Asian Retailers in Glasgow: A Glimpse of Commercial and Property Relations in the Early Eighties

Abstract

As noted in the paper published in the last issue of this journal, shopkeeping and retail have been one of the important ways of entry into the host economy in the case of some prewar migrating communities such as the Jews and the Italians and the post-war migrants such as the Asians (mostly Panjabis from India and Pakistan) to Glasgow in Scotland. We explore how the two major sets of theories the ethnic customer niche and middlemen minority theory apply to this group and explore the unchartered area of the nature of ‘property relations’ of retailers, i.e.in terms of the acquired commercial and housing property. Specifically, we explore the similarities and differences between the commercial and residential markets and their relationship and possible interdependence for entrepreneurial and asset building and the phenomenon of segregated property markets. We begin by exploring the background of retailers and their possible influence on entry into the business. We also compare some key aspects of Glasgow’s retail economy with other Asian retail localized economies using the studies of the period for comparative perspective purposes. The paper adds to the very sparse literature on asset ownership or on ethnic commercial property markets and explores if the high ownership of housing and the presence of ethnic origin national banks helped with both ethnic enterprise and asset creation. It also explores the extent to which the ‘ethnic niche’ model and the ‘middle minorities’ model applies to the Asians in Glasgow in addition to the hypothesis if the agricultural background which requires some sense of business and related skills, and the notion of success and the status of property may be the crucial cultural and experiential drivers of asset acquisition and enterprise.