Entangled imperial citizenship: decolonisation and the dual status of Commonwealth immigrants in post-war Britain

Post-WWII migration from the Global South to the United Kingdom mostly comprised immigrants who were simultaneously (post-)imperial citizens. Among major attempts to remake South–North migration dynamics in the 1960s–1970s were Britain’s efforts to distinguish overlapping citizen–immigrant categorisations, recasting ‘Commonwealth citizens’ as lacking rights and subject to control. Yet this dichotomisation remained incomplete: ex-subjects whom Britain ceased to consider citizens still present claims which complicate Britain’s immigration control intentions. What explains this contradiction? This article employs a concept of ‘entangled imperial citizenship’ to trace how imperial and post-imperial ideas of citizenship interpenetrated in key periods of UK policy development, producing residual rights. Examining the policy cycles surrounding successive immigration acts in 1962, 1968 and 1971 underlines two overarching reasons why post-imperial citizens’ rights claims were not fully extinguished. First, the overlap of imperial and post-imperial citizenship concepts in shaping earlier policies generated legacies that frustrated escalating intentions to degrade Commonwealth citizenship. Second, emerging complexity in the immigration policy field, where conflicted understandings of social membership increasingly highlighted state interests in social cohesion and domestic legitimacy, interfered with reform attempts. Entangled imperial citizenship in Britain exemplifies Global North states’ difficulties in conforming migration control to their post-decolonisation intentions for South–North dynamics.