In this volume the authors present an alternative approach to the history of Gypsies and Travelling Groups in Western-Europe. By focusing on processes of social construction, stigmatization and categorization, they offer new insights into the development of government policies towards itinerants in general and the ethnicization of some of these groups in particular. They analyze the Western images and representations of Gypsies and other itinerant groups, at the same time focusing on their functions for the labor market. By doing so, they add a new chapter to the field of social history.

The city is a place to find shelter, a market place, and an elevator for social mobility and success. But the city is also a place that frightens people and that can marginalize newcomers. Living in the City tries to understand what pulls people to the city since the High Middle Ages, focusing on one of the earliest urbanized regions in the world, the Low Countries. The book is a quest for new insights that leads the reader from Medieval Ghent and Bruges, through the Dutch Golden Age and the mass urbanization in the age of Industrialization to the present Eurodelta. A region that emerged in the last century with Antwerp, Rotterdam and Amsterdam as nodal points in a global urban network. To understand the motivations of so many to settle in cities this book focuses on a wide variety of urban institutions. What was the role of churches, guilds and businesses, but also theaters, architecture, parks and pavements? What were the cultural, economic, social, political and spatial dynamics that transformed cities into centers of creativity and innovation? How did the attractiveness of cities change over time, when cities lost their autonomy and became part of the nation state and global forces? In this book a team of internationally reknown scholars (in the field of history, art, literature, economy and the social sciences) look for continuity and change in the last eight centuries of urban developments in one of the most remarkable urban regions of the world.

Although migration and integration have become important concepts today as a result of globalization, migration movements, integration, and multiculturalism have always been part of the history of Europe. Few people realize how many ethnic groups participated in migration within Europe or into Europe and this ignorance has grave consequences for the social and political status of immigrants. Newly available to an English-speaking audience, this encyclopaedia presents a systematic overview of the existing scholarship regarding migration within and into Europe. The first section contains survey studies of the various regions and countries in Europe covering the last centuries. The second section presents information on about 220 individual groups of migrants from the Sephardic Jews emigration from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present-day migration of old-age pensioners to the holiday villages in the sun. The first resource of its kind, The Encyclopaedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe is a comprehensive and authoritative research tool.

In a modernist interpretation of migration controls, nation states play a major role. This book challenges this interpretation by showing that comprehensive migration checks and permanent border controls appeared much earlier, in early modern dynastic states and empires, and predated nation states by centuries. The 11 contributions in this volume explore the role of early modern and modern dynastic kingdoms and empires in Europe, the Middle East and Eurasia and the evolution of border controls from the 16th to the 20th century. They analyse how these states interacted with other polities, such as emerging nations states in Europe, North America and Australia, and what this means for a broader reconceptualization of mobility in Europe and beyond in the longue duree. Contributors are: Tobias Brinkmann, Vincent Denis, Sinan Dincer, Josef Ehmer, Irial A. Glynn, Sabine Jesner, Olga Katsiardi-Hering, Leo Lucassen, Ikaros Mantouvalos, Leslie Page Moch, Jovan Pesalj, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Annemarie Steidl, and Megan Williams.

Starting in the 1980s, anti-immigrant discourse shifted away from the "color" of immigrants to their religion and culture. It focused in particular on newcomers from Muslim countries-people feared both as terrorists and as products of tribal societies with values opposed to those of secular Western Europe. Leo Lucassen tackles the question of whether the integration process of these recent immigrants will fundamentally differ in the long run (over multiple generations) from the experiences of similar immigrant groups in the past. For comparison, Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. Lucassen emphasizes that the geographic sources of the "threat" have changed and that contemporaries tend to overemphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories.

Although migration and integration have become important concepts today as a result of globalization, migration movements, integration, and multiculturalism have always been part of the history of Europe. Few people realize how many ethnic groups participated in migration within Europe or into Europe and this ignorance has grave consequences for the social and political status of immigrants. Newly available to an English-speaking audience, this encyclopaedia presents a systematic overview of the existing scholarship regarding migration within and into Europe. The first section contains survey studies of the various regions and countries in Europe covering the last centuries. The second section presents information on about 220 individual groups of migrants from the Sephardic Jews emigration from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present-day migration of old-age pensioners to the holiday villages in the sun. The first resource of its kind, The Encyclopaedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe is a comprehensive and authoritative research tool.