Migrants are the city

Commentary on “London: diversity and renewal over two millennia” by Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li

Bibliographic Data

ID11634967
AuthorsN Glick Schiller (0000-0002-7834-1927, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume46
Issue11
Pages2347-2354
Publication date2023-02-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnic and Racial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9870 • E-ISSN: 1466-4356
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01419870.2023.2176248
OpenAlexW4321615444
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited21

By querying the social connections that underlie Heath’s and Li’s overview of the peopling of London over the millennia, it becomes clear that London was made as people from elsewhere settled, maintained multiple networks of connection and created local forms of sociability. Generations of migrants built London, as those in power extracted wealth from colonies around the world through the African slave trade, theft of land from native peoples, indentured labour from South Asia, and the dispossession and cultural subordination of Irish, Scottish, Welch and English rural classes. To trace the history of London must be to explicate the intertwined processes of racialization, women’s subordination, Orientalism and the cultural hierarchies of difference. As all comprehensive urban histories can do, if they address the relationships between migrants and city making, Heath and Li’s account of London teaches us that underneath politically constructed migrant non-migrant divides, over time migrants become the city

Diversity (politics · Ethnology · Geography · Irish · Power (physics · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · Subordination (linguistics · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Urban Planning and Governance

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Open DOIOpen Access