ABSTRACT
Dispelling any possible misconceptions about the importance of immigrant-origin business ownership in the UK at the turn of the millennium, the then parliamentary secretary for small business confidently declared: ‘Ethnic minority people are amongst the most entrepreneurial in our society’ (Griffith 2002). Around the same period in Britain there also emerged a new publication, the Asian Rich List, 1 a celebration of the wealth (in some instances quite breathtaking) of the most successful Britons originating from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Almost inevitably a high proportion of these are business owners, a circumstance entirely in tune with the mood of bullish optimism surrounding ethnic minority business (EMB) over the past 30 years or more. Essentially there is a widespread feeling, especially among policymakers (Ram and Smallbone 2003), that self-employed business ownership is a virtually assured antidote to the discrimination suffered by racialized minorities in Western urban society. When wealth and status are denied to them as employees in an unfavourably biased labour market, it is logical to assume that these might be better pursued through independent business ownership. In Britain, this rationale has been projected onto many of the post-war immigrant-origin communities including Hong Kong Chinese, Greek Cypriots and Turks but most enthusiastically onto South Asians. Drawing on the rich social capital of their familial and communal networks, British South Asians are invariably presented as archetypes of the upwardly mobile entrepreneurial minority (see Ram and Jones 2008 for a condensation of a proliferating literature in this vein).
