Refugees are everywhere, including in fiction, such as the masterful Go, Went, Gone by German author Jenny Erpenbeck (2015), and the new novel Refugees by American Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (2017)—which reflect their importance in the news. Indeed, the powerful introduction to this collection opens with the observation that “in the last three years, barely a day has gone by without our screens and newspapers being filled with pictures of refugees and migrants seeking sanctuary in Europe, and with the accompanying talk of ‘crisis.’” (1) The desperate plight of today's refugees opens this collection of essays—a scholarly expression of frustration that nations remain hesitant to welcome strangers in need. Implicitly or explicitly, most of the twelve chapters here condemn the present state treatment of refugees. Barely any refugees enter the United States currently, a trend echoing the great reduction of immigration of the 1920s with the John-Reed Act. Several essays of Refugees in Europe refer to that earlier restrictionist regime as a fundamental closure of avenues of relief for Europeans.

A high-angle view of refugees in 1940s France, trudging down a road with bicycles, baby carriages, cards, and wheelbarrows carrying their possessions, provides the book's cover illustration. Along with the title and time period, this leads the reader to expect essays on mid-century Europeans. Yet this collection defies these expectations in two ways. The refugees themselves are rarely the topic—individuals are only referred to in two essays; rather, the essays focus on how the history of refugees has been told, or elided, and of heroic international attempts to rescue refugees as well as repeated failures to aid them. These are essays not about the repertoires of refugees themselves, but about the regimes that have shaped their possibilities. Here four essays stand out: Barbara Metzger's essay on the work of the League of Nations, highlighting the developing advocacy of individual rights; Matthew Frank's piece on the ideas of group resettlement under consideration in the 1930s and early 1940s; Jessica Reinisch's elucidation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (1943–48); and Peter Gatrell's analysis of the use of history in refugee programs with a focus on the United Nations World Refugee Year of 1959–60.

Moreover, this is not a collection that treats Europe—or European refugees—exclusively; nor is it only about the 1919–59 period. Several authors reply to the title question “a forty years’ crisis?” with an emphatic “no,” most markedly the lead essay by Zara Steiner, “Refugees: The Timeless Problem.” Pointing to phenomena both before and after this period, this collection also stretches beyond Europe in Jan Manasek's essay on the “Imperial Refugee” in the Ottoman Empire, Claire Eldridge's essay on refugees at the end of France's Algerian War, and Glen Peterson's capacious essay on colonialism, sovereignty, and the international refugee regime.

Those essays that target European refugees, their treatment, and history offer acute analyses. Tony Kushner elucidates the uses of history against refugees and the amnesia that allows governments to indulge in unwarranted self-congratulation. Mark Levene uses the geographic moniker of rimlands to locate the great displacements of Jews dating from the nineteenth century through the Nazi regime, moving forward to close with the displacement of Palestinians and “Arab Jews” since the 1940s. Carl Bon Tempo follows US policy through its balance of aid with limited admissions through the anti-communism of Cold War policies.

The editors complain that historians have given little attention to refugees because in contrast to other marginalized groups, they have yet to be integrated into mainstream history. Yet major works of migration history, such as Dirk Hoerder's Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (2002), include the movements of refugees on one end of the spectrum from forced to voluntary movement. The editors do admit, “if you knew where to look, you could always find historians writing about refugees in some contexts” (9). They recognize Gatrell's pioneering history, The Making of the Modern Refugee (2013) and see this volume as building on its foundations. By including essays under the title Refugees in Europe that stretch far beyond Europe and beyond the mid-twentieth century, the editors propose to identify connections among these perspectives and histories. This collection succeeds because its expert authors and editors elucidate the rich variety and the ubiquity of the refugee experience, without eliding its devastating inhumane aspects. Readers of this journal may read it for the experience of eastern Europe in the twentieth century, yet it has something to teach historians of every continent.