Anxieties of Belonging: Ulster Protestant Migrants and the Troubles in Late Imperial England
Published in Journal of British Studies, January 2026.
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Abstract
Based on the findings of a major oral history study, this article uses the personal narratives of Ulster Protestant migrants to illuminate some of the understudied cultural and human impacts of the Northern Ireland Troubles for postwar British society. Situating these impacts within the history of “internal decolonization” and the postwar implosion of “Greater Britain,” it shows how the Troubles fueled popular perceptions of Northern Ireland as an “imperial liability,” creating distinctive dilemmas of belonging for Ulster Britons settling in England during the period. Drawing on cultural and psychoanalytic approaches to oral history analysis, the article demonstrates how the “composure” of Ulster Protestant subjectivities in Troubles-era England involved attempts to narratively integrate the destabilizing impacts of cultural encounter with memories, emotions, and identifications extending from migrants’ formative experiences of growing up in the polarized sociopolitical world of Northern Ireland. In analyzing the interplay between these contexts and dynamics, the article sheds new light on the cultural legacies of the Troubles for British society, suggesting new ways of situating the conflict within the historiography of postwar Britain and presenting some alternative interpretive possibilities for writing the human history of the Troubles beyond the “flattening rubric of identity.”