Imperial Heartland
Immigration, Working-class Culture and Everyday Tolerance, 1917–1947

This new history of early South Asian immigration to Britain presents a fresh and inspiring picture of settlement and inter-racial tolerance.

David Holland (Author)

9781009216197, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 August 2023

350 pages
28 x 19 x 2.5 cm, 0.708 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]