From Mon Pays, the Shtetl and the Desh to London's East End: A Rationale for Comparative Migrant Studies

Abstract

Based on research carried out in the East End of London over a number of years, this article sets out to present an agument in favour of comparative migrant studies. As the traditional first point of settlement for migrants, the East End is a rich resource of immigrant history and contemporary ethnic activity, for over a century providing a fertile laboratory for those wishing to study the migrant experience. All too often the studies have been mono—focal, concentrating solely on one of the three main groups that settled in the area from the seventeenth century onwards: Huguenots, Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis. This article demonstrates the issues arising from the migrant presence, particularly the impact of the outsider on housing and jobs, are not just a manifestation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but a recurrent theme, articulated in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries following the influx of French Calvinists, in the late nineteenth century in reaction to the arrival of Eastern European Jews and, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, as the Bangladeshi presence became permanent rather than transitory.