Immigrants and Minorities in British Society

Colin Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317384403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book, first published in 1978, examines the debate over immigration into Britain and raises the important point that the existence in the country of immigrant and minority groups is nothing new. Britain has, in fact, attracted newcomers throughout most of its history and it is to remedy the deficiency of research and knowledge about these early immigration processes that the present volume has been put together. Composed of a number of essays written from different perspectives by specialists in different areas, it attempts overall to provide a tightly integrated review of the major research areas, themes and problems involved in immigration studies.

PART I

1 Introduction: Immigrants and Minorities in Britain

by Colin Holmes

An historian concerning himself with immigration into America is likely to be embarrassed by the rich and plentiful nature of his source material. The same would hardly be true for anyone studying the history of immigration into Britain and the formation here of racial and ethnic minorities, visible on account of their physical and/or cultural traits and sharing a consciousness related to these characteristics.¹ There are, of course, a variety of contact situations which can occur between racial and ethnic groups and in the British case attention has been generously bestowed upon migrant superordination situations in which the migrating group was superior in terms of organisation and technology to the indigenous population.² In short, an emphasis has been placed upon the experiences of colonialism or imperialism. Even so, many studies which concentrated on such matters and the relationships which ensued between the British and a wide variety of other peoples passed quickly over the nature of the ideas which justified and rationalised even if they did not cause this process of domination and expansion.³ We are only just starting to discover the different attitudes which emerged in the course of this particular form of contact.

British experience of ‘Strangers’ through the immigration and settlement of racial and ethnic groups has received far less attention than colonial and imperial contact. Yet it has been pointed out that ‘the British are clearly among the most ethnically composite of the Europeans’⁴ and there is an abundance of material from Roman times to the present day to indicate how mixed British society is and the various infusions it has experienced. Some immigrants like Marx, Mazzini and Stepniak came as political refugees, others like Somersett arrived as slaves, visible reminders of an expanding metropolitan influence, and still others, such as the German influx of the late nineteenth century, entered as businessmen or workers, eager to employ their capital, entrepreneurial talent or labour in a different setting.⁵ Individuals or groups often stayed in Britain, put down their social roots and remained as members of distinctive minorities or, in some instances, merged themselves over time with varying degrees of success into the warp and weft of British life.

The impact of such newcomers on British society has undoubtedly been significant. If we examine the economic or material contribution which they have made in modern times we might refer to the financial activity of the Huguenots as well as their involvement in the London silk industry,⁶ the Jewish role in the development of merchant banking, textiles and stores,⁷ and the importance of Asian and West Indian labour to certain sectors of the contemporary British economy.⁸ If we consider these in conjunction with the enrichment of British life in terms of artistic sponsorship⁹ and achievement,¹⁰ as well as various contributions to political life, it is soon apparent that a wide range of influences needs to be acknowledged.¹¹

Some of this activity, it needs to be recognised, has not been universally welcomed. Success in business could arouse the hostility of those who regarded themselves as exploited by the capitalist system, and if particular capitalists were also racially or ethnically visible a double-edged weapon could be used against them. And when, as was sometimes the case, they operated in high risk-high reward situations or on the fringes of respectable activity, hostility could be intensified even further. At times workers from immigrant and minority backgrounds also encountered opposition, some of which resulted from a conflict of interests which did not turn upon racial or ethnic origin,¹² while some reflected an antipathy or prejudice against newcomers, in situations where it was difficult if not impossible, to allot responsibility for particular social problems and conditions.¹³ It was not unknown, of course, for such hostility to be seized upon and exploited for political purposes.¹⁴

Several ‘early’ studies were written on some of the above themes. The years of Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire saw the publication of William Cunningham’s Alien Immigrants to England, in 1897, and, influenced by wartime conditions and attitudes, the early German immigrants were discussed in I. D. Colvin’s The Germans in England, 1066–1598, which appeared in 1915. In addition, M. Dorothy George’s study of London Life in the XVIIIth Century (London, 1925) contained a number of illuminating sidelights on immigrants and immigrant activity in London and among later work Cecil Roth’s A History of the Jews in England (Oxford, 1941) and Kenneth Little’s Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (London, 1947), constituted important pioneer studies of Jewish and Negro minorities.

But historians have often shown a preference for ploughing well-worn furrows and even though a consideration of issues involving immigrants and minorities falls clearly within the province of social history¹⁵ and many of the more exciting historical advances of recent years have taken place within this particular area of the discipline, an interest in such matters took some time to develop.¹⁶ History, like any other form of human activity, reflects in part its own age, although necessarily absorbing images from the past and creating ideas for future development, and it might be suggested that it has taken the recent Indo-Pakistani and West Indian immigration into Britain to provide the necessary stimulus to the study of earlier immigrants and minorities. Against such a background the history of Britain’s black community was the subject of James Walvin’s work on The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England, 1555–1860 (London, 1971) and, more importantly, his Black and White: The Negro in English Society, 1555–1945 (London, 1973), which were designed to remedy the fact that the history of black society in England had been almost totally ignored.¹⁷ About the same time, Little’s earlier study of Negroes in British society was re-issued.¹⁸ But the impact of immigration was wider than this. It succeeded in stimulating studies beyond those concerned with the history of Britain’s black community and turned attention towards the past experience of other groups, particularly the Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire which occurred between 1880 and 1914.¹⁹ Before such interest was fashionable, Lloyd P. Gartner’s work, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914, had appeared in 1960 and filled an important gap in Jewish and immigration history. Later, under the specific influence of the contemporary immigration debate, Paul Foot wrote his polemical and challenging essay on Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmonds-worth, 1965) and John A. Garrard produced The English and Immigration, 1880–1910: A Comparative Study of the Jewish Influx (London, 1971) in which, like Foot, he was concerned to argue that parallels of protest existed between the receiving society’s attitudes towards coloured and Jewish immigrants. Among later publications Bernard Gainer’s The Alien Invasion: The Origin of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London, 1972), covered the same ground as Garrard but with different emphases, and aspects of Jewish radical politics were discussed in William J. Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914 (London, 1975).

Some of the lacunae in immigrant history were therefore filled in the 1960s and early 1970s and the same period also saw the appearance of J. A. Jackson’s The Irish in Britain (London, 1963), which attempted a general survey of Irish immigrants from an historical and sociological point of view, a theme which had previously been neglected by social scientists.²⁰ Little reminder is needed that this has been followed by a large batch of more detailed specific studies concerned with many different aspects of the Irish presence in Britain.²¹ Finally, the immigration which played such an important role in directing attention to earlier historical situations was itself covered in a mass of publications, which reflected different and differing viewpoints, by what became popularly known as the ‘race relations industry’—an industry which underwent a sharp ideological fragmentation in the early 1970s.²²

The present volume is an attempt to add to and extend our under place of immigrants and minorities in Britain. It makes no claim to be all-embracing. It is chiefly restricted to more recent history and is concerned mainly, although not exclusively, with the nature of various response patterns discernible within British society. In its structure it moves from the general to the specific. For some time there has been a need for a survey of ‘Britons old and new’ and this is what V. G. Kiernan provides in the second chapter. In this he reveals the wide geographical, ethnic and racial origins of those who entered the country whether for temporary or permanent settlement. But the essay does more than indicate the diversity of the additions to British society. It assesses the nature of the contributions which the newcomers made and gauges the responses of the receiving society, bearing in mind that in a stratified society these could vary sharply according to different perceptions of self-interest. Once this detail is provided it is possible to concentrate upon certain more specific themes and these appear in Part II of the book. Some reference is needed to the contribution to British society made by newcomers and here attention is focused upon the role of Germans in the development of the British economy from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and the changes which can be traced to their influence. Some of the Germans came as immigrants, involved themselves in British life and then moved on, whereas others came, settled and merged themselves into society. This was not something which had ceased by the mid-nineteenth century: Germans were to continue this involvement, and it is a process about which more needs to be known.

The emphasis in Chapter 3 is upon the economic consequences of German immigration into Britain rather than upon the reactions which this immigration produced in British society. Yet a consideration of response patterns and host perceptions of newcomers are important aspects in the study of immigrant and minority groups which cannot be ignored and which, in fact, have tended to capture attention. The two chapters which follow are concerned with issues of this kind. One of them concentrates upon stereotypes of the Irish and involves an analysis of the contradictory strands within the social and national prejudices of the English middle and upper classes and their distortion of the social conditions which they were meant to describe. In the course of this the temptation to write about English attitudes as a form of anti-Celtic Anglo-Saxon racism—a temptation to which some American writers have succumbed—comes under attack. It is suggested that an approach along these lines is distorting and unrewarding and it is argued instead that Englishmen drew from their experience of the Irish and Ireland a stereotype of Irish character with good points and bad and invoked the good or the bad according to temperament, moment or mood. This was a process which did not make for consistency. Following on from this attention is switched from the Irish to the Chinese, about whose history in Britain we know very little. A recently completed survey of the present-day Chinese community in London carries the briefest kind of historical introduction to the Chinese in British society, from whic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editorial Note
• Part I
• Part II
• Select Bibliography
• Index to Specific Subjects
• Index to Places
• Index to Persons and Authors Cited