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