Following World War II, European countries largely gave up their colonial possessions and, by the 1950s and 1960s, had already begun to receive growing numbers of immigrants from their former colonies. In many instances, these included the descendants of the slaves in the colonies, who had been forced to work. In this respect, Britain is a case in point. Though in small numbers, Africans and Indians had come to Britain long before the tens of thousands who came as colonial immigrants in the 1960s and thereafter. The first Africans who came to Britain were probably soldiers during the Roman possession of that country in antiquity. In modern times, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African and Indian princes and scholars visited Britain. Others coming to Britain were in service positions; for instance, in the eighteenth century, black African and Indian young men were fashionable as servants in the homes of the wealthy. Africans and Indians also came to Britain as sailors and traders, and port towns, such as London, Glasgow, Bristol, Cardiff and Liverpool, developed small black populations in the early nineteenth century, some of which persisted into the twentieth century. Relations between these populations and the native white population were varied, historians citing instances both of hostility and solidarity.