Chinese Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Italy’s Coffee Bars: Demographic Transformation and Historical Contingency

Since the Economic Recession in the late 2000s, many neighbourhood coffee bars in Northern and Central Italy have been taken over by Chinese immigrants. This article investigates why neighbourhood bars, which are thought to be at the heart of Italian urban culture, have become a new business niche for Chinese immigrants in spite of overwhelmingly anti-immigrant discourse. By elucidating the political economy of Italy's coffee bar industry and restructuring of its Chinese ethnic economy, it shows how the formation of this new immigrant business niche is a form of historical contingency embedded in a set of structural transformation processes. The broader purpose of the article is to contribute to an understanding of the structural mechanisms of embedded immigrant entrepreneurship and immigrants’ economic incorporation, as well as to debates on the roles of immigrants in the new urban economy and related local cultures of a multi-ethnic European nation-state.