Another Darkness, Another Dawn

This history of Romani people demonstrates how their experiences provide a way to understand mainstream society s relationship with outsiders and immigrants, both in the past and present. Rather than seeing these peoples as separate from the societies in which they have lived, and as untouched by history, Taylor sets Gypsies experiences in the context of broader historical changes. Understanding their history is to take in the founding and contraction of empires, Reformation and counter-Reformation, wars, the expansion of law and order and of states, the Enlightenment, nationalism, modernity and the Holocaust, as well as the increasing regulation of modern societyit is as much a history of ourselves as it is a history of others. Ultimately Taylor demonstrates that history is not always about progress: the place of Roma, Gypsies and Travelers remains as contested and uncertain today as it was upon their first arrival in western Europe in the fifteenth century."