Heathrow and the Making of Neoliberal Britain

Bibliographic Data

ID4850417
AuthorsJames Vernon (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume252
Issue1
Pages213-247
Publication date2021-08-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtaa022
OpenAlexW3122206420
LanguageEN
Citations received11

How might we understand neoliberalism and its history differently if we trace its emergence and operation in a particular place? As the first airport in the world to be privatized in 1986 Heathrow is a paradigmatic neoliberal space. And yet for decades before it was sold the airport's services - catering, cleaning, retail and security - had been steadily deregulated and outsourced in ways that force us to reconsider neoliberalism as discrete from, or emerging from a rupture with, welfare capitalism. The precarious and cheap outsourced forms of labour at Heathrow were performed by Commonwealth citizens of colour, often women, who had paradoxically arrived in Britain through an increasingly hostile immigration regime at the airport. The racialized forms of neoliberal capitalism at the airport depended upon and reproduced a post-imperial social formation that was no less marked by postcolonial crises and a new biopolitics of immigration control designed to restrict their diasporas in the metropole. Seen from Heathrow, neoliberalism is less about the global flow of ideas and capital than the local social formations and labour regimes engendered by changing forms of accumulation

Biopower · Capital (architecture) · Capitalism · Commonwealth · Economics · Economy · Immigration · Neoliberalism (international relations) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

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