Introductory description

This module explores mass migration, ideas of belonging and emerging cultures of health and welfare in the era of border control and formal citizenship - that is, from the late nineteenth through to the twentieth-first century.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Introduction: Why (and whose) history of migration?
2. Making ‘immigrants’: immigration law and national citizenship
3. Arrival: The Island Immigration Stations
4. Settlement Part 1: The Limits of Assimilationism and Integration
5. Settlement Part 2: From Migrants to Citizens
6. Reading week
7. From ‘Braceros’ to ‘illegals’: (re) making Mexican ‘migrants’
8. ‘Civis Britannicus Sum’: forging an imperial citizenship
9. From Prison Colony to ‘White Australia’
10. British Migrants in the 20thCentury: ‘£10 poms’ and ‘Home Children’

Term2

1. ‘We are here because you were there’: migration and the metropole
2. ‘This crowded isle’: the end of ‘Open Door’ Britain
3. Migration, multiculturalism, and medicalization
4. Models of African mobility: the forced and the free
5. Imperial pasts and migrant presence: Africa in the metropole
6. Reading week
7. ‘Money has no smell’: travellers, traders and ‘economic migrants’
8. Homelands and Hostlands: hybrid homes or multiple identities
9. Naming to control: 'Coolies', 'Yids', 'Yanks', and 'Dagos'; 'Wogs', 'Pakis', 'Towelheads', and 'Negros'
10. Workshop: seeing ‘migrants’ in the media

Term 3

1. Conclusion: Ethnicity, exoticism and ‘multiculturalism’

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the role of mass migration in the emergence of contemporary models of citizenship and the state and the reciprocal impacts of migration on both host and home societies and cultures.
• Critically analyse and evaluate a range of migration case studies from a comparative perspective, paying due attention to changes over time and regionality.
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, relating to the role of health and medicine in shaping responses to migration and ethnic diversity.
• Take responsibility to identify, design, and produce a coherent project on migration and ethnicity by creating content for a non-academic audience.
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to issues of migration and ethnicity in the modern period.
• Produce critically engaged undergraduate scholarship on the history and contemporary impacts of migration.

Indicative reading list

• Emily Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (London: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
• Charles T. Adeyanju, Nicole Neverson, '“There Will Be a Next Time”: Media Discourse about an “Apocalyptic” Vision of Immigration, Racial Diversity, and Health Risks', Canadian Ethnic Studies, 39, 1 (2007) pp. 79-105.
• Stephanie J. Nawyn, ‘New Directions for Research on Migration in the Global South’, International Journal of Sociology 46, 3 (2016) 163-168.
• Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004).
• Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
• Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
• Elliott Robert Barkan, ‘Return of the Nativists? California Public Opinion and Immigration in the 1980s and 1990s’, Social Science History, 27, 2 (Summer 2003), 229-283.
• Alison Bashford, Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present(2006).
• Daniel E. Bender, ‘Perils of Degeneration: Reform, the Savage Immigrant, and the Survival of the Unfit’, Journal of Social History, 42, 1, (Fall 2008), 5-29.
• Roberta Bivins, Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration and the NHS in Postwar Britain(Oxford: OUP, 2015).
• Heidi Bohaker, Franca Iacovetta, ‘Making Aboriginal People “Immigrants Too”: A Comparison of Citizenship Programs for Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples in Postwar Canada, 1940s–1960s’, The Canadian Historical Review, 90, 3, (September 2009), 427-461.
• Kelly Duke Bryant, ‘Black but Not African: Francophone Black Diaspora and the "Revue Des Colonies," 1834-1842’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, 2 (2007), 251-82.
• J. David Cisneros, ‘Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of "Immigrant as Pollutant" in Media Representations of Immigration’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 11, 4, (Winter 2008), 569-601.
• Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland (eds), Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
• Amy Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigration, Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labour Force (2003).
• Roxana Galusca, ‘From Fictive Ability to National Identity: Disability, Medical Inspection, and Public Health Regulations on Ellis Island’, cultural critique 72, (Spring 2009), 137-163.
• Libby Garland ‘Not-quite-closed Gates: Jewish Alien Smuggling in the Post-Quota Years’, American Jewish History, September 2008; Vol. 94, No. 3, pp. 197-224.
• Daniel Gorman, ‘Wider and Wider Still?: Racial Politics, Intra-Imperial Immigration and the Absence of an Imperial Citizenship in the British Empire’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3, 3 (Winter 2002), no pages.
• Joan M. Haig, ‘From Kings Cross to Kew: Following the History of Zambia's Indian Community through British Imperial Archives’, History in Africa, 34 (2007), 55-66.
• Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Immigration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Joanna Herbert, Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in Britain(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
• Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small, eds. Black Europe and the African Diaspora (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009).
• Michael B Katz, Mark J. Stern, Jamie J.Fader, ‘The Mexican Immigration Debate: The View from History’, Social Science History, 31, 2 (Summer 2007), 157-189.
• Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travellers: Germs, Genes and the ‘Immigrant Menace’ (1994).
• Erika Lee ‘Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924’, The Journal of American History, 89 (2002), 54-86.
• Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (2002).
• Krista Maglen, ‘Importing Trachoma: The Introduction into Britain of American Ideas of an “Immigrant Disease”, 1892-1906’, Immigrants & Minorities 23 (2005): 80 – 99.
• Krista Maglen, ‘A World Apart: Geography, Australian Quarantine, and the Mother Country’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 60, 2 (April 2005), 196-217.
• Howard Markel, Quarantine: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (1997).
• Howard Markel, Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society’, Milbank Quarterly 80 (2002): 757.
• Lara Marks and Michael Worboys (eds), Migrants, Minorities and Health (1997).
• Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
• Nancy Ordover, ‘National Hygiene: Twentieth Century Immigration and the Eugenics Lobby’, in Ordover, American Eugenics: Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1-56.
• Susana Peña, ‘"Obvious Gays" and the State Gaze: Cuban Gay Visibility and U.S. Immigration Policy during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16, 3 (July 2007) 482-514.
• Eve Rosen Hat and Robbie Aitken, eds, Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
• Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, (2001).
• Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (Feb., 1999), 41-81.
• Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City (2002).
• John Welshman, 'Tuberculosis and Ethnicity in England and Wales, 1950-70', Sociology of Health & Illness, 26, 6 (2000), 858-82.
• Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘African Diasporas: Toward a Global History’, African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (2010): 1-19.

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.