No other District in Pakistan has seen a higher proportion of its population engage in transnational migration than Mirpur, and from nowhere else have a higher proportion of such migrants successfully established themselves in Britain. Yet despite the intensity of the trans-local linkages which have thereby been created, and the huge flow of remittance capital into a District which otherwise occupies a thoroughly marginalised position on the global periphery, in no way has this served to stimulate any kind of sustainable pattern of economic development. This article sets out to place these developments in their appropriate historical, political, environmental, local and global contexts in an effort to establish how and why it is that the Mirpuris otherwise sophisticated and successful entrepreneurial capabilities have not led to more successful and sustainable outcomes in their home base. There are good reasons why the lessons that can be learned in Mirpur could well be applicable elsewhere.

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While the decision to include an explicit ethnic question in the 1991 Census of the United Kingdom was undoubtedly a major step forward, it is nevertheless still one whose precise meaning and significance is still clouded by a great deal of uncertainty. There are many reasons why this should be so. First of all, the concept of ethnicity itself is a relative newcomer to the vocabulary of social science, and no comprehensive consensus about its meaning has yet emerged. Understandings vary: while most specialists in the field insist that ethnicity is a phenomenon which must be understood in its own right, the term is nevertheless still often deployed as little more than a sanitised euphemism for the otherwise morally discredited concept of race.2 A second set of confusions arises from the first, for there is consequently no consensus about what the purpose of asking such a question might be, nor about the kinds of issues which the answers might serve to illuminate. Even so, remarkably little attention has been paid to the underlying issues. To be sure the proposal to include an ethnic question in the Census precipitated a lengthy and often heated public debate, as Bulmer shows in the previous Chapter, but little or none of this was directed at establishing the meaning of the question itself.Given the importance of the initiative, and the fact that both race and ethnicity refer to far less easily objectifiable personal attributes than such routine census categories as age, sex, marital status and place of birth, one might have expected that at least some attention would have been focused on what ethnicity actually meant, rather being directed almost exclusively on whether or not the question should be asked. With hindsight, the absence of such a debate was most unfortunate. Not only were the underlying conceptual issues left unclarified, but the question actually posed -and as we shall see in a moment finding a viable form of words proved to be far from easy -was much more a pragmatic compromise than the product of a clearly worked out analytical perspective. To be sure the new question "worked": there were few objections to its inclusion in the Census, and it also achieved a good response rate. This pragmatic success was far from cost-free, however, for its success depended on overlooking a whole series of internal contradictions, which in turn left considerable scope for the question to be interpreted in different ways. If respondents of differing backgrounds responded to these ambiguities by reading differing meanings into the question -and as we shall see there is a good deal of evidence that this did indeed occur -it follows that the raw results should be approached with considerable care.Hence even though the inclusion of an ethnic question has undoubtedly added an important new dimension to the Census, deciding how data associated with the new Ethnic Group variable can best be interpreted is by no means a straightforward task. Since it would therefore be most unwise to rely on nothing more than commonsense un...

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