Spencer - 1997;2002;

It hardly needs to be said that the making of multi-racial Britain is a very important subject. It is concerned with nothing less than a rapid and quite unprecedented demographic and cultural transformation of British society. In the space of half a century, between 1940 and 1990, communities of Indian sub-continental, Caribbean and African origin have grown from a small fraction of 1 per cent of the total population of Britain to almost 6 per cent. Within another generation it is likely that Asian and black Britain will comprise about one-tenth of the whole population. The consequences of the migration have beenand will continue to beprofound, eventually transforming the way Britain sees itself and is seen by others. My hope is that British Immigration Policy since 1939 will contribute to the growth in understanding of how and why this came about.

The transformation of Britain from an all white to a multi-racial society, in the course of the second half of the twentieth century, has attracted a great deal of media and academic attention. In academe the writing on the subject and most of the exchanges have been dominated by sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists, perhaps necessarily because most historians disqualify themselves from the study of the very recent past. Not that social scientists have always eschewed the historical approachBallard, Deakin and Layton-Henry, to give a few examples, have had much of value to say about the history of Asian and black immigration. In so far as historians have interested themselves in immigration as an aspect of modern British history, they have tendedas exemplified by Colin Holmes excellent 1988 book John Bulls Island: Immigration and BritishSociety, 18711971to see Asian and black immigration as part of a larger pattern of movement, or to examine the long-term history of black immigration to (and settlement in) Britain as, for example, in Peter Fryers Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). The journal Immigrants and Minorities has emerged in the last decade as the place in which historians interested in all aspects of the history of British immigration and settlement can publish their views. This present volume does not adhere to either of these approaches. It is focused on immigration into Britain in the second half of the twentieth century of a myriad of communities from the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean and Africacoloured immigration as it was called in the 1950s or New Commonwealth immigration as it was more politely labelled in the 1960s and 1970s. Put another way, this book examines aspects of the history of the immigration and settlement of most of the ethnic groups the government thought were important enough to be counted in the census of 1991. Of course, Britain has for many centuries been both multi-ethnic and multi-cultural; only recently has it become multi-racial, in the sense that only in the second half of the twentieth century have groups, who are perceived to be different from the existing settled population by the colour of their skin, settled in Britain permanently and in significant numbers.