘Containing Racism? The London Experience, 1957–1968’, in Robin D. G. Kelley and
Stephen Tuck, eds, The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights, and Riots in Britain and the United
States (Basingstoke, 2015), 125–46, at 126.
42 A counterpart to this emphasis on active citizenship and civic culture in integration was in the
engagements with international humanitarianism at the end of empire. See Bocking-Welch, British
Civic Society.
43 I am not arguing for a sequential logic, in which an earlier moment of class politics repeats in a
later moment of multicultural politics. Rather, the projects of democratic incorporation that marked
the turn to mass democracy remained incomplete even by the post-war period, as social democracy
once again remade conceptions of citizenship and democratic life. Integration politics unfolded
alongside this uncertain, unfinished process of democratization—indeed the two were inextricably
intertwined. Demands for active citizenship declined with the rise of social welfare and state planning,
but they did not disappear. The Political and Economic Planning (PEP) think tank, particularly under
Michael Young’s direction, called forcefully for what they termed ‘active democracy’, in which power
and decision making were decentralized and people were encouraged to participate (see Abigail
Beach, ‘Forging a “Nation of Participants”: Political and Economic Planning in Labour’s Britain’, in
Richard Weight and Abigail Beach, eds, The Right to Belong: Citizenship and National Identity in
Britain, 1930–1960 (London, 1998), 89–115; Pat Thane, ‘Michael Young and Welfare’, Contemporary
British History, 19 (2005), 293–9; Lise Butler, Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left,
1945–1970 (Oxford, 2020)). While PEP’s ambition was to remake political structures for all citizens—
primarily through a development of the local political sphere—many reformers and social activists
were particularly invested in developing structures and modes of participation for those whom they
saw as cut adrift in the new society. Ruth Glass’s Centre for Urban Studies and Michael Young’s
Institute of Community Studies identified populations overlooked by the services of the new welfare
state and displaced in the drive toward reconstruction, while critics of the effects of affluence found a
younger generation detached from the culture and community that their parents had grown up with.
(See Centre for Urban Studies, ed., London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964); Michael Young and
Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth, 1957); Peter Townsend, The
Family Life of Old People: An Investigation in East London (London, 1957); Richard Hoggart, The Uses
of Literacy (London, 1957); Peter Marris, Widows and Their Families (London, 1958); Peter Willmott,
Adolescent Boys of East London (London, 1966).)
Introduction 15
antidote to racism in the cultivation of civility, understanding, civics, a strong

civil society. This was a way of understanding race that made it hard to see how
it operated beyond the confines of personal animosities, violence, or disrespect.
It individualized racism and had limited means for conceptualizing structural
racism. But more than this, it simultaneously narrowed racism and limited race to
racism, while at the same time being unable to recognize its own racial coding.
It reproduced race in its attempted repudiation of racism.
The local politics of race
London is our focus for understanding this post-war integrationism. The chapters
that follow track its development from the city’s railway terminals to its pubs,
clubs, and town halls, its cinemas and theatres, its hostels, housing estates, and
suburbs—each remade by the racialized politics of immigration and integration.
As integration politics developed in the post-war era, it did so in a decentralized
manner, with multiple localities, networked but largely independent, with only
limited central organization and limited direction from the central state.44 It took
a variety of forms, sustained by a variety of ideologies, and its networks of ideas
and personnel stretched across mainland Britain, and indeed globally, both across
the empire and Commonwealth and beyond them.45 To concentrate on London
may, in this respect, seem parochial. It does, however, offer the possibility of nar-
rative coherence for explaining a process that was by default locally driven and
that was driven by the problem of the organization of local social space—a prob-
lem from which flowed all other concerns: about rights, obligations, intimacies,
participations, and loyalties. London, moreover, was a hub in integration politics,
and it was a city through which the vast majority of colonial and Commonwealth
migrants passed and a great many of them settled. Importantly, it was a city that
had for many years been undergoing a spatial reorganization, shifting away from
its old class topography, divided between a rich west and a poor east. It was a city
that was, in the moment of postcolonial migration, being remade again by the
processes of post-war urban planning, reconstruction, a shifting economic infra-
structure, growing affluence, and out-migration.
Integration was often read as a spatial problem. This was so in the sense that
particular London districts became marked as problem spaces for integration
44 This set the model for ‘race relations’ politics and later for state-led multiculturalism. See Jed
Fazakarley, ‘British Multiculturalism: An Emerging Field for Historians’, in Sam Wiseman, ed.,
Assembling Identities (Newcastle, 2014), 85–98; Jed Fazakarley, ‘Race as a Separate Sphere in British
Government: From the Colonial Office to Municipal Anti-Racism’, Callaloo, 39 (2016), 185–202.
45 On the global, transnational, and imperial dimensions, see Natarajan, Empire, as well as Rita
Chin’s European survey, The Crisis of Multiculturalism: A History (Princeton, 2017), and Bebber,
‘Architects’.
politics: Notting Hill, most frequently, and often Brixton, Stepney, Hackney, and
various other districts at different times. It was also so in the sense that integra-
tion was seen as a process of reshaping different kinds of social space. ‘People
usually discriminate less in some situations than in others’, read a handbook from
the London Council of Social Service in 1963. ‘For instance a newcomer will
meet less discrimination at work or in the pub than if he tries to marry his
workmate’s daughter or to buy the house next door.’46 While the ‘law of supply and
demand . . . forces West Indians and English people to integrate during working
hours’, the black-led Standing Conference of Organisations Concerned with West
Indians in Britain observed in their London Newsletter around the same time,
‘even this modicum of integration dissolves with the blowing of the half-past-five
whistle’.47 The question of which social spaces had achieved ‘integration’, which
were deserving of it, and indeed which might be beyond its bounds animated
much discussion for London’s post-war integration leaders. It was a discussion
that they had against the backdrop of constant changes to the social space of the
city itself, as it was remade in the early years of social democracy.
To the degree that integration was a politics of space, it opened new spaces for
politics. Reading integration’s politics within a single city across the broad canvas
of institutions, people, and spaces that made it up, not only do we see it for the
decentred, uneven formation that it was, but we can also trace the subterranean
and often surprising channels by which it worked. It offers us a different vantage
for tracing the post-war politics of race. Several historians have made the case for
expanding our analytical frame when we discuss late-twentieth-century British
politics. Party, Westminster, general elections, Parliament and parliamentary
legislation, prime ministers, and civil servants remained important in this era, for
sure. But the relations of these institutions to everyday life, popular culture, local
communities, and individual citizens shifted dramatically. The links between
politicians and the people appeared to be in the process of being severed from
every direction. Both politicians and the media effectively marginalized the pub-
lic from their debates, curtailing the circumstances in which politicians might
encounter their voters—particularly the hostile ones.48 Meanwhile, party mem-
berships and voter turnout declined, as did participation in the political clubs and
societies that had formed the bedrock of an earlier political culture.49 Rather than
46 Sheila Patterson, ed., Immigrants in London: A Study Group Report (London, 1963), 49.
47 ‘Building a Bridge’, London Newsletter, 1 (April 1962), 2.
48 Jon Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair
(Oxford, 2009).
49 While some have unconvincingly read this as evidence of an enduring political apathy in Britain
(see, for example, Kevin Jefferys, Politics and the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918
(London, 2007); and, arguing for apathy from a different angle, Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson, and
Nick Tiratsoo, England Arise: The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester,
1995)), it was nonetheless a development that caused significant anxiety for politicians and political
commentators.
Introduction 17
a reduction in the scope of the political, however, we might view this as its
reorganization. New political institutions and movements—the steady rise of
non-governmental organizations, the new social movements emerging on the left
and the right of the political spectrum—saw an increased opportunity for political
participations alternative to the traditional institutions of party.50 More radically,
as the emergent New Left quickly recognized, shifting modes of political partici-
pation, arguments about what politics entailed, and understandings of where
it might therefore happen often outpaced the explanations of parliamentary
commentators and the expectations of party machines. At times it seemed that
emergent political forces ‘might not traverse the landscape of conventional
politics at all’.51 The constitutional forms of politics—politics proper, for Westminster
and the press—posed a deceptively straightforward relationship between state
and citizen. But the readiness with which citizens moved within and without this
relationship according to how well they found it to serve their needs shows us,
instead, that it was a radically contingent relationship for many.52 This contingency
became particularly pronounced through race.
As the ethnic diversity of British cities and towns increased apace in the 1950s
and 1960s, urban space was experienced in new ways. Familiar topographies
shifted; streets ‘went black’, as the white vernacular of the day described it. A feel-
ing of the encroaching spaces of racial otherness was one of the most vivid and
visceral means by which a white population came to understand themselves now
as part of a multicultural society. It was against the threat of black proximity that
many organized most ferociously, pouring energy into new tenants’ associations,
ratepayers’ associations, petitions and delegations to town halls, and mass letter-
writing campaigns. The letter writers, petitioners, and ratepayers felt themselves
frozen out of political structures. They appealed to councillors, mayors, Members
of Parliament, and newspaper editors, even as they seethed, convinced that none
would heed their warnings or act on their demands. Race moved to the centre of
local politics in part because of the displacements of national politics. On the one
hand, while anti-immigration sentiment held significant sway in Westminster and
within both major political parties, popular racism struggled to find representation
in national politics. For varying reasons of pragmatism, repeated instances of bad
50 See Matthew Hilton, ‘Politics Is Ordinary: Non-Governmental Organizations and Political

Participation in Contemporary Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 230–68; Nick
Crowson, Matthew Hilton, and James McKay, eds, NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in
Society and Politics since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2009); Lawrence Black, Redefining British Politics: Culture,
Consumerism and Participation 1954–70 (Basingstoke, 2010).
51 Sally Davison, David Featherstone, and Bill Schwarz, ‘Introduction’, in Sally Davison, David
Featherstone, Michael Rustin, and Bill Schwarz, eds, Stuart Hall: Selected Political Writings (London,
2017), 2. The essays collected here represent some of the most incisive appraisals of the shifting ter-
rains of British politics in the second half of the twentieth century. More widely, this shift was mapped
in various contributions to the Universities and Left Review and New Left Review.
52 See Stuart Hall, ‘Political Commitment’ (1966), in Davison et al, eds, Stuart Hall, 85–106.
timing, and commitment to a sense of Commonwealth unity and post-imperial

leadership, both the Labour Party and the Conservatives were cautious to capital-
ize on anti-immigration votes and were concerned that attempts to do so may
backfire.53 On the other hand, however, while successive governments were initially
cautious to restrict immigration (it is easy to forget that fourteen years separate
the 1948 Nationality Act from the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act), they
were equally slow to offer any significant plans to manage Britain’s transition to a
mass-multicultural society. It was not until 1965, with the first Race Relations Act
and the Labour government’s Immigration from the Commonwealth White Paper,
that central government began to sponsor efforts to promote a multicultural soci-
ety and to provide the means of redress for those facing discrimination.54 Progress
remained slow and piecemeal. It was a subsection of the 1966 Local Governments
Act that remained the chief source of funding for integration projects until the
late 1960s, when Urban Aid was finally introduced.55
If anti-immigration and anti-integration politics moved by routes some dis-
tance from the conventional landscape of politics, integration was also a project
undertaken mostly at the ground level and often deliberately separated from
institutions of government. Meeting the ‘problems of the immigrant’, as Nadine
Peppard of the London Council of Social Service’s Immigrants Advisory Committee
put it, was ‘a question of local rather than central action’. While organizations like
Peppard’s called for legislation on anti-discrimination and for increased funding
for education and housing, they were convinced that the responsibility for inte-
gration lay first with local authorities and voluntary organizations.56 Peppard and
her fellow integrationists concentrated their energies, therefore, on establishing
committees of representation in local government, appointing liaison officers,
conciliation services, and social workers, and cultivating networks of voluntary
association. The conviction that integration was a matter for civil society more
than the state also ensured that the work for it took place a distinct distance from
the corridors of political power. Integration was repeatedly cast as an issue of
friendship and association and as distinctly ‘non-political’ in character. Even as a
tradition of associational multiculture did become more firmly supported by the
53 John Davis, ‘Rents and Race in 1960s London: New Light on Rachmanism’, Twentieth Century
British History, 12 (2001), 69–92; Davis, ‘Containing Racism?’. On Westminster and party politics, see
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, 1997); Stephen
Brooke, ‘The Conservative Party, Immigration and National Identity, 1948–1968’, in Martin Francis
and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, eds, The Conservatives and British Society, 1880–1990 (Cardiff, 1996),
147–70. Nicole Longpré has shown how, at the level of constituency politics, anti-immigrationism
won political support even when parties and governments were wary of embracing it. See Longpré,
‘Anti-Immigrationism and Conservatism in Britain, 1955–1981’, Ph. D thesis, Columbia University, 2016.
54 Saggar, ‘Re-Examining’.
55 Gideon Ben-Tovim, John Gabriel, Ian Law, and Kathleen Stredder, The Local Politics of Race
(Basingstoke, 1986), 30–1; John Edwards and Richard Batley, The Politics of Positive Discrimination:
An Evaluation of the Urban Programme, 1966–77 (London, 1978).
56 Nadine Peppard, ‘Immigrants and Community Responsibility’, Social Service Quarterly, 38
(1964–5), 93–6, 116–17, at 94.
Introduction 19
central state, it was embraced precisely for its localism and its prioritizing of
the social over the political: ‘the richer the texture of voluntary groupings’, as
Philip Mason wrote as chair of the recently created National Committee for
Commonwealth Immigrants in 1966, ‘the happier the atmosphere’.57
Integration as a project
Integration can be understood in Raymond Williams’s sense of the term as a

keyword of post-war politics.58 Integration operated as an organizing concept in
the administration of post-war reconstruction, principally tied to discussions of
the transport and utilities infrastructure, on the one hand, and the transformation
of social services, on the other; in this respect it was a word that was connected
with the technocratic and social-democratic modernizing vision of the post-war.59
But it was as integration came into public debates as what the historian Holly Case
might term a ‘question’ that it was tied most firmly to issues of race, and to a dif-
ferent vision of Britain’s modernity: as the head of a multiracial Commonwealth.60
Just as the term ‘immigrant’ became racialized in this era—becoming synonym
ous with ‘black’, so that to speak of the ‘immigration problem’ meant, ultimately,
to speak of the ‘black problem’—so too the term ‘integration’ carried a racialized
charge.61 To talk of the integration ‘problem’, or to talk of the ‘question’ of integra-
tion, was usually to talk about race and racism. It meant to focus attention, simul
taneously, on the ‘problem’ of racism and on the ‘problem’ of racial otherness.
Historians of migration taking integration as their focus have conventionally
sought to dismiss framings of it as a problem. Proposing integration as a long
sociological process which takes place over generations, they have offered optimism:
in the longer view, apparently intractable antagonisms and divisions might not be
so intractable after all.62 By offering a comparative historical analysis, comparing
different migrant groups in different places and at different times, historians
57 Philip Mason, ‘What Do We Mean by Integration?’, New Society, 16 June 1966, 8–11.
58 Keywords, in Raymond Williams’s definition, ‘are significant, binding words in certain activities
and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought. Certain
uses bound together certain ways of seeing culture and society.’ Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (London, 1976), 13.
59 We can see this by tracing the frequency of the term, for example, across Hansard or across the
major national newspapers. Discussions of ‘integration’ in these forums rose precipitously in the two
decades after 1945. On post-war modernization, see Becky E. Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters,
eds, Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999).
60 See Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton, 2018).
61 This equation of ‘immigrant’ and ‘black’ is well remarked upon in the academic literature. See,
for example, Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005), 150; Ian Sanjay
Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (London, 2021), 2.
62 See, for example, Panayi, Immigrant History, chap. 3; Leo Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The
Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana, 2006); Leo Lucassen,
David Feldman, and Jochen Oltmer, eds, Paths to Integration: Migrants in Western Europe, 1880–2004
(Amsterdam, 2006); Panikos Panayi, Migrant City: A New History of London (New Haven, 2020), chap. 6.
approaching integration in this frame have often also, usually implicitly, sought to
defang the racial framing that dominated as ‘integration’ became the term for
identifying the problem of post-war multiculture. ‘Newcomers’ might be marked
out as different, in this analysis, but such differences cease to matter so much over
time. I do not dispute these findings, although I am sceptical about the evacuation
of historical specificity that such an approach invites.63 In this book, however,
I am not primarily interested in integration as a social process, though I do make
comments on this issue throughout; I am interested instead in integration as a
project, addressed to the problems that the expansion of post-war multiracial
multiculture was seen to have brought about. It is true that many different
migrants came to Britain in the post-war period and that all of them were engaged
in the social processes identified as ‘integration’ processes by migration historians.
But not all of these migrations mattered equally and in the same way for British
politics, and not all of them mattered for the integration project.
This book focuses on the people, and the integrations, that mattered most for
the integration project, and those people were, overwhelmingly, black migrants
from the Caribbean and, though to a much lesser extent, black migrants from
Africa and brown migrants from the Asian subcontinent; they were also, for dif-
ferent but related reasons, those elements of what was seen as the ‘rough’ white
working class who were believed to be unready to live in an integrated society.
Between 1945 and 1965, as integration shot up the public agenda—with the ‘inte-
gration problem’ serving, always, as the other side to the ‘immigration problem’—
it was the integration of these people that dominated discussion and that drew
resources, personnel, research, and intervention. In some sense the central sym-
bolic place of black people in the (racialized) integration imagination can be
explained by the character of Commonwealth migration in the period up to the
mid-1960s. Black people were not the most numerous migrants coming to Britain
(the Irish were), but by the mid-1950s they were the most numerous migrants of
colour, with around 25,000 new arrivals from the Caribbean each year.64 Thus,
while the number of South Asian-born people living in London in 1951, at just
under 20,000, was more than double that of African- and Caribbean-born people
combined, by 1961, the year that the first Commonwealth Immigrants Bill was
63 Consider, for example, Panayi’s proposal that because ‘over time and through generations, con-
vergence with the norms of the population as a whole occurs’, the same changes in upward social
mobility enjoyed, in the long run, by descendants of ‘nineteenth-century migrants’ may also be in
store for ‘post-war migrant communities’, who nonetheless have ‘a long way to go before some of them
reach the same social and economic status as much of the majority population’ (Immigrant History,
122). Such a statement risks suggesting that the sociological process of integration occurs in time but
outside of history.
64 Numbers dipped slightly following the 1958 white riots, with only 16,000 arriving that year, but
by 1960, ‘beat the ban’ migration peaked at well over 50,000. See Migrant Services Division, ‘Statistical
Tables: West Indian Migrant Arrivals in the United Kingdom, 1953–1960’ (Commission in the United
Kingdom for the West Indies, British Guiana and British Honduras, 1960), CO 1031/3940, TNA.
Introduction 21
passing through Parliament, South Asian migration had grown by only 65 per cent,
against a fourfold increase in the number of African migrants and a seventeenfold
increase in migrants from the Caribbean.65 In each of the London boroughs
where West Indian migrants were most concentrated, their numbers had grown
over this period from the low hundreds to several thousand.66 Just as the idea of a
‘colour problem’ and an ‘immigration problem’ focused principally on West Indian
migrants in the 1950s and early 1960s—before attention turned in the mid-1960s,
for various reasons, to migrations from South Asia—so too ‘integration’ work, and
the ‘problem’ of integration, focused first on West Indians, with other populations
coming within its remit often as an afterthought.67
Not only were not all migrant groups considered to be equally in need of inte-
gration interventions, but not all migrants within these groups were considered
equally in need. Integration focused on working-class West Indians as the targets
of its interventions, with the West Indian middle class more often enlisted, or
enlisting themselves, as integrationists than targets of integration. It focused, also,
overwhelmingly on men. Again, this reflected the construction of the ‘immigra-
tion’ and ‘integration’ problems. Immigration politics in this era, as Wendy
Webster has observed, worked through ‘a gendered construction of race’ that set a
primary opposition between the figures of the white woman (who figured as
‘domestic’, ‘familial’, ‘settled’, and ‘attached’) and the black man, who figured as a
threat to all this.68 Just as the concentration on black migrants did not simply
reflect the numbers on migration (white migrants simply were not, at this time,
considered so much of a problem), so too this concentration on male migrants was
65 These figures are drawn from the census results. The total number of people of colour living in
the city was higher than these figures suggest, but the census did not record race or ethnicity until
1991, so contemporary estimates routinely used place of birth as the basis for judging the ethnic
make-up of the city. Social researchers sometimes gave as much as double the figure suggested by the
census, noting how many migrants might evade census reporting (see, for example, Patterson, ed.,
Immigrants in London, 24). However, the census figures, as provided in Centre for Urban Studies,
London, xli, are as follows:
Birthplace 1951 census 1961 census
India, Pakistan, Ceylon 19,001 31,350
Africa (excl. Republic of South Africa and U.A.R.) 4,335 16,273
British Caribbean 4,216 70,523
66 In Brixton, the West Indian population increased from just over 400 in 1951 to around 5,000 by
1955, and 10,000 by 1961. Willesden saw a rise from just over 100 in 1951 to 9,000 in 1961. Social
researchers in Hackney, Notting Hill, and Paddington gave conservative estimates of over 7,000 West
Indians in each borough by the early 1960s. (See Patterson, ed., Immigrants in London, 7, 14, 20, 24.)
67 Patterson’s Immigrants in London is representative in this regard. Compiled by the London
Council of Social Service, the publication ostensibly dealt with all migrants to the city, but the bulk of
its sixty-four-page report focused on West Indians, with Pakistanis being the only other group
afforded extended commentary, and only as an appendix to the report proper. Another illustrative
example is the London Council of Social Service’s Immigrants Advisory Committee, which for its
early years, before expanding its remit, operated under the title of West Indian Advisory Committee.
On the shifting focus of racism over this period, see Panayi, Migrant City, 26.
68 Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945- 64 (London,
1998), 46.
not simply about demographics. Indeed, statistics collected by the Commission in

the United Kingdom for the West Indies, British Guiana and British Honduras in
1960 found that adult male migrants only ever made up just over half of the total
numbers arriving from the Caribbean across the second half of the 1950s, when
migration from the region was at its highest. Women consistently made up 40 per
cent or more of annual migration figures, and child migrants hovered around 5
to 10 per cent.69 Both women and men were the targets of integration projects,
and children would become increasingly important too, particularly from the
mid-1960s onwards. It was men, however, who were addressed most forcefully
and most frequently.
While this book follows the effects of integrationism on its targets and the ways
that integrationism was resisted, however, its narrative organization is shaped by
following the integrationists themselves, unpacking how it was that they saw the
world-to-be-integrated and how they intervened in it. These integrationists were
varied in background. Many were white, but as I show throughout, and particu-
larly in the final chapters of the book, there was an important tradition of black
integrationism that both mirrored and intersected with white efforts. The gender
profile of integrationists was also mixed. Those who entered integrationism from
posts in local government were often men, but those coming to it from traditions
of voluntary association and social work were as frequently, or perhaps more
frequently, women. We see the importance of these women throughout, both
English (Edith Ramsay, Nadine Peppard, Sheila Patterson, Joan Maizels, Mary
Grigg) and West Indian (Stella Gregory, Carmen Neckles, Pansy Jeffrey, Winifred
Atwell). Perhaps what was most consistent about the integrationists was their
class position: this was a professional, middle-class formation. Many had existing
links with local or national government, or with social work or education in these
spheres. Many, white as well as black, had imperial experience, often working
within the structures of colonial governance. The gender dynamics are significant
again here, because the historical routes to integrationism moved, in part, through
the terrains of women’s internationalism, empire-building, and missionary work.70
69 Migrant Services Division, ‘Statistical Tables: West Indian Migrant Arrivals in the United
Kingdom, 1953–1960’ (Commission in the United Kingdom for the West Indies, British Guiana and
British Honduras, 1960), CO 1031/3940, TNA.
70 In the transition to Commonwealth, as Barbara Bush has argued, women fostered a new official
emphasis on multiracialism as the justifying basis for Commonwealth citizenship and for Britain’s
claim to Commonwealth leadership, and they were prominent in embracing the ‘progressive’ ideas on
race and interracialism that were elaborated in the metropole as readily as in the empire. This was, as
Bush proposes, a continuation in the metropole of the way that women had recast the empire as a
‘family affair’ in the first half of the twentieth century (often described as the period of the ‘feminiza-
tion of empire’). See Barbara Bush, ‘Feminising Empire? British Women’s Activist Networks in
Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation’, Women’s History Review, 25 (2016),
499–519. On the ‘feminization of empire’, see also Barbara Bush, ‘Gender and Empire: The Twentieth
Century’, in Phillipa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), 77–111; Barbara Bush, ‘ “Britain’s
Conscience on Africa”: White Women, Race and Imperial Politics in Inter-War Britain’, in Clare
Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998), 200–23; Eliza Riedi, ‘Women, Gender, and
Introduction 23
My discussion of the sociology of integrationism here should not detract, how-

ever, from my wider argument in this book. It is of less importance to understand
who were the integrators and who was to be integrated than to understand what
political rationalities made these distinctions and categories viable, enduring, and
relevant.71 Indeed, it was the idea of integration as a necessary form of interven-
tion for dealing with the social problem of multiracial society, more than the spe-
cific solutions that integration’s interventions took or the outcomes they sought to
cultivate, which provided the unity of the integration project. Integration was a
notoriously capacious term. In its early articulations it was often taken as syn
onymous with ‘harmony’, ‘goodwill’, or ‘colour blindness’. Many of those whom I
describe as ‘integrationists’ in this book may have preferred to describe their
work in other ways—as an effort in ‘international friendship’, for instance, or as a
commitment to ‘racial harmony’ or ‘multiracialism’. It was only after the 1958
white riots that ‘integration’ became the commonest designation, borrowed in
large part from the US experience, and it was only with the greater state coordin
ation of this integration work in the mid-1960s, at the end of our period, that it
became the standard.72 The process that integration sought to describe, or wished
to set in place, was understood in many different ways. The Home Secretary Roy
Jenkins in 1966 famously embraced integration ‘not as a flattening process of
assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an
atmosphere of mutual tolerance’.73 But Jenkins’s definition, as the Indian journal-
ist Dilip Hiro noted at the time, was idiosyncratic.74 Social researchers pointed
repeatedly to the open question about which domains of social life this cultural
diversity should happen in, and pointed out that the equally open question of the
degree of diversity left plenty of scope for demands for assimilation to structure
the limits of this integration project.75 West Indian leaders like Neville Maxwell of
the Promotion of Empire: The Victoria League, 1901–1914’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 569–99;
Susan Pedersen, ‘The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over “Child
Slavery” in Hong Kong 1917–1941’, Past & Present, 171 (2001), 161–202; Emily Baughan, ‘ “Every
Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!” Empire, Internationalism and the Save the Children
Fund in Inter-War Britain’, Historical Research, 86. 231 (2013), 116–37.
71 I am drawing directly, here, from Ann Laura Stoler: ‘The task is not to figure out who was colon
izer and who was colonized, nor to ask what the difference between metropolitan and colonial policy
was; rather, it is to ask what political rationalities have made those distinctions and categories viable,
enduring, and relevant.’ See Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North
American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History, 88 (2001), 829–65, at 865.
72 Ruth Glass and Harry Pollins, Newcomers: The West Indians in London (London, 1960), 193n93.
I discuss this shifting vocabulary of integrationism further in Chapter 5.
73 Roy Jenkins, ‘Racial Equality in Britain’, in Essays and Speeches, ed. Anthony Lester (London,
1967), 267–73, at 267. Philip Mason welcomed Jenkins’s definition: ‘Let there be calypsos and steel
bands; let Pakistanis meet for a mash ‘ara . . . . The object should be a . . . mutual accommodation which
may be called integration but not assimilation’ (Philip Mason, ‘What Do We Mean by Integration?’,
New Society, 16 June 1966, 8–11).
74 Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British (London, 1971), 354.
75 See DeWitt John, Indian Workers Associations in Britain (London, 1969), 37; Michael J. Hill and
Ruth M. Issacharoff, Community Action and Race Relations: A Study of Community Relations
Committees in Britain (Oxford, 1971), 165.
the West Indian Standing Conference would define integration in opposition to

assimilation, using it to describe a form of cultural pluralism that allowed ‘differ-
ent ethnic groups’ to ‘retain their own separate cultural habits in so far as these do
not clash violently with those of other groups’.76 But when government officials
tasked with integration spoke of its aims, whether they had a form of pluralism or
of assimilation in mind depended often on the skin colour of the people they
were speaking about.77 Certainly, integration could be read straightforwardly as
assimilation. When the future Conservative MP John Selwyn Gummer worked
with his father, Canon Gummer, to set out a programme for integration in his
native Gravesend, he proposed that ‘integration lays a much heavier burden upon
the immigrant’, who ‘must make himself and his family acceptable to the com-
munity in which he has chosen to live. He is not here to create a little India on the
banks of the Thames.’78 Perhaps unsurprisingly, by the late 1960s those black
Britons radicalized by Black Power and watching the steady gains of Powellism in
shifting the domestic discourse on race thought that ‘When the white man talks
of integration’, as the Nigerian activist Ezena L. Nwaogo argued in 1969, ‘he
means you black people be like white people.’79 And yet, however it was under-
stood, what was certain was that integration would be a project of intervening in
the lives of people thought to be in need of reform towards a harmonious multi-
racial society.
This book’s exploration of integration politics ends in the mid-1960s, when
the multitude of largely voluntary integration projects that sprang up in the
1950s and 1960s, addressed towards the problem of wayward multicultural citizens,
were incorporated into a state-managed programme of integration, shaping the
structures and policies of state-led multiculturalism that grew over the final
decades of the twentieth century. Through the reforms of the first Wilson gov-
ernment, the voluntarist-civic partnership model that defined integration as an
issue of local politics was taken up as an integral structure for the management
of race relations through the support of the state. Not only were integration
organizations incorporated into new community relations councils, but leading
figures in the old voluntarist-civic infrastructure took up posts in new state-
sponsored organizations, and key integration activities, such as reconciliation
committees, shaped the direction of post-1965 provision. The social research that
early integration efforts had sponsored and responded to became formalized as
76 Neville Maxwell, The Power of Negro Action (London, 1965), 20.

77 Gavin Schaffer and Saima Nasar, ‘The White Essential Subject: Race, Ethnicity, and the Irish in
Post-War Britain’, Contemporary British History, 32 (2018), 209–30.
78 Canon Selwyn Gummer and John Selwyn Gummer, When the Coloured People Come (London,
1966), 113.
79 Brother Louis, ‘Black Power versus Enoch Powell’ (London, 1969), Black History Collection,
01-04-04-01-04-01-20, Institute of Race Relations, London. See also Rob Waters, ‘Integration or Black
Power’, Political Quarterly, 89 (2018), 409–16.
Introduction 25
a new era of research and policy formation through the rubric of ‘race relations’.80
The mid-1960s marked, in these respects, a key moment in the formation of
what would soon be called, usually derisively, the ‘race relations industry’.81
Working in close partnership with the local and central state, with an ever-
increasing budget and a growing bureaucracy to match, ‘race relations’ became
a gravitational force in the politics of race, drawing in and changing the work-
ing practices of a vast amount of the charitable and voluntary sector, as well as
think tanks, schools, and other public institutions. The scale of the change in
the period after 1965 was unprecedented, but the direction of those changes, I
am proposing, was decided with the rise of integrationism in the decades
between the end of the Second World War and the passage of the first Race
Relations Act, when integration arose as a project of intervention into lives seen
as problematic for an expanding multiracial society.
Chapter plan
In the following chapters, we will track the development of London’s integration

projects, beginning with a study of the development of London’s multiculture and
its contested politics before moving on to studies of the different forms that inte-
grationism took. At the heart of all the chapters is an argument about the traction
of ideas of civility, civilization, and respectability, which were central to how the
issue of integration in London’s expanding multiculture was engaged with, by all
sides. These ideals—civility, civilization, and respectability—were the qualities
that integrationists believed were crucial to building a successful and sustainable
multiculture; for those who opposed the growing settlement of black and brown
citizens in the city, it was precisely these qualities that were thought to be under
threat. Opposed to them were another set: incivility, barbarism, primitivity, and
roughness, all of which, for the integrationists, had to be reformed away in order
to make multiculture work. Opponents of integration were usually convinced
such reforms were impossible. It was the battle between civility and incivility,
civilization and primitivism, respectability and roughness that structured the
80 On the state- sponsorship of the voluntarist- civic integration infrastructure, see Hill and
Issacharoff, Community Action, 12–18; Rose, Colour and Citizenship, 381–2; Peppard, ‘Innocence’. On
race relations research and its incorporation into the state, see Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British
Politics (Cambridge, 1986), 191–3; Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley, 2012), 25–34;
Chris Waters, ‘ “Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’,
Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997), 207–38, at 218–20; Michael Banton, ‘The Future of Race Relations
Research in Britain: The Establishment of a Multi-Disciplinary Research Unity’, Race, 15 (1973),
223–229, at 224; Rob Waters, ‘Race, Citizenship and “Race Relations” Research in Late-Twentieth-
Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, forthcoming.
81 See John Gretton, ‘The Race Industry’, New Society, 11 (March 1971), 385–7.
politics of race and integration in these years; and for all that integrationists
insisted that these were not qualities that were limited to particular ‘racial’
groups—that all could, with effort, become civilized; that all might, without it,
descend into barbarity—nonetheless these categories remained marked by their
emergence from the history of empire, and they remained racially coded. In rec-
ognizing the central importance of these categories to integrationism we can see
how integrationism worked as a project of racial liberalism, in which race, far from
an aberration within liberal culture, provided the grammar around which the
meanings of liberal citizenship were articulated. And in recognizing the shared
categories around which both liberal integrationism and anti-immigrationist and
racist politics cohered, we can retell the history of race politics in this era, avoiding
the simplicity of any neat apportioning out of the bad and the good, the racists
and the anti-racists, the intolerant and the tolerant, the hostile and the hospitable,
or the illiberal and the liberal.
Chapters 1 and 2 show how London’s race–class topography developed in the
two decades after the end of the Second World War. As London’s multi-ethnic
make-up expanded in these years, people of colour were concentrated in just a
few of the city’s poorest districts. To their white neighbours they became an index
of poverty against which the fragile gains of reconstruction, affluence, and the
social-democratic settlement were to be measured. On-the-ground campaigns to
limit black and brown settlement in the city frequently mobilized on the basis of
the threat to socio-economic status and material prosperity that this settlement
was presumed to bring. In this, as I argue in these chapters, the politics of race
and class became inextricably linked, as, for many white Londoners, the struggles
of class status and hierarchy became tied to questions of the proximity of racial
otherness. This was the context in which the ideals of civilization and, above all,
respectability moved to the heart of anti-immigration politics. It was certainly the
case that many white Londoners launched their attacks on black and brown
neighbours with little consideration of whether their actions would be considered
‘respectable’. But for far more of them, it was precisely maintaining ‘respectability’
that was key—even while the need for expediency in this department provided
the excuse for actions that might otherwise seem far from ‘respectable’. It was
through race that the politics of respectability lasted in the post-war period,
where otherwise it might have more readily declined. These chapters demonstrate
its hold and the political work that a racism launched in the name of respectabil-
ity could do.
The interlinking of class and race politics explored in Chapters 1 and 2 formed
the backdrop, also, for the integration projects that the following chapters then
explore. First, in Chapter 3, we turn to the reform projects directed towards bad
white citizens, seeing how the reaction of integrationists to the white violence of
the 1958 Notting Hill riots led to a concerted effort to ‘civilize’ the ‘hooligans’
upon whom the violence of the riots was blamed. This, as I show in Chapter 3,
Introduction 27
was a way of understanding racism that explained it as a product, simultaneously,

of ‘roughness’ and primitivity, both of which were understood to be in plentiful
supply among the Teddy boys who led the violence in Notting Hill. A good dose
of civilization and civility, in this thinking, could transform racists into integra-
tionists and solve the problems posed by the threat of racial violence. In Chapter 4,
we then turn to the efforts to make black Londoners into good citizens, surveying
the various projects of civics, good neighbourliness, and voluntary association
that defined integration politics at the local level in the 1950s and 1960s. As with
the plans to reform the Teddy boys, these were projects that were undertaken
always with one eye on the possible alternatives—civic disengagement or, worse
still, violence and revolt. These were the nightmare scenarios that many felt were
only narrowly escaped in 1958. Citizenship and civics, however, were only ever
part of the plan. We turn next, in Chapter 5, to friendship, a term and an activity
that shaped the culture of integration throughout the two decades before the first
Race Relations Act. This chapter locates the popularity of friendship as a model
for integration in the context of long-running distrust in political institutions and
ideologies as capable of building a peaceful and cooperative world society. It
explains the popularity of friendship as an attempt to depoliticize race, which
drew both on the popular peace-making projects emerging in the reaction to the
global wars of the first half of the century and on the ‘feminizing’ projects for
building a more domestic and inclusive empire forged in the same period. In each
of the integration cultures explored in the aforementioned chapters, as I show in
particular through readings of contemporary literary and filmic imaginative
engagements with them, the dynamics of race and racialization remained prom
inent, undoing the efforts at building harmony or friendship. In each, also, the
structural features of racial subordination remained for the most part untouched,
as the business of integration was restricted to the terrain of personal conduct
and interpersonal relations.
While the integration projects that are the focus of Chapters 3 to 5 were
white-dominated, even if not exclusively white, there existed alongside them a
network of black-led integrationism—largely a West Indian diasporic forma-
tion, which was often closely tied to the nation-building drive in the Caribbean.
This is the integrationism studied in Chapter 6, and I describe it here, drawing
on the literature on black America, as an uplift project, led by a black middle
class determined to reform the character of their working-class counterparts.
Uplift, as I show in Chapter 6, was undertaken in the context of precarious
black citizenship, as middle-class leaders sought solutions that might, they
hoped, secure that citizenship’s protection. But as a part of a diasporic project of
nation-building it was built, also, on the conviction that the black poor needed
to be led into a form of responsible modern citizenship. This theme is carried
forward in Chapter 7, in which we turn from the efforts to govern black
Londoners’ social and leisure lives, which are explored in the preceding
chapters and proved the major theme within integrationism in this era, to think
instead about the way that integrationists approached the question of political
participation. Black middle- class integrationists sought to cultivate black
working-class participations in the political institutions of state—to get them
voting and running for office and to have their voices included in what counted
as public opinion. They did this, of course, with a clear purpose in mind, hop-
ing to get black citizens reckoned with as a political force and so to register
their concerns politically. But they were not alone in this insistence on the need
to get working-class black Londoners active in the accepted channels of polit
ical citizenship. All the major parties, to varying degrees, concerned themselves
with the black voter. They worried that without conscripting these citizens into
the political system, their frustrations would register in other, disorderly, poten-
tially violent ways. And yet, as Chapter 7 shows, the effort at orderly integration
of these citizens into the dominant habits and institutions of political citizen-
ship was repeatedly disrupted by their refusal to behave as they were expected
to. Working-class black Londoners entered the political field as a disruptive,
subaltern force, bringing with them their own practices, institutions, and
beliefs, and both hybridizing and pluralizing the political culture of the city.
This constituted what I term a disorderly integration, of a type that integration-
ists were constantly required to work with in the failure of their project of reform.
The final chapter (Chapter 8) turns to the intimate terrain of erotics.
Integrationists did not speak often of the erotics of their work, but within their
archives we can see how the work of interracialism, as it was often termed, car-
ried for them an erotic charge. Attending to this charge is important for a num-
ber of reasons. Firstly, it allows us to see how, even within an integrationist
project that was frequently premised on removing what were seen as the racial-
ized excesses of black Londoners—their presumed proclivities for drink, sex,
music, and hedonism, each of which were read as a consequence, ultimately, of
their blackness—exactly these proclivities were what many integrationists pri-
vately embraced. It was what made their work exciting. Secondly, attending to
the embrace of this idea of the excitement that black London promised allows
us to see another terrain of integration—informal, ad hoc, undirected. London
was ‘creolized’ by exactly these social interactions, creating an enduring, even if
uneven and sometimes unstable, multiculture. This is a story that is much wider
than that of the formal cultures and politics of integration explored in the pre-
ceding chapters, and it speaks further to the process of disorderly integration
that is explored first in Chapter 7. Thirdly, however, attention to the erotics of
integration, in its formal and informal modes, allows us to push further still at
dismantling what I proposed earlier are the false dichotomies by which the
story of race politics in this era are conventionally told. Once we start asking
what drove interracial attraction, it becomes hard to sustain the distinctions
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sharks—those great man-eating fish—it is épouvantable!" He shuddered
delicately, offered my uncle a cigarette from a case of tortoise-shell, and
blew out a cloud of perfumed smoke.
"Yes," he went on, "Monsieur Selden has told me how old Maruia's
kinsman was taken by the tonu, and how you dove down to the cave for the
old oysters your native boy had seen. And he said that if I came here this
afternoon you might show me the matched pearls you found that day."
"I have them here," put in my uncle, drawing the familiar tobacco-tin
from his pocket. "We'll show them to Sikorsky, eh? Perhaps he'll want to
make you an offer." He drew up three chairs about a table close to the
window, and pulled back the blinds to admit the afternoon sunlight into the
room. Then he opened the little box and laid the pearls side by side on the
green tablecloth.
"Well, what do you think of them?" he asked. "You've never seen a finer
matched pair, eh?"
For a moment Sikorsky lost his urbane composure. His black eyes
glittered and his hand trembled a little as he reached out to take up the pearl
nearest him. As he turned it over and over in his palm, admiring the
perfection of its form and the play of light on its flawless surfaces, he
muttered to himself in a language I had never heard. Presently he laid down
the first pearl and took up the other for examination; rose to fetch a black
leather case from a corner of the room; laid out his jeweler's scales and
measuring instruments. Without a word to us, he weighed and measured to
his satisfaction, took out writing-materials and covered a sheet of paper with
the figures of a complex calculation. Then he took up the pearls for a last
glance, and leaned back, lighting another of his perfumed cigarettes.
"There is no need of beating about the bush," he said. "You know pearls,
Selden—such a pair does not turn up twice in a lifetime. They would make a
gift for an empress! It has been a privilege to see them, even though nothing
comes of it. If they were mine, I would go hungry before I would part with
them!"
"What are they worth?" asked my uncle.

"Ah, that is hard to say—they are for sale?"
"Yes, at a price; I would buy them myself if I could afford to own such
luxuries."
"I will make you an offer, then, though the responsibility is more than I
am authorized to take. They are matched almost to the weight of a hair—Let
me see—for one of them, alone, I could safely offer you twelve thousand
dollars. Double that for the matching—forty-eight thousand for the pair—
Yes—I will make my offer fifty thousand."
He raised his hand as my uncle was about to speak.
"That is a fair offer," went on the Jew, "I assure you, a long time might
elapse before my firm could find a purchaser. I would not make it except that
they love fine pearls as I do. But if you think that this is not enough, name
your own price and give me time to wire my people in Paris. One thing I ask
of you as an old friend: show them to no one else till I have had my chance!"
"A fair enough offer, I should say," remarked my uncle, as he put the
pearls in their box and rose to leave. "I must go down to the schooner now;
my nephew and I will talk over your price to-night. Can you meet us here
after breakfast to-morrow? We'll let you know our decision in the morning."
The pearl-buyer ushered us to the door and bowed us out with another
radiant smile.
That evening, when we were sitting alone on the balcony of our hotel,
Uncle Harry told me something of the Jew. "If you met Sikorsky at home,"
he said; "you'd think he was a little counter-jumper, but as a matter of fact
there's no squarer or more decent fellow in this part of the world. I've known
him for years. He speaks half a dozen languages and has been in most of the
odd corners of the earth. What do you think of his offer? In your place I'd be
inclined to accept. I doubt, in fact, if the Twins would fetch much more. One
might take them abroad, of course, and find some rich fancier who would
pay twice as much, but peddling jewels is not in our line. What do you say?"
"Oh, let's accept his offer!" I exclaimed. I had been thinking of nothing
else since our visit to the bank. Half of fifty thousand dollars seemed a
tremendous sum to me.
"Very well," said Uncle Harry with a smile. "To-morrow will be a great
day for Marama and the old man!"
He drew from his pocket the familiar case of worn brown leather and
selected a cigar. When it was drawing to his satisfaction he tossed the match
into the street and cocked his feet against the railing of the balcony.
"I've good news," he remarked. "We have a week before your steamer
sails. I want you to see my place in the country. When does your school
begin? The first of October? That's good—you'll be home in plenty of time.
Now about the money; it's yours to do with as you like, of course, but let me
give you a bit of advice. If I were you, I'd turn the bulk of it over to your
father—he's in need of cash, and a few thousands would put the Santa
Brigida on its feet. It will be yours eventually; stick by the land, old fellow—
it doesn't pay to knock about the world as I have done. By the way, there'll
be something coming to you from your lay in the season's work, though it
will look small beside Sikorsky's check. Well, it's getting late—time we were
turning in."
In the morning, when we had finished breakfast, we met the pearl-buyer

at the bank. Half an hour later, as we shook hands and strolled out the door, I
carried in the inner fold of my pocketbook a draft for twenty-five thousand
dollars, on a San Francisco banking house. We found Marama and his father
aboard the schooner. Their eyes were bright with wonder when my uncle
told them of the bargain he had made, and they were glad to accept his offer
to look after the money for them, letting them draw on him whenever they
were in need of funds.
"I'm having some friends to dinner to-morrow," he told me as we walked

down the gangplank. "We must be getting out to Fanatea now. My boat got
in early this morning—come along and have a look at her."
She was lying a quarter of a mile down the beach, moored to the sea-wall
under the old trees bordering the avenue. On her narrow stern I saw the word
"Marara" lettered in gold, and her lean lines and the six great exhaust-pipes
standing in a row left no doubt that she could show the speed of her
namesake, the flying fish. A native in a suit of oily overalls sprang ashore to
greet us and smiled when I spoke to him in his own tongue.
"What do you think of her?" asked my uncle. "Isn't she a beauty? I built
her myself—every plank. That's a French engine—ninety horsepower—and
it drives her at better than twenty knots!"
The mechanician fetched our bags from the hotel. We took our places in
the cockpit, the spray-hood was raised, the anchor came up, and the stern
line was cast off. The deep-throated roar of the exhaust brought a little
crowd to the quay while the man turned up grease cups and oiled a bearing
here and there. He raised his head and glanced at my uncle with the odd
native lift of the eyebrows which means "All ready!" The motor burst into a
deeper and a fiercer roar; my uncle took the wheel and pulled back the lever
of the clutch. The boat quivered and sprang forward swiftly, heading for the
docks where the stevedores were dropping their wheelbarrows to watch. She
swept around the harbor in a great curve, turned seaward, and headed out
through the pass, her bows parting the waves in sheets of spray. Outside the
reef we swung southward toward Fanatea, twenty miles off.
An hour later I saw a break in the white line of the reef. As we sped in
through the gap, the huge blue combers, with spray whipping back from
their crests, raced in on either side of us to topple and crash in thundering
foam.
"There's Fanatea!" shouted my uncle, pointing to a long white house at

the end of an avenue of pahns.
A path, bordered by ornamental palms, led from the pier to my uncle's

house, set on a rise of land a quarter of a mile beyond. The plantation had a
long frontage on the beach and extended inland, across the rich alluvial flat,
up into the hills. More than two hundred acres were planted with coconuts,
—stately young palms in rows ten yards apart,—and lines of fencing divided
the land into paddocks, where I saw fat cattle grazing belly-deep in grass.
The house was long and low, plastered with burned coral from the lagoon.
The veranda overlooked a matchless view of dark-green foreshore, placid
lagoon, white reef, and sparkling sea. Far off across the channel the horizon
was broken by Eimeo's jagged peaks. Deep, cool, and airy, the veranda was
my uncle's living-room, and at the windward end, in a great glassed-in bay, I
found his collection of idols, weapons, and native implements. That night,
when the Chinese houseboy rang the gong, I scarcely knew Uncle Harry in
pumps, flannel trousers, and a smart white dinner-coat. It was his custom to
potter about all day on the plantation, bush-knife in hand and clad only in a
cotton pareu; but when evening came and he had had his bath, he never
failed to appear immaculate at the dinner hour.
"This is the only home I have," he remarked as we sat down, "and when
I'm here I make a little effort to keep up appearances. It saves me from
becoming a savage. I have a good many friends scattered about the island—I
visit them sometimes and they often come here. As I told you, a few of them
will be out to-morrow: Sikorsky is coming and a couple of Government
men. Old Jackson said he would come, too—he's my agent here; by the way,
he's reserved a deck cabin for you on the steamer. Maruia is the most famous
cook on the island—she's promised to come out to superintend the kitchen."
Maruia arrived early the next afternoon, and when she had shaken hands
with us she went straight to the back of the house, where the Fanatea people,
who stood in awe of such a rich and celebrated character, sprang this way
and that to do her bidding.
The motor-boat had gone to town, and just before sunset I heard the
hoarse bellow of her exhaust and saw her moving swiftly across the lagoon
toward the pier. When he had presented me to his guests, my uncle took the
Frenchmen in charge and left me with old Mr. Jackson and Sikorsky. The
gold-lipped shell and his adventure with Schmidt had made Uncle Harry the
hero of the hour, and since the Jew had showed the Marama Twins to several
of his friends, I found myself an object of interest to these older men. But
Mr. Jackson, a gaunt old Englishman with friendly eyes and an enormous
white moustache, knew how to put me at my ease.
"A beautiful pair of pearls," he remarked when we were walking into the
dining-room; "they'll make a sensation in Paris! Sikorsky showed them to
me last night; he's planning to take the next boat north, on his way to France.
Told me how you found them, too—the tonu and all the rest of it. Bad
brutes, those tonus—one nearly had me when I was a lad. Forty years ago,
that was—I'm getting old, eh? In those days I was supercargo aboard a
schooner of the Maison Brander. We were lying becalmed inside the pass at
Mangareva, and in spite of what the natives said, I thought I'd have a bit of a
swim. In the nick of time I saw the brute coming up at me—a great spiny,
mottled beast, with a mouth like an open door. We were towing a boat, by
good luck—I went over her stern so fast I scraped half the skin off my
chest!"
"He's off!" said my uncle, at the other end of the table. "Mr. Jackson's our
champion spinner of yarns, Charlie; he's a true artist, and you mustn't believe
everything he says!"
The old man chuckled—they were friends of many years standing. "I'll
promise not to do any more talking," he said. "I'm hungry, and I can tell by
that salad of shrimps that old Maruia is somewhere about. Lucky man! How
did you persuade her to officiate?"
An hour later, when the Chinese boy had brought coffee, one of the
Frenchmen pushed back his chair and rose. He was the treasurer of the
colony, a stout, middle-aged man, with keen dark eyes and a close-cropped
beard.
"First of all," he said, with a friendly smile at my uncle, "permit me to

thank you for an excellent dinner, such as I know how to appreciate. Nor
must we forget Maruia, whose skill in her art I have known for so many
years. And now let me propose the health of our host, whose discovery of
gold-lipped shell in the Paumotus marks an addition to the resources of the
colony. To Monsieur Selden, then, whose enterprise has earned the
Government's warm thanks!"
My uncle rose as the Treasurer sat down.
"Monsieur Durand has been more than kind," he said. "And speaking of
Maruia, she has been good enough to offer to entertain us this evening. You
all know the old-time native songs, and how rarely one hears them
nowadays. She has composed an uté on our diving-season at Iriatai. I think
she is waiting for us on the veranda—bring your coffee along."
We found her in the bay-window, examining a piece of tapa cloth. She
seemed known to all the company and perfectly at ease, addressing Mr.
Jackson in native and the others in fluent French. Her hair, which was
brushed back loosely, was fastened with a pearl-studded clasp at the nape of
her neck; golden earrings were in her ears, and she wore a flowing gown of
thin black silk. I could scarcely believe that this was the old savage beside
whom I had dived day after day, the fierce creature who had leaped
overboard, spear in hand and muttering a heathen prayer, to avenge her
nephew's death.
I sat down between Mr. Jackson and Sikorsky, on a long lounge covered
with a scarlet-bordered mat. Beyond the railing of the veranda a score of
natives squatted on the grass.
Maruia took her place cross-legged on the floor, and a boy placed in her
hands a great piano-accordion, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In the silence
which proved the interest of her audience, she drew out the bellows and let
her fingers play over the stops. Then I heard for the first time the music of
the uté—a wild minor melody, stirring, exultant, heathen, and profoundly
sad. Suddenly she began to sing, in a high-pitched wail, a song such as our
ancestors must have sung in the firelight, centuries before history dawned.
Here and there I could catch a word,—enough to piece together the story the
verses told,—but the language was full of imagery and many of the words
were of the ancient tongue which only a few of the older people understood.
She sang of how the Tara came to Faatemu and sailed away to Iriatai; of how
Seroni killed the old god in the form of a shark; and of the temple in the
cave; of the strange shell with lips like gold, such as no man in the Paumotus
had seen; of her nephew's death, and how Teura had been avenged; of
Schmidt and the fight aboard the schooner, when the woman from a far land
was killed.
All this sounds commonplace enough, as I read over the words I have set
down, but there was something far from commonplace in the quality of the
woman's voice, in the wild imagery of her words, in the primitive and
stirring cadences of her song. At last the music died away, and Maruia
leaned back with a sigh as she snapped the hooks of her accordion.
We were silent for a time, and then my uncle spoke. He turned to Mr.
Jackson.
"It's curious," he observed—"the spell of those old songs!" The trader

looked up at him, raising his snowy eyebrows in the native gesture of assent.
"Either there's real art in a thing of that kind," he answered, "or I've
become a savage after forty years!"
The Jew had not moved once while Maruia sang. The perfumed cigarette,
forgotten between his fingers, had burned out. The old man's words seemed
to rouse him from a reverie.
"Ah, gentlemen," he said, more seriously than I had heard him speak
before, "make no mistake—the essence of all art is in such a song! So our
old Hebrew minstrels sang, long before my people's captivity in Egypt! So,
perhaps, the Greek bards sang of the fall of Troy!"
As the next day was Sunday, we persuaded our guests to stop over, and it
was late afternoon when we took our places in the motor-boat, slipped out
through the pass, and headed north along the reef. The breeze had died away
and the Marara drove through a long, gentle swell, running in from the west.
I was beginning to understand my uncle's love of the island: on such an
evening, it was impossible to believe that any part of the world could be
more beautiful. Beyond the line of breakers the lagoon lay like a mirror in
the sunset calm, and I saw the smiling coastal land, with its coconut and
breadfruit groves, sheltered at the mouths of valleys which pierced the lofty
wooded hills. Out to the west, half hidden in clouds all rosy and edged with
gold, Eimeo rose from unruffled waters. A long spit of land ran out to sea
ahead of us.
"Point Venus," remarked my uncle, leaning over to speak in my ear. "The

speck of white at the end is the lighthouse, the only one in this part of the
world. It is built on the site of Captain Cook's observatory; he came here,
you know, to observe the transit of Venus in 1769. He was a wonderful man
—have you read the account of his voyages? Ah, you've a treat ahead! His
ship anchored in Matavai Bay, this side of the point, and he named the group
the Society Islands, in honor of the Royal Society, which sent him out.
Sometimes I wish I could have lived in those days, when there were still
islands left to discover—"
We were turning into the pass. Half an hour later we had bidden our
guests good-night, and the Marara was speeding homeward in the dusk.
My week at Fanatea passed with the swiftness of a dream, and the day
came all too soon when I said good-bye to the people of the plantation and
stepped aboard the boat for the last time. As we entered the pass at Papeete, I
saw the mail steamer from New Zealand lying alongside the dock, hideous
and huge beside the trim sailing vessels of the port. She was to carry me to
San Francisco.
We went aboard at once to look up my stateroom and inquire at what hour

the steamer would sail. The captain, a gray-haired Englishman, with a red
face and a great jutting stomach, tightly buttoned in a double-breasted coat
of drill, was an old friend of my uncle's. He called us to his quarters by the
bridge.
"Hello, Selden," he said, "they tell me you've had a row with old
Thursday Island. He was done in, eh? Good job, to my way of thinking! An
odd bloke; gentleman born, I should say, but a hard case, and crook as they
make 'em! I knew him out in the Solomons, in ninety-eight." He turned to
me, holding out an enormous hairy hand.
"I've heard about you, young man," he rumbled. "You're the lad who
found Sikorsky's pearls, eh? He's going north with us. They're aboard now,
safe in the purser's strongbox. I'll tell the chief steward to put you at my
table. We'll be sailing by three o'clock."
We lunched aboard the Tara that day, and when the meal was finished my
uncle and I sat talking in steamer-chairs on deck. "It's hard to see you go, old
fellow," he said, "I'll be lonely without you; but don't forget that you're
coming down again. I wish I could go north with you now—I'd give
something to be there when your father hears of our good luck, and sees how
tall and strong you've grown! But I'll be up next year without fail; perhaps
I'll bring the Tara, and you'll see Marama and the rest of them again. I've
always wanted a cruise down the Lower Californian coast, to have a look at
those Mexican islands and bays. Give my love to your father and mother,
and to Marion—tell them how glad I am that they let you come with me.
This is for your sister, by the way; take good care of it—perhaps you'd better
put it in the purser's safe." He handed me a little plush-lined jewel-case,
opening it to display a string of beautifully graduated pearls.
"I've been collecting them for several years," he went on with a smile.
"Marion is the only niece I have, and I hope this will give her pleasure for a
long time to come. But it's time you were getting aboard—the men are up
forward, waiting for you to say good-bye."
I felt a lump in my throat as I shook hands with them, one after the other:
Ofai, Ivi with his bandaged arm, Pahuri, Fatu, and the cook. Marama and the
chief of Faatemu were standing with Maruia on the dock.
"My heart is heavy to-day," said Marama, as I took his hand, "but Seroni
has promised that shall go with him when next he sails away to your land.
Perhaps it will not be long before we meet."
"Come back to us one day," said the old woman. "Your welcome will be
warm, for your friends are many in these islands!"
"E, parau mau," put in Taura, in his deep voice. "Those are true words!"
The ship was whistling for the last time. Half laughing and half vexed at
the delay, my uncle seized my arm to drag me away from the group of kind
native friends. As we pushed our way through the crowd about the
gangplank, the sailors were casting off the lashings. Uncle Harry grasped my
hand.
"Time you were aboard," he said. "Good-bye, old man."
The gangplank came up, lines were cast off, and the propeller began to
churn. I stood by the rail, gazing down at the faces of friends among the
crowd ashore, while the steamer backed, turned, and headed for the open
sea. A handkerchief fluttered on the Tara's deck; her ensign dipped
gracefully in a farewell salute. All at once a feeling of sadness came over me
—I turned my eyes away from the land, walked blindly to my stateroom, and
closed the door.
That evening, when the bugle announced the dinner hour, I went on deck
and gazed back across the calm sea astern. The far-away peaks of Tahiti and
Eimeo stood like faint blue clouds on the line where sea met sky—lands of
enchanted memory, fast disappearing in the fading light.
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Colonized by Humanity: Caribbean

London and the Politics of Integration

Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of

At the End of Everything Marieke Nijkamp

At the End of Everything Marieke Nijkamp

At the End of Everything Marieke Nijkamp

Cato the Younger: life and death at the end of the

Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience': Essays on

Cato The Younger: Life And Death At The End Of The

Anxious to find some excuse to explain away the daily pin-­pricking,

Rachael Gilmour, Rhodri Haywood, Matthew Hilton, Tim Hitchcock, Matt

List of acronyms and initialisms xv

BCWS British Caribbean Welfare Service

We arrived, I think it was Waterloo or Victoria, I’ve forgotten what

Fig. 1. ‘West Indian Arrivals’. © Howard Grey, 1962.

Grey’s photographs remind us of the other side of the postcolonial encounter

Fig. 2. ‘West Indian Arrivals’. © Howard Grey, 1962.

photographers, news anchors, police officers, and not uncommonly representatives

From racism to race

Attending to the history of the development of liberal integrationism in Britain,

distinction in terms of ‘liberalism’ versus ‘illiberalism’, or ‘tolerance’ versus

36 See Peppard, ‘Innocence’, 46.

training in citizenship.40 Integrationism took up this slack. While the voluntary

antidote to racism in the cultivation of civility, understanding, civics, a strong

The local politics of race

50 See Matthew Hilton, ‘Politics Is Ordinary: Non-­Governmental Organizations and Political

timing, and commitment to a sense of Commonwealth unity and post-­imperial

Integration can be understood in Raymond Williams’s sense of the term as a

not simply about demographics. Indeed, statistics collected by the Commission in

My discussion of the sociology of integrationism here should not detract, how-

the West Indian Standing Conference would define integration in opposition to

76 Neville Maxwell, The Power of Negro Action (London, 1965), 20.

In the following chapters, we will track the development of London’s integration

was a way of understanding racism that explained it as a product, simultaneously,

"What are they worth?" asked my uncle.

He raised his hand as my uncle was about to speak.

In the morning, when we had finished breakfast, we met the pearl-buyer

"I'm having some friends to dinner to-morrow," he told me as we walked

"There's Fanatea!" shouted my uncle, pointing to a long white house at

A path, bordered by ornamental palms, led from the pier to my uncle's

"First of all," he said, with a friendly smile at my uncle, "permit me to

My uncle rose as the Treasurer sat down.

"It's curious," he observed—"the spell of those old songs!" The trader

"Point Venus," remarked my uncle, leaning over to speak in my ear. "The

We went aboard at once to look up my stateroom and inquire at what hour

"Time you were aboard," he said. "Good-bye, old man."

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

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1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

Anxious to find some excuse to explain away the daily pin-pricking,

List of acronyms and initialisms xv

50 See Matthew Hilton, ‘Politics Is Ordinary: Non-Governmental Organizations and Political

timing, and commitment to a sense of Commonwealth unity and post-imperial