Robbie Shilliam The Deserving Poor 5/5 CEISR Annual Lecture @ UoP
Channel: Dr. Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa
Date: 2018-01-18

CEISR Annual Lecture, 16 January 2018, University of Portsmouth The Deserving Poor: Colonial Genealogies from Abolition to Brexit By Professor Robbie Shilliam (Queen Mary University) In his talk, Prof. Shilliam provided a historical context to contemporary debates over the “white working class” by accounting for the development of this constituency through a postcolonial genealogy of British empire. The objective was to account for the racialization of the distinction between deserving and underserving poor, a distinction through which the “white working class” materialises as a constituency, and to chart the consistent shifting of these racialized coordinates across imperial time and space. The aim was to demonstrate that the “white working class” is neither an indigenous constituency, nor its own progenitor, but rather a product of elite struggles to consolidate and defend British imperial order, which shaped the postcolonial compact of British society. It follows, then, that contemporary retrievals of the white working class as “deserving” of social security follow a deeply entrenched inability to consider social justice outside of the framework of race and empire. As Britain prepares for the first time [with Brexit] to carve out a national economy from an imperial, commonwealth and European hinterland, this talk clarified the stakes at play.