Please join us for the launch of the latest book from a great friend of the Canada-UK Foundation, Dr. Jatinder Mann.

Please email us for tickets or more info at admin@canadaukfoundation.org.

Adopting a political and legal perspective, Redefining Citizenship in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand undertakes a transnational study that examines the demise of Britishness as a defining feature of the conceptualisation of citizenship in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand and the impact that this historic shift has had on Indigenous and other ethnic groups in these states. During the 1950s and 1970s an ethnically based citizenship was transformed into a civic-based one (one based on rights and responsibilities). The major context in which this took place was the demise of British race patriotism in Australia, English-speaking Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Although the timing of this shift varied, Aboriginal groups and non-British ethnic groups were now incorporated, or appeared to be incorporated, into ideas of citizenship in all three nations. 

The development of citizenship in this period has traditionally been associated with immigration in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. However, the historical origins of citizenship practices in all three countries have not previously been fully analysed. The overarching question addressed by the book is: Why and how did the end of the British World lead to the redefinition of citizenship in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand between the 1950s and 1970s in regard to other ethnic and Indigenous groups? 

Jatinder Mann is an Assistant Professor in History at the Hong Kong Baptist University. He is British and of South Asian descent, specifically from the Punjab. Jatinder has also lived and worked in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is currently working on a new research project on the ‘Transnational Identities of the Global South Asian Diaspora in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, 1900s-1940s’.

Jatinder is also the author of two books. The most recent is Redefining Citizenship in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2019). He is sole editor of Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Jatinder is also a co-editor of a special issue of the British Journal of Canadian Studies on ‘Canada 150’, published in 2018 by Liverpool University Press. He has published numerous articles in front-ranking, interdisciplinary journals. Jatinder is also a co-editor in the forthcoming Documents on Australian Foreign Policy on War and Peace, 1914-1919 and the editor for a book series on ‘Studies in Transnationalism’ with Peter Lang Publishing, New York.