Nomads

Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilisation. From the Neolithic revolution to the 21st century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities.

Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, Anthony Sattin's sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible, to its decline in the present day. Connecting us to mythology and the records of antiquity, Nomads explains why we leave home, and why we like to return again. This is the history of civilisation as told through its outsiders.