This project, led by Professor Wendy Ugolini in conjunction with Professor Martin Johnes and Nadine Wright, 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 addresses imperial encounters and the intersection of race, class, and national identity amongst service personnel and civilian workforces, in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. At the same time, it takes into account the ethnic and racial diversity of the UK’s wartime population as they travelled across the British Empire. It then traces the post-war memory and memorialisation of the war, including amongst colonial and Commonwealth veterans who migrated into the UK after the war.  

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 outside their nation’s borders, addressing the experiences of people of different ethnicities, Welsh and Gaelic language speakers and other minority groups. The project further considers how service personnel and civilians experienced and perceived the landscapes and environments they encountered and how gender, class, and language framed identity construction. 

In addition to other forms of life writing, Beyond Borders will utilise the UK’s vast array of untapped local oral history archives, to 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 nationhood and race across the UK’s four countries. It will also lead to the construction of an online searchable catalogue  of oral history resources relating to the Second World War, which will be made available to future researchers. Utilizing material generated by the project and the unique collections of the Imperial War Museum, Nadine Wright and the IWM Public Engagement and Learning team will create a series of resources and offerings for schools that address the project’s key themes in relation to the differing curriculums across the four nations.

• Principal Investigator: Professor Wendy Ugolini, University of Edinburgh
• Co-Investigator: Professor Martin Johnes, University of Swansea
• Co-Investigator: Nadine Wright, Imperial War Museum
• Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Dr George Evans, University of Edinburgh
• Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Dr Ben Curtis, University of Swansea

Beyond Borders: The Second World War, National Identities and Empire in the UK / Beyond Borders by is licensed under a