ABSTRACT
The foregoing chapters have provided an opportunity to explore the immigrant experience at grass-roots level and, in the words of the introduction, examine some of ‘the dynamics which drive the processes of settlement and assimilation’. The intention has been to discover whether those dynamics are solely determined by the time and the place(s) of settlement; whether they are the perennial rites of passage that any migrant, anywhere, must undergo; or whether they are an amalgam of both. In this book, I have highlighted specific aspects of the migratory and assimilative experiences of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Huguenots, late nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews and twentieth-century Bangladeshis in Spitalfields. The cultural, religious, geographic and temporal disparities identified at the outset suggested that, for each group, the process would be very different. However, as has become apparent, there were, in fact, distinct similarities in their experience and it is only by comparing and contrasting the patterns of settlement that a fully informed response to the question which lies at the heart of this book can be made.
