Why the English like turbans? The surprising history of multiculturalism in one country

When?

Monday 16 November 2009, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 04AD00 (AD building, ground floor) University of Surrey

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Dr David Feldman

Dr David Feldman, Birkbeck College, London

This paper offers a reassessment of responses to immigration to the UK in the post-war decades. It’s starting point are the victories by Sikhs won in the 1960s and 1970s to wear turbans in the workplace, as part of their uniforms when serving as policement and in the armed services, and to be exempt from laws which required the wearing of crash helmets. These victories are notable not least because they are at odds with the conventional view that these years witnessed the triumph of racialised, white and exclusive conception of British identity. The paper argues that the triumph of a certain sort of multiculturalism since the late 1970s was the reassertion of a long term tendency with in the British polity. Over the last two centuries the British state has developed pluralist solutions to the problems posed by the existence of several cultural communities within the polity. First, it did so in accommodating, or attempting to accommodate, subordinate nationalisms in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Second, it did so in regulating the relations between Church and state. Third, it did so through strategies of indirect rule within the empire. In each case, however, these solutions were part of a strategy of incorporation and governance; designed to preserve English dominance within the United Kingdom; to govern subject peoples within the empire; and to preserve the privileges of the established Church. The policies were intended to reform but also to preserve vestiges of the English ancien regime They highlight the influence over two centuries of what I term conservative pluralism. This legacy has powerfully shaped the development of multiculturalism in the UK.