British Pashtuns () are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom who are of Pashtun ancestry. As of the 2021 census, there were at least 48,000 Pashto-speakers living in the UK. According to other estimates, the total population of British Pashtuns is as high as 100,000, making them the largest Pashtun diaspora community in Europe.
A part of the wider British Pakistani and British Afghan populations, and also known as Pathans in South Asia, most Pashtuns in Britain trace their origins to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of northwest Pakistan and to the country of Afghanistan, although sizeable minorities of Pashtun ancestry from outside of these regions and of a non-Pashto speaking background also exist. The largest British Pashtun populations are principally found in Greater London, followed by the cities of Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester in England.
History
Colonial era
The Pashtuns, also historically referred to as ethnic Afghans and as Pathans in other parts of South Asia, speak Pashto and originate from the Pashtunistan region of northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. They comprise a sizeable segment of the over one-million strong British Pakistani community. They also represent the largest ethnicity amongst the British Afghan community. Anglo-Afghan relations date back to the early 19th century. Following the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849, the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880 and the demarcation of the Durand Line with Afghanistan in 1893, Pashtun territories east of the frontier were annexed by Britain and amalgamated into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and upper Baluchistan regions of British India – now part of Pakistan – with the Frontier Tribal Areas forming a "buffer zone" between British India and Afghanistan.
As British subjects, Pashtuns were amongst the indentured workers who were transported for labour from British India to various other British colonies starting in the 19th century. In the first half of the 20th century, Pashtun men from British India were actively recruited as seamen, or lascars, for British steamship companies while others arrived to work industrial jobs in Britain. They lived mostly in working-class neighbourhoods and some of these men are known to have married local British women. In addition, the North-West Frontier was a fertile recruiting ground for the British Indian Army. The outbreak of World War I and World War II saw the deployment of thousands of Pashtun soldiers to other parts of the British Empire in support of the imperial war effort. Many of these men would end up in Great Britain to help fill up labour shortages, working in army canteens and munitions factories, and some stayed on in the UK after the wars ended. There were also those who travelled to Britain during the colonial era to pursue higher education at major educational institutions, although most of them were temporary migrants and returned home upon the completion of their studies.
Postcolonial era
After the partition of British India and Pakistan's independence in 1947, emigrants from the erstwhile NWFP – now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – were among the first group of Pakistanis to arrive in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside Mirpuris and Punjabis. Immigration to Britain was made easier by the fact that Pakistan was a Commonwealth member state. These early migrants tended to be from rural areas in the NWFP and they too found employment in various British manufacturing industries, helping plug workforce scarcity in the post-war economy. It was not uncommon for men to migrate first, in order to support extended family members back home through remittances, before settling their wives and children in the UK permanently. A professional and more urbanised stream of Pakistani immigrants including doctors entered the UK in the 1960s. The beginning of the decades-long Afghan conflict in 1979 led to a large exodus of Afghan Pashtun immigrants to Western countries, with many settling in the UK.
Demographics
Population
As the British census only collects data based on national origin, Pashtuns usually self-report their ethnicity as Pakistani or Afghan for statistical purposes. As of 2009, the total Pashtun population in the UK was estimated to number 100,000. The language database Ethnologue reported at least 87,000 Pashto-speakers in the UK. According to another estimate, Pashtuns accounted for about 11 percent of the British Pakistani population as of 2014, which numbered over 1.1 million at the time.