Migrants: The Story of Us All

Product Information

To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Miller adopts a value-free approach to the term 'migrant', which encompasses a diverse range of people including colonial adventurers, West African slaves, and Jewish refugee communities. 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.

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.His poems have been published by Reliquiae, Bad Lilies, The Interpreter’s House, and Under the Radar, among others.

Wide-lens history dominates Migrants but it’s in a close-focus portrait of the actor and dancer Josephine Baker that Miller excels. Miller demonstrates that migration is not a new phenomenon, but rather an integral part of human history that has been taking place for thousands of years.Miller is attracted to the idea that there is a ‘wander lust’ gene; but even absent that, most of us, outside of sub-Saharan Africa, carry with us a little Neanderthal DNA. The Migration Museum explores how the movement of people to and from Britain across the ages has made us who we are – as individuals and as nations. A guest post from Iqbal Wahhab OBE FRSA, founder of London restaurants The Cinnamon Club and Roast and Distinguished Friend of the Migration Museum, who was born in 1963 in Rajshahi, and moved to London before his first birthday. Grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus was said to have been born in Rome; but, exiled from his birthplace, he travelled western Europe before finally settling here.