Historiography

Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia

What is Migration History? (What is History? Polity Press), 2009

181pp., £13.99 paper, ISBN 978-0-7456-4336-6

Migration has formed one of the enduring characteristics of the human race and there have been particular periods when peoples have migrated for a variety of reasons from their homelands to somewhere new.  Sometimes, this was a matter of choice but in most cases, unfavourable circumstances were at the heart of movement.  There had been migration from Ireland for centuries before the famines of the 1840s but it took this human cataclysm to turn steady into dramatic emigration.  It is highly probable that, with global warming, the twenty-first century will be a century of migration.  Given that probability What is Migration History? is a timely and welcome book.  It first considers the reconceptualisation of the subject since the 1970s and raises a series of questions relating to migrants' cultural baggage and whether the fears of resident people are plausible.  This is followed by a chapter that takes a long view of migration examining its periodisation and is the best introduction I've read to the subject.  The third chapter examines theories of migration and cultural interaction,  the ways in which historians and others have studied and perceived migration since the 1880s when it first became a serious field of study.  The remaining three chapters provide an excellent synthesis of current thinking about migration through systems approaches, examining migrant practices and their challenge to scholarship and finally the perspective from the early twenty-first century.  There are succinct bibliographies after most chapters and a good index.  This is an excellent study that will be of immense value to teachers and students.

Richard Brown