Central to Romani experiences has been their ability to find gaps and spaces in which they might continue to exist and even sometimes to thrive. It also means reflecting on the vast array of ways in which they have lived: while some groups may have been perpetually nomadic, large numbers – across history and place – often travelled for the summer and settled in the winter still others settled permanently in particular villages or parts of towns. Understanding their history means tracking the gradual migration of peoples whose descendants became Romani, from India across the Persian empire and into Europe via Byzantium. My recent book, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (Reaktion, 2014) is an attempt to move beyond such stereotyping and to write not only a history of peoples most often known as Gypsies, but also to write their history into the mainstream. If some Roma or Gypsies are seen as deviant, thieving and untrustworthy still others – often existing more in the realm of story books and imagination – are depicted as living a timeless life of constant nomadism innately exotic, musical, most likely living in bow-topped caravan, ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, untouched by the cares of modern life. At the same time, they are rarely granted a separate history, but rather seen to exist in a timeless bubble, unchanged and untouched by modern life. Part of their marginalisation stems from the fact that they are excluded from mainstream histories.

Romani peoples are rarely seen as having a place in a country, either geographically or socially, no matter where they live or what they do. This is nothing new: in 2014 scaremongering about Bulgarian Roma may be a way of expressing deep seated fears over migration, the expansion of Europe and the lack of a democratic voice in early modern Europe repression targeting ‘Egyptians’ and ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ was means for regimes trying to control the rapid rise in vagrancy and the social uncertainty caused by wars and religious upheavals. Once again, it seems, society’s wider insecurities about social change have found a scapegoat in Europe’s most marginalised and vilified minority. The Roma are back in the news: the Daily Mail has published an article claiming that a Bulgarian Roma woman has schooled ‘hundreds of children’ in the art of pickpocketing government promises to clamp down on ‘welfare tourism’ in the wake of the dropping of border controls from Bulgaria and Romania have been tied sometimes implicitly, often explicitly, to expected ‘invasions’ of Roma. This post was contributed by Dr Becky Taylor, a lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.

There shall never be another dawn