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

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Important, comprehensive, and superbly researched. All the more urgent at the present time BART VAN ES

'A terrific, clear-eyed and balanced history that cuts through todays toxic debates' DAILY TELEGRAPH

How have those who arrived on Britains shores shaped its history

Refugees seeking to reach Britain today often face perilous journeys, impossible bureaucracy and acidic public opinion. But this hasnt always been the way. For most of our 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 violent world.

In This Land of Promise, migration scholar Matthew Lockwood overturns many popular modern-day misconceptions about Britains history of immigration. Exiles and refugees have been not only a constant presence in Britain across the centuries but also intrinsic to shaping Britain as it is today. This is a profoundly moving and illuminating history, told through the people who lived it: 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. Freddie Mercury, who at every turn tried to shake Zanzibar from his bones.

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

A terrific, clear-eyed and balanced history that cuts through todays toxic debates a very fine book that puts the current crisis, with all its complexities, into a longer perspective. Matthew Lockwood is not a tub-thumper or an ideologue but an enthralling story-teller he keeps the focus on human individuals, taking five centuries of passages from violent persecution and extreme deprivation as the context Lockwood writes a vivid, fluent prose and moves all these remarkable tales along at a cracking pace

Daily Telegraph, five-star review

Compelling and humane analyses some misconceptions about Britains history of immigration. We have a laudable past as a haven country which Lockwood details in an accounts going back to 1695

Independent, Top Reads for June

Vividly told, panoramic history of 1,000 years of Britain as the asylum capital of the world Lockwood has a keen eye for irony and the moral dilemmas of history this really is a brilliant book topical, profound, deeply researched and in places beautifully written. For anyone who wants a broad historical perspective on todays great ethical/political/environmental question, this is as good a place as any to start Lockwood is excellent at finding powerful and entertaining characters to make his points

Spectator

Important, comprehensive, and superbly researched. All the more urgent at the present time

Bart Van Es

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.