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Diasporic initiatives, implemented ‘from below’ no less than ‘from above’, have played a key role in 500 years of globalisation and have made significant contribution to swings in the global balance of power and wealth. The diasporic networks which non‐European migrants have utilised to establish themselves in the global North are far from novel, although their transgressive success has begun to alarm the indigenes of Euro‐America. In a last‐ditch effort to sustain the established global order, Northern jurisdictions are currently seeking to criminalise the ‘informal’ dimensions of the interlopers’ transjurisdictional networks, even though their function and purpose is strikingly similar to those deployed within contemporary multinational corporations.

David Coleman and John Salt (eds) ETHNICITY IN THE 1991 CENSUS, VOLUME ONE: DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ETHNIC MINORITY POPULATIONS, London: HMSO, 1996, 290 pp., £25.00

Even though the inclusion of an ethnic question has undoubtedly added an important new dimension to the [UK] Census deciding how data associated with the new ethnic group variable can best be interpreted is by no means a straightforward task.... My central objective is to bring the underlying issues into clearer analytical focus. To this end I begin with a brief review of the current state of racial inequality and ethnic diversity in Britain--both to set the issues in a wider context and to highlight the differing significance of the concepts of race and ethnicity--and then move on to consider the way in which the question itself was constructed. (EXCERPT)

The author examines the results of including an ethnic question in the 1991 census of Great Britain. "Half a century has now passed since mass migration began and in most communities at least a quarter of a century since the influx reached its peak. Hence we are now in an excellent position to begin to assess how each of these communities has fared during the intervening years and thus how far their hopes of upward mobility have in fact materialized. Furthermore and perhaps most significantly we can now begin to explore just how varied these trajectories of adaptation have proved to be." (EXCERPT)