Exploring the dynamics that drive the processes of immigrant settlement and assimilation, this fascinating book looks at whether these are solely the outcome of the temporal setting, cultural background, and the contemporaneous socio-economic and political conditions, or whether there are factors which, irrespective of the prevailing environment, are constant features in the symbiosis between the outsider and the insider.
Focusing on the area of Spitalfields in East London, this volume compares and contrasts the settlement, integration and assimilation processes undergone by three different immigrant groups over a period of almost three hundred and fifty years, and assesses their relative successes and failures. The three groups examined are the Huguenots who arrived from France in the 1670s, the Eastern European Jews coming from the Russian Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century, and the Bangladeshis who began settling in Spitalfields in the early 1960s.
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