Introduction: Marking Race in Twentieth Century British History.

How might historians narrate Britain's past if we centre imperial racial formation and its contestations? The thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation provided an opportunity for a new generation of scholars to consider the frameworks of race in British history. In 1987, Gilroy challenged Marxist approaches that treated race as secondary to or even a mechanistic expression of class inequality. He showed that the failure to account for race and empire positioned racialized subjects as perpetual outsiders.

The African Grounds of Race Relations in Britain.

'Race relations' became the most common way of conceptualizing the 'integration' of Commonwealth migrants and various obstacles to it in post-war Britain. However, interest in race relations did not centre initially on Afro-Caribbeans and other non-white migrants to metropolitan Britain as is commonly assumed. Before the 1960s, efforts to study and manage them centred primarily on British settler colonies in Africa.

Marking Race: Empire, Social Democracy, Deindustrialization.

This joint-authored essay concludes the thematic issue 'Marking Race'. Drawing on the authors' individual essays and reviewing the wider literatures in the field of race and immigration, imperialism and decolonization, social democracy and the welfare state, and deindustrialization, the essay makes a series of proposals about what an analytical focus on race adds to our understanding of modern British history.