Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom

Across modern history, refugees have articulated their experiences and wishes against the backdrop of mass displacement brought about by world wars, civil war, revolution, population exchange, decolonisation, and state formation. Men and women displaced in different sites, from different backgrounds, and at different times have played for high stakes: they deliberated about what to say and to whom, and they sought, expected, and effected a response.

Refugee Voices in Modern Global History places refugees at the centre of modern history. It demonstrates how ordinary refugees understood their experiences of displacement and engaged with institutions that sought ’solutions’ to their predicament. Ranging widely across global contexts to establish what refugees had to say and to whom, it shows them to have consistently been purposeful actors, making it possible to transcend conventional and hackneyed depictions of ’crisis’.

By adopting the term ’refugeedom’ the authors show how the voices and perspectives of refugees can be incorporated alongside the power dynamics associated with the multiple incarnations of the refugee regime that ’managed’ refugees and articulated ’solutions’ to their predicament. Extensive archival research across three continents makes it possible to explain in comparative terms the significance attached to the encounters between refugees and officials in modern Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The result is an original and in-depth study of the contrasting responses of refugees to displacement and to the arrangements made on their behalf at a series of critical junctures in the past.

Peter Gatrell, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Manchester, Katarzyna Nowak, MSCA Fellow, University of Vienna, Lauren Banko, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, University of Manchester, Anindita Ghoshal, Associate Professor of History, Diamond Harbour Women’s University

Peter Gatrell was appointed to a lectureship in economic history at the University of Manchester in 1976 and retired in 2021 when he became an emeritus professor. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was a founding member of the University of Manchester Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute.

Dr Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specialising in cultural and social history of the early Cold War. Currently she is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Research Center for History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. Previously she held research positions at the Central European University, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the University of Manchester.

Lauren Banko is currently Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities in the Department of History at the University of Manchester. Her three-year research grant is entitled ’Medical Deportees: narrations and pathographies of health at the borders of Great Britain, Palestine, and Egypt, 1919-1950’. She completed her PhD in Near and Middle East History at SOAS, London, and is the author of The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship (2016). A social historian who works primarily on pre-1948 Palestine, Lauren has previously held the Palestine-Israel Postdoctoral Research Associate role at the University of Manchester. She has taught at SOAS, Manchester, Glasgow, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Anindita Ghoshal is an Associate Professor of History at Diamond Harbour Women’s University, Kolkata, India. Her area of research includes Partition and refugee studies with special emphasis on eastern/northeastern India and Bangladesh. She has been awarded major research grant by OKDISCD, Guwahati, Assam (2017-2018), as well as a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship (2015), an Academic and Foreign Travel Grant from ICHR (Cardiff University, 2013), ’Gautam Chattopadhyay Memorial Prize’ by Paschimbanga Itihas Samsad (2013), Research-Writing Fellowship from Calcutta Research Group (2012), UGC Minor Research Project Grant (2010), and an Academic Affiliation from the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (2009).