Jews and Roma

The first Jews in Britain were brought to England in 1070 by King William the Conqueror, while Roma in Britain have
been documented since the 16th century. Although not normally included as British Asians, the Roma and Jews
originated in South Asia and Western Asia, respectively.
Mainly Sinti (as opposed to the Roma, who are more common in parts of Central and Eastern Europe), consisting of
tribes originating in South Asia (the Indian subcontinent) around 800, began arriving in sizable numbers in Western
Europe in the 16th century, including in the British Isles. Mostly speakers of a dialect of the Romani language (a
language very similar to Sanskrit and other Indic languages) and initially mainly travellers largely working
as hawkers, basket weavers; also as ostlers, jockeys and many other occupations working with horses.

Early modern
Huguenots
The Huguenots, French Protestants facing a new wave of persecution, began arriving in England in numbers
around 1670. King Charles II offered them sanctuary, and in all some 4050,000 arrived. Many settled in
the Spitalfields area of London, and, being former silk-weavers, brought new energy to this industry in the area and
raised silk to an important fashion item in Britain.[4] It has been estimated that as many as a quarter of London's
population today have a Huguenot ancestor.

Indians
People from the Indian subcontinent have settled in Great Britain since the East India Company (EIC)
recruited lascars to replace vacancies in their crews on East Indiamen whilst on voyages in India. Many were then
refused passage back, and were marooned in London. There were also some ayahs, domestic
servants and nannies of wealthy British families, who accompanied their employers back to "Blighty" when their stay
in Asia came to an end.
The number of seamen from the East Indies employed on English ships was so great that the English tried to
restrict their numbers by the Navigation Act of 1660, which restricted the employment of overseas sailors to a
quarter of the crew on returning East India Company ships. Baptism records in East Greenwich suggest that young
Indians from the Malabar Coast were being recruited as servants at the end of the 17th century, and records of the
EIC also suggest that Indo-Portuguese cooks from Goa were retained by captains from voyage to voyage.[5] In
1797, thirteen were buried in the parish of St Nicholas at Deptford.
Beginning in the 17th century, the East India Company brought over thousands of South Asian scholars, lascars,
and other workers (who were mostly Bengali and/or Muslim) to England, most of whom settled down and took
local European wives, due to a lack of Asian women in the British Isles at the time.[6] Due to the majority of early
Asian immigrants being lascars, the earliest Asian communities were found in port towns. Naval cooks also came,
many of them from the Sylhet Division of what is now Bangladesh. One of the most famous 18th-
century Bengali immigrants to Britain was Sake Dean Mahomed, a captain of the East India Company. In 1810, he
founded London's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House. He is also claimed as the person who
introduced shampoo and therapeutic massage to Britain.[7]

Modern
Indians
By the mid-19th century, there were at least 40,000 Indian seamen, diplomats, scholars, soldiers, officials, tourists,
businessmen and students in Great Britain.[8] In 1855 more than 25,000 of these were lascar seamen working on
british ships.[9][10] By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were around 70,000 South Asians in
Britain,[11] 51,616 of whom were lascar seamen working on British ships at the beginning of the First World War.[12]

Africans
During the 18th century, a substantial population of black people, thought to number about 15,000 by mid-century,
were brought to Britain initially largely as the captain's share of the cargo of transatlantic slave ships. Many of these
people became servants in aristocratic households and are frequently depicted in contemporary portraits of the
family often depicted in a similar manner to family pets. Many black people became part of the urban poor and
were often depicted in the caricatures and cartoons of William Hogarth, but others attained highly respected
positions in society, e.g. Ignatius Sancho and Francis Barber a servant to Dr Samuel Johnson who became a
beneficiary of his will. These ships stopped carrying black people to Britain after it banned slave trading in 1807.
Following the British defeat in the American War of Independence over 1,100 Black Loyalist troops who had fought
on the losing side were transported to Britain, but they mostly ended up destitute on London's streets and were
viewed as a social problem. The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was formed. They distributed relief and
helped the men to go overseas, some to what remained of British North America. In 1786, the committee funded an
expedition of 280 black men, forty black women and seventy white wives and girlfriends to Sierra Leone. The
settlement failed and within two years all but sixty of the migrants had died.[13]

Germans
Throughout the 19th century a substantial population of German immigrants built up in Britain, numbering 28,644 in
1861. London held around half of this population, and other sizeable communities existed in Manchester, Bradford
and elsewhere. The German immigrant community was the largest group until 1891, when it became second only to
Russian Jews. There was a mixture of classes and religious groupings, and a flourishing culture built up, with the
growth of middle and working class clubs. Waiters and clerks were two main occupations, and many who worked in
these professions went on to become restaurant owners and businessmen, to a considerable extent.[14] This
community maintained its size until the First World War, when public anti-German feeling became very prominent
and the Government enacted a policy of forced internment and repatriation. The community in 1911 had reached
53,324, but fell to just over 20,000 after the war.[15]

Russian Jews
England has had small Jewish communities for many centuries, subject to occasional expulsions, but British Jews
numbered fewer than 10,000 at the start of the 19th century. After 1881 Russian Jews suffered bitter persecutions,
and British Jews led fund-raising to enable their Russian co-religionists to emigrate to the United States. However,
out of some 2,000,000 who left Russia by 1914, around 120,000 settled permanently in Britain. One of the main
concentrations was the same Spitalfields area where Huguenots had earlier congregated. Immigration was reduced
by the Aliens Act 1905 and virtually curtailed by the 1914 Aliens Restriction Act.[16] In addition to those Russian Jews
who settled permanently in the UK an estimated 500,000 Eastern European Jews transmigrated through British
ports between 1881 and 1924.[17] Most were bound for the United States and others migrated to Canada, South
Africa, Latin America and the Antipodes. [18]
JEWS & ROMA
- No evidence of Jews residing in England before the Norman Conquest (1066)
- Believing that their commercial skills and incoming capital would make England more prosperous, William I
invited a group of Jewish merchants from Rouen, in Normandy, to England in 1070
- At the beginning: for money lending purpose only, they were not permitted to own land nor to participate in
trades (except for medicine)
- Edward I (1269): If the Jews were not to have intercourse with their fellow citizens as artisans, merchants, or
farmers, and were not to be allowed to take interest, the only alternative was for them to leave the country
Between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and their formal return in 1655 there is no official trace of
Jews