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"HAVING LIVED CLOSE BESIDE THEM ALL THE TIME:"1 NEGOTIATING NATIONAL IDENTITIES THROUGH PERSONAL NETWORKS
| By Laura Tabili |
University of Arizona |
| Many scholars have treated nationality as a creature of the state, imposed more or less legitimately or "successfully" from the top down,2 while others have stressed how individuals and groups have contested and helped define national identities through cultural processes which might coincide with, shape, or undermine state-imposed definitions.3 Abundant scholarship documents elite and state efforts to construct and impose hegemonic definitions of national identity, including nationality itself, but we lack effective measures of their success in enlisting ordinary people into these nationbuilding projects.4 We know little about how and whether such people experienced, participated in or identified with national identities as elites envisioned them. Some scholars see nationalism presupposing "unity" between "culture" and "customary practices;" others argue ordinary people had no stake in nationalism, and that "becoming national" demanded "delocalization of feelings of belonging."5 |
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Applications for naturalization in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain afford a not unmediated glimpse into the ways migrants and natives defined and articulated British nationality. Between 1879 and 1947, nearly eight hundred migrants to South Shields, a British port at the mouth of the river Tyne, applied for and received naturalization as British subjects. Systematic analysis of the record they left can illuminate how and why individuals navigated their way from outsider to insider, reconciling transnational mobility with local relationships and national allegiances. This evidence sheds light not only on these hundreds of migrants, but their social networks: neighbors, friends, spouses, employers, business and religious contacts, landlords, and the "customary practices" through which outsiders became British. These stories show that naturalization was not simply an objective, legal, and secular contract between an individual and the state, but also a personal, subjective, and collective process in which native Britons as well as migrants from afar played decisive roles. For the people of South Shields, British nationality formed in dialogue between the locality and the state, a dialectic containing significant discrepancies between local and national definitions of belonging. |
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A port since Roman times and an industrial center since the Middle Ages, South Shields experienced its most spectacular economic and population growth in the late ninetenth century. Between 1850 and the late 1930s, when the wave of global industrial development known as the "second industrial revolution" began to recede, the Tyneside economy became heavily dependent on coalmining, shipbuilding, ship repairing and merchant shipping, all highly unstable appendages of the world economy. These volatile industries attracted thousands of migrants from elsewhere in the British Isles as well as the Baltic, Scandinavia, central Europe, the Mediterranean, and Britain's overseas colonies. In its rapid industrialization, its cultural, racial and confessional diversity, and its vulnerability to global market forces, South Shields was arguably a microcosm of industrial society.6 |
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