The Ambivalence of Migration in Early Modern Thought: Comments on an Intellectual History of Human Mobility
Most contemporary overviews on the development of migration studies trace the history of the discipline no further back than to the 19th century. This approach, however, neglects the fact that preceding generations of academics and scholars also reflected
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In 1991, the German medievalist Ludwig Schmugge (1991: 307) reviewed the role of migration as an analytical concept in historical scholarship. Unlike social scientists, he argued, German historians had devoted far too little attention to this crucial term. Schmugge considered it symptomatic that most of the major historical reference books and encyclopaedias, including the monumental “Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe”, did not contain any lemmata on “mobility” or “migration”. Twenty years have passed since Schmugge voiced his criticism, and Germanspeaking historiography has definitely met the challenge. Substantial and farreaching research has been conducted on migration processes from the Middle Ages to the present day, exploring numerous facets of human mobility. The verve and the versatility of historical migration research in German academia have recently been documented by the copious “Enzyklop€ adie Migration in Europa” (Bade et al. 2007). The emphasis of research has been placed on the factual migration processes that took place and on the normative and juridical sources that regulated migration. Competitively few modern historians have, however, considered what scholars of previous centuries themselves thought and wrote on migration. This tendency is not restricted to German-speaking academia: It is indeed striking that a comparatively recent paper explicitly devoted to the early history of migration research (Greenwood and Hunt 2003) traced its topic no further back than the 1880s – as if migration theory were a prerogative of modernity. Compared to the extensive research on migration as a socio-historical phenomenon, the history of migration as a concept has been largely neglected. In this sense, Schmugge’s verdict still holds true after 20 years.
S. Donecker (*) Martin-Luther-Straße 14, 17489 Greifswald, Germany Alfried Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald e-mail: [email protected] M. Messer et al. (eds.), Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-0950-2_20, # Springer-Verlag Wien 2012
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In light of the unabatedly intensive controversies on migration in present-day political discourse, it seems more than appropriate to reflect on the conceptual prehistory of such a crucial political term. In the following, I intend to present some thoughts on the intellectual history of migration in the early modern period, in particular the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The time frame is, admittedly, chosen somewhat arbitrarily, and an examination of the role of migration in, for example, enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century would certainly be equally expedient. My remarks do not claim to be an exhaustive treatment of the topic; they are more of a work-in-progress report – and with regard to further research, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a useful point of departure that allows extending the perspective both back into the Middle Ages and forward into modernity.
Universality and Ambivalence As Rainer Baub€ ock (2008: 819) has rece
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