In September 2015, David Cameron visited Jamaica on an official state visit, the first by a British Prime Minister in 14 years. In the run up to his arrival, Jamaicans discussed whether Cameron would finally apologise for slavery, and how he might respond when confronted with the question of reparations. To most Jamaicans, slavery is not straightforwardly in the past. As Stuart Hall put it, slavery and colonialism ‘eat into Jamaica’s present’. This is not true in the same way for Britons however – who are more likely to be nostalgic for empire than remorseful – and thus Cameron was poised to disappoint those Jamaicans wanting to talk historical responsibility. 

When asked to apologise for slavery, Cameron ignored, evaded and refused. The British government confirmed that it “abhorred slavery and indeed had passed the Modern Slavery Act to tackle human trafficking today”. This formula for discussing slavery is tried and tested: if in doubt, point to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 (but not slavery, which continued until 1838); reiterate ones commitment to challenging ‘modern day slavery’; and then briskly move on. When asked about reparations by the Jamaican PM, Cameron repeated that, for the British government, this was not the right approach. We should focus on the future, not the past, he said, with how the UK can spur economic growth across Jamaica and the Caribbean. As part of that very commitment, Cameron announced that the UK would give £300m to the Caribbean to pay for infrastructure. Tourists like to be driven around on smooth roads, after all.

Perhaps most shockingly, the UK government promised £25m toward the building of a modern prison in Jamaica, on the condition that Jamaican nationals currently held in UK prisons could be transferred sooner, with or without their consent, to serve their British sentences in Jamaican prisons. Understandably, Jamaicans were aghast, and made their feelings known to the incumbent People’s National Party who had seemingly agreed to the ‘prison deal’. For many, this ‘deal’ felt like a slap in the face. And it’s not hard to see why. Jamaicans had hoped for an official apology for slavery, a considered discussion about its legacies in the present, and some engagement around the question reparations. Instead, David Cameron offered a prison so that undesirable Jamaican ‘foreign criminals’ could deported, or transferred, sooner – a prison that was to be funded through the UK’s aid budget. Few disputed that Jamaican prisons were in a dire state, but many observed that the island’s two main prisons were built by the British colonial government in the first place, one of them before emancipation. 

This episode highlighted not only to the UK’s lack of remorse in relation to slavery and its legacies, but to the ways in which immigration controls themselves actively perpetuate colonial injustice. This is the central argument in Nadine El-Enany’s new book (B)Ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire, which skilfully traces the ‘colonial structures underlying British immigration, asylum and citizenship law’. 

El-Enany’s argument is bold and direct: ‘Britain’s borders, articulated and policed via immigration laws, maintain the global racial order established by colonialism, whereby colonised peoples are dispossessed of land and resources’. She argues that Britain’s wealth and infrastructure – however unequally distributed – are the ‘spoils of empire’, and immigration and nationality law are central to the UK’s racial project of capitalist accumulation. With this in mind, El-Enany forcefully criticises the liberal politics of inclusion and recognition so central to mainstream debates about immigration, arguing instead that irregular and unauthorised migration should be rethought as a mode of anticolonial resistance – a right not a plea. 

The book is historically rich and sociologically astute, but its core intervention is within the study and politics of law:

The widespread acceptance of legal categories of people moving as defined in international, European and domestic law normalises the racial violence in which the legal system is implicated. Precluded is an understanding of the law as racial violence. Ideas and practices of racial ordering which date back to the colonial era are embedded in contemporary articulations of immigration, asylum and nationality law. In operating to target racialised people, allocating chances at life and death on the basis of rights of entry and stay, and by preventing those deemed not to qualify for a legal status from accessing Britain, law is central to ongoing processes of colonial dispossession. 

The book’s four chapters trace the history of immigration and nationality legislation in the UK, laws which progressively worked to excise colonial subjects from political membership in the White island nation under construction. These chapters are  structured around El-Enany’s core argument on colonial dispossession. El-Enany’s training in law comes through here in the thoroughgoing analysis of legislation, and yet the text is far from dry and monotonous. Throughout, the legal production of migrant categories is subject to incisive critique, the labels used to identify different ‘migrants’ are denaturalised, and the racist logics at the heart of these political processes are made plain. 

The balance of thorough legal analysis with clear political argument is what lends the book its strength. It calls for a radical rethinking of immigration and nationality law, based on a historical reckoning with the legacies of colonialism (this chimes with Maya Goodfellow’s core argument in Hostile Environment). (B)ordering Britain resonates with other excellent and recent books on race, empire, borders and Britain: Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire, which traces the colonial genealogy of the modern state; Bridget Anderson’s Us and Them? which interrogates the politics of immigration control in the UK; and Valluvan’s The Clamour of Nationalism, which delves deeper into the cultural and ideological contours of race and nation in contemporary Britain. 

Some might question El-Enany’s assertion that Britain  remains a ‘colonial state’ governing a ‘contemporary colonial space’ – for example, Nandita Sharma argues in her new book Home Rule that it is precisely the postcolonial nature of the new world order that explains the proliferation of borders/walls and nativist claims, which are hardly restricted to the former metropole. Whether our present is best described as colonial or postcolonial, however, we should all heed El-Enany’s forceful reminder to think borders historically, and to reject the meek politics of recognition which takes migrant legal categories for granted. It is true that the postcolonial world order relies on governing through citizenship – rather than via formalised racial distinctions and colonial subjecthood – but it is precisely the liberal authority of claims to universal citizenship that obscures and legitimates the immobilisation of the global poor, and  the perpetuation of colonial-global disparities. 

As El-Enany remarks, a decade of austerity and widening inequality have ensured an even greater inequality in how Britain’s ‘colonial spoils’ are distributed. In times of deepening crisis and authoritarianism, the British state is offering nothing to its citizens except more police, border guards, and prisons. The spoils hardly spoil us, and perhaps this is part of what Achille Mbembe means by ‘the becoming black of the world’. In this light, the ‘common sense’ of the racially subjugated is particularly instructive. There is much we can learn from ordinary Jamaicans, who were vexed and insulted by the ‘offer’ of a prison from the former coloniser. El-Enany’s argument is clear and politically urgent: now more than ever we need to better understand our past, so that we can develop vital anti-racist strategies in the present, as part of the collective struggle for liveable futures tomorrow.