The Transformation of the World (34 page)

Significant flows of peasant migration also occurred in mainland Southeast Asia. Despite the tropical climate, the geographical pattern here was the reverse of the Chinese: not from lowlands to uplands, but from the healthier high-lands of ancient habitation down into the river deltas. Some of this migration completed a tendency that had already been under way for some time. After the British annexed Lower Burma in 1852, for example, the opening of the Burma
delta “frontier” for rice growing attracted hundreds of thousands of peasants from Upper Burma, and later from India too. In 1901 a tenth of Lower Burma's four million inhabitants originated in the first generation from Upper Burma, and another 7 percent in India.
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Similarly, large numbers of peasants from the Northeast took part in the settling of Siam's central plain. In Vietnam the vast Mekong delta was opened up for the first time only in the French colonial period after 1866, when settlers moved down from the North. Major investment in canal construction subsequently transformed Cochin China into one the largest rice-exporting regions in the world, where immigrants performed most of the labor in latifundia under Vietnamese, French, or Chinese ownership.
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During the same period, tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants moved to Laos and Cambodia.

Internal migrants in South Asia were a small share of the total population, as compared with Europe. The state also intervened to restrict mobility. Much as attempts were made to control vagabonds and traveling people in ancien régime Europe, measures were taken in India against the nonsedentary population. The British colonial authorities sang the praises of the sedentary, taxpaying peasantry and persecuted mobile sections of the population, viewing them as bandit-like disturbers of peace and order, or sometimes even as anti-British guerrillas. In 1826, scarcely a decade after the end of the war against the Marathas and in a situation of major unrest in India, the British launched a campaign (within the law, admittedly) to wipe out the wandering cult of Thugs, who were feared and demonized as ritual murderers. In the 1870s herdsmen in northern India came under suspicion of constituting “criminal tribes” and were vigorously prosecuted.
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The emergence of a new demand for labor set up powerful migratory patterns, which the state had to tolerate. Apart from migration to the urban magnets of Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras, which had already grown considerably in the eighteenth century, the main flows were toward the newly established plantations, especially the tea-growing ones of Assam. Between 1860 and 1890, Chinese tea, once the dominant product, was driven out of the world market by tea from Assam and Ceylon. Local farmers, to whom the new-style plantations were alien, refused to work for a wage in Assam or Darjeeling, and there was no landless proletariat in the villages. Therefore workers were brought in from outside to work at cheap rates on long-term contracts—often whole families, who were expected to return to their home village for at least two months during the quiet season.
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For Russia and the whole of northern Asia, which came under
effective
Russian control until the 1890s, Dirk Hoerder speaks of a “Russian-Siberian” migration system. Unlike the two other extensive ones—the Atlantic system and the Asian contract-labor system
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—this was not maritime but inland-continental. Free peasants, runaway serfs, landowners, criminals, and even, between 1762 and the 1830s, people deliberately recruited from Germany were the pioneers in this large-scale process of farm settlement. From 1801 to 1850, a yearly average of no
more than 7,500 (including exiles and prisoners) moved to Siberia, but then the yearly figure rose to between 19,000 and 42,000 in the period from 1851 to 1890. The total number of immigrants to Siberia for the years from 1851 to 1914 is estimated at six million. In addition four million settlers moved to Kazakhstan and the regions beyond the Caspian and the Aral Sea. By 1911 the share of indigenous inhabitants in the population of Siberia, themselves split into numerous ethnic groups, had fallen to a tenth of its previous level. In the east they were caught between the hammer of Russian colonization and the anvil of Chinese.
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Nationalism and Migrant Labor

It is crucially important to distinguish between the migration of workers or agricultural settlers and the mobility of herdsmen. Pastoral existence is a special case of nomadism, of a collective nonsedentary way of life.
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It has been of widely varying importance in different parts of the world. Nor was it absent in Europe: after all, in eighteenth-century France those who for one reason or another led a “nomadic” existence still accounted for 5 percent of the population. Yet pastoral peoples do not generally feature in written history. The urban civilizations in which historians reside have always seen them as “barbarian” others. This might be associated with either negative or positive values: the patriarchs of the Old Testament enjoyed high cultural esteem in the Jewish and Christian world, and here and there in the nineteenth century a kind of Bedouin romanticism saw the “sons of the desert” or the native populace of the American West as the rough but kind-hearted embodiment of an otherwise lost proximity to nature. They were “noble savages,” at times more highly regarded in the West than in the citydominated Islamic civilization. Realistic insights into their lives were extremely rare, however. Until the 1770s there were no European accounts of the internal “functioning” of nomadic societies. Only modern ethnology has systematically investigated the inner logic of nomadic lifestyles.

There were mobile livestock breeders in every continent. Europe's specificity was that livestock breeding was a branch of the division of labor within society, and with the exception of the Sinti and Roma, no ethnic groups were entirely nomadic. Europe had no pastoral
peoples
, although it did have small communities of shepherds and herdsmen who (sometimes accompanied by their families) moved from place to place with their animals. Today transhumance—the grazing of livestock at mountain pastures in summer, with winters spent in the lowlands—is an increasingly rare and marginal phenomenon in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, and Wallachia. Long treks with cattle, as a kind of living meat transport, used to take place in the American West in the nineteenth century, but no longer in Europe. The huge ox herds that once traveled across Hungary and as far as central Germany and Alsace became unnecessary as animal farming improved, slaughtering became industrialized, the railroad network expanded, and freezing technology developed in the 1880s. Nowhere else in the world was there anything like the herds of 150,000 to 400,000, occasionally as
high as 600,000, that a couple of thousand cowboys used to drive north from Texas for three months at a time between the 1860s and 1880s.
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In no other part of the world did pastoral nomadism remain such an important way of life as in West Asia (the region between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean), Mongolia, and Africa. It is impossible to give a full survey of this here. An arc of pastoralism took in areas from the Hindu Kush through the Anatolian highlands to Sinai and Yemen. In Iran, the share of nomads in the total population fell from a third to a quarter in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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All through the century, however, livestock breeding remained one of the most important sectors of the economy. The fact that a large part of the population lived a mobile existence created problems that had not been seen for a long time in Europe: three-way conflict and cooperation in the triangle of city-dwellers, sedentary tillers of the soil, and pastoralists; disputes over pasturage and transit rights; ecological destruction; and intertribal conflicts. Nomads also remained a power factor with which every ruler had to contend. Finally the dictator and later shah Reza Khan (r. 1925–41 as Reza Shah) brutally subjugated the nomadic tribes, which he regarded as unruly savages unworthy of a modern nation-state.
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In the Ottoman Empire, the sultanic center always had to negotiate with powerful tribes, and migrant labor played a significant role in numerous sectors of the economy. After the onset of reform in the late 1830s a newly assertive state broke the power of the tribes or drove them into marginal regions of the empire, thereby enhancing its internal security and improving mobility for nonnomads. This increased the area of land under cultivation and encouraged the formation of large, commercially run estates, but did so at the expense of nomads.
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Yet, as Reşat Kasaba has pointed out, this strategy of intensified sedentarization did not meet all its aims and failed to comply with the Ottoman self-image of modernizing state-building. “[T]he Ottoman officials had to cooperate with some tribal chiefs in order to subdue others.”
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The Ottoman state always had to reckon with the tribal factor in ever-changing constellations of power.

In Africa pastoralism was widespread almost everywhere outside the tropics and the immediate coastal areas: from the Atlas Mountains to the highlands of South Africa. It existed in Sudan (which then encompassed the whole African savannah region south of the Sahara), in the Ethiopian highlands, in East Africa, and in Namibia.
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As always in nomadism, the mobility radius varied greatly from group to group: it could involve the surroundings of a village or, in the
grand nomadisme
of North Africa, cover vast areas of desert.
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Beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, at the Cape of Good Hope, further along the coast, and later in the interior too, there developed a society of white nomadic pastoralists, the Trekboers, whose conflicts with their indigenous Xhosa neighbors centered mainly on pastureland.
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Nineteenth-century Africa was a continent in constant nomadic movement.

Nomadism is not the same as migration, which implies that individuals, not whole societies or “peoples,” are on the road either voluntarily or because they have
been forced into it. Migrants leave behind a home society. Sometimes they will return to it, whether in a seasonal cycle that offers them employment elsewhere for part of the year or after a long stay in a distant land that may have disappointed their hopes of it. In Africa this kind of migration had two different origins. On the one hand, farmers and rural laborers moved of their own free will to new “cash crop” centers, such as the groundnut and cocoa areas in Senegambia and the Gold Coast (Ghana). The production of these goods was in the hands of Africans; foreigners provided only the link to world markets.
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On the other hand, a directly colonial economy, in which foreigners also controlled the means of production, brought new opportunities for wage labor in mining and labor-intensive settler farms (which could often compete against African agriculture only with support from the colonial authorities). The change happened in such a short space of time that the term “mineral revolution” has been used for southern and central Africa between 1865 and 1900, especially for the years after 1880.
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In the systems of diamond, gold, copper, and coal mining that developed from southern Congo (Katanga) to the Witwatersrand, entrepreneurs initially brought in trained Europeans to work alongside untrained African migrants. There inevitably came a point, rarely before the 1920s, when cost arguments spoke in favor of using
African
skilled workers. But until then, new seasonal patterns of unskilled employment were the norm. A topography of migration structured by new capitalist growth centers established itself on top of the traditional mobility of pastoralist societies.

Slave Exports from Africa

The Atlantic slave trade involved many areas of the African west coast in one of the principal migration systems, whose indirect consequences reached far into the interior. Sudan was furthermore the catchment area for the trans-Saharan and “Oriental” slave trade. As the African slave trade slowly contracted in the course of the nineteenth century, the continent became a less substantial part of intercontinental migration flows. In 1900 Africa was quantitatively less important in global migration networks than it had been a hundred years earlier: a case of
de
globalization. What was the scale of the nineteenth-century slave trade from an African perspective? This question, with its high moral and political charge, is all the more controversial because of the lack of hard data. Serious estimates of the total volume of the slave trade from Africa to America after 1500 vary by a wide margin. An especially thorough examination of the evidence has arrived at a figure of 12.5 million for the slaves who embarked from Africa; the horrors of the transatlantic “middle passage” meant that the number of arrivals was 10 to 20 percent lower (compared with a maximum loss of approximately 5 percent on ships carrying European emigrants).
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The best estimate of the slaves who arrived between 1501 and 1867 at the major ports in the Atlantic world puts the number at 10,705,805.
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In the destination countries of the “Oriental” trade, slaves were put to work on plantations or in the households and harems of the well-to-do. Muhammad Ali and the rulers who succeeded him in Egypt needed to keep replenishing the great
slave army (an old Islamic tradition) that they built up from the 1820s onward, at a rate that peaked around 1838 at 10,000 to 12,000 a year. At that time the initiative for the capture and recruitment of military slaves passed to private traders—the privatization of a growth sector in Sudan.
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As to Ethiopia, the Arab North preferred child-slaves, especially girls, taking 6,000 to 7,000 a year in the second quarter of the century.
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Europeans dealers did not participate in the Oriental slave trade, but its consequences for the affected regions of Africa were no less grave than those of the Atlantic trade. It is much harder to quantify, but we can be sure that—contrary to what is sometimes claimed—it was
not
significantly larger than the slave trade conducted by Europeans. If we accept an estimate of 11.5 million for the total number of African slaves who crossed the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, then it would be on the same scale as the transatlantic trade throughout its history—not including the slaves who ended up in Egypt.
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Whereas the ceiling of the “Oriental” trade remained fairly stable in the eighteenth century, at around 15,000 slaves a year, it climbed to more than 40,000 a year by 1830.
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This was the great age of the Arab slave hunts in eastern Sudan, the Horn, and East Africa. Brutal Muslim troops would make sorties from Khartoum or Darfur into “infidel” areas that were powerless to defend themselves. Deadly caravans of captives sometimes marched thousands of kilometers until they reached the Red Sea.