Multicultural diversity in western cities predates the 1980s by centuries

Evidence

This is not to say that what others such as Peter Caws and Stuart Hall have characterized as the “descriptive multicultural” or modern demographic diversity doesn’t have a much longer history in western metropoles such as London and Amsterdam, Paris and New York, but notably also in colonial capitals in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, dating back at least to the early onset of European modernities. These urban environments attracted and threw together in more or less vigorous interaction and cultural clash people from across broad swaths of the world in trade and social interaction, political tension and intimate intercourse, intellectual engagement and epistemological distinction, linguistic multiplicity and cultural translation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 102

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay pushing back on the ‘recent diversity panic’ framing: demographic mixing in colonial capitals like Calcutta and Cairo predates modern multicultural discourse by centuries.
• XREF: connects to: Multiculturalism dates to the 1960s and remains unfinished — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 868; Ethnically diverse urban contact long predates modern multicultural movements — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 102