Dr Rachel Bright
Small Group Project 2023-24
Eugenics, the British Empire, and the creation of the global migration system
With Esme Cleall & Jen Kain
Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern migration systems are underpinned by historic attitudes towards race, gender, and productivity. In the British Empire, as elsewhere, immigration controls and naturalisation processes favoured the white and able-bodied. Drawing on the applicants’ own research findings, and broader research within Migration, Legal, and Disability Studies, as well as Medical and Colonial History, this project will create an interdisciplinary network in order to develop our understanding of the lived experience of eugenics, both at the border and beyond.
More informationResearch outcomes
Reconsidering the history of eugenics and discrimination in migration control. Migration Studies, 13(1)
Areas of interest
Cohort
Biography
She earned her PhD from King’s College, London before securing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of East Anglia, and lecturing at the London School of Economics and Goldsmith’s College, London.
Rachel specialises in modern South African and Australian migration history and her publications include numerous articles and Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902-10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle (Palgrave-Macmillan Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, 2013). That book explored why Chinese indentured labour was imported into South Africa at the height of ‘yellow’ and ‘black’ perils within settler societies.
Biographical details correct as of 12.03.26