Migrants: The Story of Us All

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He reflects throughout the book on the daunting task of challenging the vitriolic narratives around migration in politics. Many of today’s issues and debates are the same as those in the past, while others are very different. With each page, this book demonstrates that migration is at the core of human history, a feature rather than a bug, and that essentially all humans are migrants.

The book challenges the belief that fixed residences and lifelong nationalities are natural, arguing that people have always been mobile. Houses and permanent settlements are a relatively late development - dating back little more than ten thousand years.

Athenians suppressed this awareness; they were the first Western people to take pride in being, in Herodotus’s words, “the only Greeks who never migrated. This broad and sweeping overview may not appeal to academics and historians, but as Miller makes clear his purpose is to tell human stories. This resource pack will be helpful to any student studying the impact of emigration from Britain; both on the countries people emigrated to, and on Britain itself. Through its engaging narrative and authentic writing, it powerfully depicts the challenges and triumphs of those who embark on the migratory journey.

What really upsets settled people is the reminder that, long ago, their kind chose to live an urban life and became less as a consequence: less wily, less tough, less resilient. The majority transited through Agadez, the last city in the north before starting their journey across the desert to reach the Libyan cost. The arrival of the Greeks was a mixed blessing for existing populations; in Syracuse, for example, they were enslaved.The Migration Museum was part of the welcome for Little Amal, a giant puppet of a Syrian refugee, to Lewisham on Friday 22 October 2021. In this guest post, Dr Trotter reveals the fascinating real-life story of the woman featured in the painting: Mrs Elizabeth Fouracre. The 12 anchor institutions have signed a new agreement to work together to boost employment, education, health and the environment across the borough. In May 1865, 153 men, women and children set sail from Liverpool to travel to the other side of the world. Miller singles out the Vandals, a migrant people from central Europe who found themselves ruling a chunk of Africa as the Roman empire imploded.

Once they have arrived in Agadez, young migrants must remain hidden, locked in houses without bathrooms or access to drinking water. Mukti Jain Campion talks to sociologist Professor Michaela Benson of Lancaster University who studies modern British emigration and hears from a range of British people currently living abroad. They would seem an ideal example of the mobile life which Miller extols – and a good example, too, of how persecuted mobile populations often are. But he himself notes Olaudah Equiano’s account of the crossing, in which the slave ship’s side were lined with nets to prevent precisely that.He illustrates this point by explaining key events in our history such as the first migration out of Africa, the creation of western civilization, and the impacts of colonialism and slavery.