This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe’s mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review.
The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been ‘solved’ and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it.
Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a ‘forty years’ crisis’ for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.
Edited by:
Matthew Frank ,
Jessica Reinisch
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 381g
ISBN: 9781472585615
ISBN 10: 1472585615
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 21 March 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors 1. 'The Story Remains the Same'? Refugees in Europe from the 'Forty Years' Crisis' to Today (Jessica Reinisch, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK and Matthew Frank, Leeds University, UK) 2. Refugees: The Timeless Problem (Zara Steiner, Cambridge University, UK) 3. The Forty Years' Crisis: Making the Connections (Peter Gatrell, Manchester University, UK) 4. Writing Refugee History, Or Not (Tony Kushner, Southampton University, UK) 5. The Imperial Refugee: Refugees or Refugee-Creation in the Ottoman Empire and Europe (Jared Manasek, Columbia University, USA) 6. The Forty Years' Crisis: The Jewish Dimension (Mark Levene, Southampton University, UK) 7. The League of Nations, Refugees and Individual Rights (Barbara Metzger, Cambridge University, UK) 8. The Myth of 'Vacant Places': Refugees and Group Resettlement (Matthew Frank, Leeds University, UK) 9. Old Wine in New Bottles? UNRRA and the Mid-Century World of Refugees (Jessica Reinisch, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK) 10. The United States and the Forty Years' Crisis (Carl Bon Tempo, University at Albany, USA) 11. The Empire Returns: 'Repatriates' and 'Refugees' from French Algeria (Claire Eldridge, Southampton University, UK) 12. Colonialism, Sovereignty and the History of the International Refugee Regime (Glen Peterson, University of British Columbia, Canada) Bibliography Index
Matthew Frank is Associate Professor in International History and Director of Taught Postgraduates in the School of History, University of Leeds, UK. Jessica Reinisch is Senior Lecturer and Director of MA Programmes at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
Reviews for Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959: A Forty Years' Crisis?
The anthology, which in view of the topicality of the topics and its methodological breadth is a profitable read for those who are particularly interested as well as for teaching, thus marks a promising change of perspective. --H-Soz-Kult (Bloomsbury Translation) Penned by prominent specialists, these essays offer the most comprehensive account of Europe's refugee problem from the end of World War One to the decolonization era. They also provide an invaluable point of comparison with the ongoing asylum and humanitarian crisis affecting the European Union. --Daniel Cohen, Rice University, USA Who can assess Europe today without the catastrophic situation of refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom are knocking on its doors? In this excellent volume, historians Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch assemble essays that put this inescapable phenomenon into its complicated and yet sometimes repetitious historical context. Using the framework of a forty years crisis framed by the two World Wars, the editors present innovative approaches to Europe's refugee past, suggesting new ways of looking one of the great upheavals of our time. --Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto, Canada
