Agenda Publishing Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Building Progressive Alternatives)

Product Description Over recent years, tabloid readers have become familiar with the concept of the 'white working class', those thought to have been 'left behind' by globalization, including immigration. Such sentiments were weaponized by politicians on all sides to fuel the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit campaign. And this racialized narrative has emerged repeatedly in mature democracies - in the political campaigns of Trump, Le Pen and others - and continues to gain traction in the guise of economic nationalism and populism. The need to understand the putative emergence of the white working class has become both intellectually significant and politically urgent. In Race and the Undeserving Poor, Robbie Shilliam does just this. He charts the development over the past 200 years of a shifting postcolonial settlement that has produced a racialized distinction between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, the latest incarnation of which is a distinction between a deserving, neglected white working class and 'others' who are undeserving, not indigenous, and not white. Shilliam's analysis shows that the white working class are not an indigenous constituency, but a product of the struggles to consolidate and defend imperial order that have shaped British society since the abolition of slavery. Review Politically uncertain times require rigorous and judicious scholarship and, with this superbly argued book, Robbie Shilliam provides just that. The UK's vote to leave the European Union has prompted a reconsideration of ideas of (national) belonging and of class. Shilliam eviscerates standard accounts that seek to locate the emergence of the 'white working class' in national terms and presents a brilliantly compelling account of why this emergence is better understood in terms of the postcolonial genealogy of British Empire. A vital, necessary book to make sense of our present. --Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex About the Author Robbie Shilliam is Professor in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.