The legacy of Empire

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Amin ordered the expulsion in August 1972, and about 28,000 Ugandan Asians came to Britain.

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The Notting Hill riots were significant first because they exposed the racism that many Caribbean migrants faced in Britain. In late August and early September 1958 gangs of white youths attacked West Indians and their homes in Notting Hill, a week after similar violence in Nottingham. The area had overcrowded, run-down housing, where landlords such as Peter Rachman exploited tenants, and far-right groups such as Oswald Mosley's Union Movement stirred up hatred. The riots shocked the nation, and the judge, Justice Salmon, gave nine white youths four-year sentences for attacks on black people, making clear that racist violence would be punished.

Secondly, they were significant because of the response of the Caribbean community. Residents defended themselves and began to organise. Claudia Jones and her newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, organised the first Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959 to celebrate Caribbean culture and show that West Indians were part of British life. When Kelso Cochrane was murdered in Notting Hill in May 1959, over a thousand people attended his funeral. In the 1959 election Mosley stood in North Kensington and lost his deposit.

Thirdly, the riots shaped politics in two opposite directions. Some politicians argued that the answer was to limit immigration, which contributed to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. Others argued that the law must protect black people from discrimination, which led eventually to the Race Relations Act of 1965.

In the long term, the community response to the riots helped lead to the Notting Hill Carnival, which began as a street festival in 1966 and is now one of the largest street festivals in Europe. So the riots were a turning point: they forced racism onto the national agenda and helped create both stricter immigration laws and the first laws against discrimination.

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One similarity is that both groups were refugees forced out by persecution, who arrived with little but settled in particular areas and built successful businesses. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Jews in the Russian Empire suffered pogroms and the anti-Jewish May Laws of 1882, and about 150,000 settled in Britain by 1914. They lived mainly in the East End of London and in Leeds and Manchester, working in tailoring, shoemaking and furniture-making; Michael Marks began a penny bazaar in Leeds in 1884 that grew into Marks & Spencer. In 1972 Idi Amin gave Uganda's Asians 90 days to leave, allowing them to take very little money, and about 28,000 came to Britain. Many settled in Leicester and London and rebuilt their lives through shops, factories and the professions. In both cases refugees who had lost almost everything became successful and changed the places where they lived.

A second similarity is that both groups faced hostility which was linked to laws restricting immigration. Jewish migrants were accused of taking jobs, lowering wages and overcrowding housing in the East End; the British Brothers' League, founded in 1901, campaigned against 'aliens', and Parliament passed the Aliens Act in 1905, the first modern law to control immigration. The Ugandan Asians arrived after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 and the Immigration Act of 1971 had already restricted immigration, and they faced opposition from Enoch Powell, the Monday Club and the National Front; Leicester City Council even advertised in Uganda telling them not to come. In both cases fears about jobs and housing turned into hostility towards refugees who had fled persecution.

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Religion has been an important cause of migration to and from Britain, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and for refugees fleeing persecution. However, across the whole period economic motives - the search for land, work and wealth - explain far more migration, and religion was often combined with other factors.

Religion played a part in the medieval period mainly through expulsion. Jewish communities that had come from Rouen after 1066 suffered growing hostility, including the massacre at York in 1190, and in 1290 Edward I expelled all Jews from England. Even this had an economic side, since Edward needed money and seized Jewish property. Most medieval migration was not religious: Vikings came to raid and then to farm, and Edward III invited Flemish weavers for economic reasons.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religion was much more important. Protestant refugees from the Low Countries settled in Norwich and London in the 1560s, and about 50,000 Huguenots fled to England after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Migration from Britain was also shaped by religion: the Pilgrim Fathers sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 to worship freely, Puritans settled Massachusetts in the 1630s, and Catholics and Quakers founded Maryland and Pennsylvania. The plantation of Ulster from 1609 settled Protestant English and Scots in Catholic Ireland. Yet economic motives competed even here: Jamestown, founded in 1607, was a business venture that survived on tobacco, and many emigrants to the colonies were poor indentured servants looking for a better life. The Ulster plantation was also about land and security.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries economic factors and government dominated. About 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, and the Highland Clearances forced Scots to emigrate when landlords replaced tenants with sheep. The Irish who came to Britain after the famine of 1845-52 were escaping starvation, not persecution. However, religious persecution returned as a cause when about 150,000 Jews fled pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1914, and Jewish refugees fled Nazism in the 1930s.

Since 1945 most migration has been economic. Caribbean and South Asian migrants came to fill labour shortages, and after 2004 many Europeans came for work. Religion shaped these communities' lives in Britain, through churches, mosques, gurdwaras and temples, but it was rarely the reason they came. The Ugandan Asians came in 1972 because Idi Amin expelled them, not for religious reasons.

In conclusion, religion was the main factor in some important migrations - the Huguenots, the Pilgrim Fathers and the Jewish refugees - but these were exceptions. Over a thousand years, economic motives have been far more important, and government decisions have often decided who could come or go. Religion was a major factor only in particular periods, so overall it has not been the main factor.