An Immigration History of Britain

Multicultural Racism since 1800

Panikos Panayi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138136007
• eBook ISBN: 9781317864226
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Immigration, ethnicity, multiculturalism and racism have become part of daily discourse in Britain in recent decades – yet, far from being new, these phenomena have characterised British life since the 19th century. While the numbers of immigrants increased after the Second World War, groups such as the Irish, Germans and East European Jews have been arriving, settling and impacting on British society from the Victorian period onwards.

In this comprehensive and fascinating account, Panikos Panayi examines immigration as an ongoing process in which ethnic communities evolve as individuals choose whether to retain their ethnic identities and customs or to integrate and assimilate into wider British norms. Consequently, he tackles the contradictions in the history of immigration over the past two centuries: migration versus government control; migrant poverty versus social mobility; ethnic identity versus increasing Anglicisation; and, above all, racism versus multiculturalism.

Providing an important historical context to contemporary debates, and taking into account the complexity and variety of individual experiences over time, this book demonstrates that no simple approach or theory can summarise the migrant experience in Britain.

Chapter 1

A country of immigration?

Migrant histories

In his groundbreaking study of the history and memory of refugees in Britain, Tony Kushner contrasted the way in which society, more especially sections of the press, fondly remembered past exiles (above all Huguenots and refugees from Nazism) with the hostility which ‘asylum seekers’ faced. Kushner argued that the contemporary British society which he studied used the apparently harmonious integration of past refugees as a stick with which to beat the problematic and scavenging ‘asylum seekers’. But he also revealed the way in which, in fact, previous refugees who had fled to Britain had received the same hostile reception as ‘asylum seekers’. While Kushner primarily wished to show how the history and memory of migrations to Britain change over time and do not reflect the initial realities, difficulties, complexities and negative reactions,¹ his volume can also act as a starting point to demonstrate the continuities in migration processes over the past two centuries.

One of the reasons for the increasingly fond remembrance of past migration to Britain lies in the fact that the descendants of those who initially made their way to the country and who increasingly become assimilated into society, forget the trauma of initial arrival and concentrate upon the more positive aspects of the history of their community in Britain. Kushner has demonstrated this process by focusing particularly upon the way in which Jewish memory and historiography has emerged since the late nineteenth century, led by the Jewish Historical Society of England. The emergence of Jewish museums in Britain has also helped to perpetuate this positive memory.²

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the reality of multicultural Britain seems to exist in every British high street, whether in terms of the physical appearance of populations or through the existence of the ubiquitous Chinese or Indian restaurant. The extent to which the history of migration to Britain is remembered and recorded by both professional historians and wider society does not prove so obvious.

Since the emergence of history as an academic discipline during the nineteenth century, the most important identified ‘groups’ have been national, and history has been largely written, understood and recognized through the prism of the nation.³ British historians have written mostly about their own country, partly due to the implicit influence of nationalism⁴ and partly due to a lack of linguistic training which limits the possibility of a wider geographical focus. Standard histories of Britain have tended, until recently, to exclude minorities, whether based on class, gender or ethnicity.

The combined influence of academic Marxism and the more recent ‘turn’ towards postmodernism has ensured that this situation has altered. Academic writing demonstrates a greater interest in ‘alternative’ histories which now stress those previously neglected areas of class, gender and ethnicity – in short a focus on multiple histories rather than one overarching history. Concentrating specifically upon the study of ethnicity, the evolution of a multicultural society and, more especially, the ubiquity of Black and Asian people in British urban settlements, has facilitated this process.

Attempts to uncover and commemorate the past are not only restricted to an academic process of producing scholarly publications. Historical recovery also involves public heritage initiatives designed to record local histories, often in collaboration with migrants who actively contribute to the collective remembering of their own communities. In addition to this, immigrants nurture their own individual memories, passing stories down to future generations and making histories which are ultimately destined to never reach any sort of academic or public arena. Academic and heritage projects, combined with a growing recognition of the evolution of a multicultural Britain, have worked together to give the experiences of immigrants a heightened presence in everyday media discourse.

The history of immigration in Britain is therefore ‘remembered’ (researched, recorded, selected and presented for current and future consumption) in three different ways. First, the development of ‘professional’ immigration history, a process which dates back to the nineteenth century largely led by historians with immigrant roots themselves. Second, the more recent popularization of the experiences of immigrants and their memories. Third, the individual perpetuation of memories.

The academic study of immigrants has only recently begun to concern ‘mainstream’ historians. Nineteenth-century historical writing was characterized by the production of glorified histories of England in the Whig tradition, whose central argument focused upon a progression away from the arbitrary power of medieval monarchy towards liberal democratic freedom. Such writing believed in progress and tended to ignore the position of the working classes, whose fate improved gradually as a result of the democratization process consequent upon industrialization.⁵

In opposition to such writing, a distinct working-class historiography began to develop during the first half of the twentieth century, especially under the influence of scholars such as G. D. H. Cole,⁶ J. L. and L. B. Hammond,⁷ and E. P. Thompson.⁸ The expansion of higher education during the 1960s brought into emerging economic and social history departments men with working class origins, who had made their way up the educational ladder through the grammar school system implemented by the 1944 Education Act. Essentially, by writing about the working classes, they were reconstructing the history of their parents and grandparents.⁹

Few of the historians appointed during the 1960s and 1970s ventured into the field of immigration history. But this could not remain the situation for long, primarily because of the visibility of post-war immigrants from the Empire and Commonwealth. Social scientists such as Michael Banton¹⁰ and Ruth Glass¹¹ immediately focused upon them, ensuring that the contemporary concern with race would eventually seep through to historians, whose methodology and areas of interest change less quickly than those of social scientists. The small number of historians with immigrant origins, who often write about the group from which they originate, has helped the growth of the history of migrants.

As the different historiographies of immigrant groups illustrate, the study of migrants in British history did not begin with the post-war influxes. The two largest groups in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish and the Jews, had already begun to produce their own historiographies. Beginning with the Irish, an important starting point was John Denvir’s informative 1892 The Irish in Britain, which provided an account of contemporary Irish settlements, as well as much detail about their history. The next major contribution appeared in the 1940s in the form of J. E. Handley’s meticulously researched two-volume social history of the Irish in Scotland.¹² In 1963 there followed J. A. Jackson’s The Irish in Britain. The influx of over a million Irish into Britain after 1945 has led to an explosion of interest in the mass migration of the Victorian period. The leading scholars who have worked in this area have included Patrick O’Sullivan,¹³ Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley,¹⁴ Mary Hickman¹⁵ and Donald MacRaild,¹⁶ most of whom have some Irish antecedents. Furthermore, an Irish Studies Institute has been established at the University of Liverpool¹⁷ together with an Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University,¹⁸ each of which heavily focus upon Britain. Nevertheless, the immigration of the second half of the twentieth century has remained largely ignored, with the exception of Enda Delaney’s recent account.¹⁹

The historiography of Anglo-Jewry dates back to at least 1738 with the publication of Anglia Judaica by D’Blossiers Tovey. The year 1851 offers a better starting point because it witnessed the publication of Moses Margoliouth’s monumental three-volume history of Jewish settlement in Britain from pre-Roman times to the Victorian era. The period leading up to the First World War also saw further scholarly studies.²⁰ The Jewish Historical Society of England came into existence in 1893, one of the first immigrant history organizations in Britain, which has also published its own scholarly journal in the form of its Transactions.²¹ Consequently, the groundwork was laid for Cecil Roth, the father of twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish history, who began his productive career in the inter-war years and continued to write on numerous general and specific aspects of the Jews in England after 1945.²² The only other figure who could really compare with Roth was V. D. Lipman, producing a series of books, most notably his Social History of the Jews in England in 1954.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a breakthrough in the historiography of the Jews in Britain, with the publication of three major social histories on the late nineteenth-century influx from Eastern Europe.²³ Since then, Jewish history has witnessed the prod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of illustrations
• 1. A country of immigration?
• 2. Migration to Britain
• 3. Three paths to integration? Geography, demography and economics
• 4. Ethnicity, identity and Britishness
• 5. Xenophobia and racism
• 6. The evolution of multiculturalism
• 7. Conclusions, contradictions and continuities
• Bibliography
• Index