‘Immigrant communities and British local history’

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Killingray, David. 2011. ‘Immigrant communities and British local history’. The Local Historian, 41(1), pp. 4-12. [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.balh.org.uk/publications/local-historia...

Abstract or Description

This important article in our ‘Themes in local history’ occasional series draws attention to one of the greatest and most basic weaknesses in the overall range of local history research and writing – the scarcity of material on the local history of ethnic and immigrant communities. It emphasises that local historians have tended to avoid this aspect of the history of British communities, despite the manifest fact that this is one of the most crucial changes in society, demography, culture, faith and visual appearance in the last hundred years and longer. Killingray begins the main part of the paper with an overview of the history of immigration and minority communities, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, drawing attention to the importance of patterns of settlement as well as numbers involved. He then analyses the character and value of writing on the subject, using the following key themes: i) the fact that other disciplines, such as geographers and sociologists, have dominated the field; ii) the separate (or otherwise) nature of Black history; iii) the special requirements of researching and investigating the history of ethnic communities; iv) the problems of sources in an often unwritten culture; v) the need to look at journals and published works from other disciplines; and vi) the real and pressing need to begin to address these issues and to tackle the challenging theme

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Article