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TRANSNATIONAL JOURNEYS AND DOMESTIC HISTORIES
| By Wendy Webster |
University of Central Lancashire |
| In Mike and Stefani, an Australian documentary film released in 1952, a family group—Mike, Stefani, their young daughter and Mike's adolescent nephew—are shown on board ship, bound for Australia.1 The displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany that they are leaving is only one of a number of liminal places on which the film focuses. These include the labour camps in Germany to which Mike and Stefani are deported as enforced workers during the Second World War, and the immigration office where they undergo a rigorous interview about their application to enter Australia. Ron Maslyn Williams, the film's producer and writer, reversed Mike and Stefani's journey, travelling from Australia to Europe to research the film, and visiting every DP camp in Germany. To save money, he travelled in an International Refugee Organisation ship.2 |
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This essay considers the potential of histories of transnational movements of people, comparative histories of particular movements, and the erosion of boundaries between British domestic and imperial history, to expand and revise social histories of place. It does so through looking at a particular case-study: that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British domestic life and work. I begin by tracing the historiography of the most common site of domestic work—the home—looking at two main impulses that gave rise to increasing interest in the home in historical work on Britain, the first foregrounding questions of class, and the second questions of gender and class. Historians of Britain were slow to take up questions of race and ethnicity. A main focus of the essay is on how such questions are raised through a consideration of transnational migrations of people which, in a British context, often involves making connections between domestic and imperial history. But I also consider enforced migrations through the movement of refugees—a neglected area in historical work, including work on Britain. |
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Work on such movements demonstrates how far the history of home involves transnational themes, including the recruitment of migrants and refugees who crossed national borders to do domestic work, and their development of what has been called the 'transnational family'—one that maintained contact and relationship across national borders. The essay is concerned to situate Mike and Stefani's journey by ship to Australia within a history of policies, shaped by ideas of gender, race and class in an imperial context, that produced convoluted movements of peoples. It compares their journey not only to that made by refugees recruited to the British labour market from DP camps in Germany and Austria, but also to that made by British migrants to Australia in the immediate post-war period. In doing so, it traces some of the intersecting transnational dimensions of diverse domestic histories. |
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A democratisation of place was a strong feature of British social history from the mid-1960s. Attention turned away from elite places and their inhabitants and activities towards what were sometimes called (especially in works of oral history) 'ordinary people' and the working classes. Through its focus on class, British social history from the mid-1960s generated interest in a wide range of places in which the working classes congregated: places of leisure, workplaces, meeting places, communities. There was also attention to working-class housing which, in a British context, included work on model villages, Chartist villages, artisan dwellings, the rural labourer's cottage. In cultural studies, Richard Hoggart's account of working-class community in Hunslet in Leeds made considerable reference to domesticity and domestic interiors, particularly through his strong focus on the figure of 'our Mam'. His portrait of working-class community and culture in a Northern English city, and their erosion by commercialisation and Americanisation, was influential for many social historians of Britain.3 |
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