Migration Across History

Abstract

Human history is migration history. (1) The ancestor humans moved out of the East African Great Lakes Region and in the process developed and adapted their bodies and nervous systems and, about 300,000 years ago, became homo and femina sapiens. (2) Research on these migrations has adapted concepts of modern nineteenth- to twenty-first-century migrations concerning the sequence of departure, actual move, insertion or acculturation after arrival. Researchers distinguish forced from involuntary and self-decided migrations and the stress factors or normalcy involved. (3) Migration and mobility since the development of writing and thus of written sources has involved vast shifts of population for demographic or climatic reasons or because of enslavement and violence. (4) In the nineteenth century migrations coalesced into major “systems”, defined as large numbers of moves with similar motivations. They involved transcontinental and transoceanic moves but even more so connected underserviced countrysides with centers of investment and industrialization as well as with vast peripheral regions with economic (and political) cores. (5) In the twentieth century the Europe-outward world wars and the Great Depression changed migration parameters and generated vast numbers of refugees whose acculturation trajectories differ from self-decided migrants. The wars against and for independence from the late 1940s shifted refugee generation to the colonized regions of the world. From the 1950s new labor migration systems emerged. (6) The U.S.-centered speculative crisis of 2008 increased impoverishment and potential for migration. (7) In conclusion, a wholistic approach, Transcultural Societal Studies, is suggested.

This summary is based on English-, French- and German-language research. Colleagues as well as translations have helped to access research in several other languages.