Thinking Like a Migration Historian

Migration Is the Long British Story

Britain has been shaped by people arriving from elsewhere for at least twelve hundred years. Vikings, Normans, medieval Jewish communities, Flemish weavers, Huguenots, Irish famine migrants, Eastern European Jewish refugees, Caribbean Windrush passengers and Ugandan Asians are all part of the same long thread. The historian David Olusoga has argued that Britain’s story cannot be told without these arrivals: hostility and welcome have run alongside each other in every period. The thematic study you are about to begin asks you to track that story across four periods — medieval, early modern, eighteenth and nineteenth century, and modern Britain — and to spot what changed, what stayed the same, and which factors drove each shift.

The Four Key Factors

The Edexcel specification names four key factors that drive change in migration: institutions (government and Church), religion, economic influences, and attitudes in society. Most exam questions are really asking which of these mattered most at a given moment. The 1290 expulsion of England’s Jewish population, for example, mixes institutions (a royal decree from Edward I) with religion (Christian hostility) and economics (royal debts owed to Jewish lenders). The 1948 British Nationality Act mixes institutions (Parliament) with end-of-Empire politics and post-war labour shortages. Strong answers name the factor explicitly.

Alongside the four factors, historians use push and pull factors to explain why people moved at all. Push factors drove people away from home — famine in Ireland in the 1840s, pogroms in the Russian Empire from 1881, the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972. Pull factors drew them to Britain — jobs in the cloth industry, royal protection for moneylenders, post-war NHS recruitment, the legal right to enter under the 1948 Nationality Act. Edexcel guidance is clear: focus mainly on what pulled people TO Britain, but show some awareness of what pushed them away from home.

Change, Continuity and Turning Points

The thematic study is not a list of arrivals; it is a study of second-order concepts — the analytical ideas historians use to make sense of the past. The most important here are change (how migration patterns altered between periods), continuity (what stayed the same — the legal idea of the ‘alien’, religious refugee waves, hostility from press and politicians), and turning points (the 1290 expulsion, the 1685 Huguenot wave, the 1905 Aliens Act, the 1948 British Nationality Act, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act). Knowing your turning points by date is what lets you write across periods quickly under exam pressure.

It is a mistake to assume there is a fixed group of ‘indigenous Britons’ against which everyone else is foreign. Each successive wave — Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Irish, Jewish, Caribbean — was at first treated as ‘foreign’ and was later folded into the idea of ‘British’. Britishness is a constructed identity, not a biological one. This is why historians like Robert Winder describe migration as the engine of British history rather than its disruption.

Sources and the Notting Hill Site

The Edexcel paper splits into a thematic study (worth 36 marks) and a historic environment (worth 16 marks). For Notting Hill, c1948–c1970, you will work with both local sources — for example the West Indian Gazette, council and Metropolitan Police records, oral memoirs — and national sources like Times and Guardian coverage, government immigration files, census data and Pathé reports. The 8-mark source question gives you two sources, A and B, and asks you to weigh up content, provenance and your own knowledge together; saying ‘it’s biased so it’s not useful’ earns almost nothing.