This Land of Promise

A sweeping and intimately told history of exiles and refugees.

How have those who arrived on Britain’s shores shaped its history?

For most of its history, Great Britain cherished its outward image as a safe haven for those displaced by religious persecution, political violence or economic crisis – an island of stability in the midst of a cruel, chaotic world. Today, however, refugees seeking to reach Britain most often face perilous journeys, impossible bureaucracy and acidic public opinion.

In Island Refuge, migration scholar Matthew Lockwood overturns many of today’s misconceptions by revisiting both our history of migrants and the way British attitudes have flexed and changed over time.

This is a profoundly moving and illuminating history, woven together through the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass and the formerly enslaved men who followed in his footsteps, fleeing America on the hopes of kinder cultures. Little girls like Liesl Ornstein, who discovered they were Jewish only when Hitler took Austria, who were sent to England and told to call themselves ‘Elizabeth’. Sun Yat-sen, who found sanctuary in London – a brief abduction aside – before becoming the Father of modern China. The writers who chronicled their fallen cities from the safety of the British Library. The patriots who found statelessness a gnawing, restless type of despair. Karl Marx, who lived penniless yet arrested the nation’s thinking. Freddie Mercury, who at every turn tried to shake Zanzibar from his bones.

What makes a home? What makes a refugee?

As allegedly record-breaking numbers of migrants attempt to reach Britain and public conversation becomes, often, poisonous, Island Refuge is a powerful account of what has come before and what has been learned by it. Almost every time, we see when we look back, Britain has not been an island refuge from the world, but an island refuge for the world. Not a country burdened by refugees, but instead transformed and strengthened by them.