Philipp Ther. The Outsiders

Philipp Ther decided to write his impressive new history of refugees on the European continent while witnessing from Vienna the beginnings of the so-called “migrant crisis” in 2015. While the media immediately drew parallels between the influx of Syrian refugees into the European Union and the displaced persons and expellees of the immediate post–World War II era, Ther’s ambition was to frame the crisis in a longer historical perspective. His sweeping survey of forced migrants in Europe since 1492 indeed reminds readers that the year 1945 was not the Zero Hour of mass displacement on the continent. Outsiders thus goes beyond the chronological boundaries of Peter Gatrell’s notable The Making of the Modern Refugee (2013), which exclusively covers the twentieth century. Like Gatrell, however, Ther shows how refugees became an omnipresent part of the modern world and, through a series of individual stories, similarly recovers the voice of refugees often anonymized by the bureaucracies or humanitarian agencies entrusted with their care. But Outsiders is also a history of refugee integration in the early modern and contemporary era. The legal status afforded to asylees, their position in the domestic labor market, as well as housing and marriage behaviors, argues the author, constitute precious indicators of successful or failed integration. Ther’s book indeed combines exit, entry, and settlement into a single continuum of refugee experience. Three main typologies of refugees come under scrutiny: victims of religious intolerance, ethnic nationalism, and political persecution.

Displaced person · Ethnic Cleansing · Nationalism · Persecution · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Refugee crisis · Scrutiny · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · African Studies and Geopolitics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender