Higher education and nation-building after Empire: Migrant students in post-war Britain

Sociological literature increasingly turns its eye towards the colonial entanglements of British welfare state institutions. Nevertheless, mass higher education in the 1960s and 1970s tends to be considered as a universal service, unconnected to processes of racialisation and bordering. Sociologists discussing the neoliberal marketisation of higher education tend also not to draw connections between these processes and racialised exclusion. By reading policies on international student fees since the 1960s through the lens of racial capitalism, this article illustrates the connections between the political economy of higher education and the production and management of racialised difference; in particular, in relation to nation-building processes after the Second World War. Using Parliamentary Hansard as a primary data source, the article traces the shifting relationships between universities, capitalism, nation and race through key policy changes between 1962 and 2011. These policies illustrate how universities became implicated in processes of racialised capital accumulation, and show that the migrant student played a key role in these processes.