Description
Conventional accounts of nationalism and nation-state formation commonly identify the United Kingdom as one of the world’s first nation-states; such a view obscures, however, the principally ‘imperial’ rather than ‘national’ character of the British state until postwar decolonization. I proceed, therefore, from a recognition of the British nation-state as a “post-colonial invention” (Baker 2009) and shed light on the following peculiarity of its ‘postcolonial’ condition: namely how, rather than emerging as the prototypical nation-state that would be replicated outside Europe, Britain has learned the art of national statehood from the colonial world that it forged. I specifically contend that the communities of the former settler empire – in particular Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – have endured as a reservoir of racialized meanings and practices through which Britain has reconstituted itself as a nation-state and navigated successive crises and dilemmas of postcolonial statehood, echoing these communities’ historical envisioning as White utopias and ‘improved’ versions of Britain itself. Drawing on a range of archival and documentary evidence, I trace such circulations from ‘settler colony to metropole’ through an analysis of the various ‘points-based’ immigration and nationality selection systems that successive British governments have adopted from the handover of Hong Kong to the post-Brexit era.
