ABSTRACT
Local bodies – the City Council, the police, immigration officers, Poor Law Guardians, the local Mercantile Marine Office – the agencies directly charged with regulating this reserve army were the focus of converging pressures. Cardiff's cosmopolitan population was expanded greatly during the First World War, but unwelcome once the exceptional demands of the war were over. Local efforts at inter-racial co-operation were certainly a marked contrast with the relations between immigrants and white communities in Cardiff generally. In 1921, unemployment was widespread in Cardiff and a variety of agencies was providing relief – National Insurance, the Lord Mayor's Distress Fund and trade unions. In 1919 the Cardiff police estimated the unemployed coloured population at the port to be 1,110, of whom 600 were Arabs and Somalis. Black actions could influence the political outcome, though they had to contend with diverse and protean forms of racism that welled up from civil society and the state itself.
