Peter Gatrell

How Migration Reshaped a Continent

Unsettling of Europe

The Making of the Modern Refugee is a comprehensive history of global population displacement in the twentieth century. It takes a new approach to the subject, exploring its causes, consequences, and meanings. History, the author shows, provides important clues to understanding how the idea of refugees as a 'problem' embedded itself in the minds of policy-makers and the public, and poses a series of fundamental questions about the nature of enforced migration and how it has shaped society throughout the twentieth century across a broad geographical area - from Europe and the Middle East to South Asia, South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Wars, revolutions, and state formation are invoked as the main causal explanations of displacement, and are considered alongside the emergence of a twentieth-century refugee regime linking governmental practices, professional expertise, and humanitarian relief efforts. This new study rests upon scholarship from several disciplines and draws extensively upon oral testimony, eye-witness accounts, and film, as well as unpublished source material in the archives of governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. The Making of the Modern Refugee explores the significance that refugees attached to the places they left behind, to their journeys, and to their destinations - in short, how refugees helped to interpret and fashion their own history.

The Making of the Modern Refugee

Professor of Economic History Peter Gatrell

Peter Gatrell tells the story of Russian experience of World War One, focusing on the economic & social changes that resulted from the conflict.

A Social and Economic History

Russia's First World War

During World War I millions of civilians on the eastern front, including Poles, Latvians, Jews, and Armenians as well as Russians and Ukrainians were forcibly uprooted. This is the first book in any language to describe their experience and consider the social, political, and cultural meanings of refugeedom before and after the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. Involuntary migration - in part the consequence of defeat on the battlefield, in part the result of deliberate action by tsarist generals - led government officials and educated society to question prevailing modes of thinking about social identity and the nature of social order in an unravelling polity. Following detailed discussion of the origins of displacement and its political implications, Peter Gatrell provides a close analysis of humanitarian initiatives and of the relationships between settled communities and refugees. Particular attention is given to the experience of displacement and to the process whereby the category of refugee came to be constructed. Other chapters consider the gender dimension of refugeedom and the participation of refugees in the war economy. In a fresh treatment of nationality issues in late imperial Russia, Gatrell demonstrates that displacement and refugeedom helped to crystallise national identity. A final chapter looks at the impact of the revolution, devoting particular attention to the impact of economic and social collapse on the plight of refugees. A whole empire walking is essential reading for historians of late imperial and revolutionary Russia and for anyone interested in World War I as a critical juncture in modern history.

Refugees in Russia During World War I

A Whole Empire Walking

The story of Russia’s First World War remains largely unknown, neglected by historians who have been more interested in the grand drama that unfolded in 1917. In Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History Peter Gatrell shows that war is itself ‘revolutionary’ – rupturing established social and economic ties, but also creating new social and economic relationships, affiliations, practices and opportunities. Russia’s First World War brings together the findings of Russian and non-Russian historians, and draws upon fresh research. It turns the spotlight on what Churchill called the ‘unknown war’, providing an authoritative account that finally does justice to the impact of war on Russia’s home front

Liubov Zhvanko

Le site de l'aediteur indique: "Mass population displacement affected millions of Europe's civilians across the different theatres of war in 1914-18. At the end of the war, a senior Red Cross official wrote 'there were refugees everywhere. It was as if the entire world had to move or was waiting to move'. Europe on the move: refugees in the era of the Great War, 1912-23 is the first attempt to understand their experiences as a whole and to establish the political, social and cultural significance and ramifications of the wartime refugee crisis. Drawing on original research by leading specialists from more than a dozen countries, it will become the definitive work on the subject and will appeal to anyone who wishes to understand how governments and public opinion responded to refugees a century ago."

Refugees in the Era of the Great War

Europe on Move

Offers a comprehensive history of global population displacement in the twentieth century, and provides a new analytic approach to the subject by exploring its causes, consequences, and meanings

An acclaimed historian examines postwar migration's fundamental role in shaping modern Europe Migration is perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, and it has completely decentered European politics in recent years. But as we consider the current refugee crisis, acclaimed historian Peter Gatrell reminds us that the history of Europe has always been one of people on the move. The end of World War II left Europe in a state of confusion with many Europeans virtually stateless. Later, as former colonial states gained national independence, colonists and their supporters migrated to often-unwelcoming metropoles. The collapse of communism in 1989 marked another fundamental turning point. Gatrell places migration at the center of post-war European history, and the aspirations of migrants themselves at the center of the story of migration. This is an urgent history that will reshape our understanding of modern Europe.

The Unsettling of Europe

Migrants have stood at the heart of modern Europe's experience, whether trying to escape danger, to find a better life or as a result of deliberate policy, whether moving from the countryside to the city, or between countries, or from outside the continent altogether. Peter Gatrell's powerful new book is the first to bring these stories together into one place. He creates a compelling narrative bracketed by two nightmarish periods: the great convulsions following the fall of the Third Reich and the mass attempts in the 2010s by migrants to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. The Unsettling of Europe is a new history of the continent, charting the ever-changing arguments about the desirability or otherwise of migrants and their central role in Europe's post-1945 prosperity. Gatrell is as fascinating on the giant movements of millions (such as the epic waves of German migration) to that of much smaller groups, such as the Karelians, Armenians, Moluccans or Ugandan Asians. Above all he has written a book that makes the reader deeply aware of the many extraordinary journeys taken by countless individuals in pursuit of work, safety and dignity, all the time. This is a landmark book on a subject that, decade by decade, will always haunt Europe.

Peter Gatrell

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