The Development of British Imperial Nationality 1900-1948

Abstract

Under the 1948 British Nationality Act, Clement Attlee’s Labour government afforded the new status of ‘Commonwealth Citizenship’ to inhabitants of the United Kingdom, its colonial possessions, and independent Commonwealth countries. Historians agree that by reaffirming an imperial model of British nationality, the Act facilitated unprecedented levels of Commonwealth migration to Britain. Yet, this outcome was unintentional, they show. Drafters of the BNA did not anticipate that significant numbers of Commonwealth Citizens from the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and elsewhere would lay claim to their British status and settle in the mother country. This dissertation explores the political and constitutional origins of the BNA by tracing the development of imperial nationality policies over the first half of the twentieth century. In so doing, it addresses a key question neglected by historians of decolonisation; what did metropolitan officials hope to achieve by codifying a sweeping grant of British imperial citizenship in the wake of the Second World War? I argue that constitutional frameworks of British imperial belonging were designed by Whitehall legal experts to order and unify colonial territories and populations across, what John Darwin calls an expansive ‘world-system’. British nationality laws relied on tactical ambiguities and technical exceptions to manage the diversity of inter-locking sovereignties, indeterminate boundaries, liberal ideals and racist contradictions which informed British governance throughout ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ zones of imperial influence. However, in the 1920s and 30s, the empire’s shared British status increasingly became a political lever for South African, Irish, Canadian, and Indian leaders seeking to advance their own national sovereignties and citizenship rights. The 1948 BNA responded to the Dominions’ gradual accession to independent statehood since the First World War. Even so, the dissertation concludes by showing that the Home Office was complacent about Britain’s role as the imperial ‘parent’ in the late 1940s, believing this would allow the metropole to covertly manipulate how the terms of the Act were applied in practice. As a result, officials paid little attention to the emerging character of the ‘new’ Commonwealth, shaped by disruptive post-colonial membership and the decline of an overarching Britannic identity.