Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers

I bought this book as part of a study of Early Modern European society. I was pleasantly surprised to find, not just the things I needed to know about Gypsies, but Jews, Muslims and other minorities. It includes the differences between Germany, France, England, Spain, Romania, the Balkans and the Ottomans. Very Helpful!

The book -which grew out of a dissertation - is probably the best book ever written on this marvelous, mysterious culture.

This is simply the best book I have ever read about the people commonly called Gypsies. The book is thoroughly researched and well written.The book is not really a history of Gypsies worldwide. It has background on Gypsies in general (Roma and Travelers are used in some places, and there are other names, some related to what might be called tribal groups). Most of the book looks at Gypsies in four European nations--Bulgaria, Germany, France and the UK. These are really historical case studies for comparison. There are no illustrations, which would have made this a better book.It is particularly good on the Gypsies during the war, and after, as the welfare state rose, and seems to have found the Gypsies as indigestible as earlier regimes. The Gypsies in Germany were subject to genocide, as is commonly known, and the story is an interesting, if very sad, comparison to the larger holocaust that consumed the Jews. The inclusion of Bulgaria gives a sense of Gypsies under a communist government, and in France, the story is the difficulty that France has had of integrating wilful ramblers into a citizenry.The myth is that Gypsies are fearless wanderers without a care. the reality is that of a widely hated minority group widely assumed to be partly or wholly criminal, and far too widely as ethnic pollution. The reality now and then makes the news, as in Ireland recently when blonde and redheaded toddlers were taken from gypsy families. The Gypsies remain not well known, but what is known is worth a read. Read this book if you are interested in the Gypsies.

This is an important contribution to the literature, but a rather old-fashioned one. It simply fails to register the debates in historiography overe the past 20 years. Willems is cited only as a (secondary) authority for certain facts, not as the radical thinker whose epistemological challenge to Gypsylorism almost denies the existence of such a thing as a fact. (I hope he appreciates the irony!) There is no mention of the work of Huub van Baar, and not a glimmer of the historiographical revolution he has consolidated. This book is firmly in the mode of Fraser (1982)This book contains additional documentation when compared with Fraser, but the narrative is less clear, and the a-theoretical approach more obvious than Fraser. The old Gypsylorist periodisation is still apparent, but it isn't clearly linked to the periodisation of general European history in its successive economic phases after the great tradition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism, and from agrarian capitalism to industrial capitalism, and from the latter to the information-based society. Lack of a deep familiarity with contemporary Romani societies sometimes leads to important questions not being asked. The book underlines the need for a broad multi-disciplinary Romani studies, rather than one constituted by raiders from different disciplines whose general knowledge is not deep enough.

Fast. Good book

Bit of a hard read but was enjoyable.