Book review - Anthony Sattin, Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped our World

Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing, 2023.

London: John Murray, 2022.

ISBN 978-1473677791 (HB) 368 pp

Nomads: The Wanderers who Shaped our World by Anthony Sattin employs historical source material to trace the interactions between settled and mobile peoples over the past 1,200 years. The author began as a fiction writer and has subsequently enjoyed a career as a travel writer and journalist, having regularly written for the Sunday Times and published a number of novels, popular non-fiction texts and Lonely Planet guides focusing on North Africa, as well as West Asia where he resides when not in the UK. In this regard, Sattin suggests that this book is ‘not a scholarly volume … [or] a definitive history of nomads’ but is instead ‘an historical narrative’ (p. 7). However, as the work is presented as historical non-fiction, it will be reviewed with this in mind. The author justifies the reason for his project as being that nomads have been left out of mainstream history. Sattin proposes that this needs to be rectified due to the value of mobile people’s own proud history which is ‘neither less wonderful nor less significant than ours’ (p. 7). The author further contends this lack of focus on mobile groups also omits what he calls ‘the shadow side of our story’ (p. 7), leading to his main argument which, as the title suggests, is to demonstrate the impact nomadic groups have had on the world stage and ‘civilisation’ (p. 7) throughout history.