Empires and Barbarians (7 page)

So far so good: if the only archaeological evidence for a possible migration is ambiguous rather than definitive, so be it. Better that than populate European history with a series of phantom invasions. Where this does become a problem, however, is when migration is viewed as ‘always simplistic’ and ‘usually groundless’. If you approach the issue in this frame of mind, then the ambiguity of the evidence will not be treated in an even-handed fashion. Where you’re looking at some archaeological transformation which might or might not represent the correlates of a migratory process, then it is important to say exactly that – no more and no less. But because archaeologists have just gone through such a nasty divorce from migration, some have a strong tendency (at least in Britain and North America) to want to write it out of their accounts of the past entirely.
²⁵
It is now enough in some quarters to show that an observable transformation
might
have been generated without migration for this to be taken as a proven fact. But since the archaeological reflections of many migration processes will only ever be ambiguous, the basic fact that just about every kind of archaeological transformation can, with sufficient intellectual ingenuity, be explained in terms other than of migration, doesn’t mean that it
should
be. The right answer is not to say that, because there is ambiguity, migration has been disproved, but to accept the ambiguity and see if anything else – especially historical evidence where appropriate – helps resolve it.

It is not safe, then, either to build your estimate of the potential scale of first-millennium migration on the presumption that group identities were always weak, or to dismiss its existence and importance
if you find only ambiguous archaeological evidence. These two observations in turn generate the third problem. The concept of a migration topos – the idea that Mediterranean writers were led by a cultural reflex to see any barbarians on the move as a ‘people’ – has sometimes been used to dismiss historical evidence for large, compact and mixed migration groups. Up to this point, however, its supposed prevalence is based on assertion rather than on any properly argued demonstration that it really existed. As a concept, it has gained a priori plausibility from the idea that group identities could never have been strong enough to generate the kind of large-group migration that the sources seem to be reporting, and from the fact that, as already noted, the archaeological reflections of migration are often ambiguous. But if archaeological ambiguity is only to be expected, and it is unsafe just to assume that all first-millennium group identities were necessarily weak, this obviously undermines the support these points have been supposed to provide for the supposed existence of a migration topos. So it will be necessary in what follows to examine on a case by case basis whether the historical accounts of large-group migration can really be dismissed so easily.

Even by themselves, these three problems would be sufficient to warrant a re-examination of migration in the first millennium. But there is also a fourth, and much broader, reason why current treatments of the topic require a thorough overhaul.

The comparative study of human migration has a lengthy pedigree. Like many other fields, it has proceeded from originally simple models to more complex and interesting ones, particularly in the last scholarly generation or so. Interest originally focused upon economic motives as the paramount factor in explaining population movements, with a landmark study arguing pretty successfully that immigration to the United States was positively correlated with its business cycles.
²⁶
The quest to understand first-millennium migration has seen some engagement with this rapidly developing field. When thinking about causation, for instance, the concept of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors – things that were bad about a point of departure and attractive about the destination – has long been part of the scholarly vocabulary. The
importance of accurate information in shaping migration flows, and the fact that larger-scale migration is sometimes preceded by pioneering individuals (‘scouts’) whose experiences add momentum to what follows, are likewise part of the landscape. But these ideas are no more than the tip of the comparative-migration iceberg and, in general terms, the literature has been little explored by those studying migration in the first millennium.
²⁷

This is a strange omission because the comparative literature offers a wide range of well-documented case studies against which to compare the first-millennium evidence, with an obvious potential to expand the range of possible migration models beyond the limits of wave-of-advance and elite-transfer. Amongst other examples, more recent history gives us economically driven flows of migrants, who are unorganized in the sense that all are making individual decisions. Nonetheless, they can over time, and especially when allied with population increase among those who have already reached the point of destination, fill an entire landscape: even one as big as the United States. The twentieth century has also underlined the importance of another basic cause of migration: political conflict. Individual refugees fleeing persecuting regimes are extremely common, but political disturbances can also generate much more concentrated migration flows. The most horrific example from recent years is Rwanda, where this chapter began. But there are many others: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the expulsion in just three months of eighty-eight thousand foreigners from Saudi Arabia in 1973, the movement of twenty-five million refugees in central and eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, the flight and continued plight of Palestinian refugees.

Aside from expanding the underlying intellectual frame of reference, the comparative literature also indicates that it is necessary to ask more detailed questions of any migratory process than has customarily been done in first-millennium studies. Early modern and modern case studies have thrown up no instance where the entire population of place A has moved en masse to place B. Migration has always turned out to be an activity confined to certain subgroups, and a particularly fruitful line of questioning has stemmed from this observation. What leads some individuals to stay at home, when their fellows in more or less identical circumstances move? Work directed at understanding this phenomenon has identified some interesting patterns. Economic migrants tend – certainly in the first instance, at
least – to be younger, often male and, in terms of their own societies, relatively better educated. Migration also tends to be undertaken by the already mobile. On closer inspection, half of the Dutch migrants to what became New York turn out to be people who had already migrated once before, from other parts of Europe to the Netherlands. Likewise, many of the ‘Irish’ participating in the early stages of the colonization of North America came from Scottish families, which, just a generation before, had moved to Ireland.
²⁸
Longer-distance migration flows have always to be understood, therefore, against established patterns of internal demographic dislocation. Participants in the latter will have a greater than average likelihood of providing manpower for the former.

Even within these variegated patterns of participation, however, the decision to migrate does not turn simply upon what you might term rational economic calculation. Other factors complicate the individual’s thought process. Information about both projected destinations and the routes to them is one key variable. Large-scale migration flows to a new destination only begin once the pros and cons of the route, and of the potential new home, become generally understood. Before that stage, ‘channelled’ migration is correspondingly common. Under this pattern, population groups from relatively restricted departure areas end up clustered together again in specific areas at the point of destination. This seems to be caused both by limitations on the amount of available information, and by the kind of social support that can be provided by a host population from the migrants’ point of departure. Transport costs, not surprisingly, also intrude into a potential migrant’s calculations, and psychological costs are important too. The strangeness of life in a new place and the disruption to emotional ties binding the individual to family and friends affect decisions to move, as well as subsequent decisions about whether to remain. A substantial flow of return migration is thus a significant feature of all well-documented population displacements.
²⁹

Over and above all these factors, potential migration flows can be interfered with by the political structures in existence at either the point of departure or that of arrival, or both. Since the 1970s, Western European countries have more or less brought to a halt the flows of legal migrant labour from particular parts of the Third World, which had been a regular feature of life since the Second World War. This decision was motivated by political rather than economic considerations,
since industry still wanted the relatively cheap labour that migrants provide, but governments were concerned to pacify the hostility towards migrant communities that had grown up in some quarters of their own societies. Migration flows from the old sources have continued, in fact, but in the greatly modified form of family reunification, not new migrant workers, and there has followed a corresponding shift in gender and age patterns among the migrants. Flows of women and the relatively elderly, wives and dependent parents of the original migrants, have replaced the procession of young men. This is but one example of the general rule that political structures will always dictate the framework of available options within which potential migrants make their decisions.
³⁰

Migration studies also offer new ways of thinking about the effects of migration, of how to form some estimate of whether to rate it a more or less important phenomenon in any particular case. Thanks to the legacy of the invasion hypothesis, these kinds of argument in the first-millennium context are now often wrapped up with the issue of migrant numbers. Are we looking at ‘mass migration’ or at a smaller phenomenon, something more like elite transfer? – with estimates of a migration flow’s importance being adjusted up or down according to the numbers involved. But since first-millennium sources never provide unquestionable data on numbers, even when there’s any at all, it is hardly surprising that such arguments often become deadlocked. Of potentially wide application, therefore, is the relative, rather than statistical, definition of mass migration generally adopted in the comparative-migration literature. For what, in fact, constitutes a ‘mass’ migration? Is it the arrival of an immigrant group that numbers 10 per cent of the population at the point of destination? – 20 per cent? – 40 per cent? – or what? And a migration flow needs in any case to be considered from the viewpoint of all its participants. Theoretically, a flow of migrants might amount to a small percentage of the population at its point of destination, but represent a large percentage of the population at its point of departure. What is elite transfer from the host population’s perspective, therefore, could be a more substantial demographic phenomenon for the immigrants themselves. To encompass this variety of situations and avoid numerical quibbling, migration studies have come to define ‘mass’ migration as a flow of human beings (whatever the numbers involved) which changes the spatial distribution of population at either or both the sending and the receiving ends, or
one ‘which gives a shock to the political or social system’, again at either end or both.
³¹

This is not just to assume that information and insights from more modern eras are automatically applicable to the first millennium. Migration studies have generally been working with twentieth-century examples, observed more or less contemporaneously, or with the European settlement of the Americas, either North and South in the first phase from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, or just the North in the case of the huge immigration waves of the later nineteenth and early twentieth.
³²
There are major structural differences between any of these worlds and first-millennium Europe. The latter’s economy was overwhelmingly agricultural in nature, and at subsistence, or not far above, in its levels of output. It had no mass production, so that nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns of migrant labour being sucked first from agricultural to industrial Europe and then from outside Europe altogether simply do not apply.
³³
The population of first-millennium Europe was also smaller than its modern counterpart to a quite astonishing degree, and even as late as 1800 governments of European countries tended to control emigration much more than immigration. The governmental and bureaucratic capacities, likewise, of first-millennium states (to the extent that there were any) were also much less developed, so that they clearly did not have the same capacity to make and enforce immigration policies as their more modern counterparts.

Similarly with transport and the availability of information. Both existed in the first millennium, but transport costs were huge compared with the modern world. Perhaps the most famous economic statistic from the ancient world is the report in the Emperor Diocletian’s
Edict on Prices
(from c.300
AD
) – that the cost of a wagon of wheat doubled for every fifty miles it was carried. Where transport remained expensive, as it did down to the later nineteenth century, this posed substantial problems to would-be migrants, although these could sometimes be obviated by state assistance.
³⁴
Information in a pre- or non-literate world also circulates over very different (that is, shorter) distances, and in an entirely different fashion from a world with mass media, again making it more difficult for would-be migrants to gather information about possible destinations. In the high Middle Ages, this was sometimes countered by designated agents mounting recruiting drives, but the limitations that would have affected information flows
in the first millennium are obvious.
³⁵
Nonetheless, and at the very least, modern migration studies generate a fresh range of issues and more detailed questions to move the study of first-millennium migration well beyond the old invasion-hypothesis model and even beyond current responses to that model.