The intentions behind this book are commendable. I just wish they had been better executed.

I have learned many things from this work, and its importance lays in the fact that the matters surrounding migration are as relevant as they are little-known, making it an often ignored aspect of contemporary history.
It barely skims the surfaces of all the events it sets out to tell, and it reads more like a reference book for the general public than a more specialised historical work – which makes it more accessible.

The author's stylistic choices are what ruined the reading experience for me. Most paragraphs or quotations were followed by a very general, opinionated synthesizing sentence, so repetitive that it ended up losing argumentative force; while agreeing wholly with the author's moral judgment, I found comments along the lines of "those poor people" or "they got basically kicked out of their homes" (paraphrasing because I read this in translation) out of place in a history book, and almost patronizing towards the reader – as if the latter needed the author to tell them how to feel about the narrated events. In this sense, this work read more like a 600 pages-long newspaper editorial.

But my biggest complaint is about the note system. There was only one note per paragraph, listing all the sources for its quotes and general content, leaving the reader to guess which cited work referred to which part of the paragraph. It felt like a repetitive, scattered biography (which, as such, was totally absent from the book).

At one point,

when referring to the English population of the 1950s, Gatrell talks about what in my edition is translated as "instinctive racism" . It left me quite perplexed, as I'm not sure how that concept could apply to citizens of a (post-)colonial empire that thrived on systemic racism for centuries.

 

I appreciated the way the narration flowed, both geographically and chronologically. The chapters were easy to follow, and easily followed each other in one coherent and cohesive account. Sometimes it was a little repetitive, but it contributed to the impression that I was listening to an informative speech. The last part's chapters were more akin to general considerations and suggestions for further reading than an historical account of events, but it made sense worrying the structure of the work, and I found them really interesting.

Sometimes, I would have appreciated counter argument to all the approaches to migration he criticized. Of course, it wasn't hard to imagine why latent racist comments were worthy of critique, but some other statements and phenomos were more nuanced and needed perhaps more than a hasty mention.