Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841–1939 by Laura Tabili (review)

The year 1948 holds a special place in British immigration history. The Empire Windrush brought many of the first non-white immigrants to postwar Britain that year, while Westminster passed the British Nationality Act. The latter defined British citizenship for the first time and formalized a migrant-native dichotomy which has come to characterize historical understandings of Britain’s migration past. Much of the post-1945 debates about immigration and the integration of newcomers, culminating in the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, revolved around the question of race. As Laura Tabili argues in her excellent and exhaustively researched Global Migrants, Local Culture, this modern construction of immigration as a “race” issue has been predicated on the ex post facto assumption that, before the mid-twentieth century, British society was ethnically homogenous and parochial. This argument is somewhat tenuous given the widespread scholarly attention given to the influence of Empire on British society in recent decades (John McKenzie and Andrew Thompson’s Studies in Imperialism series at Manchester University Press has now published its hundredth book). Tabili is nonetheless convincing in arguing that historians should focus less on the binary categories of immigrant and native Britons, and more on the practice of migration itself. The cultural practice of migration, she notes, affected those who left, those who were left behind, and the communities to which migrants moved.

Through a series of overlapping chapters which present painstakingly assembled data on the migrant population in South Shields between 1841 and 1939, Tabili demonstrates that migration comprised a fundamental part of local culture. Located at the mouth of the River Tyne, downstream from Newcastle, South Shields was an industrial town through the nineteenth century. Its economy revolved around older industries such as glass works, as well as ship building and coal. As a node in global trade and financial networks, South Shields’s economy, like that of other Victorian ports and trading communities (see, for instance, the Port Cities & Urban Cultures project), was at the mercy of distant forces. Given its industrial basis, it is unsurprising that the town’s migration patterns were determined largely by labor needs. Tabili reconstructs the arrival and integration of migrants to South Shields through the Victorian period and into the twentieth century based primarily on decennial census data. South Shields was one of the main provincial destinations for migrants after London, and as Tabili shows, its migration data tracked closely with British data as a whole. It is thus a representative case study, and Tabili is justified in using it to draw broader conclusions about the heterogeneity of British society in the long nineteenth century.

The largest national sources of migrants to South Shields were Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States. German and Jewish migrants became the most public newcomer communities in South Shields, as they were more likely than other migrants to bring their families with them, and to start businesses. Consistent with the findings of scholars such as Marjory Harper, Tabili also identifies the high rate of return migrants to South Shields from the settlement colonies. A fascinating chapter on migrants’ networks and their interactions with local people, centered on a series of time lapse maps showing the spatial distribution of migrant households between 1841 and 1901, demonstrates that they assimilated widely throughout the town. Other chapters detail the process of remigration (Tabili reveals that close to one-third of South Shields’s residents between 1841 and 1901 were born overseas); relations between migrants and native-born Britons, as revealed through migrants’ naturalization applications; local and migrant women’s contribution to the process of integration; local and migrant responses to state-building enterprises and discourses; and the ways in which migrants adapted to, and in turn shaped, local culture. Tabili does not study internal British migration flows, including those from Ireland and Scotland, but anecdotal evidence throughout her study suggests that such...