How did people define their national identity during the Second World War? Image This project, led by Dr Wendy Ugolini, seeks to recover how people conceptualised their national identity during the Second World War, whether as imperial, multinational or singular and the extent to which this shifted as people moved across the Empire at war. It examines military and civilian migration within the UK, then moves in concentric circles outwards to address imperial encounters, amongst service personnel and civilian workforces, in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. It then traces the post-war migratory movement of colonial and Commonwealth veterans into the UK. At the same time, it takes into account the ethnic and racial diversity of the UK's wartime population as well as within the British Empire. Through adopting a global history approach, and moving away from a purely nation-state framework, the project provides an original account of the meanings of the United Kingdom's wartime experience from the perspectives of those who lived - and moved - through it. It illuminates what happened when different groups were thrown together both within and outside their nation's borders, addressing the experiences of people of different ethnicities, Welsh and Gaelic language speakers and other minority groups. The project will not just interrogate how these encounters were experienced but also how they were remembered and commemorated. Utilizing the UK's vast array of untapped oral history archives, it will explore patterns in the evolving ways people articulated their sense of identity and open up a whole dimension of original scholarship by enabling the analysis of individual subjectivities. This will feed into a wider study of the memory and commemoration of the war that seeks to take forward current understandings by paying full attention to the variations and nuances of race and nationhood across the UK's four countries. Principal Investigator: Dr Wendy Ugolini, University of Edinburgh Co Investigator: Professor Martin Johnes, University of Swansea Co Investigator: Nadine Wright, Executive Producer, Schools and Families, Imperial War Museum This article was published on 2024-08-01
