BACKCOVER: Gypsies in Britain are descendants of people who survived an attempt at genocide in the 16th century. Laws making it a capital crime just to be of Romani ethnicity remained on the statute book for two centuries. The British state and people have never apologised for this, never paid reparations - and why should they? Almost every other European state has behaved in the same way. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act is now recriminalising Gypsies. Many books about Gypsies consider them only as "a problem", that a few teachers, council workers and policemen have to accommodate, without stopping to consider how and why Gypsy identity has survived four centuries of persecution. But relations with the state and with non-Gypsies have been central to the shaping of the lived identity of Gypsy people. This comparative, contemporary study of Gypsy politics in Britain and abroad not only includes work from established Romani Studies scholars such as Nicolae Gheorghe and Donald Kenrick but also from younger writers represents the cutting edge of scholarship on how the state deals with Gypsies and Travellers, and how they deal with the state.