What is Migration History?

Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder, Donna R. Gabaccia

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745656298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of migration is and always has been an interdisciplinary field of study, vast and vibrant in nature. This short introduction to the field, written by leading historians of migration for student readers, offers an acute analysis of key issues across several disciplines. It takes in its scope an overview of migrations through history, how classic theories have interpreted such movements, and contemporary topics and debates including transnational and transcultural lives, access to citizenship, and migrant entrepreneurship.

Historical perspectives reveal how the scholarly field emerged and developed over time and across cultures and how historians of migration have recently begun to re-write the story of human life on earth. Throughout, the authors suggest how the movements of millions of mobile men and women persistently challenge changing scholarly paradigms for understanding their lives. Key concepts and theories, such as systems, networks, and gender, are explained and historicized to produce a complex picture of the interaction of migrants, scholars, and disciplinary cultures in a globalized world.

1

Introduction: Popular Views – Scholarly Reconceptualizations

In the century and a half of national perspectives in historiography from the 1830s to the 1960s, emigration as departure from the nation was little studied and immigration received attention in terms of “assimilation” to the institutions and culture of the receiving society. By the 1970s, scholars recognized many of the approaches to migrations worldwide to be limited and skewed.

• The modernization paradigm posited that high levels of mobility began with industrialization and urbanization.
• Historians divided people’s moves into emigration and immigration, though each emigrant–immigrant was one and the same person.
• Scholars considered European migrants’ voyages across the Atlantic Ocean as the model for all migration and viewed Atlantic crossings as westbound only. So did popular discourse on mobility in the United States, recommending “Go West, young man!”
• Women were hardly mentioned – all migrants seemed to be men. Gender was not a category.
• Race was not a category either – all migrants seemed to be whites.
• Scholars sharply segregated slavery, the forced and involuntary migrations of African men and women, from “free” human mobility, as in “the peopling of the Americas.”
• From China, only “coolies” were said to have moved to plantations. Those going to North America all ended up in Chinatowns – if the literature is to be believed.
• Migration researchers considered many societies of the world as basically sedentary and thus of no interest.

In such views, the world’s only migrant-receiving region was a vague, generic “America” – not the Americas or particular societies in the Americas. Similarly, migrants left from undifferentiated continents – Europe, China, and Africa – rather than from specific societies of origin. This limited perspective elevated the United States to the paradigmatic country of immigration. The continents sent forth differently endowed people: those who made free decisions, those who could be enslaved, and those who were mere coolies.

Even these opinions raised many questions, however: Did all immigrants like “America” or did some of them return? Was “America” the United States or did men and women also go to Canada, Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico? How did Europe’s cities grow if only men emigrated? What did young women from Europe’s many cultural regions do? If, in Russia, serfdom tied peasants to the soil, how did the factories of Moscow and St Petersburg get their labour forces, and how was Siberia settled? Did people in the many cultures of India never move? Were Africa’s many societies not linked through migrations? If people were sedentary, who created the tenth-century interfaith Mediterranean World that encompassed North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean (West Asia), and Europe’s southern littoral?

One example illustrates the complexity of migration hidden behind these questions. Popular imagination created a generic nineteenth-century “John Chinaman.” In fact, migrants came from only two southern provinces of the huge empire. They spoke different dialects. They migrated voluntarily as well as under indenture. Since the mid-fifteenth century, their ancestors had formed a disapora in Southeast Asia. In the late twentieth century, migrants came from “three Chinas” – the People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong – and from diasporic settlements across the globe. Men and women of Chinese culture arriving in Canada between 1980 and 2000 hailed from 132 different countries of prior settlement and spoke some one hundred different languages and dialects. As this example suggests, migrations are complex, often global phenomena; migrants depart from specific places and select their destinations from among many cultures.

The traditional emigration–immigration dichotomy does not reflect such complexity. Rather, it suggests a mono-directional one-way move from a “home” in one state to a foreign “new world” – where, myths have assumed, everything would be better. It describes migrants moving either from a nation to an ethnic enclave or from a limited old world to unlimited new opportunities. The term migration, by contrast, implies multiple options: mobility may be many-directional and multiple, temporary or long-term, voluntary or forced. Within a range of options, migrant men and women make decisions. Rather than deal with “flows” of people or “waves” of migration, migration history studies the agency of men and women who, within their capabilities, negotiate societal options and constraints in pursuit of life-plans. Migration history looks at both ends of mobility: What does it mean for families, urban neighbourhoods and villages, or whole societies to lose members? What does it mean for societies of destination to receive “human capital”?

The societies between which men and women move have been contrasted as “home” – a term which conveys feelings of belonging and protection – and “foreign,” which conveys alienation and unease. However, across time and space, migrants leave their places of birth because they cannot feed themselves or their families or because they cannot lead meaningful lives. “Home” societies did not permit sustainable lives in nineteenth-century Europe and they did not do so in twentieth-century Africa. As one author put it, home may be not only an uninteresting place, it may also be unsafe, unfair, and unjust. A woman from a tradition-fettered community tersely remembered that her society of birth had no fence and no visible exits either. At the destination, receiving or “host” societies may in fact be hostile. Racial criteria – “negro,” “redskin,” “slit-eye” – may be used to denigrate any migrant of non-white skin colour. Instead of being just one more colour, “white” became a norm imposed by powerful people who could equally well have been described as pale-faced and pigment-deprived.

In addition to labelling by phenotypical skin colour, some societies treat migrant human beings like body parts, commodified as instruments of work: as “hands” or “braceros” (arms) rather than as hearts and heads. In the 1880s, Hawai’ian plantation owners ordered, alphabetically, “fertilizer” and “Filipinos.” In Europe after the mid-1950s, recruiting societies wanted nothing but a labour force – “guest workers” – but the guests arrived with emotions, life-plans, and agency. In the early twenty-first century, the term “brain drain migration” also hides the fact that families arrive and that children need playgrounds and schools. Recruiters of body parts never expect “foreigners” to protest inhuman treatment. But migrant men and women generally struggle to make homes in a new society, at least temporarily.

Although oft-repeated, treatment of migrations as the products of “pushes” and “pulls” has been recognized as insufficient to understand migrants in their complexity of culture, gender, class, identification, and intent, and in their moves between complex societies. Scholars now analyze a society of origin in all of its facets to understand the structures and processes which induce or force people to depart. They deconstruct national states into particular regions and localities to clarify migrants’ socialization and specific forms of cultural belonging. No generic Chinese settled Manchuria, peopled the Southeast Asian diaspora, or came to the Americas. Rather, specific men and women came from particular regions, different walks of life, several religions, and from urban or rural pursuits. From Africa, no generic slaves were transported to the tropical and subtropical plantation belt: they were Wolof, Ibo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Kongo, who spoke particular languages and lived particular cultures. German speakers who arrived in Canada were German, Austrian, or Swiss, were Catholics, Protestants, or Mennonites, and spoke many, often not mutually intelligible dialects. Without differentiated knowledge of cultures of origin, we easily misunderstand migration decisions, post-migration life-projects, and patterns of acculturation.

How do people travel, once they have decided to depart? Do they leave as individuals or as members of a family economy? Do they move “naturally” because their society expects migration? Does travel involve a few and the charting of a new direction (“pioneer migration”) or does it involve many and follow well-established patterns (“mass migration”)? Does travel mean a transoceanic passage lasting weeks or a plane ride of a few hours? Does the trip lead migrants across different language and cultural environments? Do people move in groups, like the Huguenots of seventeenth-century Europe or child refugees in the Sudan in the early 2000s? Does migration involve crossing heavily militarized borders such as those of the Rio Grande? Is information readily available? Modern travellers may buy a pocket travel guide book – but ancient travellers also shared knowledge with others: Around 900 CE, ibn Khordadbeh, postmaster of an Arab province in Persia, described land and sea routes as far as Korea in his eight-volume Book of the Roads and Countries.

While migrants had to learn to communicate as they travelled to the receiving society, scholars in the past often did not learn migrants’ languages. Thus, in the case of the US, they wrote of migrants arriving at Ellis Island with “cultural baggage” but assumed that the men and women simply deposited their baggage at some point. British scholars, writing about contract labourers from colonized India, looked at plantation society conditions and British English-language regulations but did not understand actual living conditions and cultural practices in the South Asian subcontinent’s regions of origin. Scholarship thus took up research only in the middle of migrants’ lives, truncating human experience.

Without knowledge of migrants’ languages, scholars resorted to naturalist-nationalist imagery and posited the “roots” of migrants in their nation of birth. They thus had to invent the “uprootedness” paradigm. Said to possess mental capacities inferior to those of the receiving society and assumed to be torn from their roots by forces beyond their control, migrants were considered adrift or in limbo. But does not a move between societies suggest migrants of keen observation and capability to learn? A late twentieth-century Quiché Indian woman migrating from the Guatemalan highlands to the capital city felt lost – no-one spoke her language and she spoke no Spanish. Likewise, European Jesuits migrating to China’s court in the sixteenth century had difficulties in understanding the capital’s culture. Both the illiterate peasant women and the educated friars had to learn. Migrants travel with the expectation of learning to live in the new social environment they select or, at least, of finding a niche in which to establish, at first, a narrow base for economic survival. When recognizing these capabilities, scholars substituted the term “transplanted” for “uprooted.” Although equally botanical, this image acknowledged human agency, operating in changing societal frames and contexts. Migrants’ capabilities are acted out via entryways offered by states and in the receiving society’s structures.

Some societies provide open gates, at least for some migrants. Typical were the port cities of the fifteenth-century Indian Ocean’s coasts; the littoral societies from East Africa via India’s Malabar and Coromandel coasts to Southeast Asia; the Ottoman Empire; and, at the end of the twentieth century, Sweden and the Netherlands, Canada, or Malaysia and Singapore. Other societies – Japan, Uganda, and Germany, for example – have shown hostility to newcomers, although again in very specific ways. It seems that, in some societies, resident “nationals” have little faith in the resilience of their historic culture and see migrants threatening their cultural integrity. Why should a few hundred thousand Korean-origin people in Japan pose a threat to 128 million Japanese, or 2 million Turkish-origin migrants in Germany threaten 80 million culturally German citizens? A similar debate, in the early 2000s, racks the United States of America as regards hardworking migrants from the neighbouring United States of Mexico. With little investment in agriculture in the People’s Republic of China, some 120 to 160 million rural labourers have migrated to cities but, at the turn to the twenty-first century, are considered negatively as a “floating population.” The narrower the entry gates and the more hostile the reception, the larger the difficulties newcomers face in developing self-supporting and self-determined lives and in contributing to the receiving society.

Worldwide, all societies accommodate in-migrants and all governments have to develop policies if they do not want to depend on erratic stopgap measures. The number of interstate migrants was estimated at almost 200 million in 2006, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees counted some 30 million refugees among them. Far larger numbers, hundreds of millions of men, women, and children, are threatened by environmental degradation, intra-state or interstate war, oppressive political regimes, or stagnant economies. They are potential migrants – proactive or anticipating ones if they leave voluntarily before disaster hits, reactive ones if they wait until survival becomes impossible. While migration studies provides background for strategic policy-making, migration history emphasizes the continuities and changes of patterns of migration over centuries and millennia.

• Has your family migrated?
• Ask your relatives and neighbours for their migration history. Is there a family memory of migration or do you not recall any mobility in the past or present?
• If you read this text in class, collect the migration histories of students in the class. Indicate the origins of all families on a world map or, if they have migrated within your country, indicate their region of origin. Each student may then select one region of origin of a friend or, alternatively, his or her own, and collect information on cultural background(s) to present in class.
• If you moved, “migrated,” from your parents’ home to your university, discuss your experiences of both regional change and status change from daughter or son in a family to student at a college.

2

Migration in Human History – the Long View¹

The history of humanity is a history of migration. There was no “pre-history” of unsettled and non-literate peoples followed by the “history proper” of settled empires or nations. Periodization differs between cultural macro- and micro-regions, but we may generalize eight distinct eras of migration over time:

• Homo sapiens migration out of East Africa across the world
• migrations in the period of early sedentary agriculture, 15,000–5000 BCE
• differentiation of migrations during urbanization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indic and East Asian societies, and the Mediterranean Phoenician–Hellenistic–Roman World
• migrations from 500 BCE to 1500 CE
• migration, intercultural contact, and trade circuits in the world’s macro-regions, 1400–1600
• migration dialectics in colonizer and colonized societies, 1600–1800
• nineteenth-century global migration systems
• twentieth-century migrations.

Our analysis emphasizes intercultural exchanges as well as conflict (when armed in-migrating colonizers forced settled peoples into outbound refugee migrations). It also emphasizes human agency – even forced migrants, such as slaves, leave their mark. Men and women make their history and, collectively, the history of their communities and societies even if under conditions not of their own choosing.

Since early developments cannot be dated precisely, scholars use a “Before the Present” (BP) scale, counting from the year 2000 backward. Since time lines are still being debated, this summary relies on the most plausible interpretations. With the emergence of urban living about 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, archaeological dating becomes far more accurate and is often supported by written records. From this period on, the BP scale is replaced by the widely used “Before the Common Era” (BCE) and the “Common Era” (CE). These are Christian ways of dating, reflecting the secular and imperial power of the Western World after 1500. The year that divides BCE from CE is mere convention since scholars do not agree on the date of the birth of Christ. Other religion-civilizations have different calendars – the Chinese, the Jewish and Muslim calendars, and others. Their starting dates are conventions, too.

2.1 Deep Time: Homo sapiens Migrates from East Africa across the World²

About 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, knowledgeable men and women, emerged in East Africa. Earlier Homo erectus and Homo habilis (upright walking and tool-making hominids) had developed independently in Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Homo sapiens were highly mobile accumulators of knowledge. They migrated first across Africa, from 60,000 BCE across the world’s tropical zones, and from 40,000 to 15,000 BCE into colder Eurasian and American zones, diversifying into ever more linguistic-cultural groups in the process.³

This understanding of humanity in “deep time” has become possible through interdisciplinary research. Archaeologists retrace the emergence and development of tools; linguists model the spread and differentiation of languages; genetic modelling traces ancestral peoples’ mixing in particular locations over time. Groups of early human beings are defined as language communities, by genetic similarity or variation, and by tools and pottery. Ethnicities or nations in the modern sense cannot be traced. Once languages and everyday ways of life differentiated through spatial distance, cultural exchanges demanded translators and migration into new ecological environments necessitated adjustment strategies.⁴

Early migrations may be aggregated into six types for heuristic purposes, i.e. to simplify highly complex developments in a plausible manner for easier understanding. Variables for this typology include reasons for departure, establishment of new communities in unsettled areas or by rule over already settled peoples, and duration of stay, as well as degree of mobility.⁵

1 Migration within a cultural group that is spread over different geographic locations involves hunting and gathering families and bands, as well as migrations for marriage following matrilinear or patrilinear patterns.

2 Migration of segments of a cultural group into new, unsettled areas is an outbound branching or filiation migration.

3 Moves into settled areas which involve establishing rule over the peoples already present are colonization migrations. Such conquest may involve considerable violence and exploitation or, from the view of those first settled, long-term suffering and oppression.

4 When a group’s survival is threatened, conflict with neighbours is becoming destructive, or new living spaces are sought, whole-community migration or migration of peoples may occur into unsettled regions (as in 2), into settled regions with conquest (as in 3), or with negotiated cohabitation.

5 Cross-community migration denotes peaceful and permanent moves or temporary stays (“sojourning”) into another group’s social space or involuntary transport of slaves or captives in...