Columbus, and the Europeans who followed him across the subsequent centuries, are often presented as heroic figures – as travellers and pioneers. They are seen to move in what has been called the age of free migration when, apparently, there were no obstacles to movement. Traders, merchants, travellers, mendicants and explorers had long criss-crossed the globe, encountering new cultures, trading with them and learning the ways of others. The population movements from Europe to the New World and beyond coalesced, over four centuries, into a phenomenon that was markedly different from these other quotidian movements and encounters. This is because European movement was linked to colonial settlement which was central to the displacement, dispossession and elimination of populations across the globe. It was also central to the creation of the global inequalities and injustices that mark the worlds we share in common and that are the basis of contemporary movements of peoples. Without understanding the histories that produced these inequalities, we are unlikely to understand contemporary movements.
Taking Columbus, and the Americas, as the beginning is not the same as taking him, or them, as the origin. As Said (1995 [1978]) argues, whereas the idea of ‘origin’ presupposes that which develops from it, that of a ‘beginning’ is developed as a complex of connections which allows for construction and reconstruction. Columbus is not the origin of what followed but can be seen as one of the beginnings of the processes and structures that have shaped the modern world. Acknowledging beginnings permits shifts in perspective and understandings of knowledge by taking different points of departure. Events, in this view, are best understood as located in, and constitutive of, particular historical interconnections. Columbus, then, is an event in a world of events which together brought into being our modern world.
Christopher Columbus, born in the Italian city-state of Genoa, patronized by the Spanish Crown of Castile, landed in the islands of what we now know as the Caribbean, searching for a direct route to the treasures of the Indies. His exploratory voyages in the late fifteenth century opened up an entire continent to European populations who travelled in increasing numbers to the New World. Some were in search of adventure, others fleeing poverty, famine, religious persecution and economic disadvantage. Whatever their motives, the decades and centuries subsequent to Columbus’s ‘discovery’ were marked by the subjugation and elimination of indigenous populations and the extraction and appropriation of their resources and land (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).
In the journal Nature, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin note that the arrival of Europeans in the lands that would come to be known as the Americas – lands which had been known by their pre-existing (and continuing) inhabitants as Turtle Island and Abya Yala – ‘led to the largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years’ (2015: 174). They suggest that the continent had had a population of around 61 million prior to European contact and that this ‘rapidly declined to a minimum of about 6 million people by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine’ (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 175). In this way, Abya Yala was gradually, although not without resistance, transformed into the Americas.
If subsequent waves of Europeans – and across the nineteenth century this involved around sixty million Europeans (Miege 1993) – found these lands to be available to them, then this ought not to be regarded as a natural fact but a social and political fact that requires further analysis. It is a fact that should be central to all subsequent discussion of the movement of peoples, to all discussions constituting migration studies. As I have argued elsewhere, migration is a movement of people across political boundaries, and migrants are people who live in societies other than their own, but according to the rules and norms of the societies of which they come to be a part (Bhambra 2019). Within this understanding of migration, those who do not, en masse, live according to the rules and norms of the societies of the lands they come to are not migrants. They are better understood as colonial settlers and colonial settlers are not migrants, even if much of the scholarship on migration describes them as such. Failing to acknowledge the ways in which colonial histories are the context for the consolidation of particular patterns of European movement and the ways in which these come to be the reasons for subsequent movements is problematic to the extent that we are interested in effective solutions to the problems of global inequality.
Where we start from, and which histories and epistemologies we acknowledge, will profoundly shape our understandings. This is the central premise of this vitally important book. Mayblin and Turner start from an understanding that the field of migration studies is poorer – in terms of both intellectual coherence and policy applications – if it does not take colonial histories seriously. While they do not suggest that colonialism explains everything about migration, they do argue that migration can rarely be adequately understood without taking it into account. While there is plenty of literature at this nexus, in a global context, it does not often form the basis of migration studies as it is generally conceived in Europe or the United States. Mayblin and Turner ask those of us located in migration studies who have not addressed the histories of colonialism to consider what difference would be made to our understandings if we were to do so. It is urgent that this call be answered.
Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Sussex
1 Introduction
Migration studies and colonialism
Between 1600 and 1950, the vast majority of mobile subjects (what some might now call ‘economic migrants’) originated in Europe and sought their fortunes on other continents. An estimated 62 million people – settlers, labourers, colonials, imperialists, invaders – moved around European empires in the period 1800–1950 (Miège 1993). Indeed, colonialism was characterized by conquest, exploitation and domination through migration. From the massive forced migrations of the triangular slave trade and circuits of indenture to the almost unfettered mobility of many (but not all) white Europeans within their various empires, from the large-scale population displacements which the turbulence of decolonization gave rise to to the migration of people from the former colonies to the former metropoles in the mid- to late twentieth century, the history of migration globally is very much entangled with colonialism. It should be unsurprising to us, then, that patterns of mobility and immobility today follow these colonial-era logics in what Steffen Mau and colleagues call ‘the global mobility divide’ (Mau et al 2015). Or that border regimes effectively amount to ‘multilateral projects for the regional containment of Third World persons beyond the First World’ (Achiume 2019: 1515). And yet, when consulting the indexes of a selection of key texts of migration studies today, it is very rare to find any mention of colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization. If the absence of empire as a relevant context to migration studies is a surprise, so too is the general lack of interest in the legacies and continuities of colonialism for contemporary migration governance and the experiences of ‘migrants’ and ‘hosts’ today.
This book starts from the premise that colonial histories should be central to migration studies. We argue that colonialism is so fundamental to contemporary migrations, mobilities, immobilities, receptions and social dynamics that it is certainly not something that should only be of concern to scholars of colour, indigenous scholars and/or those working in formerly colonized countries. Our overarching aim is to explore what it would mean (acknowledging that it will not in fact mean one thing but many) to take seriously the centring of colonialism in researching migration, not through forging new theories but through learning from, and being inspired by, the wealth of literature that already exists in the world to engage with this task.
Migration studies is of course a diverse multidisciplinary field. Yet even critical migration studies has tended, according to Tudor (2018: 1065), ‘to forget about postcolonial racism and racialization and instead promoted an understanding of migration that is disconnected from postcolonial analysis’. Gayatri Spivak (1999) calls this type of silencing ‘sanctioned ignorance’. Sanctioned ignorance is not necessarily an issue of individual malice but is an institutionalized way of thinking about the world which operates to foreclose