Defining British Citizenship. Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain

Jeannette Money of University of California, Davis reviews Defining British Citizenship. Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain by Rieko Karatani. Rieko Karatani seeks to explain the immigration and citizenship policies in Britain that repeatedly postponed the creation of British citizenship until 1981. Existing works concentrated on the reasons for the racially discriminatory nature of British immigration policy after World War II, analysing Britain’s domestic constitutional system and the political manoeuvring between political parties or between policy-makers and the public. In contrast, Karatani looks at the alternative citizenships of British subjecthood and Commonwealth citizenship, and demonstrates how the complex rules of citizenship and immigration were devised in response to the need to build and transform those ‘global institutions’, the British empire and later the Commonwealth.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00235.xi.