https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6524-8128
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Guy Ortolano, On David Holland’s ‘Toffee Men, Travelling Drapers and Black-Market Perfumers—South Asian Networks of Petty Trade in Early Twentieth Century Britain’ (2019), Modern British History, Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 109–112, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae015
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David Holland, while still a postgraduate at the University of Sheffield, announced his research in Past and Present in 2017. While writing ‘The Social Networks of South Asian Migrants in the Sheffield Area during the Early Twentieth Century’, Holland had spent time wandering Sheffield’s Burngreave cemetery.1 He noticed, among a clutch of graves marked ‘Indian Mohammedan’, that of Gisalic Amidulla. ‘Ali’, he learned, had worked as a boiler firer in one of the city’s great steelworks. Dying at just the age of 37 years in 1931, he was laid to rest by his fellow Pashtun, Warris Khan. Ali was survived by his wife, Maggie (née Windle), and their three children. Maggie was pregnant with a fourth, a boy she named Gisalic—‘Alic’—after the father he would never meet.
This sensitive recovery of the Amidulla family launches Holland’s extraordinary account of mixed-race, cross-religious, native-newcomer relationships in Sheffield before the British Nationality Act of 1948. While acknowledging the hypocrisy, racism, and violence that characterized—and characterize—too many immigrant experiences, and saluting both the activists who challenged it and the historians who recover it, Holland glimpsed another aspect of these migrants’ lives through the cemetery’s headstones. ‘[T]hese graves do not appear to be of marginalized individuals who met their fate among strangers, thousands of miles from home’, he writes. ‘On the contrary, they show that these people died among those who cared for them, who had an understanding of their traditions and what was important to them’.2 Perhaps drawing from his own history, as the son of a white English mother and an Asian Muslim father, as well as from the work of historians including Laura Tabili, Holland creates space for what he calls ‘a more sanguine, humanist approach to migration history’.3 He contrasts this approach, courteously but unflinchingly, against the more conflict-centred work of leading scholars such as Panikos Panayi.4
