Tens of thousands of
intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries
- have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in
Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the
important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth
century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of
Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks,
the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the
early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews
and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists)
following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from
Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the
migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological
reasons.
Exiles and
Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the
scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation
and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the
enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new
knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the
United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to
Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in
the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of
art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides
academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries,
there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators,
merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and
scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their
country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the
countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a
whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual
fertilization.
The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.