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‘The world economy is everywhere’: urban history and the world system1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
Extract
Even without the urban riots of 1980–1, there would be little disagreement that one, if not the major change in British cities since the war has been in the ethnic composition of their populations. The Black and Asian population of Britain, estimated at some 2.1 million in mid 1980 by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, and forming 3.9 per cent of the total population, compared with under 1.4 million (2.5 per cent) in 1971 and some 200,000 in 1951. The concentration of this population into four or five major conurbations where, until economic crisis brought unemployment, there was a high demand for labour, means that anywhere between 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 inhabitants of many towns is of so-called ‘New Commonwealth’ and Pakistan origin; in certain London boroughs, depending on definition, the figure might be 30 per cent.
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Footnotes
The title phrase is from J. Friedmann and G. Wolff, ‘World city formation: an agenda for research and action’, Int. J. Urban and Regional Research, VI. 3 (1982), 309–44. I am grateful to Professor Friedmann for an advance copy of this paper and its bibliographic suggestions. Parts of the present paper were published in ‘“The empire strikes back”: reflections on the origins of ethnic minorities in British cities’, Internationale Spectator, XXXVI, 8 (1982), 436–42 (J. Netherlands Institute for International Affairs; in Dutch).
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