Global Coventry : Migration, Diaspora and Place-Making

This exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays studies the cultural history of Coventry’s global populations.

Coventry has long been a place where diverse cultures mix. Attracting workers, traders and artisans, as well as migrants, refugees and students, the city is home to an incredible range of global and local communities and yet, until now, its place in the history of English cities, urban studies, and British social history has been obscure. Global Coventry: Migration, Diaspora and Place-Making offers an insightful and novel collection of essays by historians, sociologists, geographers and community-based scholars to make the case for Coventry’s significance across these disciplines.

Focusing in particular on Coventry’s Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, Global Coventry contributes to histories of place-making by foregrounding race, gender, class and sexuality as essential to our understanding of the concept. The collection demonstrates how global flows of goods and people brought about major transformation to the city’s landscape at the same time as illustrating how social and racialised minorities navigated their marginalisation within local, national and global structures.

Across thirteen chapters, Global Coventry provides a wide-ranging analysis of the historical and social trajectories which brought communities from all over the world to the city and reveals how these communities organised. The contributions explore topics like the hidden histories of Coventry’s South Asian community, a pioneering 1970s community development project, the arrival of Chinese migrants to the city, local oral history archives, and the presence of queer refugees in the city.

If you are interested in urban studies, histories of place-making and the cultural significance of diasporic groups in modern British history, Global Coventry is essential reading.