Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World

The remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout our history.

Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. The story of the shifting, umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via some of the lesser-known Eurasian steppe cultures, the great nomad empires of the Persians, Arabs, Mongols, and Mughals, as well as the mobile native North American peoples, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the power of the settled and their cities.

Exploring evolutionary biology and the 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 groundbreaking history of civilization as told through its outsiders.