The Chinese in Britain, 1800-Present: Economy, Transnationalism, Identity (review)

When we think about images of China in Victorian England, we're likely to conjure up the sordid opium den scenes in the writings of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Oscar Wilde; the lavish displays of Chinese merchandise at the Great Exhibition of 1851; or perhaps the major tourist draw provided by the unexpected visit of the Chinese junk Keying to London in 1848. We're less likely to call to mind Shadwell barracks housing hundreds of Chinese mariners or the emergence of that seeming staple of early Chinese immigrant business culture, the Chinese laundry.

While the Chinese were never one of the largest immigrant groups in England, their presence has been significant and enduring over the past 200 years. In The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present, Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez provide a comprehensive survey of the social and economic experiences of this group in an often unwelcoming host society. The authors' principal conclusion is that this "group" was actually far more fragmented than one might expect and displayed little of the internal cohesion and enduring ties to the motherland that would be predicted by current models of ethnic diaspora and globalization.

Recent work in transnational studies tends to assume a high degree of group identity and mutual aid within immigrant communities sharing a single country of origin. This has led, in studies of minority Chinese communities, to assumptions that apparent similarities in enterprise development and business practices within and across these groups reflect strong networking ties ("pan-ethnic unity"), shared cultural norms ("Confucian ethic"), or both. The authors convincingly demonstrate that these assumptions are flawed and that the case of the Chinese poses a serious challenge to the prevailing sociological paradigms of transnationalism. In more general terms, the authors offer a timely warning of the dangers of cultural essentialism in any interpretation of migrant experience that homogenizes people of any given ethnic background.

Working through the complexities of identity formation within any immigrant group requires a historical perspective, and the authors ground their study in a methodical review of the origins of the Chinese presence in Britain and the social and economic factors that led to its growth and gradual transformation. The first chapter, "Migration and Settlement," offers the most thorough treatment of the nineteenth-century portion of this history. Beginning with a brief overview of the eighteenth-century fascination with China and its rapid decline after 1789, it turns to the arrival of the first Chinese seafarers in East London in 1782 and the subsequent emergence of a miniature Chinatown (called huabu, or "Chinaport," by its inhabitants) among the crowded streets of Shadwell in the early nineteenth century. Its migrant dwellers were typically employees of the East India Company, which held a monopoly over the China trade until 1833 and hired Chinese mariners to replace British seamen recruited into the Royal Navy—in part, apparently, because they were admirably resistant to the temptations of alcohol. Chinese entrepreneurs began to arrive only later, followed by successive waves of contract laborers during and after World War I, students, and professionals. A key conclusion to emerge from this chapter is that Chinese immigrants to China have historically been a highly variegated group, representing a range of regions, social classes, and aspirations, with the result that differences and intra-ethnic competition within this seemingly homogeneous ethnic group have typically proven more significant as a centrifugal force than shared heritage or ties to the motherland as a centripetal one.

Subsequent chapters explore the variety of Chinese economic activities in Britain, civic and trade associations among the Chinese, transnational ties, British racism, and Chinese ethnic culture and identity. The authors clearly put a premium on thoroughness and provide a boundless trove of empirical data that will prove indispensable to other social scientists pursuing work in this area. The same thickness of detail, however, does at times interfere with the cohesion of the...