ABSTRACT
Major demographic shifts accompanied the end of colonial empire. As the Europeans left, so did many of their former colonial subjects. The statistics defining such movements are staggering: over 16 million individuals within the former colonial world changed their place of residence in scarcely more than three decades and did so as often out of despair as with hope. The result was the severe complication of urban patterns, the aggravation of racism, the enrichment of culture. Shanty towns and ghettos sprawled, race riots erupted in London and Paris, Indian restaurants in London and Indonesian ones in Amsterdam changed the dining-out habits of the populations of these cities. A forced cosmopolitanism grew in Europe – and in Australia, as well as in the United States and Canada – as political refugees and persons seeking economic opportunities came by the boatful. If there was a moment that marked this still unsettling and resettling trend, it was in May 1948 when the ship Empire Windrush brought 417 Jamaicans to London, the first such number at one time. By 1980 some 1.5 million people from the former empire, exclusive of the White immigrants from places like Ireland and Canada, had settled in the island kingdom. By then an equal number of Algerians and Africans had uncertainly settled in France.
