Migration in World History

Patrick Manning, Tiffany Trimmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351256667
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

In this third edition of Migration in World History, Patrick Manning presents an expanded and newly coherent view of migratory processes, conveying new research and interpretation. The engaging narrative shows the continuity of migratory processes from the time of foragers who settled the earth to farmers opening new fields and merchants linking purchasers everywhere. In the last thousand years, accumulation of wealth brought capitalism, industry, and the travels of free and slave migrants. In a contest of civilizational hierarchy and movements of emancipation, nations arose to replace empires, although conflicts within nations expelled refugees. The future of migration is now a serious concern.

The new edition includes:

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• An introduction to the migration theories that explain the shifting patterns of migration in early and recent times

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• Quantification of changes in migration, including international migration, domestic urbanization, and growing refugee movements

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• A new chapter tracing twenty-first-century migration and population from 2000 to 2050, showing how migrants escaping climate change will steadily outnumber refugees from other social conflicts

While migration is often stressful, it contributes to diversity, exchanges, new perspectives, and innovations. This comprehensive and up-to-date view of migration will stimulate readers with interests in many fields.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Modeling patterns of human migration

The history of the world includes remarkable stories of migration in every era. Within the past fifty years, migration from countryside to city in every corner of the world caused the proportion of city-dwellers to expand from one-fifth to over half the human population. Human life, previously rural, has now become dominantly urban. Urban areas of over twenty million inhabitants include Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, Bombay, Istanbul, São Paulo, and Jakarta: of these, only Tokyo and Istanbul had populations of as many as 100,000 inhabitants in 1800.

In the three centuries after the voyage of Columbus – an era often called “early modern” times – some two million settlers crossed the Atlantic from Europe to settle in the Americas. In the same three centuries, nearly eight million Africans were brought to the Americas, most of them in slavery. These populations of immigrants, in complex combination with each other and with the Amerindian populations, created a new social organization on two continents.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, improved transportation systems and new economic incentives, both positive and negative, enabled some fifty million European migrants to move across their home continent and then to North and South America and beyond. In the same time period, another eighty million migrants moved across East and South Asia, repopulating regions from the Indian Ocean to Manchuria and Central Asia. The continuing long-distance migrations of Africans, including some four million in this period, now appeared minor by comparison.

In times that we call “ancient,” more than two thousand years ago, Greek mariners created thriving commercial colonies along the edges of the Mediterranean and Black Seas; in their wake, Rome was able to absorb the surrounding lands into a great empire. In these and earlier centuries, land-based migrations gradually changed the culture of two major subcontinents: people speaking Indo-European languages spread from Central Asia into Iran and northern India, and people speaking Bantu languages moved from what are now Nigeria and Cameroon to many regions of Central, eastern, and southern Africa. In much more distant times the spread of Homo sapiens from Africa throughout the Eastern Hemisphere included – most remarkably and perhaps sixty thousand years ago – voyages across the waters to settle in Australia and New Guinea.

This book provides a concise summary of these and other great migrations. Further, it goes beyond mass migrations, linking large and small migrations to each other and to the broader fabric of human society. It explores the social context from which migrations emerged, showing how migration stems from the very core of human behavior.

Periodic mass migrations provide the tip of the iceberg in migration studies. The large-scale movements – including those we label as migrations of Arabs, Germans, Jews, and Polynesians – consisted in practice of an accumulation of smaller movements that fit into larger patterns with time. The approach in this book is to emphasize the ways in which the individual experience of migrating has been linked to the many other issues and choices in life. Even when the number of migrants has been small, the effects of their movement have been important in technology, social organization, and culture.

This is a study in world history, in several senses. First, it addresses a long time period and explores experiences drawn from many regions of the earth. Second, it emphasizes connections in the human experience. Migration encourages one to think of connections, at least because every migration connects a point of origin and a destination. Third, the book emphasizes migration as an engine for social change, by tracing the dynamics of ideas as well as the movement of bodies. Fourth, it emphasizes at once the continuity and the transformation in migration over time. The book gives a broad interpretation of macro-level change, and shows the connection between global change and local-level histories. Most systematically, I argue that human migration is so fundamental an element of our behavior that it needs to be considered in the study of every aspect of our experience.

The remainder of this chapter introduces a model of human migratory processes. This model – a set of principles and patterns – emphasizes the underlying logic, the recurring choices, and the interacting factors characterizing human migration. As I present it in these pages, the model has five elements that interact with each other: the boundaries of human communities, major categories of migration, the processes of migratory movement, the short-term social development brought about by migration, and the long-term influences of migration. Through the model, I introduce a terminology that will reappear throughout the book, and I identify several patterns of migration that have reappeared throughout human history. In the succeeding chapters, I sketch out the reenactments and the developments in human society associated with migration, for period after period in human history. Although each migratory movement has had its unique conditions and experiences, the underlying habits of human behavior as summarized in the model make it possible to generalize about migrations at the same time as emphasizing their distinctiveness.

Human communities as language groupings

Humans, like most other species, organize their existence into communities. The distinction, however, is that humans have developed language, so that human communities organize themselves around language and not just proximity. Oral communication surely existed among such previous hominids as Homo erectus, as it exists among such other species as birds, dolphins, and monkeys. I assume, however, that the development of fully inflected languages, with distinctive grammar and vocabulary, is a development of our own species. According to the recent results of archaeologists and geneticists, modern Homo sapiens emerged within the last 150,000 to 200,000 years. In that time, among the members of our species, all those who share a language have been able to communicate in depth with one another. Communication with members of other human communities is possible, but can only reach its potential if one learns the language.

So I am defining a human community as the speakers of a given language. The boundaries of human communities, over our long history, have been those of language. These boundaries among language communities are not necessarily sharp – closely related dialects and languages may be easily understood. But beyond a certain level of difference, languages become mutually unintelligible, and can only be understood after a period of study and practice. The many different versions of English can be understood with little effort by an English-speaker, but Spanish, in any of its versions, is quite a different language.

Defining a human community as a language community – rather than as an independent family or as an ethnic group – has significant implications for our understanding of history. Most basically, a focus on language shows that early human communities were larger and carried out more communication than is commonly thought. Our usual picture of early human foragers – the “cave man” – assumes that they lived as independent groups of at most a few dozen people. The archaeological record, indeed, shows settlements or camps with groups of this size (often known as “bands”) as an important human pattern. But languages, in order to develop and persist, require larger communities. Communities of at least several hundred people, who speak with one another, are necessary to maintain the integrity and continuity of a language. Even for the earliest times of our species, therefore, we must think of human communities not as independent bands, but as collections of families or bands held together through a shared language. Families (and bands), important as they were in the process of migration, were situated within language communities. Home-language community and local genetic community began at much the same magnitude, always bigger than bands. (Migration and intermarriage, of course, enabled some families to stretch across language boundaries.)

What have been the patterns of change in human language communities? We have no direct evidence on the nature of language communities in early times. But the patterns of language change appear to be dependable, and I assume they have existed for all of the history of our species. Changes in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar take place according to rules and patterns that cannot have been much different from those we know today. In addition, linguists have made detailed observations on the ways new words and new concepts enter languages according to the experience of each group. Language communities get smaller as groups become relatively isolated, but they must maintain a minimum size of several hundred speakers in order to survive over the long term. At the other extreme, language communities can grow to include millions of speakers if their network of communications is sufficiently intensive. The family trees of language groups reveal the steady divergence of languages from each other, as their speakers become separated in space and time. Yet there are also processes of convergence in language, as with the spread of words for innovations, and when greater communication among people makes one language or one version of a language supreme over others.

The members of each community, bound together by language, also shared a set of customs. The very existence of language enabled each community to develop and pass on an extensive set of customs – the many patterns of family, economic, and ceremonial life. Customs too differ from one community to another. Those who move from one community to another must learn not only a new language, but also an accompanying set of customs.

In the world of today we have become accustomed to defining communities as ethnic groups and nations. Yet identification of communities by language, even in today’s complex world, is an obvious and useful classification of social difference. The nations in which we claim citizenship are no more than two hundred years old, and the ethnic groups with which we identify, while sometimes older, have been remarkably changeable. Communities of language, in contrast, can be shown to have had long-term stability and steady patterns of transformation. The Germanic languages or the Semitic languages, for instance, can be traced back with some confidence for several thousand years, though the ethnic identities and states of those language communities have changed repeatedly.

For humans today, as for our earliest forbears, migration brings the task of learning new languages and customs. This learning is the most specific characteristic of human migration, and it is one of the principal sources of change and development in human ways of life. The knowledge and daily use of multiple languages, far from being a rare exception, is common in the world today and was surely just as common among our ancestors back to the beginning.

Categories of human migration

Following the very brief preceding definition of human language communities, I now move to define migration within and among these communities. I identify four categories of human migration. Three of these are quite similar to patterns of migration for other animals, especially mammals. The fourth category is rather unique, and accounts for a substantial amount of human history.

Home-community migration involves movement of individuals from one place to another within the home community. That is, the offspring of one family move to another family to find mates. Home-community migration is necessary for reproduction of the species, in order to maintain a sufficiently wide genetic pool. For humans, these movements consist most basically of young men and women moving from one family to another in marriage. Thus, many and perhaps most humans experience home-community migration, as they start new families of their own. But the circumstances can vary widely. In patrilineal, agricultural systems, it may be the case that young men grow up on the farms of their fathers, inherit a portion of the land, and never move from it. Such an arrangement requires, therefore, that women move from one family to another and from one farm to another, to marry the men and produce the next generation. In matrilineal agricultural systems, in contrast, the tendency is for the women to stay with the family into which they were born, and for men to move from one family to another. Both systems work.

Colonization is the departure of individuals from one community to establish a new community that replicates the home community. This type of migration is the primary means by which an animal species extends its geographic range: it involves moving into unoccupied territory or expelling previous occupants. Usually, the colonists settle in an environment very similar to that of their home community, and thereby maintain the same style of life. The expansion and contraction of the range of North American wolves provides an example of the positive and negative sides of colonization. Among humans, colonization takes place occasionally, especially for communities that are thriving. The colonists settle and begin new communities without having to learn new languages or customs. The initial movements of humans into Australasia and the Americas are important examples of colonization. (Of course, the variety of environments in Australasia and the Americas suggests that simple colonization does not tell the whole story of the spread of humans to those vast regions.)

Whole-community migration is the displacement of all the members of a community. Some species migrate habitually, usually in an annual cycle – whales, elk, and certain birds – and all but a few laggards in those communities participate in each movement. These migrations move communities among alternating ecologies, enabling them to complete their life cycle. Humans do not have an inherent or universal pattern of community migration – they do not generally migrate as whole communities. However, some communities – nomadic communities, as we call them – do migrate habitually, often adopting the habits of the grazing animals they have come to dominate or the fish they pursue. They often take their homes with them – their animals, their tents, and their other belongings. This pattern, known as transhumance, may have been fairly common for early human communities in the days before settled life began. Another pattern is that whole communities may migrate in order to flee a natural disaster such as famine or a human disaster such as expulsion from their homeland.

Cross-community migration consists of selected individuals and groups leaving one community and moving to join another community. This pattern is followed universally by humans, and rarely by other species: language communication among humans provides the basic reason for this distinct pattern of migration. All human communities experience out-migration by members of their population who go to other communities. The migrants leave their home communities for various reasons – to benefit the home community, to benefit themselves, to escape the home community, or because they have been forcibly removed. At the same time, the home community accepts in-migrants from other communities who find a local role to play for either a short or long time. The rates and directions of migration may vary significantly, but the practice in general is universal among humans.

The existence of language and the distinctions in language among human communities give a particular character to the cross-community migration of humans. For wolves, antelope, and whales, the various communities lack distinct languages, so that movement of an individual from one community to another would appear to be easy. But since these mammals encounter almost exactly the same society when they migrate from one community to another, their migrations bring few benefits and, indeed, few results at all. Humans who migrate to new communities, in contrast, must learn new languages and customs. At the same time, these migrating humans can introduce new language and customs to their host communities. This is distinctively human behavior, and it is the reason migration in human history is not only a story of the spread of humankind, but also a story of the transformation of human life again and again.

Table 1.1 summarizes the four main categories of migration and their usual characteristics among humans. Cross-community migration, though it is only one of four types of migration, influences every aspect of human migration because it creates and spreads changes. For instance, cross-community migration changes home-community migration so that the latter serves not only for biological reproduction but also enables a division of labor. Further, cross-community migration spreads new technology, so that colonization can include settling in new environments. And cross-community migration may encourage whole-community migration, for instance by building connections between nomadic and settled populations.

Migrations, whether of long or short distance or duration, are central to the human experience. Most humans think of themselves as staying put, within their home community. In fact most people take part in home-community migration, even if they tend not to think of their localized movements among families as “migration.” In contrast, only a minority leave their home community...