Shades of difference: Irish, Caribbean, and South Asian immigration to the heart of empire, 1948-1971

This project explores the role Irish immigrants played in both destabilizing and perpetuating racial and imperial hierarchies in England between 1948 and 1971. It illustrates that postwar immigration into England can only be understood by incorporating the Irish into the story along with commonwealth immigrants. It demonstrates the multiple contributions (and complexities) of postwar immigration toward new definitions of English national identity during the country's shift from an "imperial" to a "multicultural" society.;Though the Irish were exempted from the important restrictive 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, I argue that they gained very little from that exemption. In Birmingham and London, Irish immigrants lived and worked alongside immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia in equally dire conditions. An exploration of immigrant housing and working experiences uncovers similar conditions for all three migrant groups. I show that by the mid-1960s, Irish people, though they lived and worked in similar squalor, were gradually blamed less than immigrants of color for these circumstances, as disparaging attitudes shifted toward commonwealth immigrants. Variable cultural differences and different male ratios focused attention on commonwealth immigrants, just as they began to organize and assert themselves. Though this helped the Irish avoid equal levels of resentment over time, it also contributed to their invisibility as a minority in England.;Rightly considering themselves unjustly treated in an atmosphere of growing resentment, commonwealth immigrants organized increasingly during the mid and late-sixties due to a dialectic of derision with an increasingly vocal white racist movement. The overt stance of commonwealth immigrants in asserting their rights led to even greater chauvinism from many English. Though they had endured similar circumstances, Irish people found no will to protest their treatment and essentially vanished, leaving little mark on English culture, unlike their fellow immigrants. Not only had commonwealth immigration whitened Irish immigrants, it had helped them recede in late 1960s England. Though they had been exempted from the 1962 Act, and though they managed to avoid the worst of the late 1960s immigrant conflict, the Irish in England did not actually gain from it.