The frontiers of present day Bangladesh were drawn
after the second world war, when British India was
partitioned. The Muslim majority of Bengal, along
with Sylhet district in the far north east, came to form
East Pakistan. In 1971 Bengal seceded from Pakistan
and became the separate state of Bangladesh. The
country is flat, with a monsoon climate, prone to
flooding, and served mainly by inland waterways. The
economy is preindustrial, and most people live in
scattered homesteads with an atomistic social
organisation (that is, the family is the dominant unit
with no effective social organisation or hierarchy
beyond the family). The staple crop is rice, and the diet
is largely fish, rice, and vegetables. Although about
95% of the population is Muslim, the society contains
vestiges of its Buddhist and Hindu cultural roots. In
the 1960s and '70s, large numbers of economic
migrants came to Britain, particularly from certain
villages in rural Sylhet. Men tended to emigrate several
years before their wives followed.
Data from the 1991 census suggest that British
Bangladeshis account for about 0.3% of the
population of England and Wales,7 and about a
quarter of the population of Tower Hamlets (East
London and City Health Authority; unpublished
estimates for 1997 based on projections from 1991
census data).