Tip for Reading List: How Migration Shaped Europe

The book also retraces the history of xenophobia in Europe, recounting controversial assertions by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and the recent anti-immigrant rhetoric across the continent.

Migration has long been acknowledged as part of the history of the United States, but in Europe, it is often seen as something transient or recent, or compartmanetalised in various component countries. Peter Gatrell, a historian at the University of Manchester, sets out to explode such myths. The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present looks at how modern European history has been shaped by migrants, whether moving from one part of a country to another, between European countries, or from another continent. It argues that migrants have played a critical role in rebuilding Europe’s prosperity, and are an important part of the continent’s cultural and social sphere.

The book is packed with individual accounts of migrants of their experiences across a period of more than six decades between World War II and the recent refugee crisis in European countries. These include stories of forced relocation in the postwar period, colonists returning to “mother countries”, economic migrants from developing countries, the expansion of the European Union, Indian-origin migrants coming from East Africa.

The book also retraces the history of xenophobia in Europe, recounting controversial assertions by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and the recent anti-immigrant rhetoric across the continent. Europe, Gatrell says, has had a record of welcoming migrants when it needed them, only to act uncharitably during economic downturns.