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This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain
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 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.
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 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.
590 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 20, 2024
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About the author
Matthew Lockwood
13 books22 followersMatthew Lockwood is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama and the author of The Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern English State.
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March 11, 2025Lockwood’s This Land of Promise examines the memoirs and biographies of a selection of prominent refugees from the 16th to the 20th centuries. These are organised into a series of ‘stories’ that serve as entry points for the wider communities from which they are drawn. This format makes for an exciting narrative, and the collection of figures covered is interesting in itself. Few readers are likely to have previously connected Ugandan president Edward ‘Freddie’ Mutesa and the Queen singer Freddie Mercury, ‘two Freddies’ that Lockwood uses to illustrate late 20th-century postcolonial exile.
But if This Land of Promise succeeds in showing that there is a long history of refugees in Britain, it struggles to establish why. Interested more in narrative than analysis, Lockwood’s occasional explanations of Britain’s historical moments of openness to refugees are insufficiently developed. Why did Edward VI, who in 1550 chartered ‘strangers’ churches’ for foreign Protestant refugees to worship according to their own non-Anglican rites, have a sense of Christian duty so ‘far from the norm’ in Europe? And why, in Shakespeare’s time, when Protestant refugees might also find asylum in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and several German cities, were the English ‘different’ in their empathy for exiles? Lockwood does not say. Nor does he adequately explain moments of restriction. He claims that the ‘lessons’ England learned in welcoming the Huguenots of the 1680s and 1690s were ‘forgotten’ by 1709 when the ‘Poor Palatines’ were dispersed throughout Britain and the Empire. The reader is left to wonder how this national forgetfulness could have set in so quickly. In truth, British asylum has waxed and waned over the centuries because of complex interplays between political, constitutional, legal, cultural, social, economic, and international factors. Were the book’s stated ambition – to shape debates ‘that rage today’ by looking to ‘Britain’s long history as an island refuge’ – to have been fulfilled, that history needed to be explained with much more rigour.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Thomas C. Jones is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Buckingham.
But if This Land of Promise succeeds in showing that there is a long history of refugees in Britain, it struggles to establish why. Interested more in narrative than analysis, Lockwood’s occasional explanations of Britain’s historical moments of openness to refugees are insufficiently developed. Why did Edward VI, who in 1550 chartered ‘strangers’ churches’ for foreign Protestant refugees to worship according to their own non-Anglican rites, have a sense of Christian duty so ‘far from the norm’ in Europe? And why, in Shakespeare’s time, when Protestant refugees might also find asylum in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and several German cities, were the English ‘different’ in their empathy for exiles? Lockwood does not say. Nor does he adequately explain moments of restriction. He claims that the ‘lessons’ England learned in welcoming the Huguenots of the 1680s and 1690s were ‘forgotten’ by 1709 when the ‘Poor Palatines’ were dispersed throughout Britain and the Empire. The reader is left to wonder how this national forgetfulness could have set in so quickly. In truth, British asylum has waxed and waned over the centuries because of complex interplays between political, constitutional, legal, cultural, social, economic, and international factors. Were the book’s stated ambition – to shape debates ‘that rage today’ by looking to ‘Britain’s long history as an island refuge’ – to have been fulfilled, that history needed to be explained with much more rigour.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Thomas C. Jones is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Buckingham.
October 10, 2025
Vital, urgent, insightful in the current climate of hate.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews