The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’

They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later.

The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was full of Huguenot asylum seekers fleeing Catholic France and the Lowlands.

By the American academic Matthew Lockwood’s calculation in this vividly told, panoramic history of 1,000 years of Britain  as the ‘asylum capital of the world’ (an early 19th-century soundbite, intended at the time as a great compliment), there was an ‘invasion’ of more than 115,000 Huguenot refugees, when Britain’s population was around 4.5 million. Lockwood has a keen eye for irony and the moral dilemmas of history. Who has thought there was a Huguenot problem here for the last 350 years?

In the interests of full disclosure I will declare that I am a refugee. My family came  to Britain from Hungary after the failed revolution against the Soviets in 1956, when I was an infant, along with around 40,000 others. Naturally I have a personal interest in this story and something of an axe to grind. But this really is a brilliant book – topical, profound, deeply researched and in places  beautifully written. For anyone who wants a broad historical perspective on today’s great ethical/ political/ environmental question, this is as good a place as any to start.