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The global turn is central to the study of Europe’s many migration histories—outwards, inwards, and internal—and encompasses transatlantic, imperial and post-imperial, and other global arenas. Benefitting from a wealth of pathbreaking scholarship that often focuses on macro-level histories, this article advocates zooming in on individual interpretations and experiences. By doing so, it argues, historians can open up nuanced perspectives that risk becoming submerged in studies where, rather paradoxically, actual migrants are displaced by an emphasis on overarching migration phenomena. Taking the late-modern era as its focus, it traces the global dimensions of two lives spanning almost two centuries to open out broader questions, not least about race and ethnicity. Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and Gérald Bloncourt (1926-2018) were both leading documentary photographers who shared a deep commitment to social reform and the amelioration of working-class conditions. Each recorded migration histories on camera and in writing, thereby enabling an analysis of multi-media representations emanating from the same source. That both were of migration backgrounds themselves—Riis having moved from Denmark to the United States and Bloncourt from Haiti to France—renders the images and texts they created particularly resonant. Their own origins and mobile lives proved crucial to their interpretations of the wider flows of people that have connected Europe with different global settings—and continue to do so today.

Introduction In 1965, The Times published a series of reports discussing Britain's ‘Dark Million’ – ‘immigrants’ from the nation's former colonies who had settled in large numbers, mainly after the Second World War. Rendering the link between Britain's imperial history and its current experiences of migration explicit, one segment launched with a stanza from Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem ‘The White Man's Burden’, referring to the populations colonizers governed in the empire. The journalist reflected: The heavy harness has been thrown off. The British Empire is gone. ‘New caught sullen peoples’ have been given independence and may live next door to old men who were alive when Kipling's verse was written. Well may they think that the British have been in retreat ever since they won the last war, and that the debris of a falling Empire has crashed into their own backyards. In a Bradford cafe … I overheard two old men talking … They were lamenting the change – the coming of the Pakistanis with their alien habits. ‘Once we were great,’ [one] said. ‘We had the most powerful navy in the world. We used to export to India. Now their blokes come over here … Another old man, in Warwickshire, who had fought for his country and been badly wounded, also spoke of the days of glory when the Navy was strong. When coloured people came, he bought property to stop them coming next to his, to prevent the value falling. In this rendition, imperial decline followed former greatness as Britain proved unable to defend its shores against the arrival of Pakistanis and others, peoples now rhetorically reconfigured as ‘debris’ once they came too close to home and encroached upon neighbourhoods, streets, and private homes. With the decline and loss of empire, postcolonial migration became imagined as the new ‘white man's burden’ and ‘heavy harness’ as venerable aging war veterans made valiant efforts to protect the value of their homes. Peoples long ruled by the British overseas arrived deeply imbued with the history of empire – a history white Britons remembered and misremembered in equal measure. While some commentators imagined empire as signifying both a burden and a source of greatness for Britain, others provided less affirmative assessments.

In June 2004 on the Hobbemaplein, a small square in The Hague, members of the Netherlands’ Indo-Surinamese community proudly unveiled a two-part monument to their collective history of colonial and postcolonial migrations. Despite its chosen name, the National Hindustani Immigration Monument ( Nationaal Hindustaans Immigratiemonument ) was in fact much more than national. It commemorated a history of two uprootings and resettlements that stretched from indentured labourers’ departure from colonial British India for what was then Dutch Guiana (Suriname) starting in 1873 to the mass Indo-Surinamese migration to the Netherlands in the decolonization era a century later. Three decades on and with a substantial proportion having clustered in and around the city, the Indo-Surinamese had become ‘ Hindoestaanse Hagenaars ’, or ‘Hindustanis of The Hague’. One bronze sculpture designed by a Surinamese artist featured boats, airplanes, sacks, and suitcases on one side and people in transit on its reverse to depict the two phases of intercontinental migration. Several meters away stood a statue of Mohandas Gandhi, an inspirational migrant himself given his own journeys from Gujarat to Victorian London as a student, to South Africa as a lawyer and activist who fought for Indian diasporic rights, and back to India where he achieved global acclaim as the foremost Indian nationalist who campaigned for independence by non-violent means. The monument's two components thereby invoked a heritage that greatly exceeded the confines of the Netherlands and its ex-colony in South America to incorporate British South Asia and South Africa, rendering it trans-imperial as much as it was emblematic of (ex-)metropolitan-colonial population flows. Designed by a Dutch artist of Portuguese descent, moreover, the Gandhi sculpture also provided indirect testament to the intra-European movements and diasporas that complemented those coming from Europe's former colonies. On The Hague's Hobbemaplein, the local, national, continental, and intercontinental converged, with the global not reducible to one former European empire alone. And as Indo-Surinamese celebrated their successful re-rooting, socio-economic progress, and cultural adaptation in the Netherlands without having forsaken their roots, their guests of honour endorsed their presence and transition. Together with the city's mayor, the Dutch Minister for Integration congratulated them with the words ‘ U doet het goed ’, or ‘You're doing well’ – a far cry from the relentless level of public concern then being expressed about other migrant groups who were Muslim as opposed to predominantly Hindu.

Cet article aborde les experiences et les significations pour les enfants britanniques des voyages et communications dans l’empire par opposition a la vie en metropole, dans la seconde moitie du xixe siecle. Il examine deux categories d’enfants aux trajectoires imperiales differentes, l’une se deployant de l’Inde a la Grande-Bretagne, l’autre de la metropole vers le Canada. Pour les rejetons des familles britanniques liees au Raj, la residence dans l’Empire etait consideree comme un veritable probleme ; des lors les familles de la classe moyenne qui pouvaient se le permettre renvoyaient presque toujours leurs fils et filles des leur jeune âge en metropole, malgre le cout emotionnel de ces douloureuses separations familiales. Le courrier echange entre parents et enfants offrait un moyen de maintenir les relations familiales a travers le temps et l’espace. En revanche, quand il s’agissait des enfants pauvres nes en Grande-Bretagne meme, d’autres regions de l’empire apparaissaient comme un moyen d’echapper aux « parties les plus obscures de l’Angleterre ». Les enfants des taudis urbains britanniques etaient la cible des philanthropes « sauveurs d’enfants » qui cherchaient a « secourir » les orphelins et ceux qui etaient separes de parents juges – souvent injustement – cruels et immoraux. Les memes philanthropes placaient leur espoir dans l’emigration outre-mer, et notamment vers le Canada : on estimait que l’integration de ces enfants pauvres dans la population en expansion des colons canadiens permettrait tout a la fois de secourir des etres vulnerables et de participer a la construction de l’empire. Contrairement aux enfants de la classe moyenne qui quittaient l’Inde, les jeunes emigrants issus des classes populaires etaient supposes couper les liens avec leurs familles et communautes d’origine, decrites comme pathogenes. En depit de leurs amples differences sociales, les deux categories de jeunes ici examinees ont partage une histoire de la migration d’enfant a l’echelle globale dont on attendait avec force qu’elle conduise a une vie meilleure.

This article considers the meanings Indian restaurants achieved in Britain by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As highly stereotyped cultural arenas and nodes of ethnic encounter, Indian restaurants were open to as much ridicule, critique, and displays of racism as they were to enthusiasm and an emergent nostalgia. With both their food and interior decoration attracting attention, a growing number of commentators by turns condemned and defended the “curry house norm.” Gender emerges as integral to reassessments of restaurant dynamics, as do the possibilities for consuming South Asian food at home as an alternative to restaurant dining.

“Going for an Indian”—or “out for a curry”—has become an increasingly prominent aspect of British social, economic, and cultural life since the 1960s. In assessing the wide appeal of South Asian food and restaurants in April 2001, Britain’s late Foreign Secretary Robin Cook proclaimed that “Chicken Tikka Massala”—one of the cuisine’s mainstays among British diners—had become “a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Chicken Tikka is an Indian dish. The Massala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British customers.” Such cultural traffic did not threaten British national identity, Cook stressed; rather, it epitomized “multiculturalism as a positive force for our economy and society.”1 Estimates reveal that Britain now has nearly 9,000 restaurants and takeaways run by South Asian immigrants and their descendants that employ more than 70,000 people and have an annual turnover exceeding £2 billion.2 The

This article examines how, and why, decaying colonial-era European graveyards in India became targeted for conservation starting in the 1970s by the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA). Cemeteries serve as a barometer signaling how both ex-colonizers and the ex-colonized have assessed colonial spaces, artifacts, and empire more generally after decolonization. Alongside working to preserve graveyards and record tombstone inscriptions in the Indian subcontinent, BACSA members—many of whom count as "old India hands"—also helped make Raj nostalgia a recurring feature of British public culture in the late twentieth century.

This article considers how women and men acquired ‘European’ status in gender-specific ways in colonial India between the late nineteenth century and independence in 1947. Being considered ‘European’ in this setting required far more than ancestry and biological attributes, and depended heavily on class, culture, occupation and ongoing imperial border crossings that allowed individuals to maintain direct contact with Britain. Those born in India who failed to remain transient due to limited family incomes risked the stigma of becoming ‘domiciled Europeans‘, a group which strongly resembled (and was often equated with) the mixed-race Anglo-Indian community in socio-economic and cultural terms. The geographical location of children's schooling and the careers for which their education prepared them played crucial roles in determining perceptions of their adult racial status, and this article distinguishes between young women's and men's experiences by examining materials from school archives in Ind...

It is no exaggeration to state that the British Empire and maritime travel were inextricably intertwined. In the nineteenth century, tremendous advances in transport technology — most importantly, the development of passenger steamships — went hand in hand with imperial expansion.1 Correspondingly, more Britons than ever before participated in imperial migrations across the seas. Men, women, boys and girls all experienced the Empire in ways specific to their time, their circumstances, their gender and their social class. Imperial travels opened up new lives not only to the sailors who manned the ships but also to the countless numbers who became expatriates or settlers.2 Some Britons made but one journey overseas and lived out their days as permanent residents of the territory where they disembarked; others repeatedly travelled to and fro, periodically returning to their British homeland following time spent in the colonies.

“There are 100,000 Negroes in Britain today”, the leader ran. “Hundreds more are arriving every month. Thousands of them are already married to white girls. What do relatives and neighbours think about it? How do the children suffer? What is the price in insults, hardships and tears?”