Chapter 5 explores the reasons why the Sheffield area settlement (as well as those located by marriage records for other British towns) has remained largely unnoticed by historians and questions the prior assumption that the presence of non-white immigrants in an area can always be located by remarkable instances of resistance by state institutions or by the working-class population. It also closely examines evidence and personal testimony of the everyday lived experiences of natives and newcomers who inhabited the same neighbourhoods. These individuals frequently describe integrated lives and point to a non-ideologically aligned phenomenon, here described as ‘everyday tolerance’, which existed within many working-class communities. Fostered by values of ‘getting by’ and ‘mucking in together’ and of bonds of family, work and neighbourhood, many neighbourhoods were able to accept the inward migration and intermarriage of non-white newcomers without the hostility and violence displayed during the port riots of 1919–1920. To view the period through a historical lens focused on hostility is to overlook much of the nuance and fine grain of quotidian relations between natives and newcomers.

The ’inter-racial’ or ‘mixed’ marriage should be, Chapter 4 argues, central to discussion of South Asian immigration to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter examines evidence from the marriage records and argues that the role and widespread distribution of mixed marriages across Britain have been neglected by historians. It explores the backgrounds and social position of women who entered into relationships with South Asian men and questions J. B. Priestley’s assertion that mixed working-class couples were formed from ‘the riff-raff of the stokeholds and the slatterns of the slums’. Couples in mixed marriages have also been presented by historians as isolated from the neighbourhoods they inhabited. This chapter, however, argues that these couples were often thoroughly integrated into their neighbourhoods and maintained frequent contact not just with close friends, but also with blood relations, in-laws and neighbours. Additionally, these marriages, and the families and households they formed, played a significant, if not crucial, role in acting as anchor points in enduring chains of migration spanning the inter-war period and into post-Partition era.

Chapter 2 focuses on the social networks of South Asian immigrants to the Sheffield area. It begins with an exploration of the origins and reasons for the migration of Pashtuns, mostly from Chhachh in northern Punjab. This ethnic group was the first and most numerically dominant South Asian migration to the area during the period. The chapter also examines the crucial primary role of the biradari (clan) in facilitating and sponsoring this pioneering migration from the villages of Punjab, North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Kashmir. Through the more cosmopolitan environment of employment aboard British merchant ships as lascar seamen, the kinship-based networks supporting migration were bolstered by contact with those outside the biradari. Pioneering immigrants were thus able to establish contacts ashore in Britain. The chapter argues that these early links, which included white natives within a working-class milieu, were crucial in the establishment of successful early South Asian immigration and settlement, not only in the Sheffield area, but in towns and cities across Britain.

The ecclesiastical authorities in the Catholic and Presbyterian churches imposed penalties on members of their congregations who violated their respective institution’s regulations on bigamy and remarriage.Bigamy was, from 1634, a criminal offence which was prosecuted in the civil rather than the ecclesiastical courts. An individual who wished to invalidate a marriage in civil law on the grounds of bigamy was obliged to seek a solution in the civil courts.The destruction of court records means that we have little information on rates of bigamy in Ireland before the nineteenth century.Bigamy cases generally involved desertion and abandonment, states with practical and emotional consequences that must have been difficult for those who were deserted and for second spouses who must, in some cases at least, have also felt betrayed.The men and women who committed bigamy were on the whole servants, porters, labourers, soldiers and sailors.The majority were not improving their economic state, but perhaps tried instead to find some happiness in their lives. Bigamy pretended a marriage and thus respectability existed, and may have been preferable to open cohabitation. Bigamy reveals that over the period there was an amount of marital non-conformity, men and women interpreted the law on marriage flexibly to suit their own ends.