Imperial Heartland
Working-class Britons played a crucial role in the pioneering settlement and integration of South Asians in imperial Britain. Using a host of new and neglected sources, Imperial Heartland revises the history of early South Asian immigration to Britain, focusing on the northern English city of Sheffield. Rather than viewing immigration through the lens of inevitable conflict, this study takes an alternative approach, situating mixed marriages and inter-racial social networks centrally within the South Asian settlement of modern Britain. Whilst acknowledging the episodic racial conflict of the early inter-war period, David Holland challenges assumptions that insurmountable barriers of race, religion and culture existed between the British working classes and non-white newcomers. Imperial Heartland closely examines the reactions of working-class natives to these young South Asian men and overturns our pre-conceptions that hostility to perceived racial or national difference was an overriding pre-occupation of working-class people during this period. Imperial Heartland therefore offers a fresh and inspiring new perspective on the social and cultural history of modern Britain.
- Reveals a forgotten and previously unresearched inland settlement of South Asians - many years before the era of mass immigration, symbolised by the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948
- Explores this South Asian community largely through the numerous examples of mutuality and co-operation between natives and newcomers, in contrast to the traditional lenses of conflict, hostility, and resistance
- Draws on a new methodology for immigration research to present startling new insights into the ethnically diverse and largely co-operative nature of working-class life in the era before mass immigration
Reviews & endorsements
‘Holland has impressively conducted deep and valuable research, bringing up a whole host of material that reveals the underexplored networks of South Asian migrants in Sheffield and crucially attempted to integrate that history into a broader history of working-class Sheffield and the broader kinship and social networks and interactions of a diverse, multicultural working-class population.’ Sumita Mukherjee, American Historical Review
Product details
August 2023Adobe eBook Reader
9781009216180
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Sheffield: The Steel City
- 2. The migration networks of South Asian immigrants in the Sheffield area
- 3. Working lives
- 4. Marriage, belonging and tolerance in 'the era of moral condemnation'
- 5. Empire, racism and everyday tolerance
- Conclusion.