Claudia Jones and the Reimagining of Citizenship: Anticolonialism and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act

While sociologists have largely approached citizenship through a nation-centric lens, this paper theorizes it as a governance tool in the service of empire and postcolonial erasure. I focus on the struggles over Britain’s most influential post-war citizenship legislation, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which effectively turned Black British imperial subjects into “immigrants.” Although all British imperial subjects had the right to live and work in metropolitan Britain, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act imposed a“color bar” on British post-war immigration. Tracing its eventual passage, I focus on three archival constituencies central to the making of the CIA: (1) Home Office and colonial office debates and correspondence, (2) the writings of early social scientists, who came to construct the “Black presence” as an intrusion into the post-war British nation, (3) and the work of anticolonial activists, who offered a “path not taken.” Amongst the latter, I highlight the work of the Trinidadian anticolonial activist Claudia Jones, who exposed how the state used citizenship as a tool to manage racist exclusion while the obscuring Britain's colonial past. Engaged in counter-hegemonic struggles, Jones’ presented citizenship as a reparative measure grounded in historical imperial connections, the right to movement and long-standing economic exploitation. She argued that citizenship could not be understood solely within the boundaries of the nation-state but had to account for the global structures of exploitation established through empire. As such, Jones framed immigration not as a national issue but as a consequence of empire, demanding that post-imperial Britain recognize its historical responsibility to colonial subjects. Yet, with the eventual passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, Britain turned “the race question” into an “immigration question,” thus translating racism into a problem of liberal state-building, while erasing and bifurcating its imperial roots.