Asylum After Empire is a landmark book. It is a forensic account of how asylum became central to contemporary politics in the West. Mayblin blends insightful theoretical analysis with detailed historical enquiry to show how asylum is produced by, and is productive of, colonial modernity – it is the continuation of 19th and 20th century differential rights regimes by another name. Contemporary debates about refugees, Mayblin demonstrates, are really debates about human hierarchy. Asylum After Empire is not just a fine piece of scholarship, it matters. Read it.

George Lawson, Associate Professor, London School of Economics

Lucy Mayblin takes the reader on a seminal non-Eurocentric historical sociological journey that problematizes the current European asylum crisis, revealing how it has emerged not upon a discursive foundation of universal human rights but on one of human hierarchy; a discourse which remains today as the potent legacy of connected colonial histories which she traces back over a 200-year period. Such is the originality and seminal importance of this book that it has the potential to re-track Refugee Studies/Migration Studies and associated ventures connected to the disciplines of Sociology, Politics and International Relations onto fresh, non-Eurocentric terrain.

John M. Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield

This groundbreaking book is an illuminating application of post and de-colonial thought and the literature on race and racism to the policy of asylum. It challenges some of the fundamentals of refugee scholarship and politics and opens up new perspectives for academics and activists alike.

Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at University of Bristol

Lucy Mayblin’s Asylum After Empire is a breath of fresh air in the examination of Britain’s response to asylum seekers, reminding us forcefully that the non-European refugee is not a new, disruptive phenomenon of the post-Cold War world. . . . [it] is a game-changer in the field of refugee studies. It shifts the problem from asylum and refuge itself to a larger issue of racialized humanity as the real challenge that refugee crises throw up: they are not merely a sudden appearance of our time, but have been created in their present incarnation as a problem of a particular hierarchical superiority.

Journal Of Refugee Studies