Today, no one really thinks of Britain as a land of camps. Camps seem to happen 'elsewhere', from Greece, to Palestine, to the global South. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of British refugee camps housed hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. Refugee camps in Britain were never only for refugees. Refugees shared a space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty, as well as thousands of civil servants and a fractious mix of volunteers. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain explores how these camps have shaped today's multicultural Britain. They generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate -- 'citizens' and 'migrants', but also refugee populations from diverse countries and conflicts. As the world's refugee crisis once again brings to Europe the challenges of mass encampment, Unsettled offers warnings from a liberal democracy's recent past. Through lively anecdotes from interviews with former camp residents and workers, Unsettled conveys the vivid, everyday history of refugee camps, which witnessed births and deaths, love affairs and violent conflicts, strikes and protests, comedy and tragedy. Their story -- like that of today's refugee crisis -- is one of complicated intentions that played out in unpredictable ways. The aim of this book is not to redeem camps -- nor, indeed, to condemn them. It is to refuse to ignore them. Unsettled speaks to all who are interested in the plight of the encamped, and the global uses of encampment in our present world.

"Among the many virtues of this book is its timely reminder that Western Europe, including Britain, was itself once a "land of camps," where people lived in limbo, often arriving from settlements elsewhere, and facing fluctuating resentment from their hosts. A striking array of people, with different relationships to Britain's imperial and wartime pasts, are assembled by Jordanna Bailkin. The reader encounters the full spectrum of those in flight." - Andrew Thompson, Journal of Modern History

"Unsettled provokes scholars to reposition their focus by analysing camp settings as an integral and active part of the historical narrative, rather than as a dormant backdrop. Unsettled will undoubtedly remain a permanent fixture on reading lists across both the social sciences and humanities, and is key reading for anyone who is interested in the social and ethnic formation." - Eliana Hadjisavvas, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Journal of Contemporary History

"a singularly impressive contribution to 20th-century British history ... the appearance of Unsettled could not be timelier" - Dr Peter Gatrell, Reviews in History