Tip for Reading List: How Migration Shaped Europe | Explained News, The Indian Express

Tip for Reading List: How Migration Shaped Europe | Explained News, The Indian Express

By Explained Desk |New Delhi |Published: August 26, 2019 9:03:27 am

Tip for Reading List: How Migration Shaped Europe

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.

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.