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This article examines the relationship between the 'othering' of Irish and Jewish communities in London up to the end of the 1920s, and punitive action and harassment against these minorities on the part of the British state. Beginning by looking at early articulations of antisemitic and anti-Irish prejudice, it will consider how the associations of both groups with radical politics and transgressive behaviour led to the negative involvement of the Metropolitan Police in the lives of Jewish and Irish Londoners on a day-to-day level at the end of the Victorian era and into the Edwardian period. The situation was then exacerbated through the experience of war, and the revolutionary events in Dublin in 1916 and Petrograd in 1917. Irish and Jewish communities, as transnational diasporas, were associated with international subversion, and militant action in London itself. The article will discuss the campaign waged by the state in its various manifestations between 1918 and 1922, including arrest and imprisonment without trial and deportation to Ireland and Eastern Europe. It will conclude by identifying how the actions of the state against Irish and Jewish communities anticipated action against other minorities over the course of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the discourse surrounding diaspora in Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London , drawing upon the published volumes of that project and the unpublished notebooks used to record observations and interviews. It examines how Western and Southern European migrant groups in London were depicted in Charles Booth's work at the turn of the twentieth century, comparing these depictions with those of the Irish Catholic and Jewish Diasporas. It focuses on four areas through which the concept of diaspora was interrogated in Life and Labour – through ideas of territory, economic roles, criminality, and the nature of transnational institutions. It will examine patterns of settlement, interactions with the host society, ideas of belonging, and why between 1890 and 1914 Western and Southern European diasporas failed to attract the attention or the opprobrium so apparent in the discourse on Irish and Jewish migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renshaw examines in comparative terms two of the most virulent manifestations of racial prejudice in early twentieth-century British society. The language of antisemitism and Sinophobia in the Edwardian period and the years preceding the First World War, the similarities and differences in the ways that these two forms of prejudice were articulated, and the overlap between them are analysed. Five strands of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese sentiment and action are discussed. The first examines how international manifestations of antisemitism and Sinophobia, suspicions aimed at Jews and Chinese as transnational diasporic communities, and perceptions of these minorities, through Russian pogroms, the Boxer Rebellion in China and the post-Boer War economic situation in South Africa, were framed in narratives of victimhood and aggression. Second, the transnational and colonial circuits of racialized discourse and the relationship between periphery and metropole are considered, as are divergences in the articulation of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese prejudice. The third strand investigates the use of the language of ‘invasion’, used by both the political right and the left in discussing Jewish and Chinese immigration and economic activity in Britain, with Chinese employment in British industries (in this period particularly as sailors on British ships) framed in the context of a demographic ‘Asiatic’ takeover of European societies. The fourth strand looks at the intersection of racial prejudice and sexual and social angst, the visceral association of immigrant groups with dirt and disease, and the sexual threat that racist and antisemitic literature attributed to Jews and Chinese. Finally, physical manifestations of antisemitism and Sinophobia in the period and the racial violence that occurred in Cardiff and Tredegar in 1911 will be described and placed in context. The article positions Edwardian antisemitism and Sinophobia as a transitory stage in the evolution of British racism: a bridge between the separate domestic and colonial forms of prejudice present in late Victorian discourse, and the new manifestations of racism located in British cities and ports, but aimed at non-white minorities, that emerged in the interwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]