British Pakistani and Bangladeshi marriage practices stem from colonial labour migration, not culture

Evidence

A very similar portrait of responses to the role of marriage in Muslim immigrant communities emerges in a British study of community perceptions of forced marriage. In their study of Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Bradford and Tower Hamlets, Samad and Eade adopt an approach that begins by contextualizing the two communities within a history of colonialism and migration, something I showed was entirely missing in accounts such as Wikan’s, where Muslim communities were more or less reduced to their culture. Both communities are rural in origin, working class, possessing low human capital, and a substantially young population. They came to be in Britain through a process of chain migration, after the first immigrants came to supply cheap labour to the wool and garment industries. Their presence can be traced directly to old colonial arrangements. For example, most of the Pakistanis studied were Azad Kasmiris from what is now the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. They worked in the engine rooms of the British merchant navy and were encouraged to migrate to Britain to fill the labour shortages of the post-war period. Chain migration accelerated when the construction of the Mangla Dam produced people who were displaced but who had received a small compensation from the World Bank. These migrants (one third of a million) settled in Britain and sent remittances back home. The British labour market contracted during the eighties and nineties and unemployment for this group rose to 35 per cent, three times the national average. Unemployment was even higher for women. The end result was a very young, unemployed population with exceedingly poor educational levels owing, among other things, to the state of schools in their communities. … Marriage is used in these two communities to reinforce kinship and job networks, although people marry from a wider pool than they normally would in their communities of origin. Marrying into the right family brings respect and status in the community as well as economic connections. Various forms of arranged marriages exist, but in general the less educated the family, the more traditional the practice. Families arranged transcontinental marriages because of the limited pool of marriage partners. In Bradford, for example, 50 per cent of the marriages were transcontinental ones, a figure that rose to 71 per cent in Oxford. The researchers estimate, drawing on police data and on the Southall Black Sisters, that there are two hundred cases a year of forced marriage. Significantly, ‘liaisons with the opposite sex are an important trigger for instigating the process of forced marriage.’ That is, families sought to push through arranged marriages without the consent of their children whenever they feared they would lose control of girls and women’s sexuality. Immigration was not an important factor in these arrangements. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 322

In their study of Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Bradford and Tower Hamlets, Samad and Eade adopt an approach that begins by contextualizing the two communities within a history of colonialism and migration, something I showed was entirely missing in accounts such as Wikan’s, where Muslim communities were more or less reduced to their culture. Both communities are rural in origin, working class, possessing low human capital, and a substantially young population. They came to be in Britain through a process of chain migration, after the first immigrants came to supply cheap labour to the wool and garment industries. Their presence can be traced directly to old colonial arrangements. For example, most of the Pakistanis studied were Azad Kasmiris from what is now the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. They worked in the engine rooms of the British merchant navy and were encouraged to migrate to Britain to fill the labour shortages of the post-war period. Chain migration accelerated when the construction of the Mangla Dam produced people who were displaced but who had received a small compensation from the World Bank. These migrants (one third of a million) settled in Britain and sent remittances back home. The British labour market contracted during the eighties and nineties and unemployment for this group rose to 35 per cent, three times the national average. Unemployment was even higher for women. The end result was a very young, unemployed population with exceedingly poor educational levels owing, among other things, to the state of schools in their communities. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 322

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s central argument that Muslim communities are reduced to ‘their culture’ rather than understood via colonial history — and to the standing ‘Grafting & Growth’ or the law-merchant readings on structural vs cultural explanation.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the ‘forced marriage panic’ in European welfare states systematically erases the class and colonial economic history behind these families’ vulnerability — a structural-story-behind-the-culture-story piece.
• ADDENDUM: Precise supporting data for the argument that structural/material causes (colonial displacement, the Mangla Dam, wool-garment labour, 35% unemployment) generate the conditions later read as Muslim cultural deficit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 322