Normal View Dyslexic View
Commentary
From the ‘culture wars’ to reparative histories
Gurminder K. Bhambra*†
,
G.K.Bhambra@sussex.ac.uk
Elizabeth Edwards‡
, Margot Finn§
,
m.finn@ucl.ac.uk
Fiona Williams¶
Abstract
The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.
Keywords
culture warsempirecolonialismrepresentationphotographygenderwelfare statesreparationssociologyhistoryIntroduction
Gurminder K. Bhambra
A central topic in the ‘culture wars’ is how to represent histories of British colonialism and empire. One side—powerfully represented in the media—argues that there needs to be a ‘balance sheet’ of benefits and drawbacks, rather than judgements grounded in ‘presentist’, politicised understandings. However, as Margot Finn (2021) has argued, what agitates the proponents of this argument is not novel, 21st-century ‘distortions’ of history. Instead, what seems to be primarily of concern is the very address of histories of empire and colonialism—including critiques by Britons of such phenomena that date from at least the 18th century—in the telling of our national story. This motivated us to explore a different way in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. We use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts (see Bergin & Rupprecht 2016; Hall 2018). Elizabeth Edwards, in her contribution, addresses issues of colonial photographic representations and indigenous spaces; Margot Finn focuses on gendering reparative histories; and Fiona Williams sets out the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective. In my own contribution below, I suggest that what is primarily at stake is the relationship between history and sociology. I put forward an argument for a reparatory sociology as a way of thinking through, more concretely, how understandings of the past are mediated by the present even as the present is shaped by that past.
For a reparatory sociology
Gurminder K. Bhambra
While there is greater recognition of the continuing legacies of colonialism and empire within contemporary societies, the significance of colonialism to the very structure of those societies remains a relatively neglected topic. Similarly, within the social sciences, there are histories that are acknowledged in accounts of their emergence and development, and others that are elided and actively written out of such accounts. I am interested in the difference that would be made to our conceptual understandings if we were to write those histories in. As such, I have argued for a reconceptualisation of the concepts and categories that constitute social science disciplines through a systematic consideration of histories of colonialism and empire (Bhambra 2007). This, I argue, is a necessary first step in their renewal and their more effective application to pressing problems in the present. In this contribution, I extend my earlier arguments to rethinking mainstream accounts of political economy and capitalism and discuss what the reparative frame enables in this context.
Standard accounts of capitalism tend to understand colonialism in terms of Eurocentred ideas of ‘primitive accumulation’; that is, as part of the prehistory of capitalism. Capitalism itself is understood to be organised in relation to the formation of formally free labour out of feudal or feudal-like relations of social subordination. Other forms of subordination, specifically related to colonial processes, are absorbed into this understanding and located, again, as part of the prehistory of capitalism such that their resolution would require first going through the stage of capitalism. These other forms of subordination are, nonetheless, the (ongoing) experiences of much of the world’s population, both within and outside the West and emerge through colonial processes. However, they are rarely accounted for within the concepts and categories of the social sciences. Accounts of inequality, for example, are often organised in relation to modes of social stratification nationally, and global inequality is understood in terms of the aggregation of national models. Histories of colonialism and slavery are elided in the process.
Such absences have led some scholars to argue for the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ as a way forward; that is, in accounting for the global inequalities organised around race and associated also with the socio-economic disparities of capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018; Virdee 2019). These arguments draw on earlier scholarship, primarily that of Cedric Robinson (2020 [1983]), whose classic work, Black Marxism, was directed at contemporary problems of Marxian class analysis in the context of understandings of racial inequality. Although Robinson’s argument represents an important corrective to Marxian class analysis, I shall suggest that it does not go far enough in reconstructing the underlying approach to political economy that is in need of transformation. This, as I will go on to argue, requires a reparative frame that works in the histories of colonialism to contemporary understandings of inequality.
The problems with arguments for racial capitalism are, first, that its proponents tend to accept the idea of capitalism as emerging in the transition from feudalism within Europe. Second, they also, by and large, remain focused on the Atlantic world. In my critique, I do not downplay or deny the importance of race, but rather suggest that our very conceptualisation of capitalism is problematic and that this isn’t resolved simply by arguing for its intersection with race (Bhambra & Holmwood 2023). Rather, I point to the importance of colonialism as central to a more adequate understanding of capitalism and to addressing the inequalities it has generated. Specifically, it is in colonialism that the regime of private property attributed as the foundation for market capitalism was first developed and extended.
Even if some scholars have acknowledged the contingent importance of colonialism, they have rarely regarded it as systematically integral to structural analyses of capitalism. Rather, the stages of capitalism tend to be understood as ‘first, mercantile or commercial capitalism, followed by “liberal” capitalism, then state-managed (or social-democratic) capitalism, and finally, financialised capitalism’ (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018: 64). In contrast, I have argued that these stages would be better understood as stages of colonialism: that is, colonialism through private property, state-managed colonialism (also known as empire, specifically empires of extraction), the amelioration of Western labour exploitation through colonial patrimonies, and our current stage of neoliberalism and authoritarian populism (see Bhambra 2021).
These stages have cumulatively established the systematic inequalities that structure our current world, and it is these that need redress. Specifically, I am arguing that a global system of private property is a product of colonialism and what we think of as capitalism is nested within it. The centrality of private property to our understandings can be seen in the fact that, where reparations have been acknowledged as legitimate, this has been in the context of loss to property recognised within European juridical norms—whether that be confiscated property from Jewish people after the Holocaust, or property nationalised under former communist rule, or then property in enslaved people after abolition; that is, reparations for slaveowners rather than those who were enslaved, as Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, and colleagues, have set out so powerfully in their Legacies of British Slave Ownership project (see Hall et al. 2014). A reparative frame, however, needs to go beyond issues of property.
The appropriation of land and other natural resources under colonialism, for example, and the forced appropriation of labour (that is, slavery and indenture), are not generally accepted as being within the ambit of reparations. These processes, however, have been significant to the establishment of structures of inequality that continue to make life unliveable for so many. As such, they also require urgent address. An argument for reparations in this context is not an argument for compensation of individual loss. The injustices of the past cannot be repaired, in the sense that suffering could be undone or the past restored. It is an argument, rather, about current inequities in distribution that are placed beyond the purview of justice by virtue of being represented as merely historical. A reparative frame brings together consideration of the broader histories responsible for the configuration of contemporary structures of inequality and enables us to think through the implications of their connections in a more meaningful way.
A reparatory sociology, then, requires a reconsideration of the histories that are taken to be central to it as well as a reorientation of our conceptual understandings as a consequence. Arguing for the histories of Europe to be understood as colonial histories, for example, is an inclusive move that seeks to account for the shape of Europe (and the world) today as a consequence of global practices of domination and appropriation. It is these histories that have produced the modern world and need to form the basis from which we rethink the social sciences. In conceptual terms, we need to move from using the nation as the unit of analysis to working with a broader approach that takes seriously colonial and imperial histories. Epistemological justice, in turn, requires recognition of the knowledge claims of others in terms both of respect and (re)constructive response. Recognising the modern world as the colonial global world enables us more adequately to contextualise events and processes that are often presented as separate and to understand them within a connected frame of reference—one committed to repair and transformation.
The forgetting of the histories of colonialism and empire involves also the forgetting of the political communities—colonial and postcolonial—that they created. A reparative frame brings back into view those histories and asks that we reconstruct our understandings on the basis of an acknowledgement of our shared histories.
Expanded histories: colonial photographs/indigenous space
Elizabeth Edwards
What are the theoretical and methodological possibilities of colonial representations as indigenous spaces within a broad reparative and restitutive landscape? I have worked for many years on photographs as spaces of cultural restitution and actants within forms of cultural reparation, with the points of fracture in historical photographs, and the decentring of assumptions around photographs. It is some time since I have been on the frontline of this work, but for me the questions have morphed into more expansive ones about the relationship between photographs and the practice of history as a reparative form that returns, gives backs and repairs.
The consideration of photographs has been strangely muted in the public face of restitution and reparation debates. Yet it has a long history because colonial photographs have continually sprung leaks. They have been hugely active in forging reception routes and fostering workable relationships. Many years ago, scholars such as Australian Aboriginal historian and curator, Michael Aird, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, artist, historian and curator of Navajo/Diné heritage, argued that we must learn to ‘look past’ (Aird 2003: 25), beyond the colonial surface of the photograph. They argue that this, in itself, is a call for restitution and recognition. To quote Tsinhnahjinnie ‘it was a beautiful day when the scales fell from my eyes and I first encountered photographic sovereignty’ (Tsinhnahjinnie 2003: 41).
Such photographs, whatever their making, are traces of ancestors, of lands and thus of spirit. However, the emphasis of culture wars on the repressive nature of photographs, though their contextual inflexibility and lack of a sense of what people want photographs to be for them, has the effect of silencing the multiple narratives. It is a version of what Susie Linfield called a hermeneutics of suspicion applied as a negative inflection as, on the one hand representational violence, and on the other hand as ‘sentimental realism’ (Linfield 2010; Edwards 2021).
However, there is nothing ‘sentimental’ or suspicious, about desire for historical recognition, social justice, and survivance that shapes indigenous and indeed many other majority photographic desires. However, if we are to understand what photographs have to offer historiographically, concepts have to be inhabited differently. Retooling, or at least making transparent, our conceptual base helps to excavate the layers that disguise and submerge the historical presences with which photographs face us.
There are many facets to this. Here I focus on the concept of presence, as a trace of social being, standpoint, a being in the world, that is inscribed in photographs. Presence can contribute to larger questions of restitution, reparation, and cultural recuperation. Because photographs, in their majority apprehension, present a visceral actuality of what people believe themselves to be about, which is vested, as I have suggested, in the trace of ancestors, the trace of land, and, by implication, of spirit.
There are innumerable examples that suggest how we might open out into different categories of history and of experience. There are clear acts of agency and photographic desire within colonial contexts (Figure 1). Part of my conceptual interest in presence emerged from a disquiet with the way agency was used analytically in relation to colonial photographs. This led me to the concept of presence as it has been discussed in theory and philosophy of history (for instance, Runia 2006). There is always presence within agency, but presence exists where all agency is denied—one thinks here of colonial medical or anthropometric photography.
Figure 1.
Naboa and his family with their pet monkey, taken at their request. Torres Strait 1898. Photograph: A.C. Haddon. © Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Sometimes presence is in plain sight. This is exemplified in two photographs that appear archetypically colonial: two rival Samoan leaders on the deck of a British gunboat (Figure 2). But coming on board, the protagonists arrange themselves and their entourages precisely in spatial configurations which perform their own cultural and political power. Not only does that confront colonial power, but importantly, they confront one another in contested Samoan space. While this needs detailed forensic unpicking (see Edwards 2001: 107–29), it is significant how their presence layers the moment with a different spatial consciousness, indicating different historical experiences and indeed desires They shift the photographs from objectification to a moment of self-fashioning: Tsinnahjinnie’s encountered photographic sovereignty hums in the background.
Figure 2.
Mauga Manuma and Mauga Lei with their entourages on the quarter deck of HMS Miranda, Samoa, November 1884. Photograph: Capt W.A.D. Acland © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
More oblique perhaps is another photograph of an encounter between local men and the British Royal Navy on the beach at Malekula (Vanuatu) (Figure 3). The conventional analysis of the colonial gaze can again be punctured by the concept of presence. If the sailors and the Malekulans appear, within the photographic frame, to occupy the same space, the photograph also inscribes multiply-experienced space. So why do we privilege analytically colonial ‘context’ over islander ‘context’? If ideas of ‘context’ are shifted, a Malekulan world view emerges, imprinted in the photograph, one which links, space, beaches, trees, canoes, and being, for instance. The Malekulan’s own social being, their own perception of the event, of place as presence, and a moment they lived through are photographically inscribed.
Figure 3.
An encounter on the beach at Malakula (Vanuatu [colonial name New Hebrides]). 1884. Photograph: Capt W.A.D. Acland © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
One can point at similar excavations of presence which restore different historical experiences and perspectives of historical actors with repressive contexts. An example is writer Gabriel Gbadamosi’s response to Bernhard Hagen’s late-19th-century anthropometric photographs of tobacco plantation workers in Indonesia and German New Guinea. Looking past the violence of anthropometry, we see a presence, lived experience as economic migrants, their bodies burned by the use of chemical fertiliser and hard labour (Gbadamosi 2014: 37). The photographs become a restitutive history. In another example, historian Gary Minkley has used ‘presence’ to explore the repressive ID passbook photographs in apartheid South Africa to understand the affective histories within individual photographs. To quote:
Held somehow in the frame of the pass image are dreams and desires where, as the sign of permanence, they mobilize landscapes of nostalgia and anticipation, as well as different genealogies of belonging: perhaps a piece of land and some cattle, but certainly a job, a house, a family, as husband, a wife, a love, or the possibility of a different life. (Minkley 2019: 113)
Both Gbadamosi and Minkley, and there are many other examples, draw on the intersection of photographic ontology as presence and a reading out of the photographs as historical practice to move us towards more nuanced historical possibilities.
Instead of assuming the constraining contextual frame of ‘colonial photographs’, perhaps we could think about how the nature of photographic inscription works with, and pushes through into, refigured historiographies via questions of restitution, reparation, and cultural recuperation. Presence has the potential to decentre what we think a photograph does and for whom. Reparations are not only financial but historiographical, addressing the imbalances of theory which frame how we formulate research questions and what we assume of photographs in relation to history. The politics of representation are inherently unstable, uneven, and multiple.
I am far from alone in this work. One of the ironies of the field is that the appropriating and objectifying scientific data collected in Western archives have been transformed into starting points for restitution and reabsorption into communities. The list is long and well established: for instance, Alison Brown and Laura Peers’ work in Kainai, Canada (2006), Chris Morton and Gilbert Oteyo’s in Kenya with Luo colleagues (2009), or Carol Payne and colleagues’ with the Project Naming out of National Archives of Canada. The potential is marked by the language of such projects. The title of Payne and colleagues’ book, Atiqput (Payne et al. 2022), is an Inuit word that means ‘our names’, what we call ourselves. Oteyo and Morton’s project was called Paro Manene, which translates roughly as ‘reflecting on the past’, Brown and Peers’ Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa ‘Pictures bring us messages’. How pathways out of the archive into historical salience and dynamism are constituted becomes extremely important. Such approaches also position photographs in ways that decentre Western theories of what photography is and what it does. They begin to address what Patricia Hayes (Hayes & Minkley 2019), writing of photographs and African histories, has called the ‘imbalance of theory’, theory which she describes as entirely inadequate to the analytical needs of photography in Africa.
None of this lets anyone off the representational hook, nor does it erase geo-political legacies, but it contributes to a rebalancing of historical narratives in useful ways which have meaningful futures. With photographs working at the cutting edge of repressed identities and unfulfilled claims, questions of reparation, restitution, and cultural recuperation have the potential to decentre what we think photographs do in the historical field.
How we wrap ideas around the desire for ancestors, ancestral land, and spirit homes, is important. It becomes not only ‘looking past’ but a duty of care. We have to refigure what we assume photographs do, what we assumed requires historical attention, and be responsive to what people want photographs to be for them in the majority world, a shift that can only be described as reparative.
Gendering reparative histories
Margot Finn
Present-day United Kingdom (and United States) discussions of reparative justice have been strongly inflected by the horrendous murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. Focus on this horrific public crime has worked to associate the concept of reparative justice and the practice of reparative histories in Britain closely with the Black Lives Matter movement and with the long-term legacies of Atlantic World slavery. Building on previous scholarship on slavery and capitalism inspired by the pioneering work of Eric Williams, historians writing in the shadow of Floyd’s murder are now increasingly cognisant that our understanding of, for example, the industrial revolution requires a re-centring of Britain within a Black Atlantic in which white lives and livelihoods were predicated on the forced labour of the enslaved (Williams 1944; Berg & Hudson 2023).
Focusing reparative histories on the Atlantic world has done much to illuminate the extended chronology, great depth, and enduring impact of Caribbean and colonial North American slavery throughout the British world. But this emphasis has arguably also acted to close down other lines of inquiry that merit consideration. Gender is one such line of analysis. In this very schematic intervention, I ask what attending to issues of reparative justice in the context of the gendered history of British colonialism in India might add to this analytical framework. Developing in the same decades that saw Atlantic slavery reach its apogee, the Indian empire offers historians alternative insertion points for thinking through whether the 18th- and 19th-century history of British colonialism should inform reparative histories.
Predicated on ‘repair’ (rather than ‘restitution’), reparative justice requires the historian to ask whether, and if so to whom, damage has been done. Philosophical discussions of reparative justice typically elide gender identities even when—as in discussions framed by the legacies of Atlantic slavery—they recognise the salience of race (Boxill 2003). Yet for historians of British India, addressing questions of potential damage surely demands close attention to gender differences. At the heart of decades of British writing, rhetoric, and policy about East India Company rule and its legacies has been the argument that British colonialism was good for Indian women. The ‘abolition’ or partial criminalisation of sati (widow immolation) in Bengal in 1829, the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1856, and subsequent age of consent, child marriage, and female infanticide policies implemented by the British have all been inserted into this dominant narrative of female benefit (Mani 1998; Pande 2020; Sinha 1995).
Within the Subaltern Studies school pioneered in India in the 1980s, criticism of this narrative of gender-based colonial benefit has focused on questions of intentionality. This line of critique asked whether British policies were intended to provide Indian women with justice, or instead (as argued most forcefully by Gayatri Spivak) exemplified a process in which colonial racism was bolstered precisely by its claim to exemplify ‘white men protecting brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1988). How might we shift the focus of our inquiries from intentionality to an assessment of damage (or its absence)? What topics might historians need to consider if we viewed reparative justice claims from a gendered perspective, with respect to Indian women in the early phases of British colonialism on the subcontinent? Was British colonialism’s impact gender neutral, beneficial for women, or detrimental to them?
Slavery provides an obvious starting point. Slavery in the Indian Ocean world, in contrast to the Atlantic colonies, predated the arrival of the British and was predominantly a female and infantile phenomenon (Chatterjee & Eaton 2006). Focused on domestic service and reproductive labour rather than on commodity production for Western markets, domestic slavery in India displays a significantly different relationship to both labour coercion and capitalistic profit than is seen in Atlantic plantation systems. The chronology of its abolition also differs: the East India Company’s domains were explicitly excluded from Parliament’s abolition of Caribbean slavery in 1833. For the predominantly female population of domestic slaves in British India, abolition would begin only a decade later. Belated and partial, achievement of Indian domestic slaves’ juridical emancipation under this colonial aegis defies the triumphalist claims that until recently have dominated British narratives of abolition (Finn 2009; Major 2012). How might including Indian slavery in historical assessments of colonial damage alter perspectives forged within the Atlantic World paradigm? Addressing this question will require us to consider the gendered attributes of ‘freedom’ while attending to topics that include the value (and the devaluation) of household and reproductive labour.
Consideration of the family and the reproductive labour of ‘free’ Indian women who cohabited with British men in colonial India further complicates assessments of colonial gain and colonial damage. Indian bibis (concubines) or housekeepers gave birth to tens of thousands of ‘mixed-race’ children fathered by British men in the era of the East India Company, typically in unions that lacked the sanction of marriage (Ghosh 2006). The great majority of these women remained in India together with their illegitimate children when their British partners returned—with their accumulated capital—to Britain. The modest annuities accorded for their maintenance, like the financial inheritances bequeathed to their children, typically paled beside the wealth conferred on their erstwhile partners’ white British wives and legitimate children. Calculating damage in this context defies easy solutions: the mixed-race male progeny of British men were strictly excluded from lucrative employment in the East India Company from 1791; mixed-race daughters, although barred from all such employments by their sex, nonetheless enjoyed greater access to British wealth and society than their brothers, through the institution of marriage (Hawes 1996).
Switching the lens from Indian to British women in the Company era raises a further series of questions about potential benefits and harms. For two centuries, historians conceptualised British imperialism as a masculine domain, but the past two decades of research have illuminated British women’s deep entanglements in both imperialism and its financial institutions. Already in the 18th century, for example, and notwithstanding the legal disabilities they suffered in English common law, women were significant investors in the East India Company (Froide 2017). Basic questions about whether women profited from empire in the same ways and to the same extent as men remain to be addressed. If imperial profits were gendered, should reparative justice follow suit? Having written white women back into the history of British colonialism, should feminist historians now turn their attention to crafting gendered reparative histories?
In suggesting that it is now timely to attend to Indian Ocean as well as Atlantic World colonialisms, my point has not been to argue against the current emphasis within discussions of reparative justice on racial inequalities that were constructed within regimes predicated on plantation slavery. Rather, my hope is that, by shifting attention to other loci, spheres, and dynamics of colonial impact, we can open up new avenues for exploring what a reparative society and a reparative politics might look like. To understand reparation, I suggest, we must recognise and interrogate its gendered histories.
Reframing the British welfare state through reparative history
Fiona Williams
This contribution to ‘reparative histories’ examines two connected aspects of the British welfare state: first, how such histories reframe central concepts in the study of welfare states, in this case, redistribution; second, how a decolonial reframing then raises the issue of reparative justice, applied here to migrant care work.
In recent debates over immigration policies, ethnonationalist assumptions of eligibility to welfare have become a political common-sense in which it is taken for granted that migrants, documented and undocumented, place a heavy burden on already strapped public services (Fitzgerald et al. 2020). Such policies have a long and ongoing history which dovetail with racism in the social relations of welfare (think Grenfell and Windrush). They date back to denial of subsistence relief to Asian seaman from 1813 and the laws of settlement of the 1834 Poor Law, which rendered many Irish immigrants destitute. They were embedded in the early 20th century’s ‘social imperialism’. This linked welfare reforms to imperial power: healthy soldiers and mothers for the forward march of the imperial race. They also instituted forms of imperial privilege in which hierarchical citizenship rights denied racialised groups access to provision. This continued in the post-war reforms and was accompanied by the imperial resourcing1 of the new institutions of health, care, and education by workers from existing and former colonies (Williams 1989; Shilliam 2018).
This bitter irony of migrant workers providing necessary labour to keep welfare institutions going while being blamed for their demise and denied equal access to them is, however, only one part of the story of imperial resourcing. There is another significant dimension.
Redistribution reframed
Gurminder Bhambra’s research establishes the integral part that colonialism and imperialism played in the development and, more precisely, the funding of the British welfare state over the course of the 20th century (Bhambra 2022). She shows how revenues from deeply regressive forms of taxation inflicted upon the colonised population of India as a ‘normal’ part of colonial rule were then rendered to the British state. These forms of extraction were as dire in their consequence as the extraction of raw material and labour in not only contributing to poverty and famine in India but also in withholding mitigation support for such devastation. Over half of the income available to the British state in the late 19th century came from labour, taxes, and resources of the empire. There was no attempt in the early welfare reforms—nor in the subsequent post-war welfare state—to enact any form of redistributive measures to colonised populations.
This research impels a reframing of a central area of welfare state studies—redistribution, or distributive justice, and the fiscal relations of welfare (Titmuss 1958). At their heart these concepts concern the national parameters and relations of collective reciprocity, of (in)equality and of moral obligation. How should welfare provision be funded and divided, between whom, in what measures, and with what conditions? The funding of the British welfare state through colonial taxation challenges assumptions behind these questions in important ways:
It extends the parameters of the fiscal relations of welfare from nation state to imperial state and thus challenges the nation-based principle of collective reciprocity.
It extends our understanding of the resourcing for the British welfare state from national to imperial taxation.
It thereby extends our understanding of the dynamics of contemporary and historical racial divisions of welfare to three dynamics of embedded relations of inequality and extraction: the denial and misuse of social rights;2 the extraction and exploitation of labour to service the welfare state; and the failure to compensate for fiscal extractions from, or unpaid debts to, former colonies.
The Implication of these points is to add new spatial and temporal dimensions to the concept of welfare state redistribution (Williams 2022). First, by widening it across countries—in this case colonial and colonised and their associated geo-political inequalities. Second, by foregrounding the temporal connection of past distributive harms to present inequities. Together, these summon a wider and deeper understanding of moral responsibilities and material obligations. They operate transnationally beyond and across national boundaries; and they are transgenerational. They point to the way harms to present generations are connected to the unrecognised suffering of past generations and this implies a need for commitment to justice for future generations.
Such a frame is similar to a reparative approach to the planetary crisis on the basis that the prosperity of the rich world has been achieved at the expense of past and present extractivism from colonies and populations who are now paying the cost in greater vulnerability and risk (Burkett 2009)—a point I return to.
Migrant care work and reparative justice
Here I take the idea that a reparative historical frame leads us to consider to reparative justice today and apply it to the transnational political economy of care. This refers to the movement of mainly female care labour from the colonies, ex-colonies, and poorer regions over the 20th and 21st centuries. Today almost half the world’s migrant workers are women, many of whom find domestic or care work in households or institutions of high-income countries (Michel & Peng 2017).
I argue that the contemporary transnational political economy of care should be understood as part of a global crisis of care (Williams 2021). While the effects of this crisis are different for different women in different countries and regions, they are nevertheless characterised by two interlocking dynamics:
The devaluation of care. This is its longstanding invisibility as women’s work either unpaid or low paid plus its subordination to paid work and to productivism. This is bound up with inequalities in class, caste, race, and migration in the care providers; and disability, class, and age for those receiving care support.
The second is the depletion of care (Rai et al. 2014), that is, the failure to provide the resources that give people the capacity to care and to be cared for—material resources, time, support, space, and so on. This has been exacerbated by changing demographics, austerity, and neo-liberalism, as well as by conflict, increased chronic illness, the pandemic, and climate disasters.
These dynamics are similar but much sharper in the Global South, where there is often greater reliance on a female wage with little infrastructural support. The effect is to create a set of geopolitical relations of inequality whereby welfare states, private institutions, and households in higher income countries can solve their care expenditure costs by buying in migrant care or domestic labour at low cost. This exacerbates both the devaluation of care and its depletion in migrants’ countries of origin because family members are deprived of care support and societies lose care capacity, skills, and investment in training.3 In other words, the personal and social reproductive nature of care makes this depletion a very intense extraction relation.
Furthermore, while this is a relatively new phenomenon, it reproduces an older condition of colonial extraction in the British welfare state. After the war, the recruitment of health and care female labour from the colonies provided cheap labour for the new institutions of the welfare state. It also met a labour shortage which otherwise would have had to be filled by British married women in a period in which women were assumed to have primary responsibilities for the home and children. Little support was provided for the new workers’ own care responsibilities. Both then and today, these workers provide cost-effective ways of securing white family norms and care needs at the sacrifice of their own.4 Indeed, it reiterates an even earlier trope of the racialisation of female domestic servitude.
These multiple historical, intersecting, and geopolitical injustices caught up in migrant care labour suggest it as a suitable case for reparative justice. There have been some important struggles by migrant care workers such as those realised in the ILO’s Convention 189, ‘Decent Work for Domestic Workers’ (ILO 2011). But this only attends to conditions at work. The globally unequal extraction of care labour requires broader geopolitical framing. For example, developing principles for transnational reciprocity as a basis for migrant care work to guarantee free training or infrastructural support in the country of origin. Rather than framing such policies as aid, which is often conditional and where the donor country holds power, or humanitarian compensation in which the notion of charity obscures historic relations of power, improvements in migrant care work would be framed as reparation for past and present extraction and exploitation of care capacities.
Migrant care work is one colonially-inflected consequence of a global care crisis. Using a reparative frame further allows for alliances across other urgent global crises. As mentioned earlier, the analysis of global redistributive justice and reparation is also used by movements around the planetary crisis. Increasingly, strategies for economic alternatives to growth bring together care justice with climate justice—a globally redistributive green and caring economy as central to human and planetary flourishing which begins to break with past, present, and future relations of extraction.5
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1
The term ‘imperial resourcing’ is used by Fitzgerald et al. (2020) in their study of the NHS.
2
By misuse I refer to the ways in which racialised groups may have access to services such as health or education or housing, but these are administered in racist, dehumanising, or controlling ways.
3
In 2022/3, 26 per cent of all registered nurses working in social care in the UK were from non-EU countries (Skills for Care 2023).
4
At the time of writing, proposals are being discussed in the UK to prevent migrant care workers from bringing family members with them.
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DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a10
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 753
Article download count: 49
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Bhambra, G.K., Edwards, E., Finn, M. & Williams, F. (2024), ‘From the “culture wars” to reparative histories’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a10 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a10Crossref
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July 2023
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