Emigration, War and Reconstruction: Imagining the International Dispersal of Britain in the 1940s

Debates about reconstruction in Britain at the end of the Second World War included proposals to migrate up to half of the country’s population across the Dominions. The advocates for mass migration included prominent figures in British civilian and military planning who were informed by anxieties about the consequences of a future war, the potential for demographic and trade imbalances to provoke social and economic problems, and concerns about Britain’s place in the new balance of power. This article looks in detail at proposals to disperse millions of people from Britain by influential planner E.A.A. Rowse and Sir Henry Tizard, a prominent military scientist who held numerous high positions in the wartime and post-war governments. Proposals for mass migration on such a scale were outlandish and radical and have been somewhat dismissed in the historiography as a result, but a close analysis of these two interventions highlights how continuities in thinking about town planning and development in Britain intersected with those about migration and imperial development and were reframed by the emerging Cold War.