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‘The world economy is everywhere’: urban history and the world system1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

A. D. King
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Extract

Even without the urban riots of 1980–1, there would be little disagreement that one, if not the major change in British cities since the war has been in the ethnic composition of their populations. The Black and Asian population of Britain, estimated at some 2.1 million in mid 1980 by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, and forming 3.9 per cent of the total population, compared with under 1.4 million (2.5 per cent) in 1971 and some 200,000 in 1951. The concentration of this population into four or five major conurbations where, until economic crisis brought unemployment, there was a high demand for labour, means that anywhere between 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 inhabitants of many towns is of so-called ‘New Commonwealth’ and Pakistan origin; in certain London boroughs, depending on definition, the figure might be 30 per cent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 10 , May 1983 , pp. 7 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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Footnotes

1

The title phrase is from J. Friedmann and G. Wolff, ‘World city formation: an agenda for research and action’, Int. J. Urban and Regional Research, VI. 3 (1982), 309–44. I am grateful to Professor Friedmann for an advance copy of this paper and its bibliographic suggestions. Parts of the present paper were published in ‘“The empire strikes back”: reflections on the origins of ethnic minorities in British cities’, Internationale Spectator, XXXVI, 8 (1982), 436–42 (J. Netherlands Institute for International Affairs; in Dutch).

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8 Fraser, D. (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (1980).Google Scholar The inclusion of a chapter on ‘Imperialism and Leeds Politics’ does not substantially detract from the viewpoint expressed here. Whilst considerable reference is made to other immigrant groups, namely, the Irish and Jews, there is little discussion of why or how they arrived there; as with otherstudies of urban immigrants, their presence is simply taken for granted. An additionalirony is that the authority on the town's eighteenth-century economy left for the West Indies, and then went to Australia (p. 43) whilst the joint author for the chapter on nineteeenth-century industrial development was, at the time of publication, at the University of Dar es Salaam. The criteria for choosing this book were principally, though not entirely, personal: as I live in the city, I am interested in it.

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54 One is not looking here for direct evidence of the investment of the profits of world trade in recreational environments (see Johnson, R. J., City and Society (1980), 108, 1182.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar) in the later nineteenth century, though it no doubt could be found; rather that the particular political economy of the time, with, for example, cheap food resulting from overseas investments in plantations, or high wages resulting from the export of cotton and iron and steel, enabled such recreational environments to be viable.

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57 E.g. Samson, G. C., Houses, Villas, Cottages and Bungalows for Britishers and Americans Abroad (1910);Google Scholar also King, , The Bungalow (in press).Google Scholar The question of international labour migration is comprehensively discussed in a forthcoming book by R. Cohen, The New Helots, to be published by Heinemann.