Greek immigration and Settlement in Southern Africa: a history of capital, race and mobility in the British empire

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My PhD offers a study of Greek immigration into Southern Africa over the course of 60 years, from 1917 to 1977. The Greek experience acts as a lens onto various elements of the history of empire in Africa, such as the development of racialised governance, the shifting racial categories which underpin that governance, and the development of border regimes in these processes. It will be able to do this because the history of the Greek community in the region is an enigma for imperial ideology - Greeks did not fit into the ideological categories of either metropolitan settlers or native or imperial subjects. They nevertheless had important roles to play in the spaces between these categories. This project will thus contribute to a literature on migration, the development of whiteness, of the governance and ideology of global mobility and race and of local economies and social structures. It will be conducted through the use of local state and non-state archives in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi and the imperial archives in London as well as with oral histories and family archives in each of these sites.Central Research Question: What can the study of immigration into Southern Africa of people of eastern Mediterranean origin from 1917 to 1977 tell us about the place and nature of "race" and mobility in local and imperial governance? Related questions: What is the place of these migrants in the regional socio-political and economic landscape? How does migrants regional role interact with colonial and imperial governance? What are immigrants' experiences of the attribution of "whiteness" to them? How does this attribution intersect with pre-existing ethnic and diasporic identities?