Preliminary Programme

By the onset of World War I, hundreds of Ottoman immigrants were living and trading in Britain. During wartime and through much of the interwar period, these multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottomans were automatically branded as enemy aliens, even after the dissolution of the Empire, subject at times to internment and deportation to concentration camps, stripped of their freedom of movement, and uniformly barred from British citizenship. Drawing on hundreds of recently declassified naturalization applications pertaining to Armenian, Jewish, Syrian, and Greek Ottoman subjects in wartime and interwar Britain, this conference paper discusses the prosopography of Middle Eastern newcomers, nativism and xenophobia, and the role of the state in shaping national and ethnic identities.

Although this influx is not as well known as the mass immigration of Turkish labor migrants in the 1960s, it afforded British metropolitan society and its governing lawmakers formative and direct experience with a local Middle Eastern presence. The experiences of these forerunners and those who interacted with them provide a previously unknown gauge of the reception of non-Europeans in Christian Europe at a time when the foreign-born population of metropolitan Britain hovered just below 0.75 percent.

The naturalization process of Ottomans in wartime and interwar Britain is an example of what I call ‘identity imperative’—the situational coercion or pragmatism that induced individuals to officially choose one term of self-classification over another. In some cases, this nomenclature was invented or imposed by the British government.

Scholarly literature depicts British society in the first half of the twentieth century as xenophobic. Anne J. Kershen, for example, posits that “racism and discrimination seem to have played a part in the history” of all non-conforming foreign-born groups, including Chinese, Eastern European Jews, Africans, Asian Indians, Germans, and Italians. While similar hostility is borne out by the difficulties Ottoman subjects encountered in Britain during their often protracted or futile attempts to achieve naturalization, many of the recently unearthed documents also speak to a Britain that was distinctively xenophilic, from the native-born sponsors who advocated on behalf of Ottoman applicants, to the Foreign Office itself, which seldom if ever employed racist or racialist locution. (Show less)

Immigration to Belgium in the last quarter of the 19th century will be analyzed on the basis of the alien files which the Belgian central authorities opened for all newcomers. Taking into account the bias of the registration process we analyze in depth the profile of the immigrants by a sample representative for immigration throughout one year. Admission policy selected negatively only a very small share of the newcomers. Most newcomers did not stay put and the profile of the settlers will also be provided. (Show less)

Flight to Luxemburg from Nazi Germany in the 1930s will be analyzed on the basis of the alien files which the Luxemburg authorities opened for all immigrants. By a sample representative for immigration we will provide the rational of the increasingly restrictive admission policy and provide a profile of all those who arrived at the border and the few who were granted access to Luxemburg territory. (Show less)