Race, Obsolescence and the Management of "Surplus" Populations in Post-War Liverpool

How do histories of welfare, housing, top-down urban redevelopment and economic management look when viewed from Liverpool? In this talk, I compare the postwar fate of various groups deemed to be “surplus” in the city in the 1930s and 1940s: white unemployed workers, West African seamen and Black and Chinese technicians and sailors recruited into the city during the war. Liverpool’s unemployed white population were the beneficiaries of a massive state-backed expansion of housing, and jobs. At the same time, this dramatic reorganisation of Liverpool’s economy and built environment hardened lines of racial difference in the city, with people of colour becoming unhoused, policed, confined to insecure work and, in some instances, deported. In telling both halves of this story, I seek to situate broader arguments about decolonisation, racialization and welfare in a single city, while offering a different explanatory framework for understanding a period of urban redevelopment, mass house-building and industrial policy.