Eugenics, the British Empire, and the creation of the global migration system

Modern border regimes can be seen as implicitly based on eugenics principles: the national body politic regulates the movement of migrants to avoid contamination from ‘undesirables’. Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern migration systems are underpinned by historic attitudes towards race, gender, and productivity. In the British Empire, as elsewhere, immigration controls and naturalisation processes favoured the white and able-bodied. Drawing on the applicants’ own research findings, and broader research within Migration, Legal, and Disability Studies, as well as Medical and Colonial History, this project will create an interdisciplinary network in order to develop our understanding of the lived experience of eugenics, both at the border and beyond. This project will centre both the policy and practice of migration control in order to develop a better understanding of the intersectional and complex legacies of migration discrimination. By focusing on processes of naturalisation, colonial immigration law, and health-related border controls, this working group will enable us to bring together issues which have often been treated independently. We will build on existing scholarship which focuses on the legal and discursive nature of immigration control to interrogate how border regimes worked in practice. This fund will enable us to deepen our understanding of important issues around migration, the body, inclusion and exclusion. In drawing on a wide range of disciplines and sources, it is envisaged we will scope, design and write a larger, ambitious project plan to continue our innovative research and broaden our collaboration across the Social Sciences, and present our findings and recommendations to a broad interdisciplinary audience.