In Global Migrants, Local Culture, Laura Tabili continues the astute analysis of immigration, race, and the relationship between the transnational and the local in maritime communities that she began with her excellent first monograph, We Ask for British Justice (Ithaca, NY, 1994). In contrast to British Justice, which examined the legacies of colonialism as they applied to one specific racial cohort, Global Migrants opts for a demographically and chronologically broader exploration of a single locale, the Tyneside community of South Shields. The goal of Tabili’s second book is more ambitious than that of her first. Her purpose is to use the wealth of official government documentation on the region to revise inaccurate historical assumptions and, by doing so, to address the fallacies of popular political rhetoric on immigration and multiculturalism in English society before the postwar waves of immigration. By reconstructing a complete historical picture of South Shields’s entire overseas migrant community, Tabili aims to redeem migrants from historical marginalization and popular hostility and to demonstrate how movement, integration, and heterogeneity (racial and cultural) represented the norm, rather than the exception, in provincial England.

The author describes the project as a microhistory, and Global Migrants is meticulous in its exploration of Home Office Records, census reports, and materials from the Tyneside local archives. Tabili employs condensed narratives of individual lives and circumstances to illustrate particular points. Their stories, however, are overshadowed by the tidal movements of whole populations, vast shifts in industry, the growth (or regional contraction) of Britain’s empire, and the spasms of migration fostered by political, social, and economic upheaval on the European continent. Global Migrants has something interesting, original, and significant to offer about many of the central topics in British social history. Tabili discusses housing, labor and the labor market, neighborhood formation and community dynamics, the role of the state, imperialism, marriage and family structure, gender roles and relations, and, of course, the fluctuating dynamics of immigration and emigration at the national and transnational levels. Major preconceptions that the author effectively debunks include the housing segregation of racial minorities, the widespread hostility against newcomers, the stark social divisions between long-term residents and more recent arrivals, and the contrast between a geographically stable, nonmigratory populace and a more transient, migratory one. Tabili uses her evidence to prove, quite convincingly, that South Shields, in the century before the Second World War, was a highly fluid community. There, people of different geographic and cultural origins intermingled constantly, the boundaries and identities of race and culture were highly unstable and permeable, and regional and international migration, long term or short, was ubiquitous. These circumstances, the author argues, reveal the inaccuracy of both popular and historical interpretations of racial conflict in modern Britain. She points to the early twentieth century, in particular, as a period in which allegedly “racial” tensions have been wrongly attributed to the innate characteristics and mere physical presence of migrants. Tabili asserts that the true cause of such conflicts, which were far less pervasive than is commonly portrayed, was the historically evolving institutional and geopolitical currents that were concretely manifested in local communities.

With the author’s framing of South Shields within the primary contexts of the local and the transnational, it is the middle ground, the national, that receives the shortest shrift. It is in no way ignored, but Tabili insists her evidence allows her to say little about her subjects’ own understandings of what Britishness meant. She does argue, however, that naturalization documents reveal that contrasting currents of inclusion and exclusion, rather than general xenophobia, were at the core of official and popular attitudes toward immigrants in local communities. In light of British historians’ overwhelming emphasis on popular hostility and incidents of violence against racial minorities in the period, Tabili asserts that this is one of the most essential counterarguments to be made about immigrant communities, and I am inclined to agree.

Not surprisingly, a book that engages such a broad array of topics over a considerable time period does suffer from some issues of organization. Although each chapter, and the subsections within chapters (which are numerous), builds on the author’s overall effort to normalize migration and heterogeneity (geographic, racial, cultural), the absence of an overarching narrative direction and minimal transitional passages make the reading quite jarring at times. Sudden shifts in focus from the local to the transnational exacerbate this issue. Also largely absent, despite its prominent inclusion in the title, is a significant engagement with many important aspects of “culture” as it is widely understood in current historical parlance. Leisure, education, and popular politics all either receive cursory treatment or are ignored altogether. Occupational networks and marriage patterns, however, are subjects of close scrutiny, and the social aspects of community religiosity receive some attention. Tabili does address the topic of identity, another major entry point for historical examinations of culture, at great length. But she approaches it almost entirely from the perspective of material circumstances (e.g., employment, country of origin, housing patterns). One notable exception is chapter 7, in which the author provides an astute and incisive analysis of the tensions among local, national, and transnational perspectives that shaped the identities (and self-identifications) of mariners in South Shields. This is one of the strongest and most compelling sections of Global Migrants, and it is particularly impressive that the author, after having written an entire book on maritime laborers already (the aforementioned British Justice), can still find much that is original and significant to offer on the topic.

Depending on one’s own theoretical perspective, Tabili’s focus on the materiality of existence and on statistically measurable characteristics constitutes either the greatest asset or the most notable liability of Global Migrants. The book’s overwhelming emphasis on official government documents lends great weight and credibility to the author’s conclusions but also allows her to avoid sustained engagement with the thornier conceptual dimensions of her main topics (i.e., race, imperialism, identity, gender, nationalism). Tabili suggests, for example, that the historical approach to race in Britain, and particularly historians’ efforts to establish stable definitions of racial identity, needs to be revised in light of her analysis. But she offers little specific guidance as to how this should be done beyond the well-established trends toward empirical investigation, paying greater attention to institutional and geopolitical forces at the local level, and a deeper engagement with gender, class, and other social formations. Another unanswered question is to what degree the patterns of migration and immigrant life in South Shields can be used to gain insights about the rest of English society. Tabili carefully circumscribes her language, saying only that her conclusions suggest larger truths about English society or provide counterarguments to long-standing myths of xenophobia and homogeneity. It certainly leaves the reader wondering whether similar patterns of inclusion and exclusion were also characteristic of rural areas, inland communities, and large metropolitan centers such as London or Birmingham, but these are the limitations of a microhistorical approach, rather than an oversight on the part of the author.

Such considerations notwithstanding, Global Migrants is an impressive achievement and an invaluable addition to the growing literature on race and immigration in modern Britain. A profoundly revealing study from one of the most incisive and meticulous historians of these subjects, it encourages scholars to reexamine many of their basic assumptions about the lives and experiences of residents in modern England’s maritime communities. Global Migrants also directly challenges the popular political rhetoric of “us” versus “them” by debunking the image of provincial, maritime England as being geographically static, culturally homogenous, inherently xenophobic, and perennially segregated.