In this paper I shall be looking at Hindu Sindhis, a well-defined community of traders from northwest India. More specifically, I will compare the pathways of economic integration of Hindu Sindhis in two very different places – London and the Mediterranean island of Malta. Data for the paper derive from two sources. Intermittently between 1995 and 2000, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in Malta, London, and Bombay (Mumbai). I draw extensively on oral history as narrated to me by several senior traders. Research in the Malta National Archives in 1999 yielded 88 records pertaining to 10 Sindhi firms that date from 1887 to 1928.

Any study of migration and integration must include a look at processes of economic integration at the national and, increasingly, global levels. It is evident that, from the vu cumpra (‘want to buy?’) peddlers selling everything from beach towels to souvenirs in Italy, to Gujarati corner-shopkeepers in Britain, entrepreneurship of some sort is the occupational choice of many thousands of immigrants to Europe. This phenomenon has been studied for various situations (notably the Netherlands and the US) and there is a sizeable body of work on ‘ethnic/immigrant entrepreneurs’. As the word ‘ethnic’ indicates, most of the studies trace the integration of immigrant groups into host economies by focusing on the group itself – in so doing ‘‘they reduce immigrant entrepreneurship to an ethno-cultural phenomenon existing within an economic and institutional vacuum’’. There is a dearth of studies that locate particular groups within different spatio-temporal contexts, thus highlighting the importance of the interaction between ethno-cultural dynamics and local socio-economic situations, as part of the integrative process.

In this paper I will try to show that Hindu Sindhi diaspora and migration are:

– themselves embedded, to paraphrase Clifford, in ‘particular maps and histories’, these being quite often specific to nation-states;

– uneven processes that leave ostensibly homogenous (on the basis of ethnicity, religion, nationality, etc.) groups with marked internal differentiation as regards access to resources and structural positions within nation-states and the global economic system.

Although ‘Sindhi business’ may, on the basis of ethnic affiliation, be seen as a vertebrate category, in fact it takes on different local hues as different facets of the diaspora that themselves have developed within particular historical milieus, encounter specific local situations.