Working-class Britons played a crucial role in the pioneering settlement
and integration of South Asians in imperial Britain. Using a host of new
and neglected sources, Imperial Heartland revises the history of early
South Asian immigration to Britain, focusing on the northern English
city of Sheffield. Rather than viewing immigration through the lens of
inevitable conflict, this study takes an alternative approach, situating
mixed marriages and inter-racial social networks centrally within the
South Asian settlement of modern Britain. Whilst acknowledging the
episodic racial conflict of the early inter-war period, David Holland
challenges assumptions that insurmountable barriers of race, religion
and culture existed between the British working classes and non-white
newcomers. Imperial Heartland closely examines the reactions of
working-class natives to these young South Asian men and overturns our
pre-conceptions that hostility to perceived racial or national
difference was an overriding pre-occupation of working-class people
during this period. Imperial Heartland therefore offers a fresh and
inspiring new perspective on the social and cultural history of modern
Britain.