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. This article demonstrates how colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies directed towards race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of African liberation movements and to shape post-colonial futures with neoliberal solutions.