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 evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, Sattin’s sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible, to its decline in the present day.