Publications

In this article, we consider how the Barthian model of ethnicity, with its emphasis on boundary transactions, can be usefully applied to understanding non-elite views of the nation. Drawing on qualitative interview material, we show that the boundary concept has significance for people’s views of English and British identity and for how they view relations…

The results of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom came just in time to add some comments to our newly published book, Nation Class and Resentment: the politics of national identity in England Scotland and Wales. In these comments, we claimed the results tended to confirm some principal arguments we had advanced. We wrote of…

This paper examines the experiences of Chinese settlers in the Cairns district of northern Queensland, Australia, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a potential early expression of a ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ that has more recently been associated in the geographical literature with contemporary international migration. In contrast to other parts of Australia,…

This timely book provides an extensive account of national identities in three of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom: Wales, Scotland and England. In all three contexts, identity and nationalism have become questions of acute interest in both academic and political commentary. The authors take stock of a wealth of empirical material and explore…

In this chapter we examine orientations towards nation and country with sole reference to the ‘ethnic majority’ in England. Drawing on extensive qualitative interview data collected as part of the Leverhulme Programme, we examine the nuanced ways in which majority people orientate to concepts of nation, country and multiculturalism. We illustrate the linkages between these…

Relatively little is known about what the ‘ethnic majority’ think about ethnicity and ‘national identity’ and indeed about whether they think about those things at all. Baumann (1996) has shown, in his study of Southall, that in a multi-ethnic social space where ‘white’ groups are numerical minorities, those communities (white English, Irish) do develop a…

This article examines trends in entrepreneurship among minority ethnic groups in Britain. It begins with an analysis of how self-employment rates for different ethnic groups have evolved since the early 1990s. We find that rates of self-employment have fallen for Indians and the Chinese and argue that this is due to increased opportunities in paid…