In 1907 Liverpool marked its seven hundredth anniversary, the local authorities proudly trumpeting their city's cosmopolitanism and distinctiveness. As the preeminent port in Britain, Liverpool had become a global center from which new markets were opened up, a city from which—and into which—both goods and people flowed, justifying the proclamations of cosmopolitanism by the city's guardians. A sizable population of dock workers, especially from West Africa and the Indian subcontinent, had already contributed to Liverpool's uniqueness, as had the incessant interaction between residents and those passing through, making the dock area a “pleasure zone of cultural contact” (21). Of the 5.5 million Europeans who crossed the Atlantic between 1860 and 1900, 4.75 million of them sailed from Liverpool. While some Liverpudlians celebrated the status that settlement and migratory movement had conferred on their city, others were less charitable, both with respect to the growing nonwhite working population and to “the scum left by the tide of migration,” as the city's head constable put it disparagingly in 1904 (27). It is the history of nonwhite settlement in Liverpool, along with the contradictory responses it elicited, largely between the 1900s and the 1980s, that is the subject of John Belchem's detailed study, Before the Windrush.

Over the years Belchem has made the study of Merseyside his own. In valuable books, essays, and edited collections, he has woven a complex history of ethnicity and migration, of class formation and local politics, of the economics of trade and urban development—a history of Liverpool's uniqueness. He has written the definitive account of the Irish in Liverpool; here he turns his attention to very different groups of settlers. It is a much more depressing story, a story of rejection and alienation, of well-meaning white liberal humanitarian dreams of assimilation hitting the buffers of deprivation and endemic discrimination that marked the experience of most nonwhite migrants in Liverpool. Concluding his study with the Toxteth riots of 1981, Belchem observes that by then it had become clear that “Liverpool blacks—unlike their Liverpool-Irish counterparts—were yet to be acknowledged as ‘scousers’” (271).

The title of Belchem's book is misleading given that fully half of it is devoted to the period after 1948—that is, after the arrival of just under five hundred West Indian immigrants on the Empire Windrush, initiating new patterns of migration. Belchem contributes significantly to the historiography of postwar settlement, but he also pushes the story backwards, and by focusing on Liverpool's uniqueness he disrupts a number of familiar narratives. The extent and multifaceted nature of migration to Liverpool, he argues, shaped riots that took place there in 1919 in ways that differed from other cities. In addition, it gave rise to a number of interwar studies of ethnic communities in Liverpool that were both pioneering and unmatched elsewhere in the country. On the other hand, due to Liverpool's post-1945 economic malaise, the city was shunned by many new arrivals and thus avoided the riots that erupted in Nottingham and London in 1958. Belchem also argues that in the wake of those riots Britons were preoccupied with the politics of immigration, turning away from an increasingly blighted Liverpool—home to few new immigrants—where deprivation and discrimination grew unchecked, resulting in the disillusion and alienation that led to riots in 1972 and 1981.

Before the Windrush is a local study, but, as Belchem insists, it is no “mere exercise in local history” (xx). It contrasts the experience of Liverpool with that of other parts of the country and positions the city as a precursor to the problematic racialized relations which accompanied Britain's transition to a postcolonial society. Moreover, national politics are never far removed from local events, and Belchem tells an important story of “inter-departmental wrangling” (45). In the wake of the 1919 riots, the Colonial Office's concerns about how news of what had happened in Liverpool would reverberate across the globe were not shared by the Home Office, which was already dreaming up schemes of repatriation for members of Liverpool's communities of color. Two decades later, the Ministry of Labor and the British Council would also weigh in on the “colour problem” in Liverpool, and Belchem recounts with great insight and skill the conflicts that took place between these various agencies.

Despite its breadth of learning, and despite the detailed and fascinating story Belchem tells of the centrality of race in the history of twentieth-century Liverpool, Before the Windrush remains problematic in some respects. There is no central argument to glue the various pieces together: the preface merely highlights a number of the book's claims; the introduction simply offers a potted summary of what will come next, replete with passages that are repeated in exactly the same words later on; and there is no conclusion—indeed, aside from a couple of cursory paragraphs, the book merely ends, for no apparent reason, in the wake of the 1981 riots. Furthermore, although Belchem dutifully extracts passages from the work of Antoinette Burton, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Paul Rich, Bill Schwarz, Laura Tabili, and others—the usual suspects in the writing of the history of race in Britain—his book lacks engagement with their larger arguments. In addition, even though he readily admits that the modern language of “race relations” emerged only after 1945 (and was problematic insofar as it constructed the very “problems” it sought to address), Belchem continues to operate within its framework “for the sake of convenience,” refusing to make what he calls the “disproportionate effort” to cast his study in different terms (xx). As a consequence, his book has a rather dated feel. That said, it remains an erudite and important study. We have no other local studies of race in Britain that are so comprehensive, either in the complexity of their subject matter or their chronological scope; we have none that are as successful as is Belchem's in using the experience of a single city to shed light on the ways in which a broader, national story has been told.