The setting of this book is Leicester, a medium-sized industrial city in the English Midlands. I know Leicester well: it is the place where I spent the longest continuous time of my life, some sixteen years. About a hundred yards from where I used to live was a small fish-and-chip shop called Luigi’s. Actually it was run by a Cypriot called Steve (for Stavros), the original Italian owner having sold it on. Just round the corner from the fish-and-chip shop was a Polish bakery and confectioner’s. Encapsulated in my memory of this small space are the three migrant groups who are the subjects of this book: Italians, Greek Cypriots, and Poles.
Leicester is the British city with, statistically, the highest proportion of minority ethnic inhabitants, who, given their younger age profile, will soon outnumber native “whites.” But Leicester's overwhelmingly ethnic character is Asian, predominantly Indian (although there are many subgroups). There are also substantial Caribbean and Irish communities. In choosing her three target groups, Kathy Burrell has interestingly strayed from the mainstream of ethnic and migration studies in Britain, as well as setting herself a challenging task by comparatively studying three different national-origin groups, each with its own microhistories, cultural traditions, and languages.
The book is a former PhD thesis; how much it has evolved from the thesis is difficult to say, but it still bears the heavy apparatus scolasticus of the thesis, with extensive literature reviews, copious footnotes and references, and detailed discussion of methodology. Actually I found the methodology in some respects quite badly flawed. The basis of the research is fifty-two in-depth interviews, but they are unevenly distributed, for reasons that are never properly accounted for. Thus, half the sample are Poles (twenty-six), fifteen are Cypriots, and only eleven are Italians. Females (thirty-two) outnumber males (twenty). And while more than half the Greek Cypriot subsample are second generation, nearly all the other two subsamples are first generation. Given the explicit focus of the analysis on narrative, memory, community, “return,” and personal and national identity, there are serious biases, in my view. And given the preponderance of first-generation interviewees, the reliance on oral-history narratives in English only is another potential drawback.
Having said all that, the interview material is quite rich, and it is comprehensively contextualized, with mainly descriptive rather than theoretical attempts to interpret and analyze the data. Key foci are the decision to migrate, memories of the “homeland,” networks, family, and social capital. There is nothing as such on theories of integration and even less, for U.S. readers, on (segmented) assimilation. These theoretical debates are cast aside in favor of narrated experiences, memories, and perceptions, which is, in this reviewer's view, a valid stance to take.
Within the limitations imposed by the research design, the author uncovers several instructive contrasts among the three groups. For instance, the differential experience of forced vesus voluntary migration colors national identity, political engagement, and links to the homeland. The Poles have a tragic history of occupation and enforced exile; they have fewer ties to the homeland, fewer family and kinship links, a greater sense of loss, and stronger national identity, reconstructed in exile. The Greek Cypriots also speak of a traumatic past, when their island was partitioned by Turkish action in 1974, but much Cypriot migration to Britain predated this schism. The Italians have been more voluntary in their migration decisions, but poverty was often endemic in their rural areas of origin in the immediate postwar years. They are also regionally diverse and identify less with the Italian “nation” (indeed they are quite disparaging about this) and more with their particular little corner of Sicily or Tuscany or wherever.
These intergroup comparisons—and there are many more—are unfolded carefully by the author and are one of the strengths of the book. However, the crucially different comparative perspective between the first and the second generations—so vital in immigration research—is glossed over, partly because of the unbalanced sample structure.
What is lacking, too, is any sense of historical connection to the present. The three groups settled in Leicester (and elsewhere in the United Kingdom) during the early postwar decades. We hear little of ongoing Italian immigration within the EU's (European Union's) free-movement principles, which have applied since the 1970s; nothing of recent Polish migration to Britain, which has been fairly massive in the lead-up to and after Poland's accession to the EU in 2004; and no updated perspective on Cyprus, also now an EU member.
