This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A sweeping and intimately told history of exiles and refugees.

How have those who arrived on Britains shores shaped its history
For most of its history, Great Britain cherished its outward image as a safe haven for those displaced by religious persecution, political violence or economic crisis an island of stability in the midst of a cruel, chaotic world. Today, however, refugees seeking to reach Britain most often face perilous journeys, impossible bureaucracy and acidic public opinion.

In Island Refuge, migration scholar Matthew Lockwood overturns many of todays misconceptions by revisiting both our history of migrants and the way British attitudes have flexed and changed over time.

This is a profoundly moving and illuminating history, woven together through the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass and the formerly enslaved men who followed in his footsteps, fleeing America on the hopes of kinder cultures. Little girls like Liesl Ornstein, who discovered they were Jewish only when Hitler took Austria, who were sent to England and told to call themselves Elizabeth. Sun Yat-sen, who found sanctuary in London a brief abduction aside before becoming the Father of modern China. The writers who chronicled their fallen cities from the safety of the British Library. The patriots who found statelessness a gnawing, restless type of despair. Karl Marx, who lived penniless yet arrested the nations thinking. Freddie Mercury, who at every turn tried to shake Zanzibar from his bones.

What makes a home What makes a refugee

As allegedly record-breaking numbers of migrants attempt to reach Britain and public conversation becomes, often, poisonous, Island Refuge is a powerful account of what has come before and what has been learned by it. Almost every time, we see when we look back, Britain has not been an island refuge from the world, but an island refuge for the world. Not a country burdened by refugees, but instead transformed and strengthened by them.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR MATTHEW LOCKWOODS PREVIOUS BOOKS

Matthew Lockwood is a master storyteller, deftly showcasing the lives of ordinary people alongside the impact of historical ideas and events enthralling, provocative, and wonderfully enlightening Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana

Lockwood has a keen eye for a good yarn, and there are enthralling glimpses here of individual lives buffeted by the American Revolution Alex von Tunzelmann, New York Times Book Review

A breakthrough popular history, written with a novelist's eye for detail and atmosphere Publishers Weekly

A stunning narrative Stella Tillyard, author of Aristocrats

Author Bio

Matthew Lockwood is the author of The Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern English State (Yale, 2017) and To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (Yale, 2019).

He received his PhD from Yale University in 2014, where his dissertation won the Hans Gatzke Prize for outstanding dissertation in European history. He held posts at the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions and at the University of Warwick before moving to the University of Alabama where he is currently Assistant Professor of History.