Around 5.6 million British nationals live outside the United Kingdom: the equivalent of one in every ten Britons. However, social science research, as well as public interest, has tended to focus more on the numbers of migrants entering the UK, rather than those leaving. This book provides an important counterbalance, drawing on the latest empirical research and theoretical developments to offer a fascinating account of the lives, experiences and identities of British migrants living in a wide range of geographic locations across Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. This collection asks: What is the shape and significance of contemporary British migration? Who are today’s British migrants and how might we understand their everyday lives? Contributions uncover important questions in the context of global and national debates about the nature of citizenships, the ‘Brexit’ vote, deliberations surrounding mobility and freedom of movement, as well as national, racial and ethnic boundaries. This book challenges conventional wisdoms about migration and enables new understandings about British migrants, their relations to historical privileges, international relations and sense of national identity. It will be valuable core reading to researchers and students across disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, Politics and International Relations.

This memorial book honours the legacy of Eric Richards's work in an interplay of academic essays and personal accounts of Eric Richards. Following the Eric Richards methodology, it combines micro- and macro-perspectives of British migration history and covers topics such as Scottish and Irish diasporas, religious, labour and wartime migrations. Eric Richards was an international leading historian of British migration history and a pioneer at exploring small- and large-scale migrations. Starting with a foreword from David Fitzpatrick and Ngaire Naffine's eulogy, the book includes Richards' last public intervention, given in Amiens, France, in September 2018. This volume brings together renowned scholars of British and migration history who pay tribute to Eric Richards - a remarkable historian, but also a gentleman who is remembered for his kindness and humbleness. He stood as a role model for early career researchers. The book combines local and global migrations as well as economic and social aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century British migration history.

This is a ground-breaking volume into the phenomenon of migration in and to England over the medieval millennium. A series of subject specialists synthesise and extend recent research in a wide range of disciplines and marks an important contribution to medieval studies, and to modern debates on migration and the free movement of people.

Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.

The first survey of British Immigration policy to include both its pre-World War Two origins and its development after the crucial 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. An accessible introduction to a subject of increasing popularity.

The essays in this volume have been written by leading experts in their respective fields and bring together established scholars with a new generation of migration and transnational historians. Their work weaves together the ‘new’ imperial and the ‘new’ migration histories, and is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the interplay of migration within and between the local, regional, imperial, and transnational arenas. Furthermore, these essays set an important analytical benchmark for more integrated and comparative analyses of the range of migratory processes – free and coerced – which together impacted on the dynamics of power, forms of cultural circulation and making of ethnicities across a British imperial world.

England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration. The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement -- New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda -- and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties -- Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.