Migrants: The Story of Us All

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It’s hardly news that Athenian democracy was exclusionary, of course. Gender and property were grounds for disenfranchisement, as they so often are. Miller’s new history of migration proposes that another axis of obscurity and denial runs through our history: the animus of sedentary peoples against their nomadic rivals. Miller argues this animus was ignorant of their recent past, for most human life on this planet has been mobile, unsettled and/or shifting with the seasons. Once, Miller writes, we were all migrants. Agricultural revolution

Alas, neither did they write. Nor did the Roma, until the 19th century; nor did the (very literate) Chinese of Victorian London. Migrants rarely find time to write, and where first-person accounts are missing, fantasy is bred. Some of it ( Asterix) is charming, some of it ( Fu Manchu) is anything but.The author's writing style is both eloquent and engaging. Miller's descriptions transport the reader to various settings, from the bustling streets of a war-torn city to the treacherous paths of a refugee camp. The prose is evocative, effectively conveying the characters' emotions and immersing the reader in their world. The pacing is well-balanced, capturing both the urgency and the quiet moments of introspection that define the characters' journeys. What is migration, anyway? Not much more than a hundred years ago, women regularly “migrated” to marry or to work as governesses, servants and in shops. And yet they would never have called themselves “migrants”. Migration is politically explosive because it goes far beyond simple movement. It touches the heart of who and what we are

What emerges from this onion of a book (fascinating digressions around no detectable centre), is, however, more than sufficient compensation. We have here the seed of an enticing and potentially more influential project: a modern history that treats the modern nation state – pretending to self-reliance behind ever-more-futile barriers – as but a passing political arrangement, and not always a very useful one. Migrants by Sam Miller is a captivating walk through that delves into the theme of migration. As an avid reader interested in stories that shed light on the human experience, I was drawn to this book's exploration of some interesting topics. This sets predictable limits on Miller’s work: after a certain passage of time, untold stories generally have to stay that way. Migrants, as a consequence, is uneven. We survey population movements in and out of Britain over the years: a resume of the case for the Viking invasions; a rundown of the Neolithic discovery of America; the horrors of the last slave ship to arrive in the United States. Mythic migrants – Aeneas of Troy, Brutus of Britain – have only walk-on parts. Timely and empathetic: a rare combination on this most controversial issue' Remi Adekoya, author of Biracial Britain

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Tremendous: blends the personal and the panoramic to great effect' Robert Winder, author of Bloody Foreigners Briefs for the defence are thin on the ground. Nomads and seasonal migrants made up a majority of human beings over most of time, but literate society meant, nearly always, settled society. Different distances on the human story allow one to tell wildly different stories. If you follow humanity through deep time, our settlement of the almost the entire planet looks very much like manifest destiny and we’ll all surely end up on Mars tomorrow. But if you trace our movements over a few dozen generations, you’ll discover that, absent force majeure, people are homebodies, moving barely a few weeks’ walking distance from their birthplaces.