Refugees and Urban Poverty: A Historical View from Calcutta

Abstract

Global urbanisation is once again recasting cities as key sites to explore a myriad of issues with uniquely urban characteristics, from politics, to economics, planning and urban social relationships. Urban poverty is increasingly significant in this discussion. A consideration of the history of studying poverty is appropriate which locates the urban squarely within the discourse. Poverty studies have their beginnings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in urban Britain undertaken by Charles Booth in London and Seebohm Rowntree in York. Rowntree’s work, for example, highlighted urban poverty as a new and distinct phenomenon from rural poverty due to the fact that urbanisation and urban living had unique characteristics, from commodification of standards of life to individualisation, and the particularities of the labour market (Mingione, 2008). In the United States, as well, many of the studies on poverty focused not only on urban poverty but on inner city poverty and emphasised questions of race (Beteille, 2003). The concentration of studies on urban poverty in countries in the Global North is partly due to the specific concentrations of poverty and visible poverty in these places, and it can be argued that it is qualitatively different from the poverty in developing countries. In nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, for example, the production of slums and poverty amongst the working classes was largely driven by the Industrial Revolution.