March 08, 2005

• Nice one! Corrected my notion that England was pretty uniformly Anglo Saxon till, suddenly, large numbers of Jamicans and Muslims appeared from no-where. What I've always found interesting, is English willingness to settle in other lands: India and Africa, for example. In the small amount of travelling I've done in the Mediterranean, there seemed to be an English community in every place with good weather.
• See, you answered your own question there - "in every place with good weather." Which is pretty well anywhere but the UK. ;) Yes, including Canada.
• Only Jewish and Irish people have been immigrating to England since at least the middle ages, so the timelines starting in the 19th century don't make sense. I know the Jews were expelled (perhaps more than once - it was a royal tactic to seize their property), but I thought laws against their immigration were pretty well ignored from at least the 18th century on. The Irish were, of course, a minority around in the 18th century - I've read vangracy papers ordering that Irish labourers be forcibly sent back to Ireland.
• Okay - the origins section clears that up somewhat. It would just be interesting to see focus of the history taken back farther than it is.
• (last comment) - Ah, I've found out that Jews were allowed to live in England and practice their religion from 1656 on, thanks to Cromwell. He's such an interesting/complex man.
• I believe the rabbi who persuaded Cromwell to lift the ban believed he was helping to bring about the end of the world ( a good thing in his eyes). Prophecy said the end would come once the jews had been scattered to all the nations of the earth. So long as there weren't any in England, Doomsday was being held up.
• We had all those Huguenots and Flemish weavers and the like coming too didn't we? I seem to remember there's a bit of Lincolnshire called Holland because so many of the latter settled there. Frank Pieke at Oxford does good research on Chinese migration to Europe. The community in Liverpool was one of the earliest.
• There were certainly a lot of Dutch and French in and around the Fens, yes, but Holland was actually named that sometime earlier and for a different reason, which I don't remember. I met someone who was writing her PhD on Dutch communities in 17th century England, quite interesting stuff.
• Yeah, thinking about it it's more likely that we called the Netherlands 'Holland' because of some meaning in English like 'rather flat bit of countryside'. There's all those places called 'Petty France' too which I suppose would be yer Huge Nots.
• An interesting page of an interesting site about black and Asian immigration to Britain starting from Roman times. Queen Elizabeth I, in one of her less proud moments, complained about the large and growing number of 'blackamores' in England.
• Oh, and a link to the full text of Oroonoko, a novel by Aphra Behn (1640-1689), in which the romantic hero is a black slave. (Admittedly it's set in Surinam, but the author is English.)