For History Today I reviewed Taj Ali’s excellent book on the history of British South Asian activism.
Taj Ali’s book begins with the violent assault of a South Asian man in Hartlepool while onlookers cheer, one of them shouting ‘a Paki got banged’. In nearby Middlesbrough a group of white men establish a checkpoint to interrogate the ethnicity of passing drivers. These disturbing scenes are not from decades past, but from the 2024 race riots that shook the UK.
Those riots were the most recent incarnation of a hostility towards people of colour that has recurred throughout modern British history. Britain was afflicted by significant outbreaks of racist violence in 1919, 1948, 1958, the early 1960s, 1979, throughout the 1980s, and again in 2001. As Ali shows, British South Asians have responded through community organising, ranging from campaigns for Indian independence to street defence patrols mounted by assorted Asian youth groups.
Read the full article online.
