Between Dispersion and Belonging: Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice 9780773599147

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Between Dispersion and Belonging

McGill-Queen’s Studies in Ethnic History Series One: Donald Harman Akenson, Editor

1 Irish Migrants in the Canadas A New Approach Bruce S. Elliott (Second edition, 2004)

11 Best Left as Indians Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory, 1840–1973 Ken Coates

2 Critical Years in Immigration Canada and Australia Compared Freda Hawkins (Second edition, 1991)

12 Such Hardworking People Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto Franca Iacovetta

3 Italians in Toronto Development of a National Identity, 1875–1935 John E. Zucchi 4 Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs Essays in Honour of the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Kr. Barons Vaira Vikis-Freibergs 5 Johan Schroder’s Travels in Canada, 1863 Orm Overland 6 Class, Ethnicity, and Social Inequality Christopher McAll 7 The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars James Belich 8 White Canada Forever Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia W. Peter Ward (Third edition, 2002) 9 The People of Glengarry Highlanders in Transition, 1745–1820 Marianne McLean 10 Vancouver’s Chinatown Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 Kay J. Anderson

13 The Little Slaves of the Harp Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York John E. Zucchi 14 The Light of Nature and the Law of God Antislavery in Ontario, 1833–1877 Allen P. Stouffer 15 Drum Songs Glimpses of Dene History Kerry Abel 16 Louis Rosenberg Canada’s Jews (Reprint of 1939 original) Edited by Morton Weinfeld 17 A New Lease on Life Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada Catharine Anne Wilson 18 In Search of Paradise The Odyssey of an Italian Family Susan Gabori 19 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario Pauline Greenhill 20 Patriots and Proletarians The Politicization of Hungarian Immigrants in Canada, 1923–1939 Carmela Patrias

21 The Four Quarters of the Night The Life-Journey of an Emigrant Sikh Tara Singh Bains and Hugh Johnston 22 Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism Colonial Guyana, 1838–1900 Brian L. Moore 23 Search Out the Land The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 Sheldon J. Godfrey and Judith C. Godfrey 24 The Development of Elites in Acadian New Brunswick, 1861–1881 Sheila M. Andrew 25 Journey to Vaja Reconstructing the World of a HungarianJewish Family Elaine Kalman Naves

McGill-Queen’s Studies in Ethnic History Series Two: John Zucchi, Editor 1 Inside Ethnic Families Three Generations of Portuguese-Canadians Edite Noivo 2 A House of Words Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory Norman Ravvin 3 Oatmeal and the Catechism Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec Margaret Bennett 4 With Scarcely a Ripple Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 Randy William Widdis 5 Creating Societies Immigrant Lives in Canada Dirk Hoerder 6 Social Discredit Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response Janine Stingel

7 Coalescence of Styles The Ethnic Heritage of St John River Valley Regional Furniture, 1763–1851 Jane L. Cook 8 Brigh an Orain / A Story in Every Song The Songs and Tales of Lauchie MacLellan Translated and edited by John Shaw 9 Demography, State and Society Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 Enda Delaney 10 The West Indians of Costa Rica Race, Class, and the Integration of an Ethnic Minority Ronald N. Harpelle 11 Canada and the Ukrainian Question, 1939–1945 Bohdan S. Kordan 12 Tortillas and Tomatoes Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada Tanya Basok 13 Old and New World Highland Bagpiping John G. Gibson 14 Nationalism from the Margins The Negotiation of Nationalism and Ethnic Identities among Italian Immigrants in Alberta and British Columbia Patricia Wood 15 Colonization and Community The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbia Working Class John Douglas Belshaw 16 Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War Internment in Canada during the Great War Bohdan S. Kordan 17 Like Our Mountains A History of Armenians in Canada Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill 18 Exiles and Islanders The Irish Settlers of Prince Edward Island Brendan O’Grady

19 Ethnic Relations in Canada Institutional Dynamics Raymond Breton Edited by Jeffrey G. Reitz 20 A Kingdom of the Mind The Scots’ Impact on the Development of Canada Edited by Peter Rider and Heather McNabb 21 Vikings to U-Boats The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador Gerhard P. Bassler 22 Being Arab Ethnic and Religious Identity Building among Second Generation Youth in Montreal Paul Eid 23 From Peasants to Labourers Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada Vadim Kukushkin

30 Ireland, Sweden, and the Great European Migration, 1815–1914 Donald H. Akenson 31 The Punjabis in British Columbia Location, Labour, First Nations, and Multiculturalism Kamala Elizabeth Nayar 32 Growing Up Canadian Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists Edited by Peter Beyer and Rubina Ramji 33 Between Raid and Rebellion The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916 William Jenkins 34 Unpacking the Kists The Scots in New Zealand Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon 35 Building Nations from Diversity Canadian and American Experience Compared Garth Stevenson

24 Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Elizabeth Jane Errington

36 Hurrah Revolutionaries The Polish Canadian Communist Movement, 1918–1948 Patryk Polec

25 Jerusalem on the Amur Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924–1951 Henry Felix Srebrnik

37 Alice in Shandehland Scandal and Scorn in the Edelson/Horwitz Murder Case Monda Halpern

26 Irish Nationalism in Canada Edited by David A. Wilson

38 Creating Kashubia History, Memory, and Identity in Canada’s First Polish Community Joshua C. Blank

27 Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939–1945 Ivana Caccia 28 Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905–1945 Rebecca Margolis 29 Imposing Their Will An Organizational History of Jewish Toronto, 1933–1948 Jack Lipinsky

37 No Free Man Canada, the Great War, and the Enemy Alien Experience Bohdan S. Kordan 40 Between Dispersion and Belonging Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice Edited by Amitava Chowdhury and Donald Harman Akenson

BETWEEN DISPERSION AND BELONGING Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice

Edited by Amitava Chowdhury and Donald Harman Akenson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

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London

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Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4712-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4713-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-9914-7 (epdf) 978-0-7735-9915-4 (epub)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Between dispersion and belonging : global approaches to diaspora in practice / edited by Amitava Chowdhury and Donald Harman Akenson. (McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history. Series two ; 40) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4712-4 (hardback). – isbn 978-0-7735-4713-1 (paperback). – isbn 978-0-7735-9914-7 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-9915-4 (epub) 1. Human geography – Historiography – Case studies. I. Akenson, Donald Harman, 1941–, editor II. Chowdhury, Amitava, editor III. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history. Series two ; 40 gf41.b48 2016

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c2016-904946-9 c2016-904947-7

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Foreword: Between Dispersion and Belonging: At Home in the Diaspora xi Amitava Chowdhury Introduction: Is “Diaspora” a Live Hand Grenade? 3 Donald Harman Akenson PART ONE CONCEPT 29 1 What and Where Is Diaspora?: Definitions, Analytical Boundaries, and Research Agendas 31 William Safran 2 Diaspora: Legacies, Typologies, and “Push-Pull” 70 Donald Harman Akenson 3 The Diaspora Symptom: Global Projection of Local Identities 95 Amitava Chowdhury PART TWO FORMATIONS 107 4 Who Was First and When?: The Diasporic Implications of Indigeneity 111 James T. Carson

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Contents 5 Trade Diasporas and Merchant Social Cohesion in Early Trade in the Western Indian Ocean 125 Eivind Heldas Seland 6 Perhaps a Silly Question: Was There a Swedish Diaspora? 138 Donald Harman Akenson 7 An “Invisible Diaspora”?: English Associational Culture in Nineteenth-Century North America 189 Donald M. MacRaild 8 Ulster Presbyterians, the Great Famine, and the Historiography of Early Irish America 215 Rankin Sherling 9 Narratives of Home: Diaspora Formations among the Indian Indentured Labourers 240 Amitava Chowdhury Conclusion: Diaspora as Global History 254 Amitava Chowdhury Notes 263 Bibliography 311 Contributors 355 Index 357

Acknowledgments

This project owes its origins to many conversations in the offices and corridors in the department of history at Queen’s University. We want to begin by thanking our colleagues in the department for providing us with a collegial and congenial environment over the years. Thanks are especially due to the department’s chair, James T. Carson, for his unfailing support throughout this project. We would also like to thank Debbie Stirton-Massey and Cathy Dickison at the department, for timely help on numerous occasions. Gillian Akenson of the Queen’s library assisted with several production issues. At mqup, our thanks are due to Philip Cercone, Ryan Van Huijstee, Kathleen Fraser, and Jennifer Roberts. We are especially indebted to Dr Colleen Gray for her invaluable help with copyediting. Amitava Chowdhury would like to thank the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History (wigh) at Harvard University for a visiting fellowship in 2013 and again in 2015. Much of the writing was done during my stay at the wigh. I am indebted to Sven Beckert, Charles Maier, and Jessica Barnard, for their support during my stay. I would also like to thank Timothy Wyman-McCarthy for looking over the manuscript with keen eyes and for several valuable suggestions. Jessica Stites-Mor, Andrew Jainchill, Jeffrey S. Ravel, and Sana Aiyar read parts of the manuscript and provided precious comments and criticisms. Don Akenson wishes to thank Lars Hansson, formerly director of the Utvandrarnas Hus, Växjö, Sweden, and his staff, and the board of directors, for support, advice, and encouragement. That institution, an especially valuable blend of archival, genealogical, and bibliographic resources,

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unhappily was closed in its research friendly form in November 2013, and later was subsumed, through the initiative of local municipal and regional governments, into Kulterparken, Småland, AB. I also wish to thank Joan Harcourt, literary editor of the Queen’s Quarterly and David Wilson, professor of history and Celtic studies in the University of Toronto, for reading, criticizing, and considerably improving several chapters.

FOREWORD

Between Dispersion and Belonging: At Home in the Diaspora Amitava Chowdhury

Two fundamental constituent elements, either implicit or explicit within all uses of the concept of diaspora, give the term meaning. On one hand, diaspora, a term derived from antiquity, connotes dispersion, scattering, network, and movement. Entrenched within such a meaning, or alongside it, is a realization that diasporas signify difference. The stated difference operates along two axes – difference of the diasporans from the host societies; and, difference of the diasporans from the emigrating zones, that is, the place of origin. Diasporic difference along these two registers leads to a particular way of belonging in the world. Thus diaspora denotes a curious double bind of dispersion and belonging – belonging with a claimed or perceived difference. The concept of diaspora, as it has been employed since the early 1990s, has a synchronic dimension. Diasporas come into being through a network of globally dispersed migrants and their descendants. It is the synchronic dimension – the horizontal association and linkage – that makes diasporas possible. As several theorists, including James Clifford and William Safran, have warned us, diasporas come into being only when the dispersal takes place multilaterally and not when an entire community is transplanted to another region of the globe.1 It remains the case that much of the discussion on diasporas in theory and practice has revolved around this synchronic dimension of horizontal linkage. It would appear that lateral linkages of a people connected by a common geographical origin, or ethnicity, or language, or other markers of belonging contribute to a collective claim or recognition as a diaspora. The synchronic dimension is the raison

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d’etre behind what we may call diasporic consciousness. It is no wonder, therefore, that the disciplines of sociology and political science have long dominated the discourse surrounding the concept of diaspora. However, too much emphasis on the synchronic dimension of diaspora leads one to ignore the historical and formational aspects of diasporic claims. This book stems from the need to reassess the concept of diaspora from an historical perspective, while we remain conscious of the fact that the concept of diaspora cannot be divorced from the social sciences. An historical perspective on diaspora must emphasize its diachronic dimensions. Diasporas do not miraculously come into being through a sudden discovery of synchronic connections, but gradual changes over time determine the very basis of consciousness and claims that are constitutive of diasporas. The diasporic difference is a derivative of the diachronic evolution of a people on the move dispersed over space. Thus, if spatial distribution is a foundational aspect of diasporas, temporal evolution is the formational axis along which such dispersions occur. As many of the contributions to this volume make it apparent, consciousness of belonging in a diaspora is often a matter of encountering a changing self over time. Ignoring the diachronic dimension of diasporas leads to a static, immutable, and forever stagnant view of human societies and diasporic consciousness. Static views of diasporas leave the diasporans without an element of choice. Diasporas, in this reading, become an essentialist reduction of a plurality of identities into a singular determining attribute predicated on the basis of genealogical origins. An historical appreciation of the diachronic aspects of identity immediately reveals the flexible, contingent, and accidental nature of the processes that lead to articulations of group identity. It also exposes the fact that people make conscious choices over time that determine their awareness of being in the world. Thus, not all dispersions lead to diasporic claims. Only some do, and they do so by turning to the narratives of the past – real, imagined, and invented – for denying the past is also a feature of historicality and in itself is symptomatic of historical ruptures and collective experience. It is our view that formulations of diasporas in the twentieth century should spring from dynamic readings of identity. Thus, we turn to the past to find meaning in the claims, contests, boundaries, and narratives of belonging. Between Dispersion and Belonging follows the guiding thought that the logic of diaspora resides in the process through which dispersion becomes

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belonging. It is in the historical formational processes in-between the fact and process of dispersion and the consciousness, awareness, stance, and claim of belonging that diasporas emerge as historical artifacts.2 Not by dispersion alone, and neither by assertions of belonging, but it is through a mediation between the two that the meaning and relevance of diaspora as a concept is constituted. Thus, diasporas inhabit that curious space made possible through dispersion, and are claimed through varied articulations of belonging. Diasporas in their narratives of belonging underline an ambivalent association with territory. Seen primarily as deterritorialized formations, diasporas, nevertheless, are predicated around claims of connection with a distant territory. Furthermore, diasporas inhabit a double ambivalence in their relationship with nation-states and the notion of nationhood. From the perspective of host societies, diasporas are internal contradictions that stymie nationalist aspirations; externally, it is precisely by invoking ethnonations that diasporas weave their narratives of origin. Such dual ambivalence of diasporic formations relegates them to the interstices between the nation and the state; and, simultaneously they become an embodiment of a critique of modernity and the shape of modern nation-states. The dual ambivalence of diasporas in the intersection of ethnonations and territorial units make it impossible for us to assess and interpret the diaspora phenomenon from within national narratives. I argue that the guiding apparatuses of modern historiography are ill-equipped to study diaspora projects; it is only through engagement with the emerging field of global history that we can claim to attempt an appropriate interrogation of the concept. Diasporas are global in the sense that they are not bounded by geopolitical units, but they do not necessarily have to span the entire globe to stake a global claim. The globe, in this reading, is a synecdoche. This book employs and captures this reading of the global in locating diasporas between dispersion and belonging. We begin with Donald Akenson’s substantive introduction that poses the intriguing question, “is ‘diaspora’ a live hand grenade?” Drawing from a lifetime of engagement with diaspora scholarship, Akenson provides a comprehensive account of the entanglement of diaspora and galut, “exile,” and the most exhaustive genealogical exploration of the concept of diaspora to date. Tracing the concept across time and space, Akenson demonstrates how the inherent duality of the concept was repeated in twentieth-

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century articulations. He makes the perceptive observation that in the 1980s, “the Israeli authorities were trying to define the Jewish diaspora as being entirely voluntary, [while precisely at the same time] most Africanists were using the term to refer to involuntary dispersion.”3 Following the introduction, we move to a section on concepts, consisting of three chapters. In chapter 1, William Safran provides us with an upto-date iteration of the meaning and boundaries of the concept of diaspora. Safran argues that diaspora as a category of analysis has traditionally been neglected in the scholarly literature in the twentieth century because the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis reigned supreme from the late nineteenth throughout the twentieth centuries. The primacy of the nation-state rendered any other formulation that transgressed and transcended its authority too hard to accept. Following an inclusive treatment of the pluriform research agendas emanating from the concept, Safran offers a view of diaspora as “an embodiment of ambiguity.”4 Ultimately, he brings the entanglement of the concept of diaspora with exile in an interesting juxtaposition with the treatment provided earlier by Akenson. Safran concludes with a series of observations on the behaviour of the concept in practice. In chapter 2, Akenson confronts some of the typologies that diaspora studies inherited from nineteenth-century migration studies, in particular with respect to the writings of Ernst Ravenstein. Akenson warns us by arguing that, “any set of typologies is apodictic,” and demonstrates the inherent problem embedded in a “one-size-fits-all mode of thought.”5 Drawing from Ravenstein’s hydraulic model of migration and twentieth century gravity models framed in Newtonian terms, it appears that several twentieth-century theorists and demographers predetermined the complex dynamics of diaspora and migration in a simplistic “push-pull model.” The artificiality and limitations of the push-pull model were further exacerbated by economists and economic historians engaged in the phenomenon of migration. A more sophisticated version of the model developed by human geographers has come to occupy contemporary migration and diaspora studies, but, in the face of evidence, that too appears to be of limited applicability. In chapter 3, I move away from genealogical explorations and typologies of the concept of diaspora and ask, “why diaspora, and why now?” In other words, perplexed by the recent proliferation of the term in academia and public culture, I ask, how does the conceptual frame of diaspora cap-

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ture the manifold subjectivities in contemporary society? I also offer a different reading of how the term has been used in academia, particularly in the last two and one-half decades, and I identify three primary categories of formulations – diaspora as dispersion, diaspora as project (as aspirations for belonging by transcending the nation-state), and diaspora as metaphor. Drawing from a study of the proliferation of the term, I argue that diaspora is a symptom of anomie peculiar to our time and, at least in its second iteration as a project, is best seen as a “global projection of local frames of identity.” The second section of the volume, “Formations” offers an array of particular instances of diasporic invocations. In chapter 4, James Carson assesses the import of diaspora as a concept in relation to the meaning of indigeneity. By exploring the cases of the Tuscaroras and Chichimecs, Carson is able to expose a curious colonial conundrum that destabilizes the very concepts of diaspora and indigeneity. In chapter 5, Eivind Seland, drawing instances from the pre-Islamic Western Indian Ocean (with comparative data from the Mediterranean), casts in relief the so-called trade diasporas with other more traditionally accepted diasporas. Seland points out that, on the basis of homeland orientation, internal coherence, and boundary maintenance, the commercial specialists of the Indian Ocean were able to maintain structures analogous to diasporas. Seland’s study offers us the intriguing thought of extending the diasporic analytic to liminal horizons in the premodern era. In chapter 6, Donald Akenson, in his third intervention in this volume, undertakes the painstaking task of tracing the “multi-pole dispersal pattern” of the Swedish people during the era of the Great European Migration. While not much is said in the extant literature on the existence of a Swedish diaspora, Akenson’s evidence indicates the existence of a picture that “looks very much like a diaspora,” based on the logic of dispersion. In chapter 7, Donald MacRaild undertakes a fascinating study of the “invisible diaspora” of English associational cultures in nineteenth-century North America. MacRaild lays out the ambiguity of recognizing the English associational cultures as diasporas, since their action and intentions spanned multiple registers of belonging. Despite the fact that the English confounded the logic of ethnicity with an imperial identity, signs of a transnational ethnonational consciousness justify the recognition of an English diaspora. In chapter 8, Rankin Sherling performs the very useful task

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of pointing out the mistake of identifying Irish diasporic dispersal with the singular catastrophic event of the Great Famine. Contrary to popular thought and ideas in certain quarters of academic scholarship, Sherling shows us that the story of Irish migration and diaspora is not one of constant victimhood resulting from English misrule. While it is the case that the majority of Irish migrants were scattered around the Atlantic World, Sherling’s broader analysis, drawing from the migration history of the Ulster Presbyterians, reveals a far more nuanced and complex picture. Finally, in chapter 9, drawing from empirical data from the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, I argue that the Indian indentured labour diaspora is best understood as a diachronic transformation. Here we move away from the inflexibility imposed by a rigid and unchanging geographical identity.6 Between Dispersion and Belonging, by capturing the diversity of diasporic experience, in practice and in usage, enables the reader to apprehend the very ambiguity that diaspora as a term embodies. It is in the concluding chapter of the book that I develop the argument that the diverse usage of the term diaspora is best captured within the rubric of globality. The process of multilocal dispersal, the development of alternative discourses of belonging that go against the modern narrative of the nation-state, and the recognition of the complex subjectivity of diasporans, clamour for a method of analysis that we have collectively begun calling global history.

Between Dispersion and Belonging

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INTRODUCTION

Is “Diaspora” a Live Hand Grenade? Donald Harman Akenson

(1) “Diaspora” inevitably is a troublesome concept and had best be handled gingerly. It may be a literary and linguistic hand grenade. That this is the case is indicated by the testy article on diaspora that is found in the authoritative Encyclopaedia Judaica. First published in 1972 with the financial support of Israel’s government, this massive multivolumed effort (twentytwo volumes in its second edition of 2007), combines front line scholarship with the semiofficial governmental line on certain sensitive matters. One of these is the Jewish Diaspora. In a breathtakingly apodictic ruling, the editors preface the article with two paragraphs of proper-think. Thus: “The word Diaspora, from the Greek … (“dispersion”), is used in the present context for the voluntary dispersion of the Jewish people as distinct from their forced dispersion, which is treated under Galut. As such it confines itself to Jewish settlement outside Eretz Israel during the period of Jewish independence or compact settlement in their own land.”1 Under this secular halachah, “Jewish law,” the historical boundaries of the Jewish Diaspora therefore are three-fold. First, is the settlement in Egypt referred to by the prophet Jeremiah (see Jeremiah, chapter 44) in the late First Temple period (c. 600 bce). How large this population was and how long its predecessors had been in Egypt is unknown. Secondly, and at the other end of the time-line, the Jewish Diaspora is accepted as existing after 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Thirdly, in the medial period, matters are contested. The Jewish Diaspora begins in a fuzzily defined period that runs

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from the beginning of the Second Temple era (say, 450 bce) to either (a) the Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, or (b) to the end of the Palestinian patriarchate (roughly 430 ce). During this medial period, Diaspora Jews spread all over the Roman-Hellenic world, with large numbers in Egypt, Syria, Rome, and what is present-day Iraq. That second point, concerning the post-1948 period, makes some things clear: We are here listening to an authoritative judgement directed at the Jewish population outside of Israel, and especially at that of the United States of America. By the 1960s, at least in the English-speaking world, it had become common as part of Jewish identity to use the term diaspora and not just to apply it to persons living outside of Israel post-1948, but also to long sweeps of earlier Jewish history. Such employment of the concept asserts an historical continuity between present-day dispersed Jews and all those dispersed in the past. The state of Israel will have none of that. Members of the present-day Jewish Diaspora (allegedly a “voluntary dispersion,” remember) are not to think themselves equal to those who suffered galut, “forced exile,” before 1948. Those who formed modern Israel had suffered galut, and their suffering was nobler and their redemptive heroism greater than that of those who remain outside of Eretz Israel,“land of Israel.” One here catches a faint whiff of the old Soviet Encyclopaedia which pretty much set the world right on every big issue and most small ones as well. The implied delation of the non-Israeli Jews for conceiving of themselves as a noble and historically contiguous diaspora is not for a full-blown thought crime, but it is for a thought misdemeanor.2 John Kelleher, one of the twentieth-century’s best scholars of literary material originating late in the “pre-Christian” and “early-Christian era” (in his case, early Celtic material), observed that, “a good, glaring contradiction is worth a square yard of smooth, question-begging consistency. A permanently unresolved problem over which many men have laboured unsuccessfully at different times, for varying reasons, is generally replete with information and suggestion.”3 Certainly that is what we have here, a revelatory swirl that began when some descendants of the ancient Hebrews picked up demotic Greek. Since that time, and down to the present day, the words galut and diaspora have, for some, meant the same thing; for others, they are sharply distinct concepts; and for still others, the two concepts relate in ways that are not precisely articulated and often are unconscious to

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their utterer. To demonstrate that the two intertwine today is a probative simplicity: if they did not, then the Encyclopaedia Judaica would not have needed to issue its schoolmasterish corrections on the usage of the terms. Manifestly, “diaspora,” in whatever form it is employed, carries much more invisible baggage than do most concepts that present-day historians and social historians try to use analytically and, sometimes, antiseptically. In chapter three, Amitava Chowdhury will deal with the task of providing a reasonable pragmatic usage of the term diaspora. He is not engaged in a hunt for ultimate linguistic or terminological truth (a chimerical mission that would be), but rather in suggesting a sensible common definition that historians, and those in allied disciplines, can use as an everyday tool. To develop an agreed meaning of a contested term is not always agreeable, but it can be done. The everyday practical term will necessarily be a border-setting device (what is not a diaspora) and also a term that quells uneasiness from within all the groups that are labelled as diasporic (most particularly, the we-are-more-diasporic-than-you sort of arguments that are based on comparative victimhood). (2) My own brief here is to suggest that as historians we should be aware of the long-term evolution of the concepts that we take for granted. And, equally, we should be respectful of earlier generations of scholars: to our collective embarrassment and perhaps shame, we often forget their work, and thus that many of them knew things that we now have forgotten. In the nineteenth century, “diaspora” became a naturalized English word, when English biblical scholars became enamoured of the German higher criticism of the period in which diaspora was an accepted concept that had a general scholarly usage.4 The formal acceptance of diaspora as a standard term in educated English is found in the article by the great Julius Wellhausen in the “Israel” entry in the 1881 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.5 Thus, it required no special explanation when “diaspora” was employed in an article on Philo of Alexandria in the 1885 edition of that standard English reference work.6 Confirmation that by the late 1880s, well-educated persons were expected to know how to employ diaspora as a useful concept is found in a very smooth, very worldly essay in the most widely read of High Victorian

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intellectual periodicals, The Edinburgh Review. There, in January 1889, in an extended review of a recently published commentary by Anglican scholars on the “Apocrypha” (usually called the “Deutero-Canon” by Roman Catholics), diaspora was used to explain why Jewish religious culture expanded and spilled outside of the limits of the canonical scriptures. Physical diaspora enlarged Jewish mental horizons, it was argued, and the cultural richness that ran from the stories in the books of Tobit and of Judith, to the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach, to the heroics in the various Maccabean volumes was the product of ancient Jewish culture being rubbed against “Oriental” societies. “The growth in this direction is not only demonstrable, it is rendered a priori natural and reasonable by the very existence and large area of the Diaspora.”7 Significantly, in this review essay no distinction was made between the Babylonian Exile (galut) and other Jewish scatterings in antiquity. They all are said to have had the same culturally enriching effect. Thus, unlike so many old words drawn from the early Common Era, diaspora was not undergoing linguistic entropy. Quite the opposite: from the High Victorian era onwards, it became a more and more familiar term within the field of biblical studies, and this at a time when knowledge of that field was an essential part of the education of any gentleman, agnostics and atheists included. Educated gentlemen of the later nineteenth century almost universally had had classical Greek flogged into them, and a facility in ancient Hebrew was taught to those considering being ordained – a requirement for a surprising number of academic appointments that today would be considered secular. Consequently, they could read their sources directly if they so desired: Hebrew, classical Greek, biblical Greek, and of course, Latin. Because most of us as historians working in the postmedieval periods have lost those technical skills, we have simultaneously become vulnerable to the importation of intellectual viruses from writings that have their origins way before our own intellectual horizons begin. Thus, most present-day academic historians of migration operate within an envelope of concepts that is infrequently examined and is frequently misleading. This envelope includes the following words: emigration (as a pain word), exile, diaspora, and push-pull (as a covering explanation for diaspora and galut). Each word is a complex concept and each one is related to the others. It is certainly possible to use any of these words without buying into a set of patently unjustified assumptions, slightly slanted observations, and in-

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evitably biased conclusions; but only if one is willing to understand how the concepts arrived at our doorstep. These are not innocent foundlings. They are superbly constructed wee household gods and they can bend the minds settled within our own mental domiciles. (3) The most seductive of these are galut and diaspora. They are not as distinct as the Israeli authorities suggest in their encyclopedia. They wind around each other, and it often is impossible to tell which one is the host, which one the parasite. As concepts that describe, evaluate, and explain migration, each of these terms has a power that stems from its shared origin. They owe their ideological force (although not their formal etymology) to one of the strongest texts (I think the strongest) in world history, the Tanakh – or, to adopt the conventional (but misleading) designation, the “Old Testament.” The late Iron Age culture of ancient Israel is the oldest culture with which the West has never lost touch. Continuity with most of the corpus of classical Greek and Latin learning was disrupted and only partially recovered after a long break. Conceivably it is merely fortuitous that the chain of continuity with the Semitic aspect of Western culture has never been severed, but I suspect that there is a Darwinian aspect here: the Hebrew texts survived and held their place because they were strong – stronger than any others. And they formed in their own image other crucial cultural entities, such as the concept of the social covenant and, not least, the texts that Christians came to call the New Testament. To understand the uncanny power (deeply buried, and thus foundational) that the Hebrew scriptures still have upon the way migration historians of Europe and of European-inflected cultures think, it is crucial to recognize that the Tanakh, though containing almost entirely the same material as the Old Testament, is arranged better. For our purposes, the important point is that the primary narrative that runs from creation to the Babylonian Captivity is a single entity. It is Genesis through Kings, without the distracting interpolation of Ruth as occurs in the Christian version of the canon. And Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles conclude the Hebrew canon rather than sitting in the middle, as in the Hellenic version of the text. How can those distant facts have anything to do with the way presentday migration history frequently is written? Through the concept of galut.

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This – the condition of being in exile from where you belong – is the ground bass upon which most of the later terms concerning out-migration play their grace notes. My observation is that most present-day European and North American historians of the Great Migration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also those of the massive migratory flux of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, look at their subjects in part through a lens that was cut and polished in the sixth century before the Common Era. That is not necessarily either good or bad, but certainly it is a sector of our common cultural programming of which we should be consciously aware and, perhaps, reflect upon. Therefore, when we inquire into the character of galut in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, it is not an antiquarian exercise. Nor is it something that we engage naively. Remember that the ancient masters knew how to play games with words. Galut (the condition of being exiled; the coordinate term, “golah,” refers to the place outside Eretz Israel where the exiles are located) in the Hebrew scriptures obtains its power as the concluding segment of Genesis-throughKings. This is the most ambitious, and stomach-churning of narratives. It begins with the Creation of the world, the formation of humanity, the Covenant with the Chosen People, and then moves through a series of adventures and vicissitudes to triumph in the capture of Eretz Israel. After that, life in the Land is temporarily glorious and then it goes all bumpy and eventually ends with a plunge. The narrative runs full speed off a cliff: the Babylonian Exile. This galut is chronicled in two places: at the end of Genesis-Kings (with references in Jeremiah) and in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. The former text was created soon after the Babylonian Exile of 587 bce, and the second set roughly 140 years after the Exile. Here recall that in the Hebrew scriptures, Genesis-Kings comes at the beginning of the canon, and EzraNehemiah and Chronicles conclude the canon. This placement of the second version of the story of the wrenching primordial Hebrew galut gives to it a privileged position in the canon, rivaling but not quite equal to that assumed by Genesis-Kings. Clearly, something is going on here, for the two versions do not agree.8 These differences are particularly intriguing because the matter of the Babylonian Exile is one of the few issues on which one catches the scriptures lying. I do not mean contradicting themselves, because that happens hundreds of times and, far from being an indication of mendacity or bad

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faith, such contradictions are an indication of the faithfulness of the Tanakh’s compilers. When they encountered variant versions of traditions, the redactors acted like the good historians they were: when they could not make up their minds about two alternate sources, they presented both of them. For this sound historical practice, they took a good deal of criticism from nineteenth-century skeptics. Such intentionally preserved contradictions are not what we are here talking about. Instead, we are noting one of the rare cases where the record is intentionally falsified and this involves the central matter of galut. The report of the Babylonian Exile – the beginning of “galut” and of “diaspora” – that one finds in the Book of Kings, near the conclusion of the fundamental building block of the Hebrew scriptures, is either by an eyewitness or by an individual of the second generation – that is, by one of the children of the Exile. It is based on good solid historical information. The salient point is how undramatic, how factual, the report of these events is – given, of course, that the events are perceived as comprising tragedy. Although later chroniclers were to dramatize the physical and social dimensions of the “Babylonian Captivity,” it was not, by the standards of the Ancient Near East (or even by the standards of the twenty-first century) a particularly nasty conquest, and the editor-writer of Kings knew this. Only a minority, at most 10 to 20 percent, of the population was actually sent into exile. The “poorest sort of the people of the land” were left behind (2 Kings 24:14) to be farmers and to tend the vineyards. Their life in a war-levelled land must have been bleak, the more so because the skilled artisans, such as carpenters and blacksmiths, who could have rebuilt the city, were taken away. However, this situation was moderated by the Babylonian satrap who was in charge of Judah. He gave land and vineyards to the poor – probably an indication that some of the lands of the exiled elite were redistributed to the previous underclass (Jeremiah 39:10). No new national or ethnic group was introduced into Judah. It was not colonized in any formal sense, but rather was a tiny, poor colony. The key to understanding the Babylonian Captivity is to see it from the vantage point of Babylonian realpolitik. The standard Babylonian practice was to strip conquered territories of their political and religious elites. They removed most of the potential trouble makers, the local leaders. This process was not a pogrom. The very top men in the conquered societies were brought to the capital city on the Euphrates River and were treated generously, even by

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modern standards, let alone those of ancient Near Eastern warfare. They were indoctrinated in Babylonian learning which, in some areas, such as astronomy, was prodigious.9 Thus, young King Jehoiachin, who had been on the throne of Judah in 597 bce, was taken to Babylon with his family and treated well. He was still alive in 562 when Nebuchadnezzar died, and members of his family took a leading role not only in the exiled community of Babylon, but also in Judah after the exile ended. Admittedly, King Jehoiachin’s successor, and the last monarch of King David’s line, the puppet King Zedekiah (597– 586/7) was treated horribly. His sons were killed before his eyes, and then he was blinded and incarcerated until his death (Jeremiah 52:10–11). Such severity was not routine policy. Zedekiah was punished because he had taken an oath of loyalty to the Babylonian king and had broken it by treating with the Egyptians. That was unusual: for the most part, the Babylonians dealt with the departed elites decently and probably used many of them, those who were not artisans, as what would today be called middlelevel civil servants. Disloyalty, however, was a capital offence. The displaced Judaeans were given considerable religious toleration and were not dispersed. In addition to those who lived in Babylon proper (located in what is today the suburbs of Baghdad), another concentration of dispossessed Judaeans lived in “Tel Aviv,” an ancient Babylonian location of some debate, and not to be confused with the modern city of that name.10 Here, some of the exiles may have been engaged in reclaiming land, a form of manual labour that must have been anathema to those of the soft-handed elite. The key, however, is that even then the Babylonians permitted sufficient concentrations of Judaeans to coalesce, and this preserved their language and their literary and religious traditions. Eventually, in 538 bce, Cyrus of Persia allowed the Judaean religious elite to return to Jerusalem. The Babylonian Exile was over. It really seems not to have been such a terrible ordeal, once one gets past the horrendous sacrilege of the destruction of the First Temple. Why, then, is the Babylonian Exile’s imprint so strong in the Judaeo-Christian tradition? Why does the image in Psalm 137 of a people weeping by the waters of Babylon have such resonance? For the reason that earlier, realistic bit of reporting in Kings was erased, or as close as one was permitted to do so with ancient Hebrew religious writing. Here, some simple arithmetic illuminates the process. In the Book

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of Kings, written within easy living memory of the Babylonian Captivity, the editor-writer gives sensible estimates of how many persons were taken prisoner. Almost all were males, except in the case of princely families. A total of ten thousand persons were taken to Babylon, the editor-writer estimates. Of these, seven thousand were soldiers and one thousand were craftsmen and blacksmiths. Those numbers are schematized – “rounded off” as it were – but they are not unrealistic or exaggerated. There is no wailing in this report, just a straight-faced historical tone. Using these estimates, one infers that the number of princely families and retainers and of scribes (both civil and religious) and priests was only two thousand persons in total (2 Kings 24:14–16). Painful as this forced migration of the elite may have been, it was a far cry from being a desolation of the Land. Consider what this set of facts must have meant fifty years later when the religious elite was permitted by Cyrus to return to Jerusalem: they must have been woefully short of priestly manpower. Given that only men had been deported (except for female members of the royal family), there had been no women of the proper religious background for the exiled Judahite elite to marry. Either they had to intermarry with Babylonians – and thus effectively drop out of the Judahite cause – or import Judahite women from the old homeland, or to remain without issue. Whatever the prevailing choice, the number of trained and enthusiastic and physically resilient Judahite religious leaders was greatly reduced between 587 and 538 bce. If there were one thousand priestly exiles and their sons and grandsons to straggle back to Jerusalem, it would have been surprising. And, indeed, we know that not all the exiled Judahites returned. So few and so weak were those who did so, that it was almost twenty years after their return before they were able to begin to rebuild the Temple, the centrepiece of their religion. Even then, it took a major external intervention in the 450s bce for the religion of Yahweh to triumph in Jerusalem. In other words (1) the exile was not particularly brutal, and (2) the return was inglorious. That brings us to a second set of numbers. These are found in the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles and in Ezra-Nehemiah. Both Ezra-Nehemiah and Second Chronicles rewrote the estimates of the editor-writer of Kings, a man who, at minimum, had been in contact with many eyewitnesses to the Babylonian deportation. The later writings replace the earlier estimates with ones that are less realistic historically and construct a very different narrative. According to Ezra 2:1–65, some 4,363 priests and Levites, accompanied by

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128 religious singers and 139 temple porters led the return from Babylon after Cyrus’s decree – and, in total, 42,360 persons (plus 7,337 servants, presumably of foreign origin) were involved. A large, dust-disturbing caravan of fifty thousand of the righteous, so it was claimed. In Chronicles (the companion volume to Ezra-Nehemiah), the eyewitness based reports of the Book of Kings are rubbed off the page. Whereas the editor-writer of Kings made it clear that the lower-caste majority of the population of the former Kingdom of Judah had remained in the homeland and had not been exiled, the author of Chronicles affirms the certainly historically inaccurate myth that everyone in Jerusalem had been either killed or carried away to Babylon at the start of the Exile, and that the land experienced a “Sabbath of desolation” for seventy years: that is, from 587 bce to the rebuilding period, 520–515 bce (2 Chronicles 36:20–1). Where the material in the Book of Kings, balefully accurate though it may have been, was faulty from an ideological point of view, was that it explained all too well the failure of the Judahite religion to quickly and triumphantly win back to the proper observance of the Yahweh-faith the people of Jerusalem and of the surrounding countryside. This took nearly three generations, from roughly 520 to 450 bce. It was such a slow slog because the number of returnees from Babylon was too small, their character was insufficiently authoritative, and the local Judahite majority, which had been left behind during the period of the Babylonian Exile, had developed religious institutions which resisted successfully the No-Way-But-Yahweh sloganeering of the returnees. In other words, the numbers provided in the Book of Kings concerning both the deportees to Babylon and the majority who had been left behind had to be erased because they provided much too accurately an historical explanation of why the Judahite retaking of Jerusalem for the religion of Yahweh failed for so long. An historical excuse was needed. New numbers covered over the older evidence.11 Thus was the concept of galut formed. It was the result of an ideologically dictated judgement that the real story was not sufficiently lurid, was too historically complex, and did not provide sufficient victimhood to justify the actions of the Chosen People. In other words, in its final form, galut was a social and political tool that was configured for the purposes of propaganda. That origin bears reflection.

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The most tempting way to simplify this apparent problem out of existence is to turn again to the Bible, find a quick answer, and then hurry away. The usual trick is to refer to the Septuagint, which is conventionally described as the Hellenic-Jewish translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.12 There the Greek noun diaspora and various grammatical variants appear fairly often.13 The first diaspora-based verb appears in Genesis 9:19, and the first usage as a noun in Deuteronomy 28:25. Thus, job done: the concept now is in play, and let us move quickly to something important, something that puts us in the centre of the frame. Except for the fact that there is a disconcertingly familiar pattern in the Septuagint’s employment of the concept of diaspora. Not once is there a direct translation of “galut” as “diaspora.”14 Galut is used sparingly in the Hebrew scriptures, but there is one instance when it simultaneously is the signal for the conclusion of the primary narrative in the Tanakh (GenesisKings), and for the introduction of a motif that will be incorporated into all future Jewish theodices. This is 2 Kings 25:27, and it comprises one of those rare moments in great religious literature where the reader can observe something very important being given a name. The naming of gods is of course the big item, and that is as close to observing Creation occur as one is likely to get. The present case is similar, for it is the naming of one of the basic relationships of god and his human subjects. Here, King Jehoiachin of Judah is reported as having been in the thirty-seventh year of his galut (a passive form is used) in Babylon. Thus appears in chrysalis form an entity that was destined to become one of the central elements of oral Torah: the Babylonian Galut – called the Babylonian Exile or Babylonian Captivity in most English-language discussions of the Hebrew Bible. It is an incredibly big deal, a live issue from the late sixth century bce down to the present, for exile is an answer to a central social question of the Covenant – what happens when the people stray far from the ways of the Almighty?15 Crucially, at this pivotal moment, the translator-editors of the Septuagint shy the way an experienced hunter does before attempting a fence that it knows is way too high to surmount. The ancient Jewish translatoreditors refuse to use any diaspora-based word to mean galut – that is, to mean exile. And they show the same conscious refusal to take that jump in

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the other signature uses of galut (see Isaiah 20:4 and Amos 1:5). A simple way to empirically demonstrate this hermeneutical angst among the translator-editors of the Septuagint is this: of the seventy-eight times that diaspora or a diaspora-based term is employed in the Hellenic-Jewish translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the original word that is translated is never galut.16 So, perhaps our irritation at the scolding tone of the discussions of galut and of diaspora in the Encyclopaedia Judaica is a touch too sensitive. Whatever the value for present-day Israeli state policy of trying to force a specific distinction between the terms, it is clear that such a distinction once held – at a specific period in the Jewish past and in specific sites. The sites were Egypt, especially Alexandria where the Septuagint probably was translated, and every other place in the Mediterranean Basin where Greek was one of the primary literary languages of a Jewish population. The time period was from some time in the third century bce when the Greek translation began, running to, at minimum, the end of the Second Temple era, 70 ce. Therefore, in a large set of texts we have a widely evidenced refusal of the Hellenized scholars in the Jewish community to equate diaspora with galut. In English, that is a refusal to equate emigration with exile, or exile with diaspora. The fact and force of this pattern are apt to be somewhat lost on those of us who mostly read the scriptures in one of the English-language editions, because “diaspora”-based words occur much more frequently in the Septuagint than do words based on “dispersion,” the cognate word in English Bibles. This harkens to the monumental work of William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) who, in his translation of the Pentateuch and of the New Testament, provided both the linguistic foundation and the set of literary habits upon which the “King James Bible” of 1611 was based. Thus, to take the text’s first example: Genesis 9:19 describes in Greek the worldwide dispersion of the three sons of Noah. In a luminous moment, Tyndale teaches the English language a new word: “and of them was the whole earth overspread.” The scholars who produced the Authorized Version of the early seventeenth century learned this and a good deal more from Tyndale. That is why instead of dispersion or dispersal or diaspora, one finds in the King James Bible words that are always apposite, and occasionally magnificent: “scattered abroad” is found in several places, but one also finds “spread abroad” (Genesis 10:18), “divided in the earth,” (Genesis

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10:32), “removed into all kingdoms of earth,” (Deuteronomy 28:25), and on and on. The only trouble with the classic Authorized Version of the Old Testament scriptures is that replacing the flaccid diaspora-based words with vigorous, often visually strong, English terms leads the reader into the muddling of galut and diaspora that the pre-70 ce editor-translators of the Septuagint were quite careful to avoid. (5) All these Old Testament usages may lead one to conclude that this material should have been dealt with by the scripture section of the Unregulated Words Committee (the precursor of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary); so, we will briefly note one major nonbiblical instantiation of the patterns we have observed in scripture.17 This is a compelling case, for it involves Philo of Alexandria (variant names: Philo Judaeus, Philonis Alexandrini). He is the first author in the Jewish tradition whom we can be sure we know by name. And, as Harold Bloom observes, he was the first real Jewish theologian.18 Before Philo, Yahweh was an awkward and uncanny personality; after Philo, it was possible to consider Yahweh as a concept and as an ideational principle. Philo left an extraordinary body of work. Only about a quarter of it is estimated to have survived, but even that fills thirteen volumes in the Loeb Classical Library. In fact, Philo gave posterity the largest body of work in the Judaeo-Christian tradition that can be ascribed to a single author before the late middle ages. His precise dates are unknown, but the years 20 bce and 50 ce bracket his life. He is usefully yoked with Saint Paul: they share a dual Jewish-Hellenic cultural background and they are the only religious writers in the pre-70 ce period whose works can be surely identified by author. So Philo is exactly the kind of identifiable and independent witness to late Second Temple thought that we require. Although it is almost an act of vandalism to limit our consideration of Philo to his writings that bear on the concept of diaspora, that here is our remit. If we put aside Philo’s purely philosophical work and his often helium-filled allegorizations of biblical history, there remains a strong spine of reflections on the nature of the Jewish people and their history. This was a people who, in Philo’s time, were spread throughout the Middle East. Philo knew what it was like to experience anti-Jewish attacks: during his

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lifetime, the Jewish quarter of Alexandria was sacked and synagogues and private houses were burned. He bitterly records this period of Jewish history (in Flaccus). In De Legatione, he chronicles at book length the antiSemitic predilections of the Emperor Gaius Caligula, and Philo includes his own part in an embassy of protest to the emperor. Maren Niehoff has demonstrated how, taken as a whole, Philo’s works provide a construction of Jewish identity that, while it centres on Jerusalem, is open to Jews everywhere. Philo was himself a Jew of the Diaspora, and it is not clear if he could even read Hebrew. However, he insisted strongly on ethnic differentiation between the Jews and their Gentile neighbours. He particularly disliked the Egyptians and used them as the antipole of Jewish group identity. On the other hand, Philo quite admired the Romans and he saw them as cultural affines to the Jews. Nevertheless, even they were to be kept at arm’s length in matters of ethnoreligious identity, such as intermarriage. As for the Greeks, Philo virtually nationalizes their greatest thinkers; he puts Plato high up on the slopes of Moses’s mountain but, again, a certain distance from contemporary Greeks was to be maintained.19 Given that Philo has a long view of Jewish history and that he has a broad geographic view of Jews in the ancient Middle East, what does he say about diaspora? Actually, although he uses the noun diaspora only twice and the verb form sixteen times, it is enough to tell us what the definition and the resonance of his base concept was.20 Astonishingly, Philo avoids the Babylonian Exile as a topic of reflection. Although he uses the scriptures as a plinth for most of his writings on the true character of Jewish life, he simply avoids reference to the Babylonian Exile as related either in Kings or in Chronicles. Thus, there is no chance of his conflating the connotations of galut and of diaspora. Of course this observation has to be hedged by the recognition that perhaps three-quarters of Philo’s writings are lost. That granted, the brief discussion that follows should make it clear how unlikely it is that the darkness in the meaning of galut could have infiltrated his use of diaspora. Indeed, diaspora is not all that bad a thing, according to Philo. How could it be when the principle of dispersion is part of the Almighty’s arrangement of the moral and social geography of humanity? Thus, through the divine principle of dispersion, the various nations were taken from their common Edenic origin and settled about the earth.21 The process of dispersion from the original unity of mankind is, in fact, the precondition for

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the existence of the Chosen People. Had the nations of the world not been dispersed, there could have been no separate nation of Israel as the distinct and consecrated portion of humankind.22 Philo so enjoys playing with Hellenic philosophical notions that he occasionally reverses cause and effect, somewhat to the damage of his own argument. For example, at one point he makes the arresting observation that God sometimes disperses an individual – “God hath dispersed me” are the words that Philo feels should have been spoken by Eliphaz, son of Esau, in Genesis 36:12. Philo observes that when the Almighty scatters the soul and ejects it from his presence, an unreasoning and therefore immoral passion occurs.23 In this instance, the dispersion of the Edomites (the seed of Esau) seems to have been the cause of their eventual moral emptiness. Usually, though, when diaspora and moral bankruptcy are causally related in Philo’s thought, it is because immorality necessitates punishment, and one of the potential forms of divine punishment is dispersion. Thus, the multiple incomprehensibility of human languages after the Tower of Babel incident was caused by moral failure.24 Here, physical dispersion follows cultural dispersion, and both are a divine reaction to a previous and deep human moral confusion. How does Philo avoid dealing with the Babylonian Exile? He is able to ignore it as a hideous disaster by focusing his (and our) attention on what he prefers to honour as the signal events in the history of the Chosen People, the Egyptian Captivity and the Exodus. Apparently there was little plangency for a Hellenized Jew living in Egypt in a story that saw exile in Babylon as a totally bad billet. Besides, Philo really hates the Egyptians, past and present, not the Babylonians. Therefore, the figures of Moses and of Joseph are accorded separate biographical essays, and every time Philo can take a swipe at ancient or contemporary Egyptians, he does so.25 Yet, however much Philo despises his Egyptian contemporaries, the truly hideous ancient bondage in Egypt was an experience that had already terminated. That experience was site-specific, for the scriptural passages that Philo meditates upon are too rich in detail, too precisely biographical, too anchored in specific supernatural occurrences to be repeatable. Unlike the ill-defined pain of the galut, the Egyptian bondage could not return. Ultimately, in Philo’s perspective, diaspora was part of God’s world and it evinced the double-sided nature of all Creation since the banishment of humankind from the Garden of Eden. Life outside of Eretz Israel could be

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either good or bad: bad, as in the case of the Egyptian pogroms and of Roman prejudice; but good as well, as in the Jewish enrichment of their own culture by learning from the best of others, Greeks and Romans mostly. The potential result of that cultural enrichment would be that the Jews would be uniquely religiously, morally, and intellectually endowed. For Philo, the communities of the Jewish Diaspora circled around the celestial majesty of Jerusalem – the Mother City he called it. Listen, as he explains to the Roman emperor Gaius Caligula that the political empire of Rome would benefit from being generous to the religio-cultural empire of Jerusalem: “As for the holy city, … she is also the Mother City not of one country, Judaea, but of most of the others in virtue of the colonies sent out at divers times to the neighbouring lands.” Which lands? “Egypt, Phoenicia, to the part of Syria called the Hollow and the rest as well, and the lands lying far apart: Pamphylia, Cilicia, most of Asia up to Bithynia and the corners of Pontus, similarly also into Europe: Thessaly, Boeotia, Macedonia, Aetolia, Attica, Argos, Corinth and most the best parts of Peloponnese.” Anything more? “And not only are the mainlands full of Jewish colonies, but also the most highly esteemed of the islands: Euboea, Cyprus, Crete.” And? “I say nothing of the countries beyond the Euphrates, for except for a small part they all … have Jewish inhabitants. So that if my own Home-City is granted a share of your goodwill, the benefit extends not to one city but to myriads of the others situated in every region of the inhabited world.”26 Although those lines are mostly from Philo’s imagination (the words come from a fictive letter of the Jewish tetrarch Agrippa I), it matters not. This is a truly amazing manifesto for the validity of the Jewish Diaspora as an authentic and valuable set of entities within the Covenant with the Almighty. Despite the sometimes painful aspects of the Diaspora, Philo Judaeus never confused it with exile. (6) So, the ancient Hebrew text of the Tanakh made exile (galut) so strongly superordinate over diaspora as to almost completely blot out the latter; the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the scriptures by Hellenized Jews, kept diaspora completely separate from exile (galut), and therefore diaspora operated as a concept with its own base and boundaries. Philo Judaeus, the

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founder of Jewish theology, is not known to mention the Greek equivalent of galut, but instead deals with diaspora as a condition that had both positive and negative aspects for those who experienced it. Why then are things so messy? Why is emigration and diaspora so often confused with exile? Why did the editors of the Encyclopaedia Judaica feel the need to wag their fingers at their readers and to prescribe how the concepts of exile (galut) and of diaspora should (in their particular view) be kept apart? Or, to rephrase the questions, when did the present messiness with the ideational units, diaspora and exile, become entrenched? Of course it occurred when the world was turned upside down – with the rise of Christianity. But that rise was a slower process than usually is reckoned. Indeed, until the Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, it is anachronistic to speak of Christianity as anything but one of the many branches of febrile Second Temple Judaism. “Yeshua-followers,” the “Yeshua-faith,” or “proto-Christianity” are more accurate terms than “Christianity.”27 From that earlier pre-Destruction period, there is only one Yeshua-faith writer, the Apostle Paul. But what a giant he is! Not only is he the only source of proto-Christian information that was put down in written form before 70 ce, he is the only New Testament writer whose identity we know with certainty.28 The texts that are usually referred to as the Seven Authentic Letters of Paul (in their probable chronological order, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, Galatians, and Romans) were composed between c. 46 and 55 ce. They testify to the conceptual world of one portion of the ill-defined planetary system that circled around the Jerusalem church which was dominated by Jacov, brother of the lateYeshua of Nazareth. Paul’s sector of this system was both deeply Jewish (Paul was certainly learned in several aspects of Jewish law) and also Hellenic (Paul frequently thinks in the same sort of typologies and allegories that characterize Philo). For our present purposes, the paradoxical point about the writings of Paul is that he does not employ diaspora either in noun or verb form, and yet his letters force a fundamental rethinking of the entire matter of dispersion. This, therefore, makes him the single most crucial functional link in the confusing cross-textualization of diaspora and galut, of emigration and exile, that befuddles and bedevils so many migration historians and “diaspora” scholars, right down to the present day.29 In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul obliterates the ethnoreligious distinction that is fundamental to the Hebrew scriptures’ concept of galut

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and to the idea of diaspora as used in the Septuagint: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free …” (1 Corinthians 13). Mind you, one has to have been “baptized into Christ” (Galatians 3:27), but if that has occurred, a mighty oneness characterizes the social universe: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor Free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heir according to the promise” (Galatians 3:28–29). Now, it will hardly be fresh news to most readers that the Apostle Paul is one of the figures in Christian history whom Jews have most hated down through the years. In the twentieth century, it became common for liberal Jewish scholars to accept Yeshua of Nazareth as a slightly unusual Jewish religious leader of the Second Temple era, but Paul has been another matter entirely. He has been accused (unjustly, I think) of anti-Semitism and worse, of somehow being behind the music of Richard Wagner. He is charged – rightly, I think – with instigating a take-over of Torah by the followers of Jesus-the-Christ. In using his Hellenically derived conceptual apparatus, he claims the substance of the Law (the Spirit) for the Yeshua-faith and leaves the accidents (the dry husk of orthopraxy) to the rest of the Second Temple Jewish community. Moreover, he shares this True Spirit of Torah with Gentiles who follow Yeshua. And in sharing it, he makes them, along with the Jewish adherents to the Yeshua-faith, the only true heirs of the patriarch Abraham. In one deft Hellenic swoop, he has redefined the “seed” of Abraham. Descent is no longer a matter of semen, but of the human soul. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin argue convincingly that Paul’s universalism “is not anti-Semitic or even anti-Jewish. From Paul’s perspective, the drive toward sameness was precisely to be understood as the fulfillment of Judaism.”30 Yet, idealistic as Paul’s motives may have been, his inclusive approach was possible only by embracing Yeshua of Nazareth as Jesus-theChrist. The Boyarins observe that, “anyone at all can be Jewish, [but] those who ‘call themselves Jews’ are not necessarily Jewish at all. The double reading of the sign Jew by Paul as both Signifier of unruly difference and symbol of universalism has had fateful consequences for the Jews in the Christian West. Once Paul succeeded, real Jews ended up being only a trope” (emphasis mine).31 Thus, the Apostle Paul brought Christianity to the halfway point in its smashing of the old lines of thought. (1) Now, the community of the

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Covenant with Yahweh was spiritually defined, with no genetic input, and (2) exile from the community, when it occurred, was a spiritual estrangement, not a function of geographical coordinates. It is a sign of the genius of Paul (whether malevolent or beneficent) that he had the nous to raise the matter of “Abraham’s seed” just at the time that the Second Temple Jewish community was becoming immersed in the question of what the genetic requirements were for birthright Judaism. (Converts were another matter.) This is a messy historical issue, but it is clear that in the late Second Temple period, thought was being given to redefining birthright Judaism from being something one inherited from one’s father to a new requirement that to be Jewish-by-birth meant that one had to have a Jewish mother, but not necessarily a Jewish father. Obviously, it was better to have both parents Jewish and, for priestly figures, Cohens and Levites, the requirements were very tight, but the rest was up for debate. For example, Philo Judaeus favoured the innovative “matrilineal” approach.32 Paul definitely hit a nerve. In the actual course of events, the Jewish redefinition of biological membership of the People of the Covenant did not shift decisively to the “matrilineal principle” until after the Destruction. It appears in embryo in the Mishnah and is not fully ironed out until the Bavli was closed in the late sixth century. Still, what counts for our purposes here is that the precondition for either diaspora or galut – that there be a defined community in existence – was on the edge of being shifted decisively. And after the Destruction of 70 ce, that shift was radical and it forever separated the two faiths that had once been related parties in late Second Temple Judaism: one branch became Rabbinic Judaism and adopted the Talmud’s primarily biological view of community membership; the other branch evolved into Christianity and defined community in its theology entirely in nonbiological terms.33 The problem from our present-day viewpoint is that the two faiths continued to share a common basic vocabulary, even if it soon became one shared only in translation. At minimum, both faiths referred continually back to their shared ancestral text, the documents of the ancient Yahwehfaith found in the Tanakh, and in the Septuagint. To greatly simplify, the situation became as follows. From the second century of the Common Era until the close of the Middle Ages, the Sages of Blessed Memory, as they articulated the Oral Torah and recorded it in the classic Rabbinic texts, dealt continually with exile. Usually they did so without using the term galut –

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and they never used any term derived from the Greek word diaspora. For almost all of the Sages, the physical removal of the Chosen People from their homeland was a matter of deep and unalloyed regret. For Christians, however, things were more ambiguous: (1) at one semantic extreme, diaspora was a good thing, for the word sometimes referred to the expansion of Christianity into more and more places; (2) at the opposite end of the scale, diaspora was used to refer to the justifiable punishment of the Jews. Here diaspora and exile (galut) were intertwined in Christian usage, for physical dispersion of the Jews was said to be the result of their already being in spiritual exile from the Almighty. And between the extremes were two more usages: (3) reference to the physical dispersion of the Christian community as a result of the persecution that occurred in the second and third centuries; and (4) the idea that if Christians turn from the faith, they could be exiled from God, a concept that did not involve physical dislocation, but was spiritual in character. These are not unintelligent ideas, certainly, but they overlap and therefore the signifier is inevitably ambiguous. (7) None of the potential problems with diaspora and galut needed to bleed into the present-day disciplines of history and the social sciences, but they did. This occurred, first, because what is vaguely referred to as the “humanistic revolution” yielded the rediscovery and eventual translation into the vernacular of the writings of many of the ancient classical and patristic authors. Philo of Alexandria, for example, was available in English in the seventeenth century. So too was Eusebius, third-and fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, the first historian of the Christian church. His writings, which were especially popular, survived virtually intact.34 As I mentioned earlier, in the nineteenth century, diaspora evolved into a naturalized English word through its importation from Germany into English language biblical studies undertaken by Christian (mostly Protestant) scholars. In the cultural equivalent of welder’s blowback, many (not all) of the Christian-based interpretations and usages of the concept of diaspora returned to influence Jewish studies. The precondition for this retro-invasion was the complex cultural phenomenon usually called the Jewish Enlightenment. The iconic figure in this process was Moses

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Mendelssohn (1729–86), an heroic polymath who, as Paul Johnson mischievously observed, “laid no claim to a specific Jewish stake in the Enlightenment; he simply wanted to enjoy it.”35 Mendelssohn and his colleagues brought Jewish culture into the German mainstream (he produced in German an up-to-date translation of the Pentateuch) and he introduced aspects of European high culture into the cultural ghetto of middle-class German Jewry, all the while fighting against the anti-Semitism of his time. The form of “liberal Judaism” (the term is descriptive and does not refer to the Jewish denomination of that name) that he and his successors developed had little impact on the shtetl Rabbinism of the Pale of Settlement, but its cumulative effect from the later eighteenth century onwards meant that in the cultural hubs of Europe, educated and still-observant Jews participated in front-edge cultural developments. To take the course of events into the twentieth century, as the academic field of religious studies broke away from Christian apologetics, Jewish scholars were intimately involved: first in “Old Testament” studies, but soon in scholarship on the New Testament and in interpretations of the kaleidoscope of religious material produced in the late Second Temple era. Inevitably, the word diaspora – reintroduced into Jewish scholarly vocabulary after an absence of a millennium-and-a-half – found its way into the political and social conversation of the laity, stimulating, within the Jewish community, fierce debates about the nature of diaspora, which, in many ways, muddied the waters even more than Christian usage had done: Was there a real difference between exile (galut) and diaspora? (Most persons in the Jewish Diaspora would have said no, especially because the Holocaust occurred in a time period which the purists labelled as being mere diaspora, not heroic galut); Was the Jewish Diaspora ever a Good Thing? (Liberal American Jews tended to say yes.) Was the Jewish Diaspora the only possible diaspora, or could the concept be shared with other religious or ethnic or national groups? And, if the concept was to be shared with other groups, was there a requirement that a certain degree of victimization was necessary before one was granted admission to the club? The sad truth is that by the later decades of the twentieth century, Jewish commentators on diaspora were as inconsistent in its employment and as indeterminate in its definition as when the term was used by non-Jews.36 Like so many words that become more and more fashionable, mushiness in meaning was a prerequisite for popularity.

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Why, then, would any student of human behaviour employ the term diaspora save for the dubious pleasure of riding the same crowded wave as a lot of other sharp-elbowed people? Granted, a term that is argued about has some sensible attraction: at least the dialectic might spark off a conversation that metamorphoses into rigour, empathy, narrative, good things like that. Yet, that is a bit optimistic. One suspects that when, in the later twentieth century, diaspora was grabbed at by so many scholars in a wide range of disciplines, their choice was not a positive embracing of diaspora so much as their being dead sick of the old and lifeless alternatives. Take the field of Irish studies. Here is a personal example, one that is presented in the form of a palinode, for I went too far. In 1998 in my inaugural lecture as Beamish Research Professor of Migration Studies in the Institute for Irish Studies, the University of Liverpool, I employed the following main title: “Let’s Stop Talking about Irish Emigration.”37 This was a response to a very specific Irish situation, one in which it was almost impossible to discuss emigration without immediately invoking the ochoneochone threnody of alleged Irish exile. (In the vocabulary of our present discussion: when one started to talk about Irish diaspora, most responses were couched in the vocabulary of galut.) In my view at the time, emigration as a concept in the analysis of Irish history was virtually mined-out. Not that it was invalid as a descriptive reference, but in the Irish historical literature, emigration as a higher-level concept had become almost useless because it was used both to denominate a set of events (a set of effects in other words) and also the cause of those events. “Emigration” had become a going-nowhere omnibus construct. A monumentally unsuccessful Irish government commission of the late 1940s and early 1950s had tried to define past emigration trends and to suggest future policies, and the emotionladen nature of the topic had precluded both clear historical analysis and cogent policy alternatives.38 Here the point is that “emigration” was not a topic that either politicians or historians could employ coolly and rationally – the less so because Irish emigration was overwhelmingly defined on a sectarian level and this at a time when the Troubles were still in train. None of my observations at that time were inaccurate, but what I failed to do was to see how “emigration” could be cleansed and rehabilitated by the cumulative effect of a new wave of scholarship by persons such as David Fitzpatrick, Enda Delaney, Donald MacRaild, David Wilson, Liam Kennedy, and others.

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Still, I managed to employ a decent subtitle – “Some Constructive Alternatives” – and here I had a chance to preach the gospel of diaspora. I had been hawking that idea around Irish studies for a decade, and it was not because the term itself was so convincing, or robust, or fecund, although potentially it has those virtues. Instead, “diaspora” was chiefly attractive because it permitted escape from the most chaffing spancel of “Irish emigration,” namely, the cultural imperialism of the United States of America. Overwhelmingly, the story of “Irish emigration” has been centred on a voyage by ship, usually with Liverpool on one side and New York, Boston, or Philadelphia on the American side: a journey as predetermined as a train ride. In fact, Irish people of all sorts (Catholics and Protestants, well-off, poor) migrated all over the world, and mostly to spots that were, or had once been, parts of the English empire. The histories written under the American imperium kept this multiplicity of migration outcomes as far offstage as possible. So, “diaspora” it was, not chiefly because of its inherent virtues, but because the old alternative – Irish emigration – seemed at the time to be lifeless and not a little fly-blown.39 Now, it would be both unfair and inaccurate to suggest that the strong rush to employ “diaspora” that occurred in the 1990s and thereafter has been solely a reaction to the flaccidity of the existing ways of talking about complex patterns of human migration. Indeed, despite its near ubiquity in studies of antiquity and in theological monographs, as an item of secular academic fashion, diaspora took off quite late. For the secular academy of the English-speaking world, one (of several) foundation moments was John A. Armstrong’s “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas” in The American Political Science Review (June 1976).40 His nimble essay (it well repays reading today) has the advantage of having become part of a documentable causal chain that flows right into the present cascade of diaspora studies. Armstrong’s work was referenced several times by the authors who, in 1986, contributed to Gabriel Sheffer’s Modern Diasporas in International Politics.41 And, in turn, Sheffer’s collection was one of the several threads that was woven together by Kachig Tölölyan when he founded the journal Diaspora in 1991. A related, and ultimately contributory, chain of secular scholarship introduced diaspora from the viewpoint of what was then called Black Studies, a field that had much more force within the academy than did the fragmented subspecialties that initially were drawn into diaspora studies. The first book

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to use the term “African diaspora” in its title was published in 1976. The editors of that volume, Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg, noted: The application of the Greek word for dispersion, diaspora, to this process of Jewish migration from their homeland into all parts of the world not only created a term which could be applied to any other substantial and significant groups of migrants, but also provided a concept which could be used to interpret the experiences (often very bitter experiences) of other peoples who had been driven out of their native countries by forces similar to those which had dispersed the Jews: in particular, slavery and imperialism.42 This idea, that there were parallels between the Jews and Black Africans had been suggested, Kilson and Rotberg noted, as early as 1802 by the English author, William Movor, in a volume entitled, The History of the Dispersion of the Jews, of Modern Egypt, and of the other African Nations and had been taken up several times during the nineteenth century by writers on Africa.43 It was only during the 1960s, however, that the word “diaspora” began to enter the working vocabulary of Africanists and of historians of Black history worldwide. At the International Congress of African Historians, held at University College, Dar-es-Salaam in 1965, Joseph E. Harris and George Shepperson each gave papers on various aspects of the African diaspora. Shepperson’s “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora” was especially important, for it attempted simultaneously to indicate the breadth of the topic and to impose a significant limitation. The breadth came from an estimate Shepperson cited for the year 1946: that in the western hemisphere alone there were forty-one million people of African descent. The limitation was this: “it must be emphasized that not all migration from Africa comes within the bounds of the concept of the African diaspora which is the study of a series of reactions to coercion, to the imposition of the economic and political rule of alien peoples in Africa, to slavery and imperialism.”44 That limitation introduced a major problem into the study of the African diaspora and, proleptically, into all diaspora studies: should these discussions involve only the study of those persons, and their descendants, who were forcibly moved from their homeland? Work done in the 1970s and early 1980s emphasized the duality of the concept when applied to the

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African diaspora and, though it focused overwhelmingly on forced migration and its results, it left open the theoretical possibility of nonforced voluntary migration being of some consequence.45 (The irony at this point was that just at the time Israeli authorities were trying to define the Jewish Diaspora as being entirely voluntary, most Africanists were using the term to refer to involuntary dispersion.) In global African studies, things changed sharply in the late 1980s, with the introduction of a strong feminist perspective46 and with the increasing recognition of the magnitude of preslavery mobility of the African population and of the degree of voluntary migration since slave times. According to Aubrey Bonnett and G. Llewellyn Watson, “a balanced appreciation of the [African] Diaspora must note that many Africans were dispersed globally by choice, through adventure, long before Columbus went to the New World and inaugurated the trade in human cargo.”47 And an immense amount of voluntary migration by Africans and persons of African descent had occurred since the ending of most forms of slavery. As Roy BryceLaporte forcibly argued, “With regard to Blacks, the term ‘diaspora’ too often operates against the background of a yet pervasive but incorrect presentday orientation which presents them as a dominated, confined and immobile people in closed, segregated conditions. But, in fact, an important and understudied aspect of the Black Experience is the historical and ongoing mobility of its people, which indeed carries us back to the very genesis.”48 If the concept of diaspora could be applied to the dispersal, both voluntary and involuntary, of the African peoples, it could also be employed to white groups, at least those whose cultural history included an epochal tragedy comparable to slavery. Thus, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 becomes a fulcrum upon which the idea of an Armenian diaspora pivots. The exact extent of the displacement and slaughter of the Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman Empire is a matter of some controversy, but in the two decades before World War I perhaps 200,000 Armenians were killed and, beginning in the spring of 1915, as many as a million were killed, deported, or scattered. The United States and Canada became the chief new homelands, but Armenians and their descendants are found all over the Middle East and Europe, as well as sub-Saharan Africa. The Armenians have maintained a strong cultural identity. As one generation has folded into another and yet another, the single motif that more than any other elicits loyalty is the genocide of 1915.49 Scholars who belonged to

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the Armenian community formed a third leading strand in the evolution of diaspora studies. Not accidentally, the journal, Diaspora, was founded with the aid of Armenian philanthropy. That diaspora had become one of the most fashionable concepts within the scholarly academy in the 1990s was confirmed by the 1995 meeting in Montreal of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. There, the world’s leading historians were asked to focus their attention upon three major topics. These were denominated as being the most important items for historians of the world to address for the start of the twenty-first century: Peoples and State-Forms; Gender; and Peoples in Diaspora.50 And in an echo of affirmation, the American Historical Association in 1999 had “Diasporas and Migrations in History” as its primary theme. Springtime for diaspora, apparently. The only difficulty is that suddenly almost every ethnic group, tribe, and religious community is being described as a diaspora. Certainly any construct that covers in a single breath the overseas Chinese and the underground Cornish, the Coptic Church and the Hutterites, the descendants of African slaves, and the princely clan of the Rothschilds has very porous borders indeed. At an epistemological level that problem is almost certainly insurmountable, for it involves incompatibilities of group identities that at best are articulated as ideology or theology; and at worst as wagon circling, self-reference, and intolerance. However, as a practical tool, not much different than a good circular saw or a laser level for a carpenter, diaspora has utility for historians. That practical usefulness is discussed in the succeeding chapter.

PART ONE

Concept

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1

What and Where Is Diaspora?: Definitions, Analytical Boundaries, and Research Agendas William Safran

“Diaspora” has become an increasingly trendy concept throughout the academic world. This is not surprising, given the incessant movement of peoples from one country to another for a variety of reasons. Since the end of World War II there have been so many population shifts that millions of people came to live in countries other than where they were born. Although the settlement of most of these migrants in hostlands appears to be permanent, they cannot simply be regarded as immigrants. Their presence is often so massive and their refusal to assimilate completely into their hostland society so palpable that they challenge traditional notions of national identity, citizenship, and national sovereignty. This development has called into question the relevance of the nationstate, or, more exactly, the congruence of nation and state, and created a situation where the societies of most countries are becoming multiethnic and multicultural. Minority populations were once referred to as refugees, immigrants, expatriates, asylum seekers, or guest workers. These classifications seemed to be sufficient, and help to explain the fact that most specialists on nationalism, ethnicity, and migration did not deal with diaspora as a distinct category, at least until recently. As a political scientist, I note that my discipline discovered ethnic groups after anthropologists and sociologists had done so, and diasporas much later.1 The reason for this omission is the fact that the nation-state was the basic unit of analysis in political science, and this made it difficult to accept the idea of nations outside of states. This applied in particular to the United

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States and France – the former because diasporas did not mobilize for separatism or institutional recognition; and the latter because the Jacobin republican dogma did not make room for diasporas or any other ethnic groups as intermediaries between the individual and the state. Moreover, both countries were committed to the melting pot.2

attempts at definition If one wishes to create some order in the discussion of diaspora, one must begin by asking what sort of ethnic or religious communities it should refer to that distinguishes them from mere immigrants. There is considerable agreement about the diasporic character of many displaced people – among them Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Cubans, and Palestinians. When we classify them as diasporas, we do so on the grounds that they have certain commonalities. In an article written more than two decades ago, using the Jewish case as a prototype along with the Armenian, Greek, and a few other cases, I tried to promote a comparative political science approach to the study of diaspora by positing an analytical framework for the concept.3 Briefly summarized, this prototype included the following features: an ethnic community physically dispersed from an original homeland to various countries and continuing to preserve its particular identity; collective memories or visions of the homeland; a troubled relationship with the hostland; the idealization of the homeland and a commitment to its maintenance or restoration; and a continuous material or sentimental relationship with, including the notion, or myth, of eventual return. The article – amended by Robin Cohen and James Clifford4 – generated a stream of responses. Some critics considered my paradigm too historical; others, too Jewish;5 and still others, too circumscribed. Some misread my ideal-type as an ideal rather than an analytic tool; to others it suggested an “absolute power of the homeland and its role in shaping diasporic subjectivity.”6 My model was particularly problematic for those who felt that “their” people were not given enough, if any, space. I failed to include Magyars in Romania in this category; and I devoted insufficient attention to the Indian diaspora.7 I did not make a special case for AfricanAmericans. Others complained that existing definitions and taxonomies were too narrow. Paul Gilroy suggested that the focus on homelands was

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exaggerated because one’s descent has relatively little importance.8 Floya Anthias argued that most scholars on diaspora focused too much on the ethnic element and on national identity while neglecting class, race, and gender.9 For Anthias, diaspora may be a heuristic concept, a descriptive typological tool, and a societal process that “may also denote a social condition, entailing a form of consciousness, which is particularly compatible with postmodernity and globalization.”10 But as a concept, diaspora has been inadequate because it did not include enough elements; it failed to deal properly with a variety of conditions, such as minority status, discrimination, social exclusion, hate, and so on. Both James Clifford and Kim Butler objected to reducing diaspora to an ethnic label, but they, too, complained about the undisciplined use of the term.11 The concept of diaspora had become a “kind of mantra,” overused and undertheorized.12 Rogers Brubaker referred to “the ‘diaspora’ of diaspora, a dispersion of the meanings of the term.”13 Khachig Tölölyan, the editor of Diaspora, himself warned against an uncontrolled conflation of the concept. In 1996 he concluded that the term was becoming “a promiscuously capacious category.”14 Most recently, in an effort to tighten its semantic boundaries, Tölölyan stated the following: “All diasporic groups are also ethnic communities, but not all ethnic communities are diasporas ... When strictly defined, diasporas are a specific subset of ethnic minorities. The defining characteristics of diasporas are, first, a culture and a collective identity that preserves elements of the homeland’s language, or religious, social, and cultural practice, either intact or, as time passes, in mixed bicultural forms.”15 Tölölyan pleads guilty to “terminological fussiness;” yet he retains an openended view of diaspora and “diasporicity,” which enables him to deal with all sorts of social, behavioural, and attitudinal phenomena under the rubric of diaspora. This is understandable, given the popularity of the concept. Tölölyan is joined by many others, who have complained that there is too much conceptual stretching and not enough theory. In the eyes of Donald Akenson, diaspora has degenerated into a “massive linguistic weed” 16 which continues to be irrigated by those who proclaim that “we want to be diasporans, too.” Diaspora represents autonomy and cosmopolitanism and it liberates individuals from the essentialism of the nation. To Eastern European Jews, diaspora was a pathological form of existence; they spoke of it as galut, “exile,” or in Yiddish, as goles; and the

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Yiddish proverb referred to an interminable and undesirable situation as lang vi der goles, “as long as exile.” It was associated with insecurity, powerlessness, and neurosis. Today, however, it has a more neutral and even positive connotation for many people.

modernity and postmodernity Political scientists, sociologists, and historians, for whom reality is grounded in concrete situations, generally deal with several types of diasporic belonging: (1) political – exemplified by dual citizenship; (2) social – Gemeinschaft among persons of common origin; (3) cultural – sharing a legacy; and (4) economic – the middleman and labor functions. Most observers have defined diaspora variously in terms of legal status, physical displacement, and distance from a “home” country, the nature of relations with it, and/or a collective consciousness of being different from the hostland majority due to differences in origin. Locating one’s origin outside of one’s country of residence, however, is not ipso facto being in diaspora for, if one goes back far enough, most people have ancestors who had come from somewhere else. Consciousness of origin clearly exists among people who stand out because of their religion, language, and other markers of difference, although not all transplanted minorities have made the same effort at preserving such markers. Earlier immigrants to the United States were intent upon assimilation, having rejected the traditionalism and poverty of the Old Country and having been coopted by the opportunities of the New World. More recent immigrants have been more interested in maintaining their cultural and communal identities, once they come to realize the limitations in the hostland, its social problems and superficialities, and to experience a growing anomie resulting from the coldness of human relations in postindustrial society. If such relationships can be called “modern,” then the reaction to them, and hence the persistence of diasporic identities, can be labeled “postmodern.” It is not always clear what is meant by postmodernity: to some, it refers to premodern, i.e., traditional, attitudes; to others, it is a rejection of certain aspects of modernity, such as functional social relationships; to still others it is a quest for community or kinship ties, a return to familialascriptive models of society, and a general discontent with the consequences

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of globalization. Postmodernity is also viewed as a rejection of a rational (i.e., cost-benefit) approach to behaviour. Postmodernists argue that diaspora connotes the feeling of “otherness,” which may be based on factors besides migration. It defines a sense of not truly belonging, because one’s race, religion, language, or way of life is at variance with that of the majority population, and therefore not congruent with membership in the dominant political community. This absence of congruence, which accentuates the diasporic identity of minorities, was expressed by the Germans who distinguished between Staatsangehörigkeit, “nationality,” based on political criteria, and Volkszugehörigkeit, “ethnicity,” based on “organic” criteria and, under the Nazis, racial criteria. Theoretically, that distinction does not exist in republican France, where, according to Jacobin dogma, the two kinds of memberships are fused. Nevertheless, many French people continue to refer to Jews, Muslims, and various more “visible” minorities in terms of their origins, but not to Catholics. The lack of “belongingness” is expressed in various ways: referring to individuals by their color; typecasting them by their accents – or, as former President Jacques Chirac once did, in terms of “odours and noises”; and in holding members of minority groups responsible for the policies of their countries of origin. This produces a “reactive ethnicity” and revivifies the notion of a homeland to which one really belongs. This was seen in the transformation of assimilated German Jews into Zionists during the Hitler regime, and the self-identification of French people of African origin, including Franco-Caribbeans, as “nous, les blacks.” It is also seen in the “re-Sinification” of the Chinese community in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe in response to prejudice and exclusion. This has been particularly true of the older generation that hailed from Indonesia, where the expression of Chinese cultural identity had been forbidden.17 In short, otherness has often been associated with alienation, discrimination, marginalization, and deracination. More recently, however, otherness has acquired a more favourable meaning, which has spilled over into the diaspora of the literary imagination. That imagination transports a writer “elsewhere” – to a diaspora evoked by the view of a homeland as utopia. To some, such as Homi Bhabha and André Aciman,18 diaspora is a complex identity associated with desirable multicultural experiences; to others, it is a social form that

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provides its members with a type of socio-psychological autonomy vis-àvis their surroundings. Brian Axel and Vijay Mishra have both written about the “diasporic imaginary.” While Axel has held the diaspora responsible for conjuring up a homeland,19 Mishra has dealt with it as a literary treatment of the hyphenated identity of an expatriated group in terms of travel and translation. These theorists do not depend on homeland ethnosymbols or reconstituted homeland institutions; they need only their imaginations. This approach is found especially among those for whom subjective definitions are more important than those based on objective criteria. According to Mishra, the “diasporic imaginary” is “the state of identification in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing ‘what we would like to be.’” Diaspora, for him, is a product of fantasy, “a joy, a pleasure around which antimiscegenation narratives of homeland are constructed.”20 For these observers, diaspora is not dystopia. Rather, they view the diasporic condition as “transcendental, sexy, glamorous, interesting,” “fashionable in intellectual discourse,”21 “a preferred psychic positioning,” and “a form of ‘transcendental homelessness.”22 These characterizations may apply to a cosmopolitan immigrant intellectual who can opt for a post at Oxford or in the Ivy League, but not to the majority of ethnic or religious minorities who have been expelled and have come penniless to an unstable and not always welcoming hostland. This approach to diaspora is especially prevalent among cultural theorists, for whom diasporic identity has less to do with a community’s location outside of the homeland than with particularism, marginality, and the precariousness of a community’s condition. Others have gone further by defining diaspora as “otherness.” Such a definition has been characteristic of the postmodern approach, according to which, “complex transformations, questions, and problems deemed to be constitutive of the present are not adequately articulated in prevailing forms of theory and analysis” because they are reflections of the hegemonic culture.23 In this approach, diaspora is not an unchallenged factual condition; rather, it is as much a product of the imagination as is Benedict Anderson’s national community. In short, diasporicity is based, not on empirical elements understood (according to the criteria of modern social science) crossnationally, cross-culturally, and intersubjectively, but on personal narratives and discourses.24 To these scholars, diaspora must revolve, not around the

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fate of a community, but around the personal experiences of individuals that relate in one way or another to a self-placement outside of their country of residence.25 Diaspora is revealed in autobiographies of individuals who may not be quite comfortable where they are. These narratives, which are not always distinguishable from anecdotes, constitute the ultimate diasporic imaginary, often mixing descriptions of a pampered childhood and youth with travels to exotic places.26 It is clear that diaspora, once an object of suspicion, has become one of fascination.27 Whereas once diaspora was a historically and politically loaded concept, today it is a “catch-all” term, embracing various categories of people who are outside of the prevailing norm in terms of appearances, lifestyle, and social and political behaviour. For example, there have been references to the Queer diaspora28 and the Katrina diaspora, i.e., constituting those who, in the face of disaster, moved from New Orleans to Texas and other places in the United States. Recently a French politician referred to the electorate scattered in various directions between the right and the left as “the centrist diaspora.” In the above usages, two elements of diaspora traditionally associated with the concept are seemingly dispensed with: ethnicity and transborder migration. This is where transnationalism has entered the picture. Nina GlickSchiller and Peggy Levitt have put everything involving a relationship across borders under the rubric of “transnationalism.”29 This means moving beyond “the container theory of society” and beyond national, territorial, ethnic, and political boundaries, and dealing with a variety of transnational social fields (presumably including ethnically mixed marriages and international business relations). The only thing that seems to be left out of this concept is tourism or buying goods produced in other countries. Nina Glick-Schiller et al. have argued that transmigrants are different from ordinary immigrants because “their daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nationstate.”30 This may apply to jet-set academics, but not usually to diasporas; nor does it apply to individuals engaged in multinational corporations or international financial transactions. The former activities tend to be managed by indigenous agents, while the latter are not usually associated with diasporas because the movement of capital is seldom followed by the movement of its owners, and fiscal havens such as Luxembourg and the Cayman

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Islands are not noted as hostlands of oppressed people. The daily lives of most diasporans are focused on their hostland abode. They do not depend on international connections, which are contingent, often episodic, and sometimes imaginary, and their public identities are molded by the sociopolitical context of their host country. If the homeland connections are disrupted, diasporas do not necessarily cease to exist. Diasporic orientations persist over generations, although this is not true of many transnational ones. Moreover, the foci of transnational activities are not always “homelands.” And not all social categories that engage in such activities are ipso facto diasporas, e.g., staffs of embassies and consulates, armies of occupation, or foreign branches of business enterprises, even if they are accompanied by their families and organize as social groups. Although all of them manifest what have been referred to as three major elements of diaspora: “mobility, connectivity, and communication in a globalized world,”31 they live in an extra-territorial institutional setting that is only physically located abroad. Their communities do not become independent centers of cultural creation, and their expatriation is temporary. A fortiori, diasporicity does not quite apply to individual persons, such as visiting academics, sex workers, or au pair girls who have gone abroad for specific assignments. Conversely, not all diasporas engage in transnational activities on a regular basis.32 Moreover, not all ethnic minorities are diasporas. For example, the Basques and Galicians in Spain and the Bretons in France are indigenous groups, although one may argue that their Celtic ancestors had come from somewhere else and that they maintain selective relationships with Celts in other countries. Specifically, a diasporan must have some orientation, memory, nostalgia, cultural connection, or family ties to an anterior homeland or a continuing interest in it. By these criteria, there is no “Mayflower” diaspora; the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (wasp) settlers in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, who still constitute the plurality, if not majority, of the population in these countries, do not have diasporic identities. Diaspora is not limited to ethnic communities whose members have fled, or have been expelled, from their home countries and whose expatriation is marked by collective traumas such as famine, political persecution, or ethnic cleansing. Diaspora may also include communities that had expatriated themselves for reasons of economic improvement, political ambi-

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tion, cultural self-development, or adventure. If we extend the label of diaspora automatically to this latter group, it would embrace American descendants of German, Scottish, English, and Swedish immigrants who, unlike Jews, Armenians, or Chinese, had not been subjected to acute danger, oppression, or legal disabilities, and who have lost all connection with, or interest in, their forebears’ native lands. Such an expansive and permissive use of the term is based on a purely physical denotation of dispersal or change of locality. In its most liberal application, it would mean that any American family that moves from a familiar village in the South to an unfamiliar New England town because of job opportunities would find itself in a Yankee diaspora. Given the fact that the ancestors of most people have at one time moved from one country, province, or city to another, the term would then cover the larger part of humanity. A well-known scholar has distinguished between “homeland societies” and “immigrant diasporas.”33 Are there diasporas not based on immigrant stock? And are all immigrants diasporans? Does the designation apply to the Germans who settled several centuries ago in Bergen, Norway as agents of the Hanseatic League? They spoke German and followed German social, religious, and cultural patterns, but it is not clear to what extent they were oriented to their native land or thought of returning to it, especially since they enjoyed extraterritorial privileges. (Indeed, in the “prenational” situation that prevailed before the seventeenth century, the Hanseatic League had no precise geographical homeland.) Do the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of the Huguenots in South Africa regard themselves as a diaspora today? Are the Scots and the English who settled in Northern Ireland a diaspora, or do they consider themselves inhabitants of one of several provinces of the United Kingdom? Does the concept apply to the descendants of Irish or English settlers in North America; the French settlers in Canada, who did not inherit the Jacobin tradition of the nation-state; the English settlers in Australia, including those whose nostalgia for England (expressed in loyalty to the monarchy) has been rapidly disappearing? Diaspora has to do with a social condition or an identity, but is that enough? A mere proclamation of identity – as for example, that of an American saying, “I’m Irish,” “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m Italian” – has little or no meaning unless it reflects a way of thinking, a feeling of being ethnically different and, occasionally, patterns of behaviour that fall outside of the norms

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of society at large. Is the staging of a public event – e.g., a Saint Patrick’s or Columbus Day parade or the annual unfurling of the Norwegian flag in a Minnesotan community34 – a sufficient expression of a cultural symbol to tie an ethnic community to the home country? Is the retention of certain culinary preferences a meaningful marker of ethnocultural specificity, especially when such preferences are becoming globalized? Italians and Jews also participate in the Saint Patrick’s Day parades in New York, and Italian, French, and Chinese food is eaten by non-Italians, non-French, and nonChinese as well. As the advertising billboards in New York proclaimed under the portrait of a Native American: “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Rye Bread.” There must be a time constraint for the retention of diasporic identity. The collective historical memory or myth on which a homeland focus is based may fade to such an extent that the diasporic consciousness may disappear. This may occur for a number of reasons, among them the lapse of homeland culture, language, or religion; the thinning out or fragmentation of the diasporic community; the lack of cultural reinforcement by the homeland or by newcomers from that homeland; the growth of exogamic marriage; an increasingly negative image of the homeland; or the loss of meaning of the homeland narrative. It is doubtful whether the descendants of Polish immigrants to Chicago still have a clear, if any, picture of the glories of the Jagiellonian monarchy, the traumas of failed rebellions against Czarist oppression, or any other “usable past.”35 It is also doubtful whether the majority of Americans of Polish descent define their Roman Catholicism in such Polish terms as, for example, the image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa (unlike most Poles in their homeland, who equate their national identity with Catholicism). It is equally doubtful whether the Hmong of Southeast Asia, who have been widely dispersed in the United States, can, in the long run, maintain a diasporic collective identity if their descendants forget their parents’ language; have neither the desire nor a realistic possibility of returning to their homeland; if they integrate successfully into American economic and social life; have little or no institutional backup for their ethnic identity; and have neither a homeland nor a hostland elite that provides a cultural source or political support for a continuing diasporic consciousness.

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homeland influences, hostland pressures, and crucial events To what extent is the diasporic character of an expatriate ethnic minority influenced by the involvement of the home country? There is no doubt that the sense of difference of a minority in relation to the majority of the host society is buttressed by the educational, cultural, or religious services provided by the home country. This applies to the emissaries sent by Israel to selected cities in the United States, who try to encourage an interest in their country among young Jews; and it applies equally to the Koranic teachers sent by Algeria and Egypt to France. In neither case do these efforts motivate appreciable numbers to return “home.” However, it is felt by some that the Koranic teachings may serve to instill in children Islamic fundamentalist values not in consonance with the French republican norms of pluralism, gender equality, laïcité, and the primacy of civil law. In addition, the homeland may serve as an articulator of selected diasporic concerns. This is reflected in Israel’s fight against global anti-Semitism; in Turkey’s role as protector of its workers in diaspora; and in Russia’s position as guarantor of the safety of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and the Baltic countries. One of the recent instances of homeland intervention in diasporas is the decision of the Hungarian government to grant social security benefits to Magyars living in Romania, a policy that either could be interpreted as a gesture of ethnic solidarity or as a form of political pressure falling short of encouraging irredentism. There are other examples of homeland pressure on external ethnonational kinfolk. The Nazi regime attempted (with limited success) to encourage Americans of German descent to lobby the government of the United States to adopt a pro-Hitler policy; and in the mid-1960s, President Charles de Gaulle tried to foment diasporic sentiments among the francophones in Quebec. Homeland-diaspora traffic is not one-directional. There may be a reverse cultural relationship in the form of diasporic cultural and political influences on the home country to the extent that the diaspora’s impact on the homeland may extend to its very existence as a polity. Brian Axel’s contention that the Sikh “diaspora has produced the homeland” is hyperbole,36 and cannot be applied to the Chinese, Ethiopian, and Polish homelands, which preceded their diasporas as sovereign states. Nor should Lord

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Acton’s remark that “exile is the nursery of nationality” be taken literally.37 Nevertheless, Armenian and Sikh diasporas proclaimed the political independence of their homelands from abroad,38 and the groundwork of the institutions of a future Jewish state was laid in Europe. And although the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamsala, India, through its government-in-exile, is unlikely to be successful in creating an independent Tibet, it has at least recreated the nucleus of a Tibetan nation.39 Numerous other examples exist. At the end of World War I, the Czech and Polish diasporas acted as midwives for the restoration of the independence of their homelands. After World War II, the Jewish Diaspora in the United States was a powerful force for the creation of the state of Israel, and it continues to act on behalf of its security and economic development. During the Cold War, various East-Central European diasporas in the West pressured their hostland governments to take a tough stance in favor of their communized homelands and against any accommodation with the Soviet Union. Members of the Croatian diaspora in Germany lobbied with their hostland government to encourage Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia; and members of the Serbian diaspora protested against the nato bombing of Yugoslav targets. The Armenian diaspora succeeded in getting several hostlands in the West (most recently in France) to acknowledge the Ottoman genocide. Exiled Iranians in the United States have been denouncing Islamic fundamentalism and promoting women’s rights in their homeland,40 while the Association of Tamils of Sri Lanka in the United States fought for an independent Tamil homeland. Tamils in India helped their ethnic kin in Sri Lanka; and the Tamil diaspora in Canada sent food to the Tamil Tigers. Expatriate Afghanis in the United States have shown pride at the sight of their flag at the embassy of the post-Taliban Afghan government. They have been helping Afghanistan to build a modern democratic state (some by returning to their native land) and have demonstrated their identification with their homeland by keeping their dual citizenship.41 The Armenian Assembly of America has been lobbying the United States Congress for earmarked assistance. The assembly has also provided philanthropic contributions and inaugurated a tree-planting project in the homeland. Members of the Kosovar diaspora in Germany and Switzerland have been charged with the “moral obligation” to give a portion of their income to help Kosovar Albanians.42

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Not all such interventions have been successful, and some have been opposed by hostland governments, especially if they do not accord with the national interests of the hostland. For example, various attempts by the Kurdish diaspora to protect Kurdish minorities in Turkey and Iraq have met with limited success, as have their protests against the arrest of Abdullah Öcalan. Much the same has been true of attempts by the Greek diaspora to lobby in favor of Greek interests in Cyprus and of Irish American lobbying in favor of the Irish Republican Army. The impact of diasporas on their homelands is primarily economic – as it must be in most cases, since the origin of most diasporas can be traced to the poverty that impelled them to leave, and the fact that established diasporas are often better off than their fellow ethnics in the homeland. Diasporic activity often reflect its own ideas of what the homeland should be or should do, and this often puts it in conflict with the homeland. This applies to the defense of Kemalist secularism by Turks in Berlin; the fight against the authoritarian government in Addis Ababa by the Ethiopian diaspora in the United States; and the opposition to the government in Yerevan by the Armenian diaspora in France. The concerns of homelands often diverge from those of their diasporas. For the Armenian diaspora, the memory of genocide counts heavily, whereas homeland Armenians are more concerned with the loss of lands to Turkey and Azerbaijan. Jews in the diaspora are concerned primarily with sociopolitical equality and the threat of anti-Semitism, while Israelis are worried more about physical security and the threats posed by their neighbors to their independence.43 Diasporas experience much greater difficulty in their attempts to exert nonmaterial influence on their homelands. Many Third World countries, in particular autocratic ones, are likely to resist efforts by their diasporas in modern Western democracies to export unwelcome ideas, such as democracy, gender equality, pluralism, and the supremacy of civil over religious law. For instance, the Israeli rabbinate complains that varieties of the nonOrthodox Judaism of the diaspora are being imported by Israel to the detriment of Jewish unity, while members of the Islamic establishment in North African countries complain that western notions of religion are corrupting the thinking of Muslims in those countries. At the same time, diasporas may function as cultural reservoirs. It is often the diaspora that preserves national values – unpolluted by the ideological

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overlays of an autocratic homeland regime – better than the homeland. This, however, is the case only if the diaspora is free to express these values, or if the hostland government encourages it to do so. Thus the exile literature produced by diaspora intellectuals and the exile religion maintained by diaspora clerics have served to preserve and perpetuate aspects of traditional cultures that could not be pursued effectively in the homeland itself – such as non-Nazi German and non-Communist Russian literature, Tibetan religion, and Chinese Confucianism – for eventual reimportation into the homeland by returnees. Some of these imports are welcomed by the homeland, others are not. The importation of diasporic patterns has been particularly remarkable with respect to Israel in terms of forms of religion, lifestyle, cuisine, and aspects of diasporic political culture.44 Among the reimports are numerous Hebrew back formations via the Yiddish language, for example, a classical Hebrew word incorporated into Yiddish and reintroduced in its adapted form into Israeli Hebrew. In many cases the behaviour of the hostland government and society affects the diasporic identity of a minority community. Hostland policies may create conditions that lead to the “de-diasporization” of a minority. Conversely, the moribund diasporic consciousness of an ethnic minority community may be resuscitated as a result of pressure from the government of the homeland. There is a tendency to demonize certain diasporas as “fifth columns” employed by home governments to promote the political agenda of the latter, and this tends to have a chilling effect on the political activities of the diaspora. The converse sort of pressure, however – that of a host government upon a diaspora within its borders – seems to be more common. The following examples may illustrate the point. During the Cold War, the government of the United States (especially under Republican rule) recruited Polish, Czech, and Hungarian expatriates for its anti-Communist propaganda efforts; and during the Italian elections in 1948, it asked Italian-Americans to write to their kin in the homeland to persuade them to vote against the Communists. After the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the American government strove to keep alive the diasporic sentiments of Cuban exiles who had settled in Florida. The American government has manipulated the diasporic Jewish community (under the threat of invoking the specter of an anti-Semitic backlash) to exert pressure on Israel to make difficult compromises in its conflict with the Arabs. On several occasions, the American

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government has encouraged the Jewish Diaspora to influence Israeli elections in order to produce a government more amenable to American foreign policy goals. After the establishment of Israel, most Arab countries where Palestinian refugees had settled refused to integrate these refugees in order to keep alive, if not promote, the diasporic consciousness of the refugees. In 1990–91, shortly after the reunification of the two Germanies, the German government stirred up the ethnonational sentiments of Croatian expatriates, who had settled in the Federal Republic after World War II, in order to create a system of political pressure that helped to promote the breakup of Yugoslavia. The refusal of Germany – at least until the modification of jus sanguinis, “right of blood,” in the early 1990s – to naturalize millions of Turkish “guest workers” (including their offspring born in Germany) and its retention of Heimkehrillusion, “the myth of return,” fostered a collective diasporic identity among these minorities. A waning diasporic consciousness may be revived after a special event, such as a revolutionary struggle or a tragic experience, that rekindles the kinship connection. Prominent examples include the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans, most of whom had never been to Japan, did not know Japanese, and retained no Japanese cultural inheritances. The Holocaust too stirred the feelings of separateness, if not periodic abandonment, even among assimilated North American and Western European Jews – feelings that reemerged strongly just before the Six-Day War of 1967, when the majority of Jews feared for the survival of Israel.45 Other examples include the earthquakes in Armenia and Haiti, which generated massive campaigns of support, among expatriate Armenians and Haitians; a hardening of the position of Ulster Unionists and increasing Protestant violence against Northern Irish Catholics, which stirred long-suppressed memories on the part of many Americans of Irish stock and Catholic faith and caused some of them to furnish weapons to the Irish Republican Army;46 and the capture and prosecution by the Turkish government of Abdullah Öcalan, a leader of the Kurdish separatists, which sparked a massive outpouring of support of Kurdish expatriates in various countries. More recently, the Kurds’ fight to defend the city of Kobane against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (isis) led to an even greater mobilization of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe and elsewhere.47

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conditions of expatriation and of diaspora The paradigmatic Jewish and Armenian diasporas began with forcible expulsion. The origin of several other diasporas has been more complex. The Palestinian diaspora was produced in part by expulsion and in part by flight in response to conditions created in the newly established state of Israel or to policies promoted by its government. The Irish diaspora was the consequence of intolerable economic conditions in the homeland. Admittedly, expatriation under duress is not a sine qua non of a diasporic collective identity. It may be proper to refer to imperial diasporas, as does Robin Cohen, but one must be careful to differentiate between the beneficiaries of imperialism and unskilled workers forcibly settled in a colony in order to exploit them for reasons of divide et impera.48 The Indian settlers in South Africa developed a strong consciousness of diaspora because they had been brought in as indentured laborers and constituted a marginal presence in the socio-political sense. But such a designation hardly applies to the English, Dutch, or Scottish settlers who dominated South African politics and society. It applies even less to the hundreds of British civil servants in India who were part of the British ruling class, on temporary assignment as agents of the colonial empire, most of whom fully intended to return home. As Gérard Chaliand has written, “The claims concerning the status of ‘minority’ would not have any sense if one speaks of dominant minorities.”49 For Jews, diaspora has had a specific meaning historically – that of exile under unfavorable conditions, and, more specifically, conditions of minority status and of powerlessness in relation to a dominant majority.50 Diaspora also connoted a continuing sense of insecurity, for Jews were the proverbial Other in terms of religion, dress, customs, cuisine, and language. They constituted convenient scapegoats and as such were subjected to forcible conversion, expulsion, and pogroms. The condition of continuing alienation, subordination, deprivation, or imperfect integration does not apply to all diasporas. In some cases, diasporic ethnic groups make up the majority of the population of a host country or dominate its political or economic life. This raises the following questions: Are the Chinese in Singapore a “gilded diaspora,” since they constitute the majority of the state’s population, are the dominant economic force, and control the country’s politics? Are the Indians in Fiji a diaspora, when they control the economy of that island republic? Are the wasps in

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the United States a diaspora, since they dominate the political and economic life of the whole country and set the tone of its cultural life? Is the United Kingdom, the source of most of the early settlers who came to the North American colonies, still their homeland in the same sense that the Armenian Republic is the homeland of Armenians scattered throughout the globe? Conversely, is it not more justified to consider Native Americans, who have been displaced and quarantined within their own country, an “internal” diaspora? To what extent is the diasporic consciousness of an ethnonational or religious community eclipsed after it moves from a less desirable political, social, and cultural environment – one that tends to sharpen the sense of alienation – to a more desirable one? Specifically, do the Jews whose ancestors settled in the United States in the nineteenth century have the same sense of being in a diaspora as those who remained in Eastern Europe? Are Jews who have left the former Soviet Union and settled in the United States a diaspora in relation to Israel, or in relation to Russia, Georgia, or Tadjikistan? To many Israelis (whether they intend to “expatriate” from Israel or to stay there), the diaspora construed as galut is Poland, Lithuania, or Romania, not the United States and Canada, which are designated as tfutsot, a theologically neutral term denoting “physical dispersion.” In short, although Jews outside Israel are, collectively, categoric members of the diaspora, not all Jews regard themselves as such. In Germany, an increasing number of Jews attempted to westernize (i.e., deethnicize or “Protestantize”) Judaism by eliminating all references to Jerusalem by referring to themselves as deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, “German citizens of Jewish faith.” Many German Jews convinced themselves that there was a “spiritual symbiosis” or “elective affinity” between Germans and Jews, until the Nazis reminded them that they remained a people apart.51 This was also true of France (at least until the Holocaust, and later, the arrival of Jewish rapatriés from North Africa) where Jews had come to think of themselves as French men and women of “Jewish origin” whose adherence to the republic’s civil religion was (unlike that of Bretons or Occitans) unmediated by membership in an historical subnational community and whose Jewish identity had no intrinsic meaning unless they were reminded of it by anti-Semites. Moreover, in the United States, in which Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism are, theoretically, part of the trinity of the “American religion,”52 many Jews do not believe themselves to be in exile.

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One of the features of diaspora is the existence of a panethnic solidarity, marked by links between fellow ethnics across various hostlands.53 Such links have been particularly strong in the case of Jews, informed by the dictum that “all Jews are responsible for one another.” But these links are uneven; they are influenced by the social patterns and cultural standards of hostland countries. Between the 1880s and 1920s, Jews from the eastern European shtetl (small market town) moving to Germany were not warmly welcomed by their coreligionists, who regarded these Ostjuden as too outlandish and whose presence hurt the status of “indigenous” Jews who were in process of shedding their diasporic self-image. The Jewish pieds noirs who “returned” to France from Algeria in the 1960s, although coming from a more traditionalist environment, had to be welcomed by their Ashkenazic coreligionists because they were French citizens; but they were welcomed also because, in the wake of the Holocaust, Jews (following the example of “indigenous” minorities) were becoming selectively reethnified.

the hostland-homeland ambiguity There is wide agreement that diaspora implies an interactive (direct or indirect) relationship between the hostland and the homeland. It assumes that the hostland does not interfere in the expression of the homelandoriented sentiments of a minority community, and that the homeland is receptive to the input of its diaspora. However, this does not seem the case with respect to the expatriate Tibetans, whose influence on their homeland is severely restricted, despite the geographic closeness of Dharamsala, the diasporic center, to the homeland. It is not always clear which is the homeland and which the hostland, and precisely where the homeland is located. This question applies especially to serial diasporas – communities expatriated from the homeland to one hostland en route, and subsequently to another hostland. This leads one to ask: to the extent that there is nostalgia for a homeland, is it for the original homeland or the preceding hostland? Are the Jamaicans and other West Indian Blacks who settled in the United States or in London a West Indian diaspora or an African one? Where is their “true” homeland: is it the more distant or the recent and proximate one? Where is the homeland of the Jews from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Israel and subsequently settled in the United States? What about the Jewish pieds

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noirs who “repatriated” to France? Israel is their historical homeland and France their political homeland; but Algeria is the country where they grew up and which formed their culture and their character. Jamaican immigrants to the United States harbor nostalgic feelings about life in the West Indies; Jewish immigrants to Western Europe and North America romanticize the shtetl, and recent Jewish immigrants to Israel remember with some fondness the countryside, the food, and the culture of Russia. If diasporism means a degree of discomfort occasioned by physiognomic or cultural difference between an ethnic minority and the hostland majority, Irish immigrants to the United States were less diasporic than Jews, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. Yet it can be argued that they were more alienated in their new country than the Jews. For a while, [the Irish] remained … American nativism’s leading Catholic, ethnic opponents; [they] had been the first ethnic group to arrive in the United States; they controlled the Catholic church, still the principal irritant to nativist sensibilities; they dominated urban politics in the North, challenging Anglo-American Protestant ascendancy … and there was, of course, the ancient rivalry planted in the old country. While the Irish might resemble the Anglos, they were less anxious to associate with them than were many other ethnics. Jews and many non-Irish Catholics often were obsequious in their relations with Anglo-America. They were hungry to belong. But because they had long been the victims of Anglo-Saxon Protestant prejudice, the Irish distrusted the honor and integrity of the Anglo-American.54 For many years, the diasporic identity of Irish immigrants was nourished by reference to their preimmigration experiences. For a long time they retained a memory of their powerlessness in the old country in spite of their domination of urban police forces and Democratic party machines in the United States. Whether that experience is still fresh enough in peoples’ memories to keep alive a collective diasporic identity is a matter of controversy. The Jewish myth of return is expressed in the phrase, repeated at every Passover seder outside of Israel, “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Do the Irish in America proclaim “Next Year in Dublin” or the Chinese in North America or Singapore, “Next Year in Beijing”? Do the Jamaicans have a myth of return? Do they think of Kingston, Jamaica, as a homeland and London as

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diaspora? According to one observer of the members of Caribbean communities in London, diaspora-homeland relationships are reflected in the fact that migrants to London continue to send home remittances to Jamaica for as long as they intend to return.55 On the basis of that criterion, it would appear as if the Caribbean diaspora is diminishing, for remittances have declined dramatically. However, such an indicator of hostland-homeland relationships has its problems as many immigrants cannot send remittances in the first place because of their own poverty. Therefore their alienation vis-à-vis their host society remains, and consequently, their diasporic identity. The opposite may be true of Jews in the diaspora, whose economic assistance to Israel seems to be inversely related to their intention to make aliya, “return to Israel.”

is a “homeland” necessary?: the question of location Roger Caratini has used the term “centrifugal minorities.”56 If one applies that label to diasporas, the implication is that the homeland is the center, and the hostland the periphery. To use the “solar system” analogy of Michael Bruneau, the homeland is the sun and the diasporas are part of an expanding constellation of stars formed around it.57 What if the sun is too far away to illuminate the satellite – how long can the memory of its former light linger on? Caratini has referred not only to the Kurds as “centrifugal” groups, but also to Corsicans, Basques, and Chicanos. Are the latter three communities diasporas? The question of hostland-homeland relationship is complicated by the fact that, in some cases, it is not always clear where is the homeland and where the hostland. According to Robin Cohen, West Indians cannot clearly focus on an original homeland because it is too far in the past and its location is uncertain. This makes the Caribbean people in Europe “a diaspora of a diaspora,” or a “diaspora once removed.”58 Does the same label apply to the Volga Germans – were they a diaspora in relation to the German homeland of their distant ancestors or, rather, of European Russia, where they had lived for generations before being dispersed to Siberia under Stalin? The Kurds do have a homeland in the general geographic sense; but it is not quite clear where their present homeland is and where is their Middle Eastern diaspora. Are the countries adjacent to Turkey diasporas, or are they all homelands and host-

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lands simultaneously? Is not their real diaspora in Europe and elsewhere outside the Middle East? Is it absolutely necessary for a diaspora to have a home country? Jews have an historical homeland, and there is little doubt about its location. Yet although some Jews have returned to the homeland once it achieved independence, for most diasporic Jews it is little more than a tourist destination; and for the majority of them, who have never visited Israel, it is not even that.59 More frequently, Israel is a symbolic place and a millenarian concept. There are still other Jews to whom the homeland has ceased to have any meaning at all. From the end of the nineteenth century to the present, there have been secular Jews (such as Bundists and nonterritorial autonomists) who have found sufficient cultural substitutes in the diaspora (e.g., Yiddish, a socialist ideology, and selected customs) to dispense both with what Hayyim Zhitlowsky has called “a moribund religion”60 and a homeland focus. And there are others again – such as Albert Memmi and Richard Marienstras61 – who conceive of the Jewish Diaspora as a self-subsisting phenomenon, as a Ding an sich, in the sense that the feeling of being different defines diaspora without cultural elements such as religion (Judaism), language (Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino), or a homeland ideology (Zionism). Yet the destruction of Israel might constitute a major tragedy even for these individuals. It might undermine their Jewish identity and reduce the Jewish Diaspora to a small hard “core.” What about minority communities such as the multiple diasporas of the Roma and their subdivisions in Europe (the Sinte, Manouche, Gens du voyage et al.)? Although they share a collective consciousness of their diasporic condition, they lack a clear focus on a “home” country or even a memory or narrative about one. Do they have a common image of an idealized pre-diasporic condition? Do the members of these scattered people who have been sedentarized become “rediasporized” if their hope of economic and political integration is frustrated? And if so, on what external homeland would they fix their imaginations? Are African Americans able to focus on the location of their original homeland more specifically than on a vast geographical area, and does that imprecision attenuate or accentuate their diasporic consciousness? Both the Kurds and the Saami (Lapps) are stateless ethnonational communities dispersed among several adjoining countries with distinct languages, traditions, and lifestyles. Unlike the Kurds, however, the Saami

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have not considered themselves a diaspora nor articulated a strong desire for autonomy,62 for two major reasons: insufficient demographic thickness, given a very small population widely dispersed over three Scandinavian countries; and a traditional economic base inadequate to maintain a state. One may perhaps add the fact that, unlike the Kurds, the Saami have no globally dispersed communities that provide funds or help to create a politicized diasporic consciousness.

“stranded” diasporas Is diaspora necessarily a consequence of the mass movement of an ethnonational or religious group from one place to another? What about ethnic minorities who have not moved from their homeland to some other place? Is the involuntary expatriation of these groups equivalent to diaspora? Have they become a diaspora by virtue of boundary shifts, even though they may be physically close, or even adjacent, to the homeland? This question is now most frequently posed with respect to the Russians who were left behind in Latvia and Estonia after the end of the Cold War in a condition referred to as a “stranded” or “beached” diaspora.63 As they were not forcibly driven out of Russia, nor are they prevented by the host country from returning to Russia, the government of the latter is not under pressure to defend their interests. It is worth noting that the Russians themselves refer to their ethnic brethren in the Baltic countries not as diasporans who are agents of Russian irredentism, but rather as russkoyazychniye, “Russian-speaking,” Latvians or Estonians.64 Such labels are not necessarily permanent. They may change as the Russophones in Latvia develop a diasporic identity in response to a policy of suppression of the Russian language. The sense of diaspora as dystopia – of not being in the right place or under the proper jurisdiction – has been applied both by Ukrainians in the Russian Federation and by Russians in Ukraine. The former do not see themselves part of Russia. Rather, they are like émigrés, as part of the global Ukrainian diaspora. On the other hand, the latter view themselves as having become “diasporized” since Ukrainian independence. Analogous questions of labelling can be raised with respect to other expatriated groups. It is unclear whether it is it proper to label as a diaspora the Poles who have continued to live in Vilnius, once a thoroughly Polish city, after it

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became the capital of Lithuania; whether the French-speaking Strasbourgeois regarded themselves as living in diaspora when, after the FrancoPrussian War, Alsace was attached to Germany; and conversely, whether the Germanic-speaking Alsatian villagers thought of themselves as a diaspora after World War I, when the province was reattached to France. The Magyars in the Romanian province of Transylvania are both at home, because they have not been “dispersed,” and in diaspora, because they have been politically exterritorialized as a result of boundary changes made by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. The same status ambiguity applies to the ethnic Germans who remained in Silesia when that province was incorporated into Poland after World War II. It also applies to the Serbs residing in Republika Srpska, a semi-autonomous statelet within the recently created state of Bosnia, who are in a diaspora and perhaps also in a terra irredenta. And if these Serbs returned to what is left of Serbia, they would be both “at home” as well as in diaspora with respect to their previous country of residence. Similarly, the Arab citizens of Israel might come to regard themselves as a Palestinian diaspora after the creation of a Palestinian state. In a number of cases the diasporic self-perception of an ethnonational community has been open to question. Do the citizens of Moldova consider themselves a Romanian diaspora, when they are perfectly at liberty to cross the border into Romania, and when Moldova may be able to unite with that country? Were the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo a diaspora under the Tito regime; or did they become one in relation to Albania when Slobodan Milosevic, the president of the rump state of Yugoslavia, took away their autonomy? Anthony D. Smith regards the Ibos living in Nigeria outside Biafra, the Tamils living in non-Tamil areas in Sri Lanka, and the Basques living in non-Basque areas in Spain as diasporas.65 By the same token one would have to consider a Walloon living in a Flemish area of Belgium, a Corsican living in Marseilles, and a Yankee living in Alabama as being in diaspora, although an objection may be raised in the case of the last-named category, for the transplanted Yankees continue to live in a cultural-linguistic environment not much different from the one they had left. The same objection applies to the Palestinian population that had been transplanted from Israel and the “West Bank” to Jordan. The pieds noirs in Algeria were not generally regarded as a diaspora while that country was formally part of France, but did they come to be so

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regarded after Algeria obtained its independence? Similarly are the French citizens living in France’s Overseas Departments and Territories a diaspora, or are they merely Overseas French? The answer to both questions depends upon whether a person regards the center (mainland France) as the “true” homeland or the periphery (the outlying region or colony), where she was born and had kinship and emotional ties. Are the Armenians who live in Nagorno-Karabagh, which is adjacent to their central homeland, a diaspora?66 Does their diasporic consciousness differ from the situation that prevailed when both Nagorno-Karabagh and Azerbaijan were part of the Soviet Union? A less controversial argument can be made for members of communities that find themselves in a neighboring state or province after having been forcibly removed there. This seems to be the case in East Timor. Many of those who survived the slaughter of the indigenous population and who were dispersed to West Timor and other areas within Indonesia will probably constitute an East Timorese diaspora, even if little but memory is left of their homeland community. The situation is, however, more complicated with respect to the Germans who had been living in Poland and (what is now) the Czech Republic for many generations and who were expelled and settled in the German Federal Republic. Is it proper to consider them as living in diaspora when, in point of fact, they have “returned” to the land of their ancestors? Unlike the Sikhs, who are dispersed throughout India and abroad and who are components of a far-flung diaspora, those concentrated in the Punjab live in their traditional homeland; but it could be argued that as long as their yearning for an independent Khalistan remains unfulfilled, they are, in a political sense, in diaspora. This suggests that diasporicity may be a function not only of physical relocation, but also of political status redefinition, memory, longing, and belonging in relation to a past or present “homeland.”

language and culture as diasporic markers How far must the culture of an immigrant community have digressed from that of its original homeland before the traces of diasporic consciousness can be said to have disappeared? The role of language in the maintenance of diasporic sentiments is as controversial as that of language in ethnic consciousness in general. There is a difference between Irish Americans or Pol-

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ish Americans, on the one hand, and the descendants of Welsh immigrants in Argentina, on the other. The former have forgotten their native languages and cultures; the latter have maintained cohesive communities where Welsh festivals, complete with recitations of Welsh poetry, are observed, and the Welsh language continues to be taught in local public schools.67 The perpetuation of ethnic idioms may help a minority community to survive as a diaspora but does not guarantee it, if only because languages change in contact with the surrounding society. The language of Quebec is French; but that does not mean that the Québécois consider themselves a diaspora, nor could President de Gaulle convince them that they were. However, if the culture and language of an expatriate community have evolved to such an extent that they have only a tenuous resemblance to those of the motherland, should the former still be regarded as a diaspora? Can it be said that the culture of Haiti still has a clear resemblance to that of France; or that the language and culture of the Afrikaans-speaking whites of South Africa are still so meaningfully related to those of the Netherlands that they regard themselves as a Dutch diaspora? Haitian French has a rather weak relationship to the language of the Parisian bourgeoisie, and the kinship between the two idioms that is occasionally proclaimed has more to do with French foreign policy than with cultural rapprochement. The members of the Acadian (“Cajun”) community in North America are dispersed over three maritime provinces of eastern Canada. All they have to keep their identity distinct from the vast majority of anglophones who surround them is the French language and selected aspects of their Acadian culture. Thus they have reconstituted a historical village and restored a number of small wooden houses of the eighteenth century, as if to reify a mythified community. But, if they are a diaspora, where is their homeland – is it Quebec or France? Meanwhile, the Acadians do not want to “return” to France or to Quebec; nor do they hope for independence for the latter. On the contrary, they fear that if Quebec became independent there would be no one with sufficient political weight to protect their culture within the remaining anglophone universe.68 The place of language in the collective identity of minorities is a matter of debate. To constructivist social scientists who believe that ethnicity is an artifact and an instrumental identity (often manipulated by ethnic entrepreneurs), language is unimportant; to others, it is of primary significance. There is no doubt that the Hebrew language was crucial in the maintenance

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of the diasporic sentiments of the Sephardic community in pre-Inquisition Spain and among the Ashkenazim in central and eastern Europe. Yehuda Halevi, a medieval Sephardi writer, wrote his poems in Hebrew. One of them, “My heart is in the East, and I am in the uttermost West,” is one of the best expressions of longing for the homeland.69 Yet Maimonides, the major philosopher of the medieval Jewish Diaspora, wrote some of his major works in Arabic. The role of language in the homeland aspirations of diasporas is equally puzzling. The Zionist masses in nineteenth-century eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, the major language of the Jewish Diaspora during that period, not Hebrew, the traditional homeland language. The aspirations of Irish independence were promoted (by Eamon de Valera and others) in English, not in Irish Gaelic; and the strivings of the Jewish Diaspora for a “return” to Zion were articulated in German by Theodor Herzl. Throughout the centuries, Jews have used one or another transpolitical language, such as Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew, that served as a lingua franca for the diaspora. In our own time, the vocabulary and morphology, and accent of Israeli Hebrew have evolved so dramatically that the language cannot be easily understood by diasporic Jews brought up on biblical Hebrew in its varied Ashkenazic pronunciations. Few American Jews speak any of these languages, yet their diasporic identity continues to be strong and to be expressed in English, which, for all practical purposes, has become a transethnic language. Conversely, although Latin American and Castilian Spanish are still quite similar and mutually intelligible, the people of Argentina, Mexico, and Peru hardly think of themselves as a diaspora.

the economic dimension To what extent is it legitimate to define diaspora in economic terms? J.S. Furnivall, M.G. Smith, T.R. Gurr, and many Marxists have discussed minority groups in terms of “ethnoclasses” – as creations or epiphenomena of capitalism. Does this analysis necessarily apply to diasporas? It is true that there are economic explanations for the slavery that created a black diaspora on the American continent; that trade and commerce contributed to the creation of a Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia; and that the middleman occupations of Jews, Armenians, Indians, and Greeks in various parts of the world reinforced the diasporic consciousness of these minor-

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ity communities and facilitated transborder relationships among them. It is also true that while Chinese, Poles, and Italians were brought into the United States as “scab laborers” in the nineteenth century, their descendants have long ago ceased to regard themselves as belonging to diasporas. In any case, “classical” capitalism did not relate to the Babylonian Exile. It had nothing to do with Jewish reaction to the Dreyfus affair, and modern capitalism was not the proximate cause of the movement of Jews from diaspora to Israel, or from one diaspora to another – from Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia, to the West. While some Israelis have left the homeland to move to the diaspora for economic reasons, others did so for reasons of physical insecurity. In so doing, they did not create a new diaspora but joined one that already existed. Similarly, classical capitalism did not figure in the creation of the Armenian and Kurdish diasporas. However, the economic dimension cannot be ignored in the discussion of the collective attitudes of the Chicanos of New Mexico and Southern California. They had been incorporated against their will into the territory of the United States; and many of them live under conditions of deprivation relative to their wasp fellow citizens. Yet few Chicanos consider themselves a diaspora in relation to Mexico, if only because they have evolved politically in a direction so different from, and with an economic status so superior to that of their neighbors across the frontier that they do not harbor any notion of “returning” to Mexico. Economic determinism is even more uncertain in the case of the Armenians, the Chinese, and the Jewish minorities in the lands of their dispersion. Theorists of rational choice would argue that these minorities have become prosperous, and that the conviction that their prosperity is better assured in their hostlands than their homelands has effectively “dediasporized” their identities. These theorists would also argue that, in our era of globalization and growing supranationalism, many prosperous people left their homelands voluntarily with their families for economic reasons, thereby helping to form bourgeois expatriate communities. This situation would apply to communities of Britons living in Germany or France, or of French or German citizens living and working in the United Kingdom on a permanent basis under the policies of free movement of individuals within the European Union. There are tens of thousands of Americans who have settled in France and other European countries.

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They continue to speak English; they often enroll their children in American schools; and they have every intention to return to the United States when their tour of duty ends. They often have transnational identities. They may feel equally at home in the United States and a Western European country; they may be fully bilingual; and they may have dual citizenship. Yet their expatriation is for the most part conditioned by economic and professional exigencies rather than factors of kinship or culture. Global economic and certain other groups maintaining transnational networks are sometimes equated with diasporas because they share two important features: they have transpolitical solidarities and they are able to escape the political control of a single nation. Indeed, some economic groups are strongly identified with particular ethnies, such as the Mafia with Italians, and some terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda with Saudi Arabians, even though most Italians are not members of the Mafia (which also includes non-Italians), and most Saudis are not members of Al-Qaeda (which also includes non-Saudis). While terrorist groups are dispersed throughout the globe, its members are not oriented toward a specific physical homeland and, since they rarely meet, they cannot maintain open diasporic institutions.70 This phenomenon should not be equated with the constantly growing Muslim diaspora embracing Iraqis, West Bank Arabs, Iranians, and Pakistanis fleeing from oppression or economic hardship in their homelands and building communal organizations in various hostlands. One diaspora rarely dealt with are the German Nazis who fled to South America after World War II. Their expatriation took place under duress, for had they remained in Germany they might have been indicted for war crimes. They have a homeland myth and a continuing (though often clandestine) connection with Germany, and they might return if that country were to move in a different political direction. However, since this is unlikely, they must hide their identities by assimilating or going underground. This makes the maintenance of institutions difficult, thereby impeding the transmission of a proper yearning for Germany to the expatriates’ offspring, and undermining the cohesion of the diaspora.71 For a variety of reasons, minorities have often failed to relinquish (or overcome) their diasporic identities: racial distinctiveness (the Chinese); religious proscriptions and the behaviourial and dress codes associated with them (Jews and Sikhs); and the memory of past persecutions (the Armenians

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and the Jews). Jews often imposed upon themselves customs that were not “the way of the Gentiles” in food, clothing, forms of prayer, and so on, and that often put them at a relative economic disadvantage.72 The vast majority of Jews in the United States, including Zionists, feel perfectly at home in their hostland, where their economic status has, by and large, been highly satisfactory. Yet few of these Jews can claim that they have never encountered anti-Semitism. Moreover, few wish to escape from the collective solidarity with Jews in other countries, and even “deJudaized” Jews are not indifferent to the fate of Israel. To cite an example: De Gaulle’s 1967 diatribe concerning the Jews – as “an elite people, selfassured, and domineering” – had the unintended effect of “re-ethnifying” the identity of most Jews in France, including those who had long ago ceased to regard themselves as living in diaspora.73 It should be noted that most North African Jewish repatriates in France share the Holocaust memory of their Ashkenazic fellow citizens.

contextual factors What demographic consistency, what degree of institutionalization, and what markers – religion, culture, memory, custom, or selective self-isolation – are required to cause members of a minority ethnic or religious categoric group to regard themselves, and to be regarded by others, as a diaspora? Is the existence of transpolitical networks between expatriates and the home country a decisive factor in generating diasporic consciousness among the expatriates? Is a kinship connection with a home country a necessary condition for sharing diasporic consciousness? Can diaspora include individuals who have converted, or married, into an ethnic or religious community? Can the criteria, once mentioned by Ernest Renan, for being part of a national community – sharing “a rich inheritance of common glories … a memory of a heroic past, and a common fate”74 – be applied to a diaspora, whose very existence is to a great extent based on a separate memory of a perhaps equally heroic past? Moreover, the heroic past of the majority of the host nation may be associated by a minority with grief and misfortune. The standard history in France is Catholic history, and despite the continued presence of Jews in that country since the days of Julius Caesar, they do not have a proper place in that history. The celebration of

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the achievements of Saint Louis reminds Jews of the Crusader massacres; to Muslims, the Battle of Poitiers recalls the expulsion of their Islamic forebears; and the exploits of Joan of Arc remind the Protestants of their defeat.75 Similarly, the collective trauma on which much of the Serbian national identity is based – the defeat at Kosovo Polje in the fourteenth century – is not shared by the Albanian Kosovars. To what extent do cultural, religious, or racial factors play a role in maintaining diasporic identity? On the one hand, the culture of the minority may be perceived by its members as so superior to that of the hostland majority that there is no incentive to abandon it. Perceptual differences that determine diasporic identity may be a generational matter. One observer, citing Israel Zangwill, suggests that while many first-generation Jews born in Britain, “viewed themselves with pride as Britishers, the old ones could never quite understand the importance of becoming English,” because they regarded the Jewish civilization as older and greater than the English one.76 Most descendants of immigrants, however, have not been taught much, if anything, about their homeland civilization, the problems of the Old Country, and the complexes of their forebears who have left it. They are not burdened with diasporic baggage, unless they have personal experience of discrimination or believe themselves to be rootless. In this case they are subjected to Hansen’s Law, according to which there is a thirdgeneration atavism, marked by an attempt to retrieve the culture of the Old Country and with it, a diasporic identity. In order to retain their distinctiveness and their communal cohesion, most modern Jews have maintained (or reconstructed) an array of particularistic cultural paraphernalia, rites, and institutions. These measures have not prevented their selective, and often successful, adaptation to the host society; although these measures have not ended the Jews’ diasporic identity, they have lightened the historical burdens associated with that identity. For the Jewish Diaspora, adaptation to the hostland culture has applied especially to Judaism, which has been selectively Europeanized in order to make it less “alien” vis-à-vis the dominant religion. In contrast, there are expatriate minorities whose religious and political traditions may be so at variance with those of the hostland majority that assimilation becomes difficult and the diasporic identity is accentuated. The widespread belief in France that Islam is incompatible with French republican values accounts

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for the refusal to consider the possibility of assimilating Muslims into the French nation. This, in turn, promotes the feeling of the Maghrebis in the French Hexagon that they will remain outsiders and it makes it difficult for them to abandon their diasporic identities. A major factor in the growing phenomenon of expatriation has been globalization. Its effect on diasporas, however, is ambiguous. It is generally admitted that globalization contributes to the massive movement of populations from their homeland to a hostland and hence may create new diasporas; as minority communities in hostlands are enlarged by new waves of immigrants, a gradually waning diasporic identity among earlier immigrants may be resuscitated. In addition, the permeability of borders and the ease of communication and transportation make it easier for expatriate ethnonational groups to keep in close touch with the homeland and periodically to replenish its cultural resources. Since globalization tends to aggravate the economic exploitation of the unskilled, poor, and powerless, it may accentuate diasporization insofar as many immigrant societies fall into these categories. Conversely, the diasporic identity of new immigrants may fail to develop if they are in contact with well-assimilated fellow ethnics who had immigrated several generations earlier. Globalization contributes to secularization and to the development of a transnational mass culture; the one would leave less room for religious diversity (or for religion as a marker of collective identity), and the other, for cultural diversity. In short, globalization has a homogenizing impact on all cultures, so that the homeland and hostland cultures are no longer as distinct as before. But globalization has also led to the decline of the “absolutist” approach to membership in the political community, one that separates political from ethnocultural identity and makes room for the recognition of diversities and accommodates to the continued existence of diasporic communities.

the institutional setting While agreeing that the diaspora phenomenon has generated questions about the relevance of traditional conceptions of the nation-state, many writers on diaspora have been too quick to dismiss the role of the state altogether. But the state continues to be important in determining the position of diasporas. Thus the refusal of selected Baltic governments to grant

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official status to speakers of Russian, and of the German government to grant official status to Islam (analogous to Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism) has accentuated the diasporicity of the ethnic minorities in question. The state influences the role of institutions; and institutional backing of an ethnic or religious minority is necessary for the maintenance of diasporic identity. Such backing, however, requires a sufficiently large number of people, an ethnic (or religious) elite that has a stake in the continuation of diaspora, a degree of rootedness that is, by definition, not present in a recently arrived or transient minority community, and an overall political context that facilitates the building of autonomous nongovernmental organizations. Such a context tends to exist in democratic polities, which are characterized by a robust civil society that provides opportunity structures for diasporas in the form of institutions and patterns of access to the public authorities. The universe of democratic regimes includes not only nationstates but also multinational states. In the latter, there tends to be a habitual institutionalized commitment to cultural pluralism, marked by ethnic accommodation policies or power-sharing schemes – by means of federalism, consociation, patronage, local options, or functional (or personal) autonomy – that are often accorded to indigenous ethnic communities. These states, in which lobbying is a constitutional right of ethnic minorities, make it easier for immigrants to maintain their cultural or emotional identities without incurring the charge of dual political allegiance. These immigrants “may never identify with their adopted country in terms of political loyalty, culture, and language, and hence [one uses] the term ‘diaspora,’ which implies a certain degree of social distance between the migrant community and the receiving country.”77 Nevertheless, they will gradually become habituated to their hostland and regard it as a “home away from home.” Not all democratic countries, however, are pluralist in the ethnic or cultural sense, and these make it difficult for diasporas to maintain themselves as such. The Poles who settled in France in the nineteenth century lost their diasporic identities not only because they lacked the requisite population density and ethnic entrepreneurs, but also – and perhaps primarily – because the Jacobin republican culture of the hostland discouraged the perpetuation of ethnic minority communities. As noted earlier, the “civic” definition of the French nation, a major element of Jacobinism, conflates culture, nationality, and political community, so that parallel or supple-

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mentary cultural or emotional orientations (reflected in ascriptive or organic communities) are suspect. The suspicion, which has traditionally applied to indigenous minorities (e.g., Bretons and Basques) is magnified in the case of diasporas to the extent that their orientations are transpolitical, so that diasporas are considered subversive almost by definition. Yet the relationship between the type of polity and diasporic identity remains unclear. An oppressive authoritarian regime impedes the free articulation as well as the institutional expression of diasporic consciousness, so that such consciousness gradually weakens to the point of disappearance. Conversely, the authoritarian regime may be so oppressive that the “imagined” homeland becomes more attractive and diaspora consciousness is sharpened. In contrast, a democratic regime that has an open society, that allows the free expression and retention of minority culture, and that does not interfere with a reciprocal relationship between the homeland and its expatriated kin in the hostland is clearly conducive to the maintenance of a diasporic identity. Yet it can also be argued that democracy may have precisely the opposite effect. A tolerant, pluralistic, and polyarchically structured regime may coopt ethnic minorities, and in so doing rule out an important reason for the perpetuation of diasporic sentiment (based on perceptions of relative deprivation). A democratic regime is a responsive one, a fact often reflected in the welfare state; such a regime does not make it easy for diasporas to maintain their identities. If the welfare state connotes a set of genuinely redistributive public policies, ethnic minorities are less dependent on their own communal resources and hence less likely to retain diasporic identities.

the “diasporic personality” as the embodiment of ambiguity Diasporans are different from mere immigrants because they are not fleeing from their original identities, or what they believe them to be. They relate somehow to a homeland, whether real or imaginary. This can take many forms, ranging from “a mental relationship with ‘imagined India’ at one extreme to periodical [sic] visits to India at the other extreme.”78 To restate it in more concrete terms, the diasporicity of members of ethnic minorities runs the gamut from a vague family tradition of origins to preparing for an actual return to the homeland.79 It can include: those who

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romanticize the shtetl or the barrio without having experienced it personally – whose identification is a merely expressive one because it is not associated with appropriate cultural pursuits; those who are proud of visiting singers or athletes from their former homeland – as, for example, Beurs who identify with French soccer hero Zinédine Zidane; Britons whose parents had immigrated from Pakistan cheering the visiting Pakistani cricket team as it defeated the British team; British Muslims buying jihad videos or passively supporting bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda terrorists;80 and finally, those who sing songs about the “Old Country” and think about it constantly. The last group is the most “diasporic,” but it has not succeeded in reproducing every feature of the homeland, for the hostland context makes it difficult if not impossible to retain, for example, such cultural practices as the caste system, gender inequality, and religious intégrisme. This problem makes the prospect of a physical return highly improbable. For the last four groups, diasporic consciousness is little more than a symbolic ethnicity. In the absence of a concrete connection with a homeland, one may construct a narrative about it. In The Book of Abraham, Marek Halter, a French Jew, has written a lengthy historical epic of descendance.81 The same is true of Alex Haley’s Roots.82 But it is doubtful whether Haley’s narrative is sufficient for the mass of black intellectuals in the United States; it is perhaps for that reason that they call themselves African Americans, in order to give themselves the sort of hyphenated identity that parallels that of Irish Americans or Italian Americans, thought to provide the latter with a kind of identitarian autonomy. Sometimes a homeland is “constructed” as a center of origin, as in the case of Africa, which Marcus Garvey did with Africa, although in this case it was not a construction ex nihilo. There is the danger that narratives take the place of experience or historical memory in defining diaspora, so that diaspora refers not only to a tension between hostland and homeland but also “otherness” associated with various kinds of cultural alienation, maladjustment, loss, and unusual experiences. André Aciman, an expatriate writer, is quoted as saying, “I think it is very hard to be a human being without having lost something that is very important, and we live partly to make up for that loss … But it defines who we are. Some of us have lost a country. Some of us have lost a family. Most of us are exiles from who we are or who we would like to be.”83

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But not all who have lost something are ipso facto in diaspora. Ian Buruma warns against the tendency to transform the notion of diaspora or exile into a metaphor for loneliness, disorientation, or intellectual or moral detachment, and he takes issue with Edward Said’s insistence that “exile is the typical condition of the modern intellectual.”84 He points out that the voluntary exile of the intellectual who lived in comfortable conditions in the homeland is a far cry from the exile who has fled oppression; the latter sleeps on a cold bench in the railroad station in his hostland refuge city, whereas the former, having lost nothing, goes abroad to another place of comfort, and does so in order to acquire an additional dimension of education, to further his career, and to add luster to his personality. In short, for some, living abroad is not diaspora; in the case of others, diasporic identity is not automatically abandoned when they return to their homeland, for when they do, they may find that it is no longer “home.” As a Chinese American writer has remarked about overseas Chinese visiting the homeland, “When they leave it after their visit they feel that they have left something of themselves behind, yet they also realize that they could never live there. Deep in their hearts they know that they love China best when they live well away from the place.”85 This is equally true of most American Jews, who adore the idea of Israel but would not want to live there because the reality of the country would destroy their idealized image of it. In short, their real home is the diaspora. Many Indian intellectuals who return to their native land after spending years abroad to study or work find that they are out of place; and many Jews who have made aliya carry the diaspora with them in terms of their personality and view of their surroundings. Indeed, if diaspora means exile as an existential condition, then diasporism has spread to Israel itself – a situation that does not apply to other homelands. As a Yiddish saying has it, “one can take a Jew out of diaspora, but not diaspora out of the Jew.” This is reflected in the fact that the collective feelings of global “aloneness” in the face of ongoing persecutions and existential threats have been perpetuated among large sectors of the Israeli population, who are convinced that their state is constantly in danger of destruction and that its legitimacy is widely questioned on ideological or religious grounds. Conversely, some of the current postZionist revisionism is analogous to the diasporic concern about, “what do the goyim think,” and even to forms of self-hatred found among Jewish intellectuals in fin-de-siècle central Europe.

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If we define diaspora as something going beyond physical elements of dispersion, we cannot ignore the galut aspect of the Jewish Diaspora. I argue that most of my criteria apply to the overwhelming majority of Jews, including those in the United States, even including those who have replaced galut with a theologically neutral concept of diaspora.86 Yet in terms of their behaviour, many Jews no longer conform to the premodern diasporic tradition. There are those who contend that the specificity of the Jewish Diaspora has been weakening to such an extent that it is no longer a paradigmatic one; that Jewish identity is becoming like other ethnic identities; that Jewish culture has become a thin one marked by the abandonment of dietary laws, of Jewish languages, and of endogamy; that signs of a Jewish presence in urban areas, such as synagogues and kosher butcher shops, are less common; that vague sentiments of “homeland” are coming to resemble Pulaski Day parades or San Gennaro festivals; that Jewish identity has been reduced to the observance of watered-down rites of passage, the purchase of Jewish ritual objects, and residues of gastronomic Jewishness, that is, “kosher-style,” rather than kosher, food; and that for many Jews, Israel has been transformed from a place of “pilgrimage to playground,” exemplified by bar mitzvah celebrations at the Western Wall in Jerusalem or Club Med holidays.87 In view of the foregoing, some recent observers would raise doubts about whether the Jews in western democracies are still a diaspora. Nevertheless, basic conditions of diaspora are still in evidence, among them less than full acceptance in many hostlands, a continued questioning of the right of Jews to have a state; and the persistence of “post-Christian” anti-Semitism.

conclusion: summary observations and working hypotheses Diaspora is a growing reality today, and we can only speculate about its future. Furthermore, we cannot predict what kinds of situations the concept will come to include. Meanwhile, however, it has led to a rethinking of traditional notions of political community and to a reexamination of the relationship between political and cultural frontiers. Below are a number of observations that summarize the major points of this chapter. They are derived from existing knowledge of socio-political situations that can be tested against evolving reality. These observations do not relate merely to

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“otherness”; they apply specifically to ethnic groups whose diasporicity resulted from physical relocation and is marked by ethnic identity and group solidarity, ethnically specific institutions, and (in most cases) relations with an anterior homeland. 1. The strength and persistence of diaspora depends upon the strength and weakness of the homeland. Strong homelands facilitate the maintenance of diasporas; weak homelands are less able to do this. 2. The persistence of diaspora depends on the political and cultural context of the hostland. Democratic countries with strongly autonomous civil societies tend to be more permissive of diasporic organization and cultural expression than authoritarian ones. 3. Culturally pluralistic countries, whether democratic (such as the United States and Canada) or authoritarian (such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires), based on a multiethnic model, are more tolerant of diasporas than culturally monochromatic ones (such as France and Turkey), especially those that include culture and language within their scope of policy. 4. Ties of kinship and religion and intergenerational transmission of memories and values, which have been important factors in the maintenance of diasporic identity in the past, are strengthened with globalization and the migration and communications networks associated with it. At the same time, diasporic identity is threatened by two developments associated with globalization: modernization (which undermines Gemeinschaft) and the spread of a homogenized, transnational mass culture. 5. Religion and language do not play the same role in the collective cohesion of homeland and diaspora communities. Religion is weakening in most homelands but remains strong in diaspora, although religion may become increasingly syncretic. Leaders of diasporic communities, even if they are themselves secular, tend to stress religion to maintain communal cohesion, and homeland leaders often stress it in their dealings with diaspora. Language maintenance is weak in diasporas, but is a primary unifier in the homeland. The hostland language, especially a globally important one, tends to function as a unifier of internally divided diasporas. 6. Although diasporic societies attempt to maintain the social structure of the homeland, adjustments are constantly made to adapt them to prevailing socio-political conditions in the hostland: homeland subidentities merge when they are abroad, while new subidentities may be created. Thus

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the social divisions in the homeland based on religion, language, and caste are not easily perpetuated in diaspora.88 7. Globalization makes the condition of diasporas easier and their legal status less fragile insofar as this development is associated with the increasing acceptance of dual citizenship. 8. The exception to the preceding hypothesis applies by and large to “stranded” or “beached” diasporas, especially in former communist countries, as these countries pursue a “nationalizing nationalism” in an attempt to restore their precommunist national homogeneity.89 9. While a homeland may seek to encourage the continuation of its diasporas and to expect economic and political support from them, it does not easily accept their advice. 10. Although a homeland may foster the myth of return among its diasporas in order to preserve a linkage to it, diasporans are not necessarily welcomed back, because they might undermine the homeland’s social fabric and political value system, and threaten the resident elite’s hold on power. This is particularly true of underdeveloped and autocratic homelands. 11. For a variety of reasons, most diasporans do not want to return to their homelands, among them the fact that economic and/or political conditions there are less attractive than in the hostland, and that real life does not conform to the image or ideal of the homeland. 12. What keeps a diaspora linked to a homeland is a common conception of peoplehood – more specifically, the notion of a common origin. However, there are rivalries between the two with regard to defining the nature of that peoplehood and its central locus.90 13. Both homeland and hostland governments instrumentalize diasporas for their own political agendas: the former to enlarge their power base and/or their global influence; the latter to influence or promote their foreign-policy goals. 14. The leaders of ethnic diasporas tend to foster the maintenance of diasporic identity within hostlands in order to preserve their positions as “ethnic entrepreneurs.” 15. Just as homelands are the origin of diasporas, so diasporas may be creators (or would-be creators) or restorers of independent homeland states. 16. There is a tendency in hostlands of ethnic minorities to lump a variety of ethnic minorities together into undifferentiated groups regardless of

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class or cultural differences or degrees of assimilation, a tendency that serves to maintain or create diasporic identity. 17. There is greater solidarity within diasporas than within other ethnic groups. 18. The merits and sins of homelands tend to be visited upon their diasporas. 19. Diasporic identity tends to maintain itself over time for the same reason as ethnic identity – its difference from the majority of the population in terms of (often visible) ascriptive markers, such as race and religion. 20. Diasporas maintain themselves best in large cities because these have the necessary demographic density, institutions, and networks of communication with homelands, and because they often serve as ports of entry for newcomers from the homeland. These observations may serve to stimulate research aimed at answering the questions I raised above and in earlier writings, all of them related to what Rogers Brubaker considers the core elements of diaspora: physical dispersion, homeland orientation, and boundary maintenance91 – to which I would add ethnic identity. This involves a decision about where to fix the conceptual limits of diaspora. In order to theorize, one must establish analytic boundaries; these are not meant to be immovable, but to be examined, revised, and expanded where necessary.

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Diaspora: Legacies, Typologies, and “Push-Pull” Donald Harman Akenson

(1) In the introduction and chapter one, we have indicated some of the beneficial paradoxes that characterize the study of diasporas. As a relatively new discipline, diaspora studies has the advantage of being able to scout out both terrain and technique with considerable freedom. Simultaneously, the field has inherited a set of legacies that provide richness of background. Some of these inheritances go back as far as the mid-first millennium before the Common Era (bce). The cultural wealth stemming from this inheritance comes with certain limitations, and we are necessarily aware of the way that certain words and techniques acquire overtones that are far from being neutral in forming the way we think or are perceived by readers. Critical self-awareness in this field is a necessary virtue. As we have demonstrated earlier, some of the terms of thought and entire swatches of vocabulary run back more than two millennia. Equally significant is that the scholarly literature which yields modern diaspora studies is based on work done in the High Victorian era. That, indeed, is when the concept “diaspora” becomes part of the vocabulary of the academic world. In the present chapter, I wish to indicate the skein of technique that is independent of the concept of diaspora, but which is part of the inheritance of present-day diaspora studies. These techniques are shared with other areas of academic concentration – notably demography, human geography, and labour economics – and have both benefits and limitations when directed towards the history of diasporas.

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(2) The least-often mentioned, and in some ways the most perplexing, antecedent of the techniques of modern diaspora studies (and of several other fields of collective human study) is the work of Ernst Georg Ravenstein: a truly fine mind whose work has to be engaged before any study of a modern diaspora is attempted. Ravenstein is one of the two most impressive solo sailors on the great ocean of European demographic history. The other legendary figure was the lonely schoolmaster, G.T. Griffith, who, in 1926, single-handedly produced Population Problems of the Age of Malthus.1 This was the first attempt at explaining population growth by grappling analytically with the entire corpus of English census data as generated from 1801 onwards and, as inferentially augmented by projections, back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the 1880s, the German-born Ravenstein directly engaged initially the United Kingdom census of 1881 and then the comparable enumerations of continental Europe and of North America, all in an effort to discover how, in what patterns, and why people moved from place to place. Ravenstein displayed an ability to disaggregate manually and to analyze huge bodies of data in a manner that denizens of the computer age can only find humbling. And some of his techniques for mapping migration flows still evoke admiration as being at the limit of most modern cartographic programs. As is the case with the work of most great scholars, Ravenstein’s studies are more often cited than read. Granted, to present-day scholars, Ravenstein’s writings, which appeared in 1885 as “The Laws of Migration,” in the Journal of the Statistical Society of London and in 1889 as “The Laws of Migration” (a second paper) in the now renamed Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,2 are slightly confusing in form and fustian in tone: they are argued in the rhetorical style that was regnant in High-Victorian periodicals, and the papers do not contain the shortcuts (abstracts, bulleted conclusions, etc.) that are commonplace today. They have to be parsed rather than merely skimmed. Because his arguments are expressed in Victorian stylistic conventions, Ravenstein is seen as historically important, but there is a fair amount of present-day puzzlement concerning what he actually meant.3 The key is to determine what Ravenstein construed as a “law” of migration. In my own reading, it seems clear that in fact he is charmingly

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negligent about the term “law.” It has various definitions, and Ravenstein was unembarrassed when taxed about this by potential critics. At some points, he clearly expresses a belief in the existence of some underlying “definite law” of migration, something that might be construed as the sociological equivalent of the One Big Theory for which physicists are forever searching.4 Towards such meaning, however, he does not press hard and he may have been voicing more a statement of a basic faith than an artifact of observation. More important is a second use of the term: to denominate a set of virtually scientific laws that covered most aspects of human migration, at least in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and North America. These were modelled on the laws of Newtonian physics. And, thirdly, when pressed by critics (his two papers were given as lectures in the august confines of the Royal Statistical Society), Ravenstein charmingly backs away and avoids all confrontation: he suggests that his laws are merely empirical patterns he has noticed. Thus, at the 1885 Royal Statistical Society meeting, one member of the audience objected that Ravenstein had sometimes worked out “consequences” from his supposed law and at other times had looked at a batch of consequences and from them had inferred a law. A single method was required, the critic said. Now, in fact, there were several ways that Ravenstein could have parried this criticism, but instead he simply stated that he “had made use of the term ‘law’ merely because he could find no other term. All he meant to convey was that migration went on according to certain rules.”5 Nevertheless, Ravenstein’s heroic 1889 study of European and North American mobility data (the linguistic and statistical proficiency of the man was amazing) produced wide-base confirmation and expansion of the propositions that he had earlier articulated. It was a forceful response to his critics. Still, in public verbal discussion of this latest work, Ravenstein again turned possum and humbly submitted that he “did not for one moment claim to have discovered any great laws.”6 Whatever the social or personal reasons for Ravenstein’s plasticity in defending the character of his great work, the present-day reader is left with the necessity of accepting his rhetoric as being polysemous. Ravenstein, in fact, used the term “law” in three ways, and one has to parse, infer, and sometimes intuit his meaning each time one employs the concept (and oftentimes one has to give up and admit that the meaning is impercipient). Nevertheless, Ravenstein is worth the

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trouble, because his work remains to this day as the foundation for the study of almost all of the great human migrations of the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, and perhaps for many earlier migrations as well. The following is my schematization of Ravenstein’s laws. That his work rested on western governments’ having come to think quantitatively about their citizens and thus to compile vast bales of enumerations does not diminish the originality he evinced in using that material. And that his work is imperfect is not worth arguing (of course, all rational study of human beings is merely a work in progress), but the man did, indeed, think big.

Base Assumptions That human life, like human biology, and like physical mechanics, is part of some overarching system of law. This is a belief to which Ravenstein only briefly referred, but it was the below-surface bedrock of all of his scholarship. 1. That the individual laws of human migration (whatever they might be) are transnational, in the dual sense of (a) operating across national borders, and also (b) being operative throughout national jurisdictions. 2. The world, as Ravenstein defines it, is a statistical universe as much as a geographical entity. In his first paper, he deals with the British Isles, and additionally continental Europe, and with North America in his second paper – certainly a limited definition of global reality. Possibly that is all of the world that he thought counted. However, in his defence, one must point out that these were the only places where one could do much in the way of rigorous counting. The European and North American nations were the only ones where Ravenstein could obtain significant bodies of statistically comparable data. One suspects (it really can only be a guess) that Ravenstein believed that his laws applied to the entire human population, not just those portions that provided credible and easily accessible banks of data. (Converting Ravenstein’s observations into predictions – by testing them on populations that latterly developed trustworthy demographic and migration data – certainly should be essayed in several venues by social scientists.)

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Fundamental Analogy Manifestly, Sir Isaac Newton’s system of mechanics was Ravenstein’s chief inspiration. However, his specific reliance was upon the theory of hydraulics. He frequently talks about currents and counter currents and, although later adapters of Ravenstein’s work usefully substitute electric current for hydraulics, Ravenstein, when discussing pressure differentials and currents, is thinking primarily of the everyday, observable characteristics of water.

Background Characteristics of Human Migration Ravenstein implicitly assumes or explicitly postulates: 1. That the base state of humanity is inertia. This is slightly paradoxical, for his entire work deals with people on the move. Yet, as far as his laws are concerned, he does not deal with the disconcerting possibility that flux is the original and continual state of humanity: ubiquitous, albeit not mathematically constant. That would be too much to take into account. Ravenstein’s statements of migratory patterns begin with the presumption that these phenomena can be defined because they are discrete and thus measurable phenomena with an inertial boundary of zero. 2. That involuntary migration is epiphenomenal. War, transportation for crime, slavery are simply left out of the systematic portion of Ravenstein’s work, although they receive mention as being of tertiary or spasmodic significance. 3. Governments are seen as being almost neutral in the migration progress. (“Almost” because he grants them just a bit more than complete impotence.) Ravenstein’s laws work without the power of the state. 4. Therefore – this can be taken as derivative from the preceding three postulates – migration is seen as a product of individual human agency. This is a central cog in Ravenstein’s machinery. Individuals act voluntarily, and the laws of migration are observed in the flow patterns of millions of individuals. Each is an autonomous person, but the collective patterns comprise laws. Up to this point, Ravenstein could have been presenting a set of scientific laws, rather than merely describing patterns of behaviour for, in the big picture, both forced migration and state control could be construed as outliers in the data.

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5. Then, maddeningly, he turns a page. He asks why do these independent human agents become part of the flow of migrants? Overwhelmingly (a) “from the inherent desire in most men to ‘better’ themselves …” and (b) in what regard? “… in material terms.”7 So much for hegira and similar cultural migrations. And, as he added in response to a questioner, he “did not for one moment claim to have discovered any great laws” (we have seen that statement previously) “and he had expressly stated that the origin of migration was economical.”8 And, perversely, as if intentionally to make his laws narrowly time-and culture-relative, Ravenstein attaches his work to the evolution of the nineteenth-century industrial city and to those rural areas of the New Worlds of North America still, in the late 1880s, being imperialized by the expansion of Europe.9 These are the foci of economic betterment after the industrial revolution. Oh dear. In just a few sentences, Ravenstein has declared his own work to be culturally blinkered (money rules), chronologically narrow (to the period of the so-called first industrial revolution), and geopolitically transient (the High Victorian era in Europe and in the neo-Europes of North America). Why pay him more heed? Because Ravenstein nevertheless expresses his laws in terms that are not necessarily culture bound, and in terms that potentially can be transferred to cultures and to eras that he himself has not engaged. These laws are: 1. Most migration is rural to urban. Here towns as well as cities count as being urban. 2. This urbanward movement creates a “current of migration” and, like water exiting a pond via a small stream, it usually establishes a second flow: some of the human beings who have migrated from a rural area are replaced by a migration-current of persons who perceive the possibility of bettering themselves economically by moving into the now less-populated parish or district. 3. Urban dwellers are less likely to migrate from their home district than are rural ones. 4. And, long distance migrants are most apt to go to large urban centres. 5. Thus, there is something like the Great Chain of Being among cities-

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towns- rural areas and together they form an integrated, stagewise migrational system. 6. Crucially, in this integrated system, most individuals make moves that are of relatively short distances. Thus, the collective currents of migration can be international, but the bulk of individual migrants remain parochial. 7. The currents of the migration system are roiled, being simultaneously contagious and sedimentary. The currents “whilst they sweep along with them many of the natives of the counties through which they pass (and) … deposit, in their progress, many of the migrants which had joined them at their origin.”10 8. Migration tends to cascade. Ravenstein asks, “does migration increase?” and responds energetically to his own query, “I believe so!” His enthusiasm stems from his belief that migration is stimulated by technological advances and he is nothing if not a believer in Progress. Things are getting better and better. “In fact, you need only seek out those provinces of a country within which migration is proceeding most actively, and you will either find yourself in the great centres of human industry, or in a part of the country whose resources have only recently become available. Migration means life and progress; a sedentary population stagnation.”11 From the preceding metaphorically expressed laws, Ravenstein presents five propositions that can be expressed mathematically and tested with data sets other than those he himself generated: 1. “The more distant from the fountain head which feeds them, the less swiftly do these (migratory) currents flow.”12 This is a verbal rendering of distance-decay. It can be measured in everything from line-drop in electrical wiring to velocity-downturn in a homerun hit out of a baseball park. And the specific path of distance-decay is a mathematical expression. 2. “In forming an estimate of this (migratory) displacement we must take into account the number of natives of each county which furnishes the migrants, as also the population of the towns or districts which absorb them.”13 This seemingly vatic pronouncement is simply an exercise in calculating relative amounts of water pressure in two linked vessels and doing so based on the configuration of each holding vessel and the amount of water that is in it.

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3. The greater the perimeter boundary lines of a unit of study – “counties having an extended boundary in proportion to their area”14 – the greater the apparent flow to and from that unit. Given Ravenstein’s belief that political boundaries were virtually permeable membranes, this point makes sense and can be easily plotted graphically. 4. “Migrants enumerated in a certain centre of absorption will consequently grow less (he means fewer) with the distance proportionately to the native population which furnishes them.”15 Or, to put it less obliquely: for any given set of individuals, the attracting power of any destination is in part a function of its physical distance from that group. Presumably, that function can be empirically determined and mathematically expressed. 5. “The process of dispersion is the inverse of that of absorption and exhibits similar features.”16 This is the most hieratic of Ravenstein’s potentially mathematical laws. Probably it means that in any given district there is a symmetry in the forces that produce out-migration and those that invite in-migration. Emphatically, this does not mean that the number of persons leaving and those entering will be the same, but rather that the forces will be equal. (In what units and by what means one calibrates these forces is a conundrum. Ravenstein never elucidates.) Thus, if one has some measure of the forces that pull people out from a given locale, one will automatically know the forces that will subsequently pull them in. Of course – staying with Ravenstein’s love of hydraulics – the size and configuration of the conduits in and out of the specific locale will determine the numerical values of the actual human flow.

(3) Ernst Georg Ravenstein, frgs, stunned scholars interested in migration into decades and decades of silence: economists, demographers and, most surprisingly, his fellow geographers. Clearly his work was brilliant, but for a long time no one knew quite what to do with it and consequently almost nothing was done. Granted, a good deal of counting of migrants by age, gender, education, distance, and a dozen or more other variables was accomplished but, as Everett Lee noted in 1966(!), few studies considered the fundamental issue that Ravenstein had raised: namely the relationship of these variables to the volume of emigration, and certainly not in any fashion that would yield causality.17 Dorothy Swaine Thomas, the head of a

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front-edge pre-World War II migration project, reported in a widely quoted memorandum on research techniques, that as far as internal migration within the United States was concerned, the only generalization that could be made relating to differentials in volume was that migrants tended either to be persons in their late teens or to be young adults.18 Actually, as Waldo Tobler notes, one earlier work, an obscure thirty-four page monograph by C. Warren Thornthwaite, published in 1934, did relate comparative intensities of population pressure (or “gradients”) to volume in migration from one area to another. This work concluded that “the amount of migration from one area to another is directly proportional to the pressure gradient between them and inversely proportional to the resistance.”19 During the 1980s, Guido Dorigo and Waldo Tobler conducted various mathematical and geometric explorations of Ravenstein’s laws. They used the flow of electric current, rather than the flow of water as their entry model, for this gave them the advantage of adapting Ohm’s law to migration studies. Despite difficulties in the American migration data that they were using, their general conclusion was that some of Ravenstein’s laws could be expressed algebraically and that they were not inconsonant with reality.20 As late as the mid-1990s, Tobler presented the following intriguing observation: “I have not found any attacks on the substance of the laws as such.”21 Not that several alternative modes of expressing migration flows had not grown up by the late twentieth century, but the refusal of historical geographers to deal with Ravenstein directly is one of those human puzzles that, as Tobler noted laconically, “could provide an interesting area of study.”22 Tobler was raising in a specific case the question that is so rarely treated in most academic disciplines: why do certain potentially powerful ideas suffer Todschweigen rather than being debated and either proved or disproved? One holds a watching brief for Ravenstein, in part because he was truly humble: he collected data on real individuals and his laws (in whatever sense of the word one wishes to approach them) were based on actual behaviour. Human beings acted, laws were detected. Ravenstein did not derive his description of human behaviour from his laws – quite unlike many recent modellers of human experience. And, in part, Ravenstein remains admirable because he was transnational in the only way that it is worth being: his laws held within national boundaries and also operated across them.

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As far as students of migration within the historical profession are concerned, the fact that his work came close to suffering Death-by-Silence from several generations of his natural colleagues – geographers – is still costing us historians (free riders as we so often are on other disciplines’ bow waves) in terms of confusion and false inferences. If Ravenstein’s work had been followed up, clarified, and expanded with celerity, the imbroglio of pushpull in the form we know it would have been unnecessary. Ravenstein’s work included both a push-factor (one of his half-developed metaphors was the hydraulic ram, wherein pressure at one end produces volume at the other), and a pull-factor (a pool that was emptied by a stream at one end, simultaneously served as a cachement basin and itself drew in a volume of migrants). The splendid feature of Ravenstein’s systemics is that this push-pull is all part of a continuing cycle, and the description of the collective current and moil does not require the historian to make any judgements about the motives of the individual human beings who are the flux of the system. (That Ravenstein himself believed in industrial-based development as the ultimate energizer of the system is unfortunate, but legitimately easy to ignore; his system would have worked just as well if he had posited that people moved citywards because they preferred living near other people.) In fact, the motivation of the migrants – cultural, religious, economic – makes no difference and can profitably be left out of the system. Just start Ravenstein’s great hydraulic machine moving, and everything else follows. That leaves the historian free to infer (that is: guess intelligently) directly from primary data sources what the motives of any individual, family, or cohort within the migratory system were. There is a huge difference between doing that and decreeing what any individual’s, or any group’s, motives were by treating them as a syllogistic product of the logic of the migration system.

(4) When, at roughly mid-twentieth century, historical geographers became mightily interested in migration, they long had forgotten that Ravenstein’s work presented a set of testable challenges and instead they worked in typologies, and these have directly influenced present-day diaspora studies. These were not typologies in either the mathematical or the hermeneutical sense of the term, but nests of categories of migratory behaviour. These

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nests acted like the vertical sorting trays in a preautomatic post office and at their best they were serviceable and durable. The first of these had been created by the sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild just before World War I. He posited five types of migration, the first of which – “dispersion” of early nomadic and seminomadic human groups – did not warrant much of his attention. The other four types -invasion, conquest, colonization, and “immigration” – were worth exploring, and Fairchild dealt with them in a fuzzy, highly discursive manner. His chief virtue was to recognize the fundamental declension between voluntary and involuntary migration – not a small apperception, given the massive forced migrations that were to characterize the twentieth century.23 The most useful typology to come out of the middle years of the twentieth century was that of the sociologist William Petersen, who constructed an easy-to-use two-axis diagram. On one axis was his distinction between migration that was conservative in origin and migration that was intended to be innovative for the individual or group. (That people could migrate in order to keep important things in their life constant was an idea not as fully appreciated as it should be.) Then, on the axis perpendicular to this, he ranged four power sources of migration: (a) those impelled by “ecological push,” such as failure of the food supply for a nomadic population; (b) migration impelled by state policy, which either directly forced people to move (slavery is a good example) or impelled them to move for fear of destruction (some of Stalin’s more imaginative ethnic rearrangements fit in this category; (c) free migration, mostly for economic gain or cultural freedom; and (d) mass migration as a semiautonomous force of its own. Petersen’s system gives eight basic boxes – or “types” – and by going into the third dimension one could add such variables as age, gender, etc. and have a neatly stacked cube of boxes that categorize quite adequately most forms of migratory behaviour.24 Petersen’s typology as a descriptive instrument has been notably durable. When in the late twentieth century, “diaspora studies” as a distinct field emerged, the most common typologies employed were based on Petersen’s original model. Typologies are extremely useful and, indeed, it is difficult to discuss rationally any significant migration, either historical or presentday, without employing an agreed set of descriptors.

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However, for the historian of migration from, say, a given parish or even an entire country, the categories should be used with a touch of caution. And this holds even more for chroniclers of family or of individual migration. Any set of typologies is apodictic. That is, the typology is decreed to be regnant prior to the examination of the specific case being studied. Thus, the categories may determine the perspective of the diaspora historian and may set the vocabulary of description and of explanation much more than is justified by the evidence. It is too easy to buy unreflectively into a onesize-fits-all mode of thought. And too much typological thinking snuffs out the most attractive aspect of the rhetoric of historical explanation: the privilege of constructing an explanation that is simultaneously a singular story and also of more general import. Narrative counts. In the years before World War II, when human geographers worked especially closely with urban planners and with transport officials, they predominantly dealt with distance as the most important determinant of patterns of human motion. This was convenient, certainly, but a bit too simple, for the physical distance of any journey (to use an obvious example) is often not the chief determinant of whether or not one makes the trip. As Samuel Stouffer argued as early as 1940, “intervening opportunities” along the pathway (and, one should add, intervening obstacles) meant that actual physical distance is not necessarily a meaningful primary variable in human migration.25 In place of simple distance calculations, what was called the “gravity model” emerged. The model was misleadingly named (“gravity” can imply a seemingly passive seepage from one place to another), for, in fact, it was a gravitational pull model that worked on an analogy of the competing gravitational pull of two planets. When combined with the concepts of intervening opportunities and intervening obstacles, human migration behaviour sometimes was accurately explained and predicted, especially in short-term situations such as internal migration within a given society. At other times the model went all wobbly, the problem being: what was the real relationship between distance and gravitational pull? Newton’s mechanics worked fine for the physical world, but there are all sorts of discounts and discontinuities and combination effects when human beings assay whether or not to migrate across continents or half way around the world.26

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This was a pull-pull model. It assumed the attractiveness of each of two rival locales. However, farther back than human recorded history runs, it is likely that potential migrants understood that each locale was not merely a place of attraction, but also of repulsion. About one week as a huntergatherer would teach that lesson.

(5) When push-pull was brought into the discussion it thus had to be done under quite specific scholarly conditions. These was the extant state of the literature in historical geography, historical demography, and migration history – and, more particularly, the gravitational-pull model had to be subsumed by a new system. The most efficient method of melding the variants of the gravitational-pull model with the concept of push-pull was achieved by Everett S. Lee. That reconciliation is indicated visually in a slightly modified version of Lee’s basic illustration.27

Everett S. Lee’s Schema of Migration Intervening obstacles and opportunities

Origin

Destination

The central characteristics of Lee’s model are as follows: 1. It must be realized that the point of origin has characteristics that are attractive and ones that are negative. 2. The same holds true for the potential destination point. Neither point can accurately be described as a pure-attractor or as a pure-repulsor. 3. The differential between place of origin and place of potential destination is not a difference between push and pull. Each place could be truly

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rebarbative – and thus the situation would be push-push – with the potential migrants’ decision as to whether or not to move from one wretched place to another being based on their perception of how bad things at each spot were, after distance-effects and intervening difficulties were metered in. Conversely, each place could be very attractive, and the migrants’ decision would be made in a pull-pull situation. And, of course, one could have a simplistic push-pull calculation, with the place of origin being a negative, and the destination a perceived positive. Granting that algebraically there is no difference between any of these situations (as Ravenstein argued, it is the differential that counts in migratory behaviour), Guido Dorigo and Waldo Tobler in 1983 confirmed, in updated form, a number of Ravenstein’s laws and implicitly affirmed the underlying systemics Ravenstein had outlined. As part of their discussion, Dorigo and Tobler broke the push-pull discussion out of the constriction of the two-place model: the two points being where migrants start and the place where they settle. That bipolar picture is intuitively attractive, but it is a seduction. In fact, potential migrants do not look at just one destination, but at many. And each receptor area has a potential attraction (and repulsion) that is a function of the way the place is perceived from a multiplicity of potential sending sites. If for a moment we use the artificially simple case of an attractive destination (pull) and an unattractive point of origin (push), Dorigo and Tobler make the following crucial observation based on their mathematical modelling: “… The push factor at a place depends on the pull factor of all of the other places and the number of people leaving the place; similarly, the pull factor at a place depends on the push factor at all of the other places and the number of people entering the place … Every place is related to every other place, but near places are more related, and the push and pull factors are structurally intertwined.”28 This restatement and improved specification of Ravenstein’s fundamental belief – that human migratory activity forms an interrelated system – is crucial for the historical study of any diaspora, even in the atypical case of a “diaspora” that overwhelmingly migrates from Point A to Point B. It would be a travesty of historical experience to discuss that process as if only two locales were involved. Migrant behaviour is understandable only within the full menu of possibilities that the migrants themselves believed were open to them. Thus, even in the most limited case – Point A to Point B migration – migration is a multipolar event, and not simple push or pull from Points A and B.

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(6) Here we must change our posture slightly and look briefly towards a discipline that impacts directly upon diaspora studies, and upon labour history, demographic history, and several other specialities: economic history when it deals with the analysis of migrational behaviour. Economists, and therefore economic historians, have a long history of interest in the relationship of migration and the mechanics of the economic system. The signal point is that economists developed a narrower definition of push-pull than did the historical geographers whom we have previously surveyed. The first formidable interposition of the concept of push-pull in the English-language economic literature was that of Harry Jerome of the New York-based National Bureau of Economic Research. He published a detailed monograph in 1926 on the relationship of “business cycles” to a transnational set of phenomena: the similarly shaped profiles of migration from several European homelands to the United States in the years 1870 to 1914. These included England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary (from 1880), and Greece (from 1881). His analysis laid the ground rules among economic historians – ones that have been occasionally rejected, but usually are accepted without even being articulated. The first of these is that migration is best explained in terms of movement from one point (in Europe in this case) to a second point (here, the United States, which is veneered with a Promised Land patina). Second, that there are only two potential forces: push from Europe and pull from the United States. Although Jerome’s conceptual tramlines were simplistic, his study was industrious, and for its time, was a sophisticated collection of data. His general conclusion was that the pull from the United States was a much more powerful force than was the push from Europe.29 And third, an unconscious set of patriotic American attitudes subliminally ran through the work. The United States was a great place and could only be defined as an attractor, not as a repulsor for migrants. Some thoughts were just unthinkable. In 1941, Dorothy Swaine Thomas’s Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Growth, 1750–1933 replaced the broad brush strokes of Harry Jerome with an almost-pointillist technique. This was made possible by the nature of Swedish demographic and migration data for the nineteenth century. Among sending countries, the Swedish data are the best

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in the world, and therefore in the modern age of the Great European Migration (1815–1914), Sweden becomes the country that one must study to generate inferences that can be transferred elsewhere. Given that a common phenomenon seems to have engaged all those nations that Harry Jerome identified, it is sensible to use Sweden to illuminate patterns and to test hypotheses that cannot be directly dealt with in European countries that have weak historical data sets. Dorothy Thomas’s work was a rejection of the automatic assertion that US-pull inevitably had a stronger valence than any push from Europe. Dorothy Thomas argued that: The great outflow of peoples which began in the 1850s drained almost a million and a third from the Swedish population … This notable emigration is far too complicated a phenomenon to be explained simply in terms of population pressure in agriculture. However the damming up of young people in the country, the slow expansion of opportunities for making a living from the land, and the late development of industrialization and urbanization had unquestionably produced a latent push towards migration upon the surplus population and this was enhanced by the severe hardships suffered during recurrent harvest failures.30 Thomas continued in that vigorous and detailed vein when discussing the dystopian aspects of Swedish life, but ultimately she concluded that the pull-of-opportunity from the United States not only worked in tandem with Swedish push factors, but excelled them in force.31 Certainly, there is no shame in Dorothy S. Thomas’s coming probatively to the point that most economic historians of her era assumed as a matter of faith. The disappointing aspect of her analysis is that, despite the richly layered Swedish data base, the home country is painted as being all push, the receiving country as entirely pull. And thus her thinking is completely bipolar. Actually, Swedes migrated to a large number of other nations – Germany, the Baltic States, Finland being the most obvious ones – but the analysis totally pertains to the United States. The rest of the world disappears. The Welsh economist, Brinley Thomas, in 1954 published a major study, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy32 that, while employing different points of migration origin, confirmed much of D.S. Thomas’s analysis. In this case, he argued statistically

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that because Kuznetian long cycles (especially building cycles) in the United States and the United Kingdom interacted, D.S. Thomas, therefore, had been correct when she tried in her mild way to tamp down the tone of cultural imperialism in American migration economics. (Incidentally, as is characteristic of much of the work of economic historians, for Brinley Thomas “Great Britain” sometimes means England and Scotland, sometimes the entire United Kingdom, including Ireland.) Equally importantly, almost two decades later, Thomas expanded his analysis to include migrant destinations other than the United States (Argentina, Australia, and Canada). Thus, he went a fair way towards breaking away from the Point A to Point B determinism embraced by his colleagues. Referring to opponents of his views, Thomas tartly noted that “these critics show a surprising tendency to view the economic growth and fluctuation of particular countries (usually their own) exclusively in terms of internal determinants.”33 Just at the time that Brinley Thomas was presenting his revised analysis of transatlantic migration (1972), the Quarterly Journal of Economics was publishing the results of a study funded by the National Bureau of Economic Research proposing an economic model of Swedish migration in the era of the Great European Migration. (That Sweden was used as the key case of European migration is confirmation of the point that I made earlier: because of the superior quality of the Swedish data, most big thinking for the period runs through Stockholm.) To set the context for the Swedish model, John Michael Quigley summarized the then-present state of econometric investigation of migration, and these observations can be annotated as follows: 1. That “the likelihood of migration is related to projected difference in economic well-being …” is the operational foundation stone of the field (which is to say: as far as primary motives for migration, Ravenstein rules). 2. In the abstract, individual migration decisions are made by evaluating monetary differences in amenity relative to “tastes” or to the “psychic costs” of relocation. (In other words, all noneconomic matters – fear, hate, love, everything related to migration – are expressed through monetary differences. Everything is articulated in terms of price, and the only things that count are things that can be counted.) 3. “In the historical context, with considerable uncertainty and with subjective discount rates unknown, it seems reasonable to use contemporaneous economic conditions as estimates of the economic benefits associated

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with employment in the source and receiving countries.” (Which is to say: even after asserting that migration is motivated chiefly by a desire to improve economic well-being, and that the difference between home-andaway is expressed in price differentials, discounted for subjective factors, one has to make yet another assumption: this is that in almost all historical situations, estimates of the benefits at any given place cannot be directly obtained by examining the migrants’ historical records, so they must be inferred from circumstantial evidence that is collected concerning employment rates and remuneration in each locale.) 4. Not surprisingly, the grand old simplification between the push of economic conditions in the regions of origin and the pull of economic opportunities in the region of destination is maintained.34 This is a fair summary of the way business was done by those economists interested in the history of migration on the eve of the computer revolution that made possible the evolution of cliometrics.

(7) In order to understand the fundamental reason why, at the present time, academic historians as an occupational cadre (including most diaspora historians) have parted company with front-edge economic historians (cliometricians), we should first recognize what the two disciplines have in common: namely, that they both face the intractable Black Box problem. The Black Box is the human mind. No matter how much one knows about what happens before any given human decision is made and about the reportage on why the decision was made, and no matter how accurately one can assay the apparent consequences of that decision, the reason why the actual decision was made is forever unknowable. What we have is limited to observable behaviour and observable circumstances. Heaven only knows what really goes on inside the Black Box. Granted, in rare cases we have chartings of neurological patterns, but even these are merely descriptive. The causality of human decision making is imputed by the observer. And, yes, there exist minutely detailed diaries, kept by introspective individuals, but these fundamentally are no different from any other form of behaviour, for they only come into existence by the physical act of someone writing and preserving that writing. Indeed, this form of behaviour, crafted as it is often for the unseen audience of posterity, is potentially much less

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useful (because of its being either intentionally or accidentally deceptive) than are other, allegedly less revealing forms of behaviour. Aside from the obvious suggestion that a little more humility in the face of history’s tremendum might be beneficial to the general and entire academic enterprise, such humility would save us from the single most pervasive fallacy that historians of all sorts exhibit. This is the simple logical error that adopts the consequences of a decision as the cause of that decision. Whether one is dealing with a single case such as a biography or a data set of several hundred thousand items, the fallacy is equally unacceptable. As a small example of the way this error in thought can affect the historical study of migration, take the fictive case of an Irish milliner who in 1870 migrates from Dublin to New York City. Before leaving, she has been beaten twice or more weekly by her husband, and recently he has been threatening to kill her. So, despite her fear of starting life over in a strange world, she escapes, sets up a small shop in Brooklyn and eventually becomes a fashionable women’s clothier. The milliner explains to her new friends in New York that she had left Dublin to avoid brutality and had headed for a place she did not actually wish to live (a push-push situation, neither alternative seeming desirable to her at the moment of decision). And that is what she truly believes to be the case. Yet, in the migration history literature, because she fortuitously had improved her economic lot, she is tallied as having decided to migrate for economic reasons and in the form of the traditional push-pull. Maybe the milliner did not really know her own mind, or maybe she lied. But it does seem a trifle arrogant to operate with models of historical experience that preclude a bit of patient and humble listening to their historical subjects on the part of the later chronicler. Granted, we can never know what went on within any given mind, or any cohort, but privileging one aspect of total context (in this case, changes in economic position) makes a mockery of the scholarly collection of information on observable behaviour and observable context.35 Not that there is always something to be heard. Historical evidence so often melts away, leaving only calcified footprints behind and no indication of the suppleness of human cognition. Still, even if we had the equivalent of exit interviews with hundreds and hundreds of European migrants as they boarded ship to various New Worlds, there still might be a paucity of material – and thus an augmented opportunity for present-day scholarly

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hubris. One reads with morbid fascination, the astute observations that Alden Speare generated in a study of Taiwanese peasants in the late 1960s and early ’70s. These were people who were accessible and whose motives could be directly examined. Yet, “the biggest problem with the application of a cost-benefit model to human migration may not be the crudeness of the actual calculation, but the fact that many people never make any calculation at all.” With baleful honesty, he continued: “A great many of the non-migrants we interviewed appear to never have given any serious consideration to the thought of moving anywhere. If this is true, then a model based on the decision-making process cannot be applied to all people.36 Actually, the nonreflective inertia of those peasants represents their having made decisions, albeit unconsciously. The obvious point is that one should be careful in explaining with great confidence how similar migrants made their decisions. If, at their best, both conventional and econometrically inclined historians have the wisdom to be humble in the face of the ultimately unknowable, the difference between them is primarily a matter of sensibility. This word is used in its full nineteenth-century connotation: it encompasses the power of perception, the readiness to engage in both emotional and cognitive consciousness, the possession of acuteness of apprehension, especially compassion for other human beings and, in a vague way, taste – not taste as something artificial or affected, but taste as a mature and wise judgement of what is most apposite and most humane in dealing with any given human situation. As an example of how sharply sensibility differs between mainline historians, particularly diaspora historians, and cliometricians, we can examine two instances from the historical literature on migration. Each historical explanation is by a first-rate scholar in his mode of work. The first example is from a paper given by Lawrence M. Geary of the history faculty of University College, Cork at the twenty-third Irish Conference of Historians, held in 1997. Geary is a scholar in the history of science, especially medicine. His paper was entitled, “‘The Whole Country was in Motion’: Mendicancy and Vagrancy in pre-Famine Ireland.”37 It dealt with difficult issues in a very tough time period: the pre-Famine Irish records vary between poor and nonexistent; and the matters of vagrancy and mendicancy, which impinge heavily on the historical question of migration, are usually the least well-documented of all migration records. Through myriad primary

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sources, Geary amply documented the fundamental fact that extreme poverty created a culture of continual mobility in pre-Famine Ireland, and this was most evident in the hungry summer months when the previous year’s potato crop was running out. It is easier to qualify than quantify begging in pre-Famine Ireland. By its very nature, mendicancy was a fluctuating phenomenon, one that was influenced by a number of economic and social variables. Need was greatest during the so-called hungry months of summer, that interregnum between the exhaustion of one year’s potato crop and the harvesting of the next. During this period, it was customary for substantial numbers to close up their cabins and take to the roads. While the males sought employment in the more prosperous parts of the country, or in England or Scotland, the distaff side and the children roamed the countryside, begging their subsistence. It is impossible to distinguish the propelling force behind this annual migration, to differentiate between compulsion and custom (emphasis mine).38 This can fairly be compared (indeed, contrasted) to a classic article by Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Migration to the New World: Long Term Influences and Impact,” published in 1974.39 Williamson, one of the world’s pioneering cliometricians, was soon to become the incumbent of an endowed professorship at Harvard, and was often on the annual informal short list that economists draw up each Nobel Prize season. His 1974 article is a classic because he vigorously kicked most of his predecessors in the economics of migration down the stairs and, with tight economic theory and improved mathematics, he explained most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European migration in terms of long-term wage trends. Here is his summary: The conventional literature may have been misled by an exaggerated emphasis on two forces. The first of these relates to harvest conditions in general and the Irish Potato Famine in particular. No doubt, poor European harvest conditions continued to push migrants to America in isolated years after 1870, but its total (his emphasis) impact on the immigration experience was not sufficiently important to produce net push effects over longer periods of time.40

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That is one way to deal with nineteenth-century Ireland. Williamson’s bigpicture concerning the Great European Migration was as follows: “Nowhere did we attempt to disentangle the underlying pull forces in America. Rather we simply took historical wage trends in America and used the migration equation to estimate the pull on European immigration, while the residual was identified as push” (emphasis mine).41 Granting to both Jeffrey Williamson and Lawrence Geary their accomplished competence in their own fields, one has to be struck by the huge distance between them. This is a synecdoche of the relationship of the conventional historian and the cliometrician. The vast gap is not so much “intellectual” in the narrow sense of the word, but cultural. Each approaches the Black Box with a different posture and mien. I suspect that these are in large part a result of self-internalized attitudes that have less to do with the House of Intellect and a lot more to do with the different playgrounds they grew up on as kids. The last thing I wish to do is to suggest that all recent economic historians are self-confident to the point of hubris. It is immensely heartening to encounter the work on emigration and poverty in pre-Famine Ireland done by Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda, two of the world’s most admired cliometricians, who worked together on trying to determine some of the qualitative aspects of the pre-Famine Irish migrants to other countries. In their concluding remarks, the reader encounters an admirable realism: “Admittedly, our data are a poor filter for all the relevant qualities which may have distinguished the emigrants; it is still conceivable that the unmeasurable characteristics of the emigrants may well have been those that were in short supply in Ireland in 1845: ingenuity, initiative, a willingness to take risk and to submit to discipline.”42 That is the kind of measured and realistic modesty that makes one inclined to trust these scholars’ affirmative conclusions. In the last three decades, the distance in sensibility or, if you prefer, culture, between historians in university departments of history and econometric historians, almost all of whom are located in departments of economics, has grown considerably – and this is not merely a matter of the advancing job-specialization that occurs as institutions grow larger and larger. Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes, and certainly no naïf concerning the field of economic history, diagnosed the problem in a letter that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (20 October

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2006): “Historians have largely abandoned economic history. Economic history has mutated into ‘historical economics.’ Most of it is now done by economists, who look to the past to provide a field of observations to test economic hypotheses, using historical data as a source of econometric studies. This has brought a great gain in rigour; the loss is that historians no longer do economic history.” The implications for historians of diasporas are obvious. Excusing Lord Skidelsky for a slight overstatement (there are indeed a few cross-over scholars), he is fundamentally right about the situation in the United Kingdom and North America: what in the 1960s had been a moderately comfortable common-law marriage between economic historians and mainline historians, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, had evolved into an agreed-separation that at present is heading to a permanent estrangement. And, as in the world of no-fault divorce, neither party is assessed blame; it’s just the way things are. Undeniably, the quantum increase in the ability of econometricians to test hypotheses effected by the computer revolution has made their explanations of human migratory movements much more powerful than they were a few decades ago. Yet, for all of this revolution in technique, the substantive assumptions and determinative postures of the cliometric historians’ version of migration history has not become that greatly different from those of earlier economic historians. For example, in an amazingly ambitious volume, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (1998), Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson examined the causes of the gross out-migration rates, between 1850 and 1913 of twelve European nations and came to the conclusion that relative wage rates were the most important cause; and also that other factors – such as the amount of assistance from previous migrants – played a part. Fair enough. What is interesting for the conventional historian is the authors’ forthright statement of method and purpose: “Our approach is economic and unashamedly quantitative. We do not seek to undermine or reject the microanalysis of historians, but rather to build on this by examining the causes and the consequences of mass migration at a more macro level. Only then is it possible to infer historical lessons useful for contemporary debate. This, after all, should be the principal goal of the economic historian”43 (emphasis mine). Avowedly, (1) the authors are not interested in individual cases, except as particles in the physics of migrational movement; (2) they believe that

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only macrolevel – that is, mass quantitative – observations can be useful in drawing lessons from the historical material; and (3) they affirm that the primary purpose of the work of the economic historian is to draw out lessons from the past that are useful in present-day argumentation and in state policy-making. Historical research, therefore, is an instrument, not an apperception. History is of no use unless it is useful. These methods and beliefs are antithetical to the culture of most academic historians and incompatible with their sensibilities. Still, one appreciates candour. And Hatton and Williamson provide a crucial definition of how the terms ‘push’ and ‘pull’ are employed in cliometric debate: “The literature has always been preoccupied with the relative strength of ‘pull’ from abroad and ‘push’ at home. Oddly enough, there has been little discussion of how these terms should be defined. Our strong preference would be to reserve them for describing underlying labor market fundamentals: the forces that served to shift labor demand and supply in the origin and destination countries” (emphasis mine).44 The italicized statement does not introduce any significant change into the econometric literature, for as we have repeatedly observed, the notquite-universal assumption of the field always has been: (1) that push comes from a home destination and pull from abroad; and (2) that economic betterment is the motivation for most migration. However, in fining-down the definition of push-pull to consist of a description of the relationship of competing labour markets, Hatton and Williamson are doing everyone a favour: economic historians are given a sharper definition of the terms within their trade, and conventional historians are given good reason to avoid the terms altogether or, alternately, to make their own specifications of the words “push” and “pull” both precise and situation-specific.

(8) Thus, in a legacy stemming from the technical virtuosity of Ernst Georg Ravenstein, historians of diaspora have been given a long scholarly inheritance that has come to revolve around competing conceptions of pushpull. One of these definitions is the purely economic definition, which is admirable in its operationality, but which (at present) is very limited in its explanatory scope. The other, stemming from the field of historical geography, is much richer – it recognizes the multipolar nature of push-pull as

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between several places of origin and destination. The evidentiary challenge presented by the multipolar perspective that has characterized the members of most diasporas is, however, daunting. In any case, “push-pull” should not be used casually; if diaspora historians choose to employ the concept, it is our duty to explain exactly what we mean.

3

The Diaspora Symptom: Global Projection of Local Identities Amitava Chowdhury

The contemporary proliferation of diasporas is a symptom of critical consciousness – an enunciation of a desire to inhabit alterity with pride. It is an indication of the aspiration to belong in ways other than that dictated by the institutions of modernity.1 It is a symptom of freedom of choice – the ability to simultaneously live within and alongside a community – not new or unique, but increasingly available to an enlarging section of the global population. In an age of rootlessness, the diaspora phenomenon captures an aspiration to belong globally while holding on to the specifics of local registers of belonging. This chapter turns away from genealogical and definitional engagements with the concept of diaspora. Instead of asking what is diaspora and what it ought to be, it is our goal here to interrogate the confounding agility of the term and its usage. In response to a large section of the theoretical literature that attempts to rein in the concept of diaspora by lamenting its recent conspicuous inflation, here we proceed from the thought that it is necessary to find meaning in the claims and performance of diasporas in practice. We move from genealogical exhumation and prescriptive consensus building to an attempt to interpret what we may call the diaspora symptom – the recent enormous explosion of the term in academia, politics, and the public space.

diasporic articulations In academic literature, the concept of diaspora is deployed in at least three prominent and often overlapping ways. The original, traditional, and commonsensical use of the term is based on the logic of dispersion – a collective

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umbrella that purports to include a people united by a common ancestral and geographical origin. In this mode of thinking, diasporas become historical realities ex post facto. Much of the original literature on diaspora, and much of the attempts at consensus building on what we may label as diaspora, stem from the logic of diaspora as dispersion.2 The trope of an original homeland dictates the logic of diaspora as dispersion. To be a part of a diaspora, in this view, requires no special allegiance, sense of belonging, or desire to return.3 One becomes a part of a diaspora by default on the basis of lineal ties to a geographical entity. Apart from the paradigmatic case of the Jewish Diaspora that has long dominated the use of the term and the field of research surrounding it, diaspora as dispersion is the basis of the original descriptions of the Greek diaspora, the Armenian diaspora, and the African diaspora, to name a few that have had the longest staying power in diaspora-talk.4 Diaspora as dispersion, as a way of thinking about diaspora, is revealing especially in those cases where a conscious recollection of ancestry is not a dominant identarian facet. Take the Italians in North America, for example.5 Although a latecomer to the continent, the Italians very quickly assimilated with the dominant population to the extent that they did not need to turn to Italy for any markers of identity. While the end of this diaspora has not been spoken about explicitly until recently, it is necessary to point out that when a people do not look homeward any longer for identarian inspirations, surely a diaspora has come to an end.6 And yet, a case for the Italian diaspora has frequently been made since the 1970s precisely by upholding the logic of dispersion as the only basis.7 The diaspora as dispersion model, in this reading, translates into diasporic members who are diasporic by default and destiny. An element of choice in identity formation has no place in this articulation. For the greater part of the life history of the term, diaspora was a religious notion. When it was adopted as an academic and secular concept in the late twentieth century – although, a few earlier invocations were not altogether nonexistent – it was done so primarily to denote the global dispersion of a group of people originating from an ethnonation.8 Perhaps secularization of a religious concept required such a framing. What is curious is that while such genetic modes of thinking not only pervaded the public sphere and political culture, they have remained alive in academic literature even in the twenty-first century. Such a position is explicit in Gabriel

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Sheffer’s formulation that “diasporas have existed since the earliest periods in the development of human societies. Hence, ethnic diasporism is a perennial phenomenon.”9 Sheffer unambiguously lays out his idea that diasporas are not “imagined communities,” but “actual entities.”10 But people rarely belong to one register unless they are fundamentalists, and one soon finds out that beyond rhetorical, political, and emotional claims, diaspora as dispersion is a rather weak analytical apparatus. Is Obama a part of the African diaspora, or the Irish? The inflexibility of diaspora through genealogy leaves no conceptual room for hybridity, creolization, and mixing. Diasporas identified ex post facto solely on the basis of dispersion and genealogy introduces the idea of “dormant” members in a diaspora.11 The implication is that in traditional formulations, such as the Irish diaspora, some members – and, bear in mind that all members are included via a head count determined by geography and ancestry – are actively diasporic. But others, that is, the dormant members, are not conscious of their ancestry or at any rate do not employ their Irish ancestry in their performance and practice of identity. The idea of dormant diasporans results in a unitary view of the world where plural identities are shunned and not accounted for. To take a specific example: In an interview in Uganda for a scholarship to study in the United States, a member of the selection committee asked Avtar Brah, “do you see yourself as African or Indian?” Brah felt the question was “somewhat absurd. Could he not see that I was both?”12 But the interviewer’s world is in black and white, and he found it difficult to visualize a world where someone could be both an African and Indian. By extension, the question of dormant membership in diasporas leads to a dogmatic view of the universe, where multiple ways of belonging are fundamentally denied. Diaspora as dispersion is the central logic behind a plethora of new national diasporas that have arisen in recent years. One speaks of an Argentinian, Australian, Cuban, Dutch, Iraqi, Haitian, Somali, Ukrainian, Venezuelan, and a whole host of other diasporas defined ethnonationally, or in Rogers Brubaker’s words, “country-defined” diasporas.13 Such proliferation of nationally-defined, country-specific diasporas stems from the logic of dispersion, and one encounters a conflation of meaning of diasporas with other cognate concepts, such as immigrants, expatriates, and overseas communities. In this vein, it is not necessary for a Dutch diasporan, for example, to consciously draw from or contribute to Dutch national or ethnocultural

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identity. The mere fact of original ancestral dispersal is enough for a diasporan head count. By the same token, Robin Cohen’s “victim diasporas,” embodied in the forced migration of the Armenians or Africans, operate from within the logic of dispersion. Diaspora as dispersion need not make any distinction between African American descendants of transatlantic forced migration and late twentieth-century African middleclass migrants drawn to the continent by academic pull. Whether or not a person wants to belong to a victim diaspora, genealogical thinking denies them any other destiny.14 A second and far more urgent and promising articulation of diaspora is one where the diasporan claims to be a part of a diaspora, or indeed practices the project of diaspora. Ancestry, genealogy, and geographical origin play a role in this only to be bolstered by a conscious desire to belong in a specific way. In Brubaker’s words, “it does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it.”15 In this view, diasporas are not concrete, immutable, actual entities, but become a “category of practice.” Diaspora as project requires no unwilling partners, marginal actors, or dormant members, but is determined by a stance and consciousness to belong in a particular way. Such articulations are often based on homeland orientations, but the claim comes from within. It is not foisted on a people from outside. In this view, one belongs to the Tamil diaspora by making a conscious ethnolinguistic claim of a multilateral fraternal linkage. Others of Tamil descent may often choose to remain outside such diasporic calls and claims. Similarly, while the logic of diaspora as dispersion combines the African American with the new African immigrant on the basis of immutable ancestral linkages, diaspora as project requires an additional ideological stance, for example, a global call of pan-Africanism to bring the two together. While the first mode leaves the diasporan with no choice, the second requires conscious subscription to an ideological call. A dynamic concept of diaspora as project helps us to unravel historical formations of identity and allows us to interrogate conditions of diasporic subjectivity – an analytical frame that cannot be easily conflated with migration, minority, or ethnic studies. While a hegemonic version of diaspora as dispersion would have us believe that identities are predetermined, fixed, and permanent, in the context of colonialism, curious processes of mixture, loss, forgetting, and reinvention mark the realm of reality. In the erstwhile sugar colonies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, the indentured

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labourers who followed slavery, mixed and mingled with the African populations. On many occasions, the progeny of such mixing claimed to be Indians.16 While the diaspora as dispersion model would remain mute and confused in such hybrid horizons, diaspora as project has the benefit of revealing formational processes by following the making and unmaking of identarian claims. The Indian in the labor diaspora is Indian often because of a stated claim, not determined entirely by geographical and genealogical roots, for, what is a diaspora if it is not a desire to belong?17 Diaspora as project as a mode of interpreting diasporas is helpful to historians because of its inherent dynamic nature and its ability to discern historical formational processes. Historians as interpreters of change would find a dynamic concept to be of interest in comparison to a fixed and static entity. Nevertheless, certain formulaic problems embedded in diasporic articulations are, in effect, compounded and reinforced in this mode of thinking. Whereas diaspora as dispersion does not recognize hybridity, diaspora as project may explicitly deny it. It is by partial erasure of memory that a conscious identarian claim can be made. It is by denying contrary ideologies that new ideological stances are promoted. And, it is by stressing uniformity, homogeneity, and purity that diaspora as project can find acceptance and meaning. To take the example just cited, a descendant of African-Indian miscegenation in the plantation context has to explicitly eschew an African-derived identity to become Indian in the diasporic sense. Diaspora as project preaches the same discourses of purity that form the stuff of nationalist imaginary. If we think of diaspora as project not as an abstract idiom but as a conscious claim, surely formulations of hybridity have no place in it. Contrarily, it is possible that diaspora as project can transcend solitary and singular identarian formulations. We can imagine descendants of interracial unions (African-Indian in the plantation horizons), or cross-national unions (Indian-Pakistani, for example), putting forward unique diaspora projects. In reality, such formulations would form special interest groups, social classes, or political interests, but diasporic claims are made on common grounds drawn from national, protonational, and perceived racial homogeneity. Hybrid diasporas can only be spoken of as an idiom or a metaphor. In this stream of thought, given the complexities of South Asian politics, the concept of a South Asian diaspora can make sense in the diaspora as dispersion mode of head count. The reality is too fragmented for a

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coherent project to be construed in the name of a South Asian diaspora, to take just one example. Devoid of any core marker of identity, such projects fall flat in practice, but may indeed gain currency in creative projects of making metaphors. A third significant way of articulating diaspora is the mode of deploying it as a metaphor. I am not referring to the “agricultural metaphor” of scattering and sowing the seeds, the basic metaphorical etymology of diaspora-talk.18 Neither am I thinking of the metaphors used to portray an imaginary, original homeland or that of a shared diasporic space. Diaspora as metaphor refers to a mode of thinking about the world where forms of cohesion, networks, movement, dislocation, and even marginality are labelled as diasporic, in cases where it is clearly evident that the use of the term has little to do with diasporas resulting from displacement. Thus, when Amy-Jill Levine writes that, “woman is in effect in perpetual diaspora; her location is never her own, but is contingent on that of her father, husband, or sons,” she is employing the term as a metaphor and not in the sense it is used in political science or sociology.19 Here, “in perpetual diaspora” means a permanent otherness.20 Diaspora as metaphor portrays the discomfort of nonconformity, or what Heidegger has called Unheimlichkeit, that is, “uncomfortable” or “to-not-being-at-home.”21 Diaspora here is wrapped up in the perplexity of being in a world that is not our own – a world that appears to be fleeting, coercive, hegemonic, and amorphous. Diaspora as metaphor is uniquely capable of expressing a curious double bind of unbelonging and belonging. On one hand, diaspora becomes the metaphor of homelessness and unbelonging and, on the other hand, the plasticity of the term allows for metaphoric invocations of empowered belonging amidst and in spite of diversity. It is in this latter sense that our mutually intelligible individual subjectivities get refashioned in the form of collectivities and group identities that we metaphorically refer to as diasporas. When Stuart Hall imagines an Afro-Caribbean diaspora, he is not referring to all of the African-derived people in the Caribbean. Such a view would find a place in the mode of diaspora as dispersion. Then too, it would be difficult to disentangle the Afro-Caribbean diaspora from the African diaspora, as the logic of dispersion would make one a subset of the other without any clearly defined boundaries, and as Brubaker has shown us, boundary maintenance is one of the principal methods of claiming diasporas.22 Thus, with respect to the dispersion model, to speak of

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Afro-Caribbean diasporas would be meaningless. Similarly, in the absence of any national, racial, linguistic, ethnic, or other covering identities, to speak of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora as practice is at best premature. As Hall states, “I use this term here metaphorically, not literally; diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland,” and “the diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity.”23 Here, we finally have an articulation of diaspora as metaphor that embraces hybridity. It is possible to identify and imagine similar diasporic expressions in the realm of metaphor making in the interstices of belonging and unbelonging. The metaphor of diaspora is present in another section of the literature, namely the various linguistic diasporas. Some have spoken about francophone diasporas in Quebec.24 Others have identified a francophone Greek diaspora in the Balkans.25 And still others have spoken of global francophone diasporas, especially in the realm of literary studies.26 Similarly, articulations of an anglophone diaspora are not rare.27 Entire conferences have been organized on Lusophone diasporas.28 And, in the same spirit, nonEuropean linguistic diasporas abound, as well.29 It is curious that the term diaspora should be used as a qualifier to talk about linguistic groups that have members across boundaries. It is naturally awkward to think of those who belong in multiple language groups. Surely, the linguistic diasporas do not actually refer to a people as an identarian group. Employing the term diaspora to account for language groups cannot, to state the obvious, align with accepted notions of diaspora as dispersion. In these cases, the language of diaspora is invoked as a metaphor of shared linguistic identity. Other creative metaphorical uses of diaspora as a term are near at hand. Increasingly, one comes across frequent uses of the term queer diasporas.30 But, of course, such articulations of diaspora do not share any resemblance to traditional formulations of diaspora as dispersion or difference in dispersion. Deploying the term in relation to queer studies may only signify a sense of unbelonging as I have discussed above in a different context. The attraction to the term diaspora in this case aims at a shared identity drawn from the realities of marginalization and prejudice. Just as there are claims to queer diasporas, it is not difficult to find instances where such claims are combined with other ethnonational identities. Thus, in recent years, academic publications abound in the areas of South Asian queer diasporas, Caribbean queer

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diasporas, Puerto Rican queer diasporas (or, Queer Ricans, according to one formulation), and indeed “Indo-Caribbean queer diaspora in Canada.”31 The diasporic horizons have been subjected to numerous partitions and fragmentations in an endless play of metaphors of subjectivity. In the last decade, academic publications and the larger society have become increasingly inundated with other metaphorical representations bearing the term diaspora. Many such formulations carry the message of a fraternity of specific dimensions of unbelonging. Diaspora as a metaphor of marginalization is seen in a recent call for deaf diasporas.32 Brubaker notes the existence of Yankee, Dixie, liberal, conservative, digital, and even terrorist diasporas.33 Evidently, the term diaspora has become the metaphor of choice for all politics of difference. Revisiting and reinventing “classical” and “traditional” diasporas with increasing frequency, and inventing new metaphorical diasporas as an identarian strategy, from the 1990s and especially in the last decade, seem to be the most prolific pasture of myth, memory, and metaphor making in society, academia, and public culture. Diaspora as metaphor has so pervaded contemporary consciousness that the term has jumped from the social sciences to medical literature. In the last two years, oncologists have started talking about cancer diasporas.34 If you thought for a moment that the cancer diaspora refers to a marginalized realm of unbelonging claimed by cancer patients, you would be wrong. Cancer diaspora refers to metastasis, the diaspora of cancer cells circulating within the body, dispersed and scattered, looking fondly towards the home tumor and nursing animosity for the noncancerous cells. “Migration” of cancer cells from the tumor to the target organs is no longer a metaphor of choice in oncology. The cancer cells now “escape” or are often “forced out” from their “original habitat” in the true spirit of galut, “exile,” in search of habitable “microenvironments.”35 And if cancer cells can form diasporas, why not other cells, enzymes, proteins, and everything else of which we are made. It appears that we diasporans are now being inhabited by billions of diasporas while at the same time we ourselves drift along making and unmaking diasporas. One can now speak of diasporas within and diasporas without in an elaborate schemata of fractals of diasporas. I must reiterate that the three articulations of diasporas: diaspora as dispersion; diaspora as project; and diaspora as metaphor are not mutually

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exclusive. The idea of a Spanish diaspora, for example, might be predicated on the logic of dispersion – that is, a diaspora of globally disseminated people of Spanish descent. But such logic may indeed be a claim and a project employed in the service of Spanish nationalism at home and a projection of Spanish pride and authority abroad. Nevertheless, such a project is a claim made from outside, foisted on unsuspecting unintentional alleged diasporans who have no desire of being engulfed by the tentacles of nationalism. Diaspora as dispersion can be a project where the so-called diasporan is hijacked for someone else’s agenda. Metaphoric articulations of diaspora can coincide with diaspora projects only in those instances where the diaspora in question has no resemblance to any paradigmatic, classical, ethnonational, or even nonstate diasporas. Scanning the literature and ngrams on diaspora reveals a rather interesting detail. Before the 1990s, the term diaspora was employed in three ways. It was used in its original technical and religious sense in connection with the Jewish experience. It was implemented in what Hall describes as “the old, the imperialising, the hegemonising, form of ‘ethnicity’” – a usage at the interface of dispersion and ethnicity, and it was further used as a metaphor.36 As the foregoing discussion has shown, some metaphorical calls to linguistic diasporas were made as early as the 1980s, and people have been speaking about religious diasporas for far longer than that. It was only in the 1990s that diaspora was formalized into an academic analytical term, and in the process it was done so in reference to its technical use. People soon realized that the technical definition did not do justice to the other formal, metaphorical, and ethnicity-oriented claims made on the term, and hence, all the quibbles regarding definitions in diaspora-talk. While it may seem that the formal definitions brought diaspora into vogue, leading to its eventual explosive proliferation in academia, society, politics, and the media, in reality, diaspora as metaphor has been floating around for a little longer. Academic formalization captured the air thick with diaspora metaphors. I argue that this entire process, that is, the cooption of a technical term as a metaphor and the formal attempt of dispelling metaphors into definitions, and the inevitable proliferation of diaspora projects and metaphors in the twenty-first century, cumulatively is a symptom of a specific form of subjectivity. Let us explore what this symptom might mean.

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the diaspora symptom It is time to pause and wonder about the diaspora phenomenon. Why have we adopted a term, at the expense of others, and employed it in every area of human consciousness, subjectivity, and biology? What is so powerful about this metaphor that it has become the sine qua non of modern-day identities of difference and unbelonging? Why does it resonate with every form of subjective experience, and why as a metaphor is it able to capture an entire universe of processes, feelings, expressions, aspirations, and criticisms? And, why now? Is diaspora a foundational metanarrative of our times? On the other hand, the plurality of meanings that diaspora as a concept has to shoulder is the very reason why the term is looked upon with suspicion. Brubaker argues that, “the problem with this latitudinarian, ‘let-a-thousand-diasporas-bloom’ approach is that the category becomes stretched to the point of uselessness … the universalization of diaspora, paradoxically, means the disappearance of diaspora.”37 The questions I want to ask are: Why has such universalization occurred and what can we learn from such proliferation?; What do a “thousand diasporas” tell us about our locus in time? I want to offer the thought that diaspora as a narrative of belonging operates along three axes. The first is the axis of difference. In other words, under the sign of diaspora one belongs with a difference – a difference that is a part of collective experience. Difference creates a boundary surrounding the diaspora and forms the basis of the formational claim and stance. Such differences can be real or imaginary and can be along the axes of major markers of identity – nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and various other differentiating domains. Such is the basis of the stated claims of classical diasporas and those that diaspora analysts are willing to include in global diaspora rosters. But, difference may also be construed in memory, in history, in ideology, and elsewhere. The point is that without a sign of difference, diasporic subjectivity does not exist. Diaspora projects bring together people who are similar in their claimed difference. The second axis of diaspora is the axis of spatiality. Space matters in constituting diaspora claims. The sign of diaspora is replete with spatial parameters. The space of emigration zones, the space one turns towards to draw identarian inspiration, the space that constitutes the adopted home, space far and near. For most uses and commonsense reference to diasporas,

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dispersal across space is the primary, formational axis of diaspora. But beyond the mere fact of dispersal across space, spatiality determines the core facets of difference. It is not only the space across which one spreads out to form a diaspora, but also the intricate subjectivities one derives from space and place that makes the diasporan different. In my own area of research, the Indian indentured labour diaspora, peculiarities of space and place determine the cultural difference that distances the diasporan from the Indians in India. There is no denying the fact that particularities and peculiarities of space inform the cultural mores of diasporans. I would argue that the third axis is time. The axis of temporality adds a layer of difference in combination with spatiality. Temporality and spatiality are the core constituents of diasporic subjectivity and determine what I have referred to above as diachronic and synchronic aspects of diaspora.38 In this vein, while articulating the difference between African Americans and Africans, Léopold Senghor saw a “gap” between the two. For Senghor, despite phenotypical similarity, the difference between the two stem, “d’un simple décalage – dans le temps et dans l’espace,” that is, a simple décalage, “interval,” “gap,” or “discrepancy,” in time and space.39 Diaspora at the most fundamental level is a symptom of an interval, a discrepancy, or décalage. It is a symptom of difference caused by dispersal through time and space. This is the basis of diaspora as project and the stimulus for diaspora as metaphor. Diaspora signifies difference in dispersion. In other words, diasporic subjectivity is a signal of difference captured along the axis of space (and time), while internal coherence in diasporas is reconciled through a mediation of individual subjectivity and collective experience. In my view, the specific nature of the double bind of dispersion and difference, resulting in an interval or discrepancy, is a curiously ubiquitous artifact of our time. The trope of diaspora resonates with the “ethnoscape” of frequent, sustained, and even permanent state of movement.40 The enormous appeal of the term partly derives from this new horizon of subjectivity. It is hard to imagine any other concept that would capture the subjective experience of the ethnoscapes in a globalized world. Diaspora is thus symptomatic of the provisional, tentative, impermanent, temporary (and yet, familiar), and fugitive nature of identity brought about by the vicissitudes of globalization. R. Radhakrishnan captures this state rather beautifully when he writes that “the demands of the ‘politics of location’ are complex: ‘home’ and

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‘not-home’ and ‘coming’ and ‘going’ are neither literal nor figurative, but, rather, issues within the politics of ‘imaginary geographies.’”41 The conditions of modernity, especially in the global era, have rendered geographies (real and imaginary) with a sense of fluidity, continuity, and evanescence. Inhabiting such geographical spaces, mentally and physically, necessitates a new trope of belonging, a service that diaspora performs readily.42 Migration, of course, is not a new feature, and surely people have been moving around since the beginning. Movement as a mode of existence is also primordial as is evident in the life stories of nomadic societies. Thus, the peculiarity of our condition does not stem from a claim that movement in our age is unique, but rather from its ubiquity and immanence. In the global present, we have come to inhabit the globe, even when we are restricted (or barred and cast out) in our movement. We simultaneously inhabit the globe in our imagination even when we experience the local histories of our physical location. The double bind of difference in dispersion is juxtaposed with a new global imagination. I want to argue that the new metaphysics of space inaugurated by the global age prompts us to project our own locally contingent identities in a global frame. The trope of diaspora captures this constant project of imagining our local frames in a global episteme. It is symptomatic of difference in dispersion, but it is so in its aspiration to inhabit global space. This is the reason behind the enormous expansion in the usage of the term, and whether or not we agree with a new diasporic claim, such is our primary metaphor of belonging. The triadic mediation between dispersion, difference, and globality situates the concept of diaspora in a unique position that captures the very warp and woof of our times. One final point. Might the recent proliferation of diasporas mean something more beyond what we have developed above? The question stems from the realization that we should not only explore what prompts us to adopt a diasporic stance, but also ask what enables us to undertake such projects. Is it possible that beyond the axes of dispersion and difference wrapped up in a global cloak there is something more that bestows us with the freedom to claim a diaspora of our own? Is it the case that amidst all iniquities, oppressions, and renewed violence we somehow inhabit a space that grants us more identarian choices than ever before?43

PART TWO

Formations

While concepts allow us to stake out the realm of theories, methods, assertions, and possibilities, it is only through interrogations of diasporic formations that we are able to assess the promises and potentials, ambiguities and opacities, and the range of diversities that characterize diasporic subjectivity. In what follows, we examine six horizons where diaspora thinking is brought to bear on historical formations. Temporally, these explorations span premodern formations to colonial constructions. Geographically, they probe into discrete global scenarios without attempting to be globally inclusive. Thematically, we attempt to juxtapose the practice of diasporas on the horizons of indigeneity, merchant networks, associational cultures, and emigrant labourers. In, “Who was First and When? The Diasporic Implications of Indigeneity,” James Carson brings two oppositional concepts – diaspora and indigeneity – “into and onto one another.” Instead of taking the oft-treaded path of reading diasporic subjectivities of globally (or, locally) dispersed indigenous communities, Carson undertakes a difficult and perhaps more expedient task of casting indigeneity and diaspora against the axis of deep time. By so doing, Carson is able to reveal the fundamental disciplinary predicaments and prejudices that prefigure our orientations when we juxtapose movement with identity. The chapter’s reading of indigeneity and diaspora informs the critique of postEnlightenment modernity that is further developed in the conclusion to the volume.

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Eivind Seland in, “Trade Diasporas and Merchant Social Cohesion in Early Trade in the Western Indian Ocean,” shows a series of scenarios of premodern merchant social networks that can legitimately be called trade diasporas, a term popularized by Philip Curtin but criticized in recent works. Drawing primarily from the Western Indian Ocean with comparative data from the Mediterranean, Seland argues that, on the basis of internal social cohesion, external boundary maintenance, relationship with host societies, and reciprocal homeland orientation, these early commercial networks resemble Curtin’s model. Seland’s study reveals the usefulness of the diaspora rubric outside of the realm of the modern nation-state. While not related historically or processually with the other formations in this book, Seland, nevertheless, speaks to some of the concerns raised in other corners of diasporic experience. Most prominently, Seland’s excursions in the Greek world of associational culture of koina and collegia, converse well with Donald MacRaild’s engagement with English associational networks. The simultaneous emphasis on boundary maintenance and frequent exchanges with the homelands relates to Chowdhury’s chapter on diaspora formation among the indentured Indian labour communities. In “Perhaps a Silly Question: Was There a Swedish Diaspora?” Donald Akenson reads the archival data “obliquely” to show that the Swedish emigration records are indeed less than revealing for our purposes. Nevertheless, examinations of immigration data of the receptor countries reveal a rich heritage of multilateral dispersal of the Swedish people during what Akenson calls the “true” nineteenth century, that is, between 1815 and 1914. In the age of the Great European Migration, the Swedish migrated to the Baltics, throughout the length and breadth of the British Empire, South America, parts of Africa, in addition to the well-known and well-recorded destination of the United States. There indeed was a multidestination emigration of the Swedish people during that long arc of history when unfolding processes of global capitalism wrenched significant sections of Europeans away from home to distant lands. Did the Swedish claim a diasporic heritage; did they remain attuned to the vicissitudes of the homeland; did they constitute a diaspora not merely on the basis of dispersal but through active processes of boundary maintenance? The answer lies not in any vocal claims of a Swedish diaspora, but in the fact that even a century after emigration,

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the Swedish immigrants preserved their mother tongue in the areas where they settled down, only to be dislodged by the relentless upheavals of a different time during the latter part of the twentieth century. Donald MacRaild, in “An ‘Invisible Diaspora’? English Associational Culture in Nineteenth-Century North America,” asks why are the English “placed in a box marked other than ethnicity?” While other European migrants, and indeed other British migrants in North America, have exerted group identarian claims based on ethnicity, historians have failed to locate the English within this common frame. Scholars, MacRaild notes, have seen the English as the default against which others have been cast and defined. And yet, as MacRaild’s intricate study of English expatriate associations reveals, beyond the imperial British world there was an Anglo-world woven around a collective identity, markers of boundary, shared internal coherence, and distinct indicators and signs of heritage. While diasporas predicated on claims of victimhood, alienation, and unbelonging have dominated the field, MacRaild is successful in showing that if at the core of diaspora is a claim of a unique subjectivity born of a particular historical experience of difference in dispersion, the English were no exception. In “Ulster Presbyterians, the Great Famine, and the Historiography of Early Irish America,” Rankin Sherling identifies two different arcs of transatlantic Irish migration. The first went to Newfoundland, and the second to the Delmarva Peninsula, comprising portions of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Historians have seen the first stream as the true bearers of Irish identity – nationalistic and Catholic. The second stream was predominantly the Ulster Scots, or the Ulster Presbyterians. Contrary to the major currents of contemporary scholarship that tend to segregate the two streams, Sherling recognizes the difficulties of disentangling the alleged eighteenth-century Irish Presbyterian migration and the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic migration. While it is true that scholars of the Irish diasporas do not hold the Famine to be the central fact behind emigration, it remains the case that popular diasporic consciousness ignores the complexities of Irish diasporic histories and still dwells on the horrific tragedy. Through close examination of the Delmarva migrations and critical assessment of the prefamine literature on the Irish diaspora, Sherling is ultimately able to decenter the importance of the Great Famine.

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Finally, in “Narratives of Home: Diaspora Formations among the Indian Indentured Labourers,” Amitava Chowdhury prefers to ask how the indentured labourers became Indian instead of seeking out the meaning of being “Indian” in the diaspora. Chowdhury claims that the early trains of indentured labourers identified with immediate markers of belonging, namely language, caste, or subcaste, and an overarching sense of Indian identity emerged only through reciprocal exchanges during the nascent stages of nationalism in the subcontinent. Chowdhury recognizes the problems of conflating the nineteenth- (and early twentieth-) century streams of labour immigration with what is increasingly referred to as the global Indian diaspora. Such conflation, Chowdhury argues, stems from the problems of privileging geographical origin as the sole determinant of diasporic identity, cultural continuity, and survival. Instead of remaining mired in formations of nativism and culturalism, Chowdhury finds it more profitable to turn to historical formational processes to explain the meaning and potential of diaspora.

4

Who Was First and When?: The Diasporic Implications of Indigeneity James T. Carson

introduction Whenever the concepts of diaspora and indigeneity come together, scholars tend to ascribe to them oppositional power. Diaspora implies transnational if not global movement, displacement, and attenuation, while indigeneity connotes originality, belonging, and rootedness. Notwithstanding such tensions between the two terms, students of what are called indigenous diasporas tend to see diaspora and indigeneity working together. Diasporic indigenous persons need not have left their homeland to lose it given centuries of imperial land grabbing and coercive displacement. They often have to constitute their identities in conflict with a nation-state’s exclusive definitions of citizenship, and their relationships to multiple places – a lost homeland, a site of current residence, and a destination for immigrant labour – can fracture their senses of place and connection. Such multiple sites, however, sit not on a line as unconnected points but rather comprise a circle of movement, relationships, and belonging, of visiting and returning in a kind of orbit around meaningful places and people. Although the cultural hybridity and political articulations that follow indigenous peoples’ diasporic experiences can undermine what some scholars consider to be traditional cultures and tribal identities, for the most part, scholars today grant that no culture is original, and that the transformations that accompany diasporic experiences can extend and renew indigenous ways of life. In such ways, an indigenous person on the move becomes both rooted and particular, cosmopolitan and transnational, locally imagining while globally imagined.1

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However, instead of following the trend to combine diaspora and indigeneity in ways that embody what is happening in indigenous communities across the globe, I would like to pause for a moment and return to the original tensions implicit in the two terms – to turn diaspora and indigeneity into and onto one another. The crucial variable in such a confrontation is time because just as the sociologist might measure decades or the historian centuries, for the geologist or astronomer thousands and millions of years afford the meters by which change and persistence are measured. When we choose an increment of time with which to assay diaspora and indigeneity, we conform to disciplinary conventions at the same time we make unconventional and perhaps even implicit political statements. What we decide is a reasonable span of time will condition any questions we may ask and any conclusions we may reach, all to the exclusion of other possibilities derived from other considerations of time.2

african beginnings Insofar as people are concerned, there is no better place to begin a consideration of diaspora and indigeneity than Africa on the occasion of the first great movement of modern humans. About five million years ago, the earth’s climate cooled and dried, and so our ancestors abandoned their treetop homes in shrinking forests to find a more secure life in open parklands and savannahs that afforded new opportunities. On the way they learned to walk on two feet and set in place the anatomical trajectory in which we stand, on those same two firm feet, today. Over two million years a species of archaic human we know as Homo erectus emerged and left its African homeland in one or more waves to search farther afield. They spread across much of what we know now as Europasia where they formed small hunting and gathering societies that moved with the seasons to exploit different floral and faunal resources. Their lives were hard, short, and always on the go.3 Just 100,000 years ago, maybe 150 of our ancestors, out of a total population of perhaps five thousand Homo sapiens, also left the continent of their births on a journey that took them across a shallower Red Sea than it is today into the Arabian peninsula and then to almost every end of the earth, all of which set in place one of our species’ fundamental characteristics —global motion. Back then, beyond all memory, early humans set

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out not into an empty wilderness, but into a world that had been inhabited for a million years where they encountered other hominid populations here and there, people, we might say, though not the Homo sapiens that we are, who also had accommodated themselves over time to different places and different ways of life: Europe’s Homo neanderthalensis, the Middle East’s Homo heidelbergiensis, China’s Homo erectus, and Homo floresiensis of early Indonesia. Of course, none of the early hominid peoples remain with us today ever since the last Neanderthals perished just thirty thousand years ago after centuries of struggles against another cooling climate and our own grasping great grandmothers and grandfathers. The lesson such movements and conflicts teaches is that there has never been a pristine earth as far as humans go nor have there ever been any pristine people. Movement, conflict, displacement, and coalescence have always been constants in the equation of life on earth.4 Historian Colin Palmer has called the great human exodus from Africa the first diaspora, but he acknowledges that it may not count as a diaspora at all. At the very least, he suggests, we ought to discuss the question, and well we should because it raises many problems about academic notions of diaspora and indigeneity. The first such question relates to our idea of who counts as human. The human brain has evolved rapidly over the past fifty thousand years to keep pace with a changing environment and the world we inhabit. However, notwithstanding whatever cognitive or intellectual changes that might have occurred over that time, the people who crossed over from Africa were not so different from us. They wore clothing, spoke a language, sported shell bead necklaces, and had developed, unlike other mammals, continuously growing hair that required cutting, combing, and braiding. We can probably say that they were aware of how they looked. They also moved constantly in quest of new territory or were driven from their home ranges by stronger groups. Whatever the case, they often took the time to bury their dead. They valued family. A second question moves beyond who these people were and asks whether or not their movement counts as a diaspora. Responding to such a query forces us to confront how our sense of time and its meaning collude to shape our definitions of diaspora and our conclusions about whether, when, and where it might have happened.5 Is this a debate we can have?

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definitions: diaspora Not really if we subscribe to any of the many definitions of diaspora that scholars have offered over the years. While such definitions run the gamut from rigid social science typologies that value lists of criteria to open discursive strategies that privilege experiential subjectivity and imagination, none of them allow for population movements that occurred before the development of humans’ ability to self-consciously record their experiences. Almost every definition of diaspora today privileges the ability to know what the peoples in question thought and did when they moved. Diaspora is, then, a concept that can only really date back to somewhere between the advent of writing five thousand years ago and the limits of what one scholar has called “acute” memory, hardly a capacious reckoning of the span of human history and movement. Such parameters eliminate our species’ first ninety-five thousand years of existence from consideration and attribute their first great movement out of Africa and subsequent movements around the globe across time to an almost naturalized consideration of migratory behaviour not unlike what we might associate with geese, wildebeests, or whales. Such a neat conceptual line between “us” and “them,” however, is untenable and bespeaks a prejudice that favours what has for centuries been recognized as the cardinal practice of “civilization” – writing – against more so-called primitive and, therefore, inaccessible and untrustworthy memories, mindsets, and motivations.6

definitions: indigeneity Defining what indigenous means is a fraught exercise too because, as with diasporic studies, it seems that the field revolves around each article revising the one that came before in a never-ending tweaking of the main idea. Nonetheless, attempts to define indigeneity fall into two rough camps, each predicated on the same kinds of principles that define the study of diaspora. Because of the divide that separates sociological criteria against historical experience and relationships, however, no consensus exists on what indigenous means.7 The criterial approach to indigeneity lists notions of having lost sometime in the past or still inhabiting today a specific ancestral territory with which people maintain enduring real or imagined relationships, possessing

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cultural and institutional distinctiveness, and experiencing exclusion, dispossession, marginalization, and disempowerment as functions of their relationship to the nation-state in which they live. Such definitions rest upon two crucial attempts to define indigeneity, one by the United Nations in 1986 and another by the International Labour Organization in 1989. Both insisted that to be indigenous requires that a people hold historical continuity with their ancestors before the arrival of conquerors which, of course, meant Europeans. Such a criterion limited claims of indigeneity to particular parts of the world that had fallen to the various crowns that governed Europe’s imperial age and precluded people who typically do not register as indigenous: Europe’s Irish, Sammi, and Basque or Africa’s Igbo, Yoruba, and Xhosa people.8 The relational approach to indigeneity focuses instead on the contingencies of the past, cultural interactions, and present-day global political relationships and complicates any clean notion of what indigenous means. For example, it is possible to locate different kinds of indigenisms depending on what causes are at stake and where. “New World” indigenism, for example, tends to focus on the regaining or protection of ancestral lands, access to government services such as education and medicine, and securing political rights either through voting or treaty making. What might be called a “Third World” indigenism characterizes countries where colonial powers did not displace indigenous host populations, such as in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Resistance to the expansion of global capitalism is often crucial to such movements and is embodied in efforts to protect local craft industries, oppose environmental degradation, and articulate a closeness with the environment that, as the critique goes, Western nation-states have lost completely. Transnational indigenisms can also conflict with local indigenisms that tend to focus on immediate issues affecting a people and that often carry significant specific legal implications.9 As a last resort, scholars from either side of the indigenous divide also rely on self-identification. The indigenous, some assert, know who is indigenous and who is not. To others, however, self-identification carries significant problems that can range from particular groups being unwilling to grant legal or cultural rights to people who assert a steadfast claim to belonging to the group in question, to groups that dispute one another’s claims to land or legitimacy, or to the awful impact of conquest and colonization on people’s ability to know and articulate an indigenous identity.

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Responses to such difficult problems range from one scholar’s injunction that the “Native” is “what it is not” to another’s attempt to synthesize a mix of sources and perspectives that, when construed loosely, can enable a kind of qualified, verifiable self-identification to prevail.10

historical roots If the same sociological/criterial and historical/relational divisions characterize how scholars approach both diaspora and indigeneity as concepts, so too do the two ideas’ different historical origins constrain their utility as academic categories. Diaspora’s history is well known. Diasporic studies emerged out of explorations of the many exiles and exoduses that have characterized the history of the people who practised and still practice the Jewish faith. Indeed, the abstracted outline of their experience stands as a kind of “classical” foundation for the field against which much of the scholarship surrounding diasporic studies has reacted over the last several decades. As the field’s founder, William Safran, put it, their exile, however, “is not very useful for social scientists attempting to make generalizations.” For such reasons, scholars have sought to move the field farther and farther from its archetypal historical case study, but, at the same time, it often seems as if they struggle still to leave it fully behind.11 Notions of indigeneity too have their origins in a past that has proven hard to overcome. Scholarship across the field often bears the imprint of the concept’s origin in Christopher Columbus’s diary. As he piloted the Atlantic crossing, Columbus relied on a form of navigation that depended on fixed objects to suggest fluid positions. Dead reckoning, however, could not weave new things and old referents into a coherent order when he reached land. Just a few days after sighting trees unlike anything he had seen before, he confronted the limits of his knowledge of the world that faced him. “But that I do not recognize them,” he confided to his diary, “burdens me with the greatest sorrow in the world.” As the days passed into weeks, the world he imagined moved farther and farther from what he might have read in Pliny or Aristotle, seen in the mappae mundi that graced the walls of the churches of Genoa, Lisbon, or Seville, or measured in navigational charts that stopped short at the far shores of the Canaries. The people he met posed a particular challenge. He called them indios, a term that reflected his own erroneous assumption about where he was and who he was seeing,

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and he reported to his sovereigns that the people he encountered were, “fit to be ordered about and made to work, plant, and do everything else that may be needed, and build towns and be taught our customs,” and, lastly, “to go about clothed.”12 Columbus’s original idea of the “Indian” had nothing to do with the people themselves and everything to do with his and his culture’s hubris, but such ideas have, nonetheless, cast a long shadow over the field that even today makes it hard to see. The so-called indios were a people, Columbus believed, who had never Fallen, and, by consequence, had never known God’s saving grace. Their lives, like the lands they inhabited, were frozen not in but rather outside of time as he understood it, and their existence, many early Europeans thought, opened a living window on the lives of Adam and Eve. Being beyond time, of course, meant that they lacked history as well as laws, civilization, morals, and, many wondered, a soul, all of which served to build them as beings who, to the mind of the Church, needed to be saved, and in the hands of the hidalgos, were ripe for backbreaking work in the mines. To be sure, Columbus was not the first figure to distinguish between “civilized” and “savage” given its roots in the classical past and, probably, back to when Homo sapiens chased Homo neanderthalensis away. Nonetheless, he set the template that countless others would follow and his narrative construction of the indios taught subsequent generations of colonizers how to use different concepts of time to embed “us” within “them” without the present they in fact inhabited all together. When the concept of indigeneity is used to distinguish what one scholar has described as “’natives’ from others,” we find ourselves trapped, no matter what our discipline, in the academic reproduction of that first encounter’s primordial sense of Otherness.13

scholarly discourses Taking in the sweep of modern university disciplines, however, a number of scholars have concluded that the act of writing, in conjunction with the disciplines of history, economics, anthropology, and geography, among others, facilitated the rise of both capitalist modes of production and the modern nation-state out of the miseries of colonization. Without colonial discourses of savagery, for example, anthropology would have never evolved out of Europe’s “age of discovery,” just as surely as we would not

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know of the discipline of geography had not imperial invaders devoted so much time and energy to describing the lands and resources they observed and coveted. Modern scholars, such critics have suggested, are therefore as implicated in the ongoing reproduction of colonialism as the officers, soldiers, and settlers who planted themselves on lands that were not theirs so long ago. Scholarly writing, after all, enabled Columbus and other Spanish officials, as anthropologist Irene Silverblatt once put it, to make “Indians” out of wholly unique and self-standing peoples.14 Do we do the same when we write about indigenous diasporas? No matter whether we pick the criterial or relational camp, when we accept as fundamental to the idea of indigeneity the fact that what one scholar has called “histories of loss and dislocation” must lie at root of any such identity claim, we are left with a frank and unreflexive assertion that indigeneity is prefigured on colonialism.15 As such, scholars have unwittingly premised indigeneity on indigenous peoples’ oppressors and victimizers for their cardinal senses of self. As Maori scholar Teresia K. Teaiwa put it, the use of postnative terms like “indigenous,” “Fourth World,” or “First Nations” exposes the degree to which “colonialism is not extinct, and demonstrates a disturbing suppleness as it reinvents itself in neocolonialism.”16 It is almost as if scholars still, no matter their intentions, strive to sit with Columbus in the ship’s boat that brought him to his first western shore or to splash through the Hawaiian surf alongside James Cook, to draw an immediate line through time, between us and them. Today many scholars reproduce the divide truly at our peril because if we rely upon the most lasting intellectual and material artifacts of the great age of global imperialism – the idea of the “native” and the “nonnative” – as basic academic constructs, then we will be doomed to chase our tails endlessly around a circumference set by the Greeks’ fear of the barbaroi, by Cortes’s disgust with the “infidels” he encountered, by the early Australians’ disdain for the “black fella,” and so on. The sacred Christian time that over the course of the European “age of discovery” became secularized natural time is now glossed over as modernity. What, then, are we to think when a student of indigeneity writes that indigenous peoples possess a depth of historical continuity that other nonindigenous people lack because of the latter’s transformation by “modernity?” Is the indigene, by virtue of being indigenous, then not modern? And if not modern, then … premodern? And if premodern then … primitive?

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When another scholar suggests that the people he defines as indigenous need to be set in opposition to the “highly rationalized societies” of Europe that undertook global colonialism, one cannot help but ask that if the colonizer is rational, then the native is … irrational? Such dichotomies echo Columbus’s notion of his time and their’s being conceptually different but chronologically coeval and reify the bifurcation of people within certain categories that embody a past the intellectual underpinnings of which we challenge only rarely.17

memories The Columbian dichotomy’s tenacity, even in its more subtle present-day guises, need not surprise us given the deep colonial roots of so much of modern life. However, there are other difficulties within the notion of indigeneity that have to do with indigenous peoples’ own memories of diasporas that attest to what we might reasonably call their lack of aboriginal roots in the lands where they first encountered Europeans. Not all histories of origin follow the same general lines, but the common themes of movement, displacement, and memory add a kind of recursive beauty to our collective human story of movement that, at the same time, explodes much of the assumptions that frame our notions of diaspora and indigeneity. Take the Tuscaroras, for example, an Iroquoian people, many of whom live today as members of the Great League of Peace and Power in upstate New York and south-central Ontario. Long ago Sky Woman’s daughter fell and landed on Turtle’s back where she and her new acquaintance conceived twins who made the earth and the beings that inhabit it. At some point, the people moved out of the mountains that had been their home and, after a while, divided into two groups. Most of the people followed valleys and rivers that headed north and east, but a smaller group walked south and east until they arrived on what we know today as the coastal plain of North Carolina. In the seventeenth century they would meet Huguenot, English, German, and Swiss invaders whose desire for land and penchant for illmannered behaviour sparked a disastrous war in the early 1700s. The colonial forces that crushed the people seized many and sold them into slavery. The few families who escaped fled slowly northward to find safety under the branches of the Great Tree of Peace and Power that sheltered the other Iroquois nations.18

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It took thousands of years for people to populate the many islands strung throughout the Pacific Ocean, and most islanders acknowledge their origins elsewhere. When New Zealand’s Maoris, for example, speak in public they establish their right to speak, their legitimacy before their audience, by citing their family’s origin story and asserting their deep roots on the land from over the water. Whether the founder of their lineage was a captain, pilot, or passenger, all families locate their beginnings in the wakas, “canoes,” that first landed them on the shores of Aoteara so long ago. Such publicly acknowledged origins attest to the importance as well as the contingency of being first on the land and root Maori identity in diasporic thoughts, memories, and deeds.19 Not all indigenous groups acknowledge so clearly their diasporic origins. The Aztecs who met the Spanish in the early sixteenth century shared a similar migratory experience to that of the Tuscaroras and Maoris but denied it at every turn. Archaeologists have shown that they originated about two thousand years ago in what is today northern Mexico, an area that gave rise to a number of various groups whom the populations that lived farther south knew collectively as Chichimecs, a term that connoted a kind of unsettled, uncivilized barbarism. As the Aztecs moved south they spent decades on the move conquering people, winning victories, suffering losses, and searching again for a prosperous and powerful life. Eventually they arrived in the fertile Valley of Mexico where they filled a power vacuum left by the collapse of the great Toltec society that had once frowned upon the uncouth Chichimecs to the north. As the Aztecs consolidated their power by establishing various tributary relationships with post-Toltec peoples, they also began to revise various recorded histories to obscure their northern origins and to censor the defeats they had experienced on their southern journey. To claim a primordial presence in the valley, they took to calling themselves Culhúa-Mexica, a term that planted them squarely in the Toltec tradition that they had managed to learn and then to usurp.20

the colonial conundrum As such cases suggest, asserting indigeneity as a kind of originality on the land is difficult when we expand our sense of time beyond first contact with Europeans. Indeed, much of the scholarship on indigenous peoples has

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granted European invasions a more potent agency in such peoples’ lives than the successive waves of remembered population movements, retreats, replacements, colonizations, and amalgamations that had occurred long before Columbus ever planted a cross on a beach. In some ways it makes sense. The devastating diseases that followed the European invasions caused deaths and disasters beyond anything such people had ever known, at least as far as anyone can tell. But at the same time, by privileging the advent of the sons and daughters of Europa, we set in place the arrogance that informed Columbus’s statement about how his sovereigns could use the people he met any way they liked. The conceit sets first peoples against second peoples or aboriginals against unoriginals, when, in a way, we can never really point to any one people and say that, yes, they were the first unless we go back to the beginning, but even then there were other kinds of humans there before us.21

diaspora vs indigeneity: the european case Given the multiple fractures and dubious assumptions that bedevil notions of both diaspora and indigeneity, what are we to do? Indeed, it is clear that the concept of diaspora, defined pragmatically as the movement of meaningfully definable groups of people in any time to any place for any reason, demolishes the idea of indigeneity as a concept that attests to any kind of human originality in space and time. Where notions of diaspora and indigeneity ought to be, as one scholar suggests, seen as “interdependent and mutually constituitive,” one can instead conclude that diaspora undermines indigeneity so thoroughly that a mighty global cause stands on fairly wobbly legs.22 And it all has to do with the academic manipulation of time. The pragmatic, even vague and perhaps idiosyncratic, definition of diaspora mentioned just a few sentences above holds no real explicit sway in the field, even if it instead seems to operate as a kind of unspoken rule of thumb. However, it does have important possibilities, particularly in reference to colonizers. Indeed, what we might consider one of the most globally significant diasporas, certainly for our time today, was the European one that took aggressive Christians from the gates of Grenada to the Azores and Canaries, to Goa and the West Indies, and then to all points beyond.

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Students of diaspora do not agree on how to frame Europe’s centuries-long imperial moment. Some students of diaspora have conceded that the search for personal or imperial opportunities can be legitimate criteria for adjudging a diaspora, while others have argued that “conquering settlers” cannot count because no one forced them to set sail. They either lack the signal diasporic criteria or no one who inflicted such pain on the world could possibly claim membership in the diasporic club.23 The European example does, however, raise questions about diaspora’s historicity. Take criteria Number 1: Nostalgia for one’s homeland. What of New England, New Amsterdam, New Spain, New Zealand, New France, New South Wales and, biggest of all, the New World?; Number 2: Desire to return? How many peninsulares longed for life in Seville while serving their time in the viceroyalty of New Spain before eventually settling down as Mexico’s social elite? How many sugar planters bade their time on the islands watching the enslaved die in the cane fields while always hoping to return to London in high style?; Number 3: Asserting a collective identity in the face of a host population that would not accept them. Over time European invaders transformed, fashioning themselves from “Christian” to “Civilized” to, finally, “White,” as a consequence of their inability to ever really belong amongst the peoples whose lands they had taken. The problem is that the key diasporic features of the European invasion of the world have passed because their descendants have acclimated themselves to their new homes, have attached their identities to new places and new things, and have figured out how to preserve their atavistic identities by hyphenating their ethnic origins, partying on Saint Patrick’s Day, or celebrating Christmas wherever they may find themselves. But can the fact that their lives are no longer lived in diaspora mean at the same time that they are not diasporic? It would seem that as time passes diasporas disappear and leave behind only the implacable certainty that people have always moved.

conclusion The theme of time raises one last question about the relationship between movement and identity. Of the 100,000 years that modern humans have lived on earth, the last ten thousand years since the end of the last Ice Age

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have witnessed the almost complete transformation of human life with the advent of horticulture, then agriculture, the rise of cities, and then nationstates, most of which was premised on an idealized achievement of progress and stability as opposed to negative ideals about backward lives lived in perpetual motion. Indeed, when Enlightenment-era philosophes looked back on human development, they saw a grand divide between the rude and illiterate wandering savage and the settled literate civilized man which, of course, was the big idea that underwrote the great European imperial diaspora. No matter that it was the Europeans who were on the move against people who had long occupied the land. And even though some invaders recognized the primacy of place held by the people they met, the invaders’ main critique of their hosts rested on what the people they encountered lacked by comparison. What one historian has called “description by deficiency” enabled the so-called “civilized” to validate their own ways, to bolster their own claims, and to consign the so-called “savage” to a kind of living hell, “a system,” historian Donald H. Akenson has argued, that was “at best, gargantuan theft – and, at worst, genocide,” facilitated by citizens, government agencies, missionaries, residential schools, and transnational adoptions before the so-called “wandering savages” were, finally, fixed in place. When we set such awful stories within the Columbian dichotomy, they make sense because they draw their power from the implacable logic of the Other. Of course it all happened, the logic goes, because that is what happened whenever and wherever the “civilized” people of one time collided with the “savage” people of another. But if we step out of Columbus’s shadow and find a new way of seeing, we can perhaps agree that such awful things happened not because the “white” met the “Indian,” but because one set of people arrogated to themselves the right to abuse, degrade, and dispossess another group of people because their monopoly of power allowed it. One does not have to be called indigenous to have suffered such unspeakable horrors. It should be enough to just be a person.24 Diasporic literature acknowledges that diasporic peoples live in contradistinction to the nation-state so perhaps, buried deep within the academic study of diasporas, lies a kind of refutation of old notions about civility and its opposite, mobility, and about which humans count as people. Setting the scholarly study of diasporas and indigeneity against the backdrop of the original movement out of Africa, in fact, bares a kind of

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desperate clamour for civility and belonging on the part of scholars whose project is either to construct or to valorize particular identities within diaspora’s rubric. To assert, in another way, that the nomad is not a nomad. To claim that the people in motion are, in fact, people. Complex. Legitimate. Rooted. Civilized. Never mind that such involved and complicated academic work, at the same time, obscures, forestalls, annuls, and avoids the fact that beneath it all we are simply, as one anthropologist put it many many years ago, “rather odd African ape[s]” who have always, and for more reasons than we can ever list or even remember, been in constant unremarkable motion.25

5

Trade Diasporas and Merchant Social Cohesion in Early Trade in the Western Indian Ocean Eivind Heldas Seland

introduction Thirty years ago, Phillip Curtin described trade diasporas as a near universal feature of premodern trade.1 By trade diasporas Curtin referred to groups of merchants living away from their home communities for prolonged periods of time, acquiring the linguistic, cultural, and commercial skills necessary to act as what he characterized as “cross-cultural brokers” between the host society and visiting traders.2 Curtin’s model had a great impact, and largely replaced earlier models of cross-cultural trade in early history, such as Karl Polanyi’s “port-of-trade.”3 Recently, however, Curtin’s model has drawn criticism from S.D. Aslanian, who points out that the notion of a diaspora also presupposes an orientation towards a geographical home.4 This was not the case with the early modern Armenian trade networks studied by Aslanian, and arguably also not with the polycentric medieval Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans documented in the letters from the Cairo Geniza,5 although in both cases it might also be argued that the respective communities were oriented towards an imagined homeland. Aslanian suggests instead the concept of a “circulation society.”6 Needless to say, both models are varieties of what sociologists describe as social networks: interdependent social entities (actors) and the ties connecting them.7 As descriptive models, they may be more or less accurate in detailing and explaining the specific past networks we are interested in as scholars; as

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analytical models, they highlight different ways of organizing communities, which can shed light on different aspects of the past networks in which we are interested. Trade diasporas are, of course, only a historical variety of the wider phenomena of diasporic communities. Leading scholars have pointed out that the use of the diaspora term has become so widespread over the last two decades that it stands in danger of becoming ineffective as an analytical category.8 Rogers Brubaker suggests that in order to be recognized as a diaspora in the scholarly sense of the word, a community should meet the three criteria of dispersion, orientation towards a real or imagined homeland, and boundary-maintenance.9 The scholarly discourse on “groupness,” and thus on the important boundary-maintenance aspect of diasporic groups in recent history and in the contemporary world, concentrates on the institutions of ethnicity, nationality, and religion.10 Modern notions of ethnicity and especially nationality stand in danger of becoming anachronistic when applied to premodern settings. Nevertheless, the people constituting the premodern social networks characterized as trade diasporas or circulation societies clearly maintained distinctive group identities. I have therefore argued elsewhere11 that geographical origin, coming close to modern ideas of national identity, was indeed a significant element in many cases of trade diasporas, as was ethnicity, operationalized as perceived shared ancestry and boundary-maintenance,12 and also religion. This paper approaches merchant communities in the ancient world, whether of the diasporic or circulation variety, as social networks. No attempt is made here at mapping these networks.13 Rather, the question posed is: how did they manage to create and uphold the necessary degree of social cohesion? I will draw on evidence from the Western Indian Ocean – one of the main hubs of Old World trade14 – in what is labelled as the ancient / early historic / pre-Islamic period in Mediterranean / Indian and Middle East periodizations respectively, supplemented with comparative material from the Mediterranean. In order to understand the role of trade diasporas as “cross-cultural brokers,” to borrow Curtin’s suggestive term, and thus mediators, we also need to emphasize the point that successful diasporic communities were not mere representatives of a home culture. They were also able to bridge the cultural distance to host societies, and therefore we also need to think about how trade diasporas were able to link up with their hosts. The contribution of this study to the wider field of dias-

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poric studies presented in this volume is to investigate how trading communities actively created and maintained diasporas as a rational response to challenges they needed to deal with, in contrast to the many historical examples of diasporas emerging as a result of forced dispersion.

why trade diasporas? Communities of culturally distinct commercial specialists, whether they should be labelled trade diasporas or circulation societies, are clearly a widespread, maybe even, as Curtin held, universal aspect of premodern exchange. Why were these people there in the first place? Among other things, premodern trade was characterized by substantial time lags between investment and return, lack of information, lack of effective external enforcement of laws and contracts, asymmetrical power relations, and lack of security.15 This all contributed towards high transaction costs, substantial risks and also potentially high profits. In economic terms, the problem might be expressed in terms of the agency dilemma, also called the principal-agent problem.16 Travel was strenuous, time consuming, and could even be dangerous. In order to engage in trade, an investor (principal) would need to rely on one, or in most cases, even a chain of agents, for instance a travelling merchant and a resident merchant in the port of call, who in turn had to rely on other agents, for example a sea captain and a supplier of certain trade goods. The principal and his agent(s) had potentially conflicting interests, and information was asymmetrical, with the agent being in possession of more information than the principal. Due to the seasonality of the monsoon winds, merchants travelling in the Western Indian Ocean would stay away for the better part of a year – at the very least. How could a principal trust that his agent would not simply pocket the money and walk away? The challenge was to build an infrastructure of trust. On a microlevel this might be achieved by formal and informal ties between principal and agent, for instance friendship, kinship, contract, joint ventures, employment, personal dependence, and so on. On a macrolevel, the answer was to deal with people belonging to the same perceived in-group as yourself, because presumably it was easier and safer to do business with people with shared cultural, ethnic, national, legal, or religious ties. The segment of these groups constituting the trade diaspora also shared ties with their host communities, which enabled them to assume the characteristic cross-cultural broker role.17 Below

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I will highlight five ways of organizing diasporic communities that were actually in operation in the Western Indian Ocean in the early centuries of the Common Era (ce), with an eye on how they established and maintained social cohesion as well as how they maintained connections with host societies, and thus how they performed their part in the chain of principal-agent relations making up the matrix of ancient world trade.

family matters: arabian mechants in east africa In the pre-Islamic period, the early South Arabian kingdoms of presentday Yemen engaged extensively with maritime trade.18 Parts of this activity were concerned with the production and export of South Arabian aromatics, but Arabian shippers also acted along with Egyptian, Indian, Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Aksumite African vessels, in the dense matrix of import, export, transit, and cabotage trade evident in the literary and archaeological records of the early centuries ce.19 A fascinating window into this trade is provided by the first century ce merchant’s report known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.20 The Periplus describes ports, people, trade, and navigation in the Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean as seen from an Egyptian perspective. The as of yet archaeologically unidentified port of Muza on the Red Sea coast of presentday Yemen is described as teeming “with Arabs – shipowners or charterers and sailors – and is astir with commercial activity. For they share in the trade across the water and with Barygaza, using their own outfits.”21 Barygaza is present day Bharuch in Gujarat, and “across the water” refers to the coast of East Africa.22 We encounter this seafaring community also in the description of the likewise unidentified port of Rhapta, probably located at the northern to central part of the coast of present-day Tanzania.23 About Rhapta, the Periplus reports that “the merchants of Muza hold it through a grant from the king and collect taxes from it. They send out to it merchant craft that they staff mostly with Arab skippers and agents who, through continual intercourse and intermarriage, are familiar with the area and its language.”24 The king in question is that of the South Arabian kingdom of Saba-Himyar. Among the imports to the region, the Periplus mentions “wine and grain in considerable quantity, not for trade but as an expenditure for the good will of the Barbaroi.”25

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The Arabian community in East Africa, as depicted in the brief account of the Periplus, was able to draw on a number of institutions that would contribute towards upholding cohesion among members. The merchants trading in East Africa were affiliated with the same place, Muza, in presentday Yemen, and with the same polity, the kingdom of Saba-Himyar. This also indicates that most of them spoke the same dialect of the South Arabian language, and that they shared a common set of laws, cultural codes, and religious practices and beliefs. Social ties of this kind will have been instrumental in creating the infrastructure of trust necessary in order to create workable principal-agent relations across the considerable geographical distance between home and host societies. Principals and agents, home and diasporic groups belonged to the same social network, and failure to meet obligations abroad could potentially lead to repercussions at home. Leaving aside the use of the ethnocentric term Barbaroi, which was the term used by the Egyptian Greek observer rather than by the Arabian merchants, the conditions described in the Periplus very closely resemble Curtin’s model of a trade diaspora. The Arabian merchants trading with East Africa were clearly oriented towards their homeland, but they also had the benefit of cultural expertise and shared social ties with the local population that come with prolonged stays abroad and intermarriage with the local population. Thus the diasporic community not only operated as the representative of Arabian merchants abroad, but also as an interface with the local community. Without postulating any continuity with later periods, the system structurally resembles that used in trade between the Swahili coast and the Arabian Peninsula in later periods.26 The mentioned gifts of wine and grain will have been suited for sharing and for communal dining and drinking, well-attested ways of creating and upholding cohesion in ethnographic settings.27

seafaring communities: indian merchants in the western indian ocean The Indian subcontinent is situated in a position that makes it the natural link between the exchange systems of the Eastern and Western Indian Ocean, and between those of the Indian Ocean and the overland routes across Central Asia. India in the early historic period also produced a number of commodities which were in demand in other parts of the ancient world,

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including spices, aromatics, dyes, ivory, glass beads, and gems, while Indian polities were interested in imports from the Indian Ocean world, such as glass, wine, coins, and aromatics. Indian seafaring traditions go back into prehistory, with coastal communities based on fishing and maritime trade.28 A number of sites in the Western Indian Ocean attest to the presence of Indian pottery.29 Indian cooking pots from important commercial sites such as Khor Rori,30 Myos Hormos, and Berenike31 are especially interesting with regard to this. Diet is a deeply ingrained element of individual and group identities.32 This makes cooking pots a useful indication of the movement of people, because they are likely to have arrived as parts of the equipment of ship crews or travelling merchants, rather than as trade goods, thus signifying the movement and activities of individuals from peninsular India.33 The Periplus reports a permanent settlement by Indian merchants on the island of Socotra,34 as well as trade between ports in western and southern India and the African Red Sea Coast,35 South Arabia,36 and the Persian Gulf.37 Given what we know about the seasonality of the monsoon trade and the organization of trade in other premodern settings, it is more than likely that people from India involved in shipping and trade would stay permanently or semipermanently in most of these places. Indeed, as Ross Thomas has argued, the living quarters of groups of different origins, including those from India, can be tentatively traced in the archaeological record of excavated Red Sea ports, using proxies such as tableware, script, and vocational activities.38 The discovery of more than 200 inscriptions in Indic scripts, probably dating from the second century ce until the late fourth or early fifth century ce, in the cave of Hoq, Socotra, not only corroborates the report in the Periplus of an Indian settlement on the island, but also give insight into the social and religious composition of the Indian diaspora in the Western Indian Ocean, thanks to Ingo Strauch’s publication of and commentary on this material.39 Not surprisingly, several inscriptions refer to maritime professions such as nāvika and niyāmaka, which Strauch in this context interprets as referring to leading members of ships’ crews.4 Personal names on the inscriptions from Hoq also reveal information on the religious affiliation and social standing of some of the dedicators. Strauch identifies individuals with Buddhist and Brahamistic affinities, and people who, if judging by their names, have belonged to all of the four varnas.41 This is a reminder that Indian visitors to Socotra were not simply united by ties of common origin and language, but also connected by institutions such as profession,

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religion, and caste, which helped to foster cohesion as well as facilitate boundary maintenance both within the Indian maritime community and towards other groups. Six of the seven inscriptions giving toponyms refer to the western Indian port cities of Bharukacca (Periplus Barygaza) and Hastakavapra (Periplus: Astakapra).4 On a paleographic basis, Strauch concludes that most of the inscriptions are written in varieties of Brāhmī utilized in western India and especially in the region of present-day Gujarat. There are also two instances of Bactrian names (one in Greco-Bactrian script) and one example of Kharoṣṭhī script current in the Gandhara region, showing northern connections, held by Strauch to probably be indirect by way of western India.4 One of the inscriptions in Brāhmī is from an individual identifying himself as Yavana, “westerner” or “Greek,” but here used in a West Indian, rather than a Mediterranean context44 perhaps a reminiscent of Indo-Greek communities in northwestern India.45 The finds from Socotra can be juxtaposed with the presence of Tamil-Brahmi script on ceramic vessels from Myos Hormos, Berenike,46 and Khor Rori,47 and Himanshu P. Ray’s identification of three language groups, Prakrit/Sanskrit, Old Sinhalese, and Tamil, all utilizing Brāhmī script, and engaging in overlapping trading networks in the same period.4 Perhaps this is an indication that merchants from different parts of South Asia specialized in trade with different regions in the Western Indian Ocean? If so, this would echo the Arabian situation, where, according to the Periplus, merchants from the kingdom of Hadramawt traded with Socotra, while merchants from Saba-Himyar traded with East Africa.49 If such preferred or traditional circuits of trade did indeed exist, they will surely have varied over time. Nevertheless, they emphasize the role of the diaspora as a social network, not only between home port and trading destination, but also between merchants and their host societies. It might not have been equally straightforward to trade at destinations where this social anchorage was lacking.

reaching out, linking up: palmyrenes in the indian ocean Palmyrene activities in the Indian Ocean provide a good example as to how the social infrastructure of trade needed to be established over time. Palmyra, in Semitic languages, Tadmor, was a city in the Syrian desert, which became an important node in the trade between the Indian Ocean

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and the Mediterranean during the first three centuries ce. This engagement in Indian Ocean trade evolved gradually. Palmyrene trade seems to have started with the operation of caravans between Palmyra and the Euphrates, perhaps in the late first century before the Common Era (bce).50 From the second quarter of the first century ce, activities of Palmyrene merchants in Middle Mesopotamia are epigraphically attested.51 By the third quarter of the first century (at the latest), a community of Palmyrene merchants operated in the city of Spasinou Charax in the kingdom of Mesene, the entrepôt of Persian Gulf trade into Mesopotamia. Palmyrenes also held civic office in Mesenian cities. In 131 ce, a Palmyrene acted as satrap, “governor,” for the king of Mesene in Thilouania, now present-day Bahrain. In 157 ce, two inscriptions commemorated Palmyrene ships successfully returning from voyages to Skythia, meaning the mouth of the Indus. In the third century, Palmyrenes moved into the Red Sea and the Western Indian Ocean. A Palmyrene dedication attests to the existence of a community of Palmyrene Red Sea merchants and shipowners in the Nile port of Koptos,52 probably operating out of the Red Sea port of Berenike. where another Palmyrene inscription, made by soldiers rather than merchants, to be sure, has been found.53 Two people from Tadmor, one of them named Aziz, dedicated a statue in a sanctuary in Shabwa, the capital of the kingdom of Hadramawt in Southern Arabia during the reign of King Iliazz Yalut, dated by Christian J. Robin to 218–19 ce onwards, and two envoys, one of them also called Aziz, and thus very likely the same people, took part in a royal ceremony along with the same king at nearby al-Uqla.54 Finally, the cave sanctuary at Hoq also contained a tablet dedicated by a Palmyrene visitor in what corresponds to July 258 ce.55 Some of the inscriptions above clearly relate to merchants, whereas others, in some cases, explicitly and in some just probably, relate to officials and envoys. Nevertheless, there is no serious doubt that the primary motivation behind the Palmyrene presence in the Indian Ocean was to take part in trade, and the epigraphic record seems to reflect a gradually increasing range of operations over time. I would argue that individuals from Palmyra, acting as officials in the Mesenian kingdom and as envoys to the king of Hadramawt, highlight a close relationship between trade and politics. The epigraphic record from Palmyra, unparalleled in the ancient world, reveals that the Palmyrene elite actively supported and contributed to the commercial activities of the city.56 This activity seems to have extended into the

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diaspora, where elite Palmyrene members used their status in order to link up with local elite networks, thus also facilitating a social infrastructure that their fellow Palmyrenes engaged in trade were able to utilize.

the restaurant at the end of the universe? a roman temple in south india In the second volume of the science fiction satire, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the main characters find themselves in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.57 At this venue situated at the end of time and space, diners may enjoy an extravagant meal while watching the final moments of existence. Seen from a Mediterranean and elite point of view in the Roman period, India was at the edge of the known world, a home of wonders and horrors alike. This is how India is perceived in the greater part of classical literature.58 Nevertheless, it is clear that a substantial number of people from Egypt, Palmyra, and many other places in the Roman world travelled to India in order to take part in maritime trade, and thus learned that India was the centre of its own world. These people needed arenas where they could interact with other people that they perceived to belong to their own group. The imperialist vision of a land of wonders at the edge of a Romandominated world, and the practical needs of traders going there, come together in the late Roman road map called the Tabula Peutingeriana (TP). TP is a medieval manuscript of a late Roman road map, probably finalized in the fifth century ce, but building also on earlier sources.59 Appropriately situated at the far right end of the 6.75 m parchment scroll depicting the world from the Iberian Peninsula to India, is Muziris, an important port in Tamil, South India, probably to be identified with the archaeological site of Pattanam in present-day Kerala,60 where ongoing excavations have yielded rich evidence of contacts with the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and South Arabia.61 Just left of Muziris is a small building described as a Templ(um) Augusti – a temple dedicated to the cult of the divine Roman emperor. It would be easy to dismiss this simply as a product of Roman delusions of imperial grandeur, and indeed that might well have been the role it was intended to fill when it was included in the cumulative map drawn in the fifth century. Nevertheless, the temple might well have existed in Muziris

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at some point in time, and have been included in the sources upon which the fifth century map was based. There are several reasons for this. Because of the seasonal regularity of the monsoon winds, merchants travelling from the Mediterranean to South India would have to stay away for the best part of a year. They would leave Egyptian ports in July and return only in February – March and the period from September to January would be spent ashore.62 This means that there would have been a sizable expatriate community residing in South India for almost half of the year, engaging in trade and the repair and refitting of ships. Some of these people would have stayed behind permanently in order to take care of business, or simply because of personal circumstances. This is not only analogous to how trade was conducted in other parts of the ancient world, but also likely because the Periplus mentions “grain in sufficient amount for those involved in shipping, because the [sc. local] merchants do not use it,”63 implying a permanent presence of people wishing to maintain a Mediterranean diet in Muziris in the first century.64 Finally, there is a parallel for the temple at Muziris in the Parthian emporium of Vologesias, near Seleucia in Middle Mesopotamia. There, as reported in an inscription found at Umm al-Amad, near Palmyra, dated in 145 or 146 ce, Soados, Son of Boliades, “erected and consecrated a temple of the Augusti.”65 Palmyra was a city of the Roman Empire, and if a member of the Palmyrene elite could establish a temple to the Roman emperors in a major centre of the Parthian Empire, the chief geopolitical rival of the Roman Empire, there is no good reason why there could not be a temple to the Roman emperors in Muziris. With regard to this, it is also relevant that there was a long tradition of Indian kings sending embassies to Roman emperors, from the rule of Augustus (31 bce–14 ce) into late antiquity.66 From an Indian (and Parthian) point of view, the presence of a Roman temple in Muziris should not be seen as any sign of symbolic submission, although the Roman emperor might have liked to think of it that way. Rather, it was a sign of friendly relations, and a concession to the resident diaspora, in line with the later legends of royal charters to Jewish and Christian communities, which would have reached Kerala in the same period and probably via the same trading networks.67 However, these visitors and expats from the Roman Empire would need other identity markers apart from diet in order to maintain their sense of “groupness.” Ethnicity, although clearly important to people in the ancient world, was not very useful in this case, as the Roman Empire was a very

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heterogeneous polity, encompassing a great variety of local communities under an umbrella of imperial rule.68 Arguably, however, a common civic identity as subjects of the Roman emperor, and for a privileged minority, Roman citizenship, existed as a sort of cultural lowest common multiple, which might have become significant when travelling abroad and interacting with other people from the Mediterranean who had different cultural backgrounds. This identity was manifested and maintained in the imperial cult, which, based on parallels from the Mediterranean world, would include offerings and prayers for the well being of the imperial family and sacrifices with ensuing communal meals.69 In some places, the imperial cult was organized by associations,70 where respected individuals contributed financially and practically to the cult, and also met for worship and communal dining. Thus, from the Roman perspective, a temple to the Divine Augustus in Muziris might well have been a kind of “restaurant at the end of the Universe,” where diasporans were able to create a sense of home away from home. The significance of such an institution, however, goes further than this. Not only does it presuppose sanction by local authorities, and thus official recognition of the expat community, it also reflects the role of trade diasporas as mediators between home and host cultures.

my club is my castle? the role of associations The example of the Roman temple in India also points towards alternative ways of creating solidarity within diasporic networks in a world where, in many cases, ethnicity and nationality were less useful categories of boundary maintenance than in the modern world, but where merchants and thus trade nevertheless depended on a degree of social cohesion, and where solidarity was also important not only on a community level, but an individual one as well. Niall Ferguson eloquently highlights part of the problem in his preface to the British edition of his bestselling Civilization: “Most people in the past either died young or expected to die young, and those who did not were repeatedly bereft of those they loved, who did die young.”71 For merchants engaged in long-distance trade, this means that they were also in danger of dying when abroad, separated from familiar people and places. Naturally, they were worried about what would happen to their physical and earthly remains after their demise. Would they have a proper burial so that their spirits could pass to the afterlife; would their families be

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notified of what had happened and receive their inheritance? In the Mediterranean world in antiquity, a common institutional solution to this situation was the formation of associations – called koina in Greek, collegia in Latin – often based on common origin, profession, and cult.72 Preserved rules for one such association, the association of the Worshippers of Diana and Antinous, formed in 136 ce in Lanuvium in present-day Italy, detail the contributions in cash and wine that new members were expected to make on joining the society, and monthly contributions towards the running expenses of the club, and towards the burial of members. The rules also contain arrangements for covering the expenses connected with the burial of members who die away from home.73 While assistance with burial was a customary prerogative and duty for members of such private associations,74 they also constituted important social arenas for their members, modelled on contemporary political organizations, complete with rules for participation, responsibility, and decision making.75 As Vincent Gabrielsen argues in his case study of the role of associations in Hellenistic Rhodes, religious rites, communal dining, festivities, and mutual support among members fostered solidarity between persons of different backgrounds and standings, including foreigners, who lacked other social ties with their host communities.76 Kasper G. Evers has demonstrated how voluntary associations of merchants and shipowners or sea captains, emporoi kai naukleroi, could help supply their members with security, credit, and information in order to overcome the structural challenges of long-distance trade,77 a point also argued by Neville Morley.78 The widespread existence of such associations in the Mediterranean make it likely that they were also formed by merchants from the Mediterranean world taking part in Indian Ocean trade, and indeed there is evidence of a sanctuary constructed by Palmyrenon naukleron Erythraikon, “Palmyrene Red Sea shipowners,” from the Nile port of Koptos in Egypt,79 a major point of transhipment between overland and maritime transport on the route from India to the Mediterranean. As was the case with the temple of Augustus, the existence of formal organizations helps to explain the formation of internal cohesion within the diaspora. But it also demonstrates how the diaspora was able to relate to host societies, because such organizations enabled local authorities to deal with visitors on the group rather than on the individual level, thus easing boundary maintenance as well as contact between groups.

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conclusion In my view, Curtin’s model of the trade diaspora remains useful as a description of the seafaring communities of the Western Indian Ocean in the ancient period. Combining literary, epigraphic, and archaeological data, we encounter a number of groups venturing and settling abroad in order to engage in maritime trade, living up to Brubaker’s criteria for modern diasporic societies with regard to dispersion, boundary maintenance, and homeland orientation. While this demonstrates the relevance of diaspora studies to different periods and different parts of world history, the cases above also show how some of these groups managed to balance the considerations of internal cohesion, local social anchorage, and orientation towards actually existing homelands, on individual as well as group levels. In this way, they successfully built the necessary infrastructure of trust to handle their part of the series of principal-agent relations that facilitated the movement of goods on the axis from East Asia to the Mediterranean, in what could arguably be called the first age of globalization.

6

Perhaps a Silly Question: Was There a Swedish Diaspora? Donald Harman Akenson

(1) Was there a Swedish diaspora? And, really, who cares? Certainly not the Swedes. During the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Sweden became well known internationally for taking in more than its fair share of persons from several diasporas. Often these were individuals and families in full flight from oppressive regimes in their own homeland, and Sweden was thought of as a very good place to land: not perfect, but better than most alternatives. It is an image the country wishes to preserve. Of course there was a counter-flow, Swedes working abroad, mostly elsewhere in Europe, but all over the world. Overwhelmingly they were part of a labour migration that did not involve any traumatic severance from the Swedish homeland and frequently the career path of these individuals was circular: they ended up back home. The major exceptions were wealthy exiles who moved abroad permanently rather than accept the high level of taxation that underwrote Swedish collective expenditure on communal goods such as education and social security. So, no, the term diaspora does not arise very often in studies of recent Swedish history. Curiously, neither “diaspora” nor terms that might be its equivalent in earlier historical writing appear very often in discussion of the era when Sweden experienced one of the highest rates of population outflow in Europe – just behind Ireland and Norway – that is, during the “true” nineteenth century, 1815 to 1914. There are masses of Swedish data and several major studies of the outflow, but these are presented almost

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entirely in terms of the Point A to Point B migration that, as we discussed in chapter two, is not the multipole phenomenon which is necessarily a part of a diaspora. Specifically, almost all major studies dealt with Swedish migration to the United States, and after this country ceased to be a source of great admiration among the Swedish academic class, at roughly the time of the Vietnam War, the whole matter was quietly put aside. Paradoxically, the Swedish experience up to World War I continues to be of fundamental importance to historians of diasporas of other European nations or ethnic collectivities. This for three reasons: (1) Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, Swedish collection of material on births, deaths, marriages – the marrow of basic demographic history – was far in advance of that assembled by other European nations. Given that patterns of population change (usually growth) are primary causes of many diasporic migrations, the Swedish material provides an empirical norm that can, with adjustments, be applied to other European nations and thus in part helps to explain the genesis of several specific diasporas. The Swedish government’s records were continually improved throughout the nineteenth century and though they were not as good in that century as Swedish historians like to assume (a point I will take up later), they still are valuable comparators; (2) In the early twentieth century, the Swedish government conducted a major study of emigration. This concentrated on the 1890s and early twentieth century, but also included a major consideration of long-term patterns. The final study, Emigrationsutredningen (1907–13), consisted of a massive main report and twenty appendices, several of which are monographs in their own right.1 Somewhat eccentric in arrangement and in topics covered, the study is rather hard to use and even easier to misinterpret, especially in its long-series data. However, it provided comparative data on Swedish and other European nations’ migration history and also on demographic matters not only of Sweden but of several other countries. Thus, for example, when in modern studies one sees comparative data on “illegitimate” births in European nations and the British Isles, the ultimate source almost always is this Swedish commission, which is more frequently employed than it is adequately cited. This holds for dozens of topics. The only wider-base study done in the first half of the twentieth century was the “Dillingham Commission” which investigated European migration as a prelude to legislation limiting entry into the United States. And (3) in the 1960s and early 1970s, the first major collaborative academic study of out-migration from any

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European country was conducted by Swedish university scholars. There were many side products, but the essence was presented in From Sweden to America. A History of Migration, edited by Harald Runblom and Hans Norman (1976).2 The title says it all. The score of scholars involved in the project focused almost entirely on movement from Sweden to the United States. Either there was no Swedish diaspora or the Swedish academics did not care. (A small by-study of Brazil was included, but it was very much an afterthought.) Thus, one has a model of admirable collaboration, a rich tapestry of theoretical approaches to migration, a trove of material that can be compared to other national migrations towards the United States. However, one would still like to know the answer to a simple question: was there a Swedish diaspora?

(2) Simple question, and we will keep the response equally simple and focus only on the matter of global dispersal. Since multipole dispersal is the base criterion for any migration to be termed a diaspora, the existence (or nonexistence) of dispersal is a first-order topic. Other matters, such as associational patterns and attitudes towards the homeland are consequential, but demand examination only later. As a plinth on which to base our examination, I think we can take three big blocks of historical interpretation as agreed-information. To those three, I should like to add a fourth, rather more controversial, structural element. First, the massive swirl of Swedish geographic mobility that occurred in the “true nineteenth century,” 1815 to 1914, was part of a much larger phenomenon, often called the Great European Migration. (With equal accuracy one could call it the Great European Diaspora, as Europeans infiltrated the entire globe, creating cultural networks tied economically, socially, and linguistically to their home cultures; however, here we will stay with the conventional vocabulary.) The usual estimates are that about fifty-five to sixty million Europeans left the continent (including the British Isles and the North-Atlantic islands) between the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I.3 Each of them fetched up in one of the several New Worlds that seemed suddenly to have opened to them. This degree of diffusion is not merely remarkable in its numerical size – it marks the largest population movement in human history – but also is astounding in

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the huge patches of the globe that were taken over: South America, New Zealand, Australia, the West Indies, North America, and, for a time, Africa and India.4 Europeans did very well out of all of this. In several ways, the millions of persons who went to the several New Worlds made everybody better off: as labourers or farmer-settlers in the new lands, the migrants received higher wages or profits than they would have at home; those left in the homeland had more resources (for example, larger farms to work with); and the receiving countries acquired a new labour force with which to create a neo-European economy. But there was more to the Europeans’ economic benefit than that nice clean bit of neoclassical economics implies. Additionally, and cruelly, the Great European Migration involved the most massive theft of land and resources in human history and, whether intentional or accidental, the unprecedented destruction of perhaps hundreds of indigenous populations and millions of individual indigene.5 Although the authors of the myriad histories of the national, regional, and local migrations that constituted the Great European Migration have rarely recognized the point, the fact is that every migrant, by virtue of the economic and social system that made migration possible, was an actor in the destruction of the indigene. That is hard to take, especially because so many migrants themselves had experienced poverty and social dislocation in their own homelands. Yet, from the viewpoint of those they dispossessed, Europe’s huddled-masses-yearning-to-be-free were Vandals and Huns. If we can agree on that first point, it permits us to accept a second without experiencing moral amnesia: that, indeed, the generality of the Swedish people of the nineteenth century were hideously poor, even more so than is usually recognized. Sweden was one of a constellation of states that comprised the “poor European periphery.” These were states that not only were on the geographic edge of Europe, but were characterized at mid-nineteenth century by poverty, little industrialization, and low labour productivity: Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.6 They form an economic set: the grossly poor. (One might also add Highland Scotland and the Isles if reliable data were available.) Given this poverty, it is not accidental that Ireland, Norway, and Sweden (in that order) had the highest rate of out-migration in the second half of the nineteenth century.7 Since Ireland is usually taken as the extreme comparator for nineteenth-century poverty, the work of the econometrician, Joel Mokyr, is highly revealing. He has calculated that the number of cultivated acres for each person in Ireland in

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1841 (that is, the amount of cultivated land divided by the total population) was 1.65. The cultivated acreage for each person in Sweden in 1840 was 1.54.8 Probably the average rural Swedish person was slightly better off than his Irish counterpart, despite the harsher Swedish climactic ambiance, since Swedish smallholders had access to common areas of timber and water meadows not available in Ireland. But poor they were. My own estimate, based on the historical data collected for Sweden’s Emigration Commission of 1907–13, is that at mid-nineteenth century, more than 40 percent of the Swedish population was at high risk to health and to life in the case of even a single year’s crop failure.9 There simply was not enough production-over-subsistence to provide a trustworthy cushion against disaster. This was a fact made clear by the Deprivation of the late 1860s which, though far from being on the same scale as the Irish Famine, swiftly accelerated the flow of migrants from Sweden. As a third block of agreed-knowledge, I suggest that we take as read the entire massive corpus of work on the Swedish migration to the United States. Not that one has to have gone through it all to accept the fact that most Swedish migrants during the period of the Great European Migration went to “America,” meaning to the United States. The reason one does this is not that the American material is anything other than of major import – but we are dealing with the question of whether or not there was a Swedish dispersal in the nineteenth century. And, as indicated earlier, a point-to-point migration is not a diaspora. What we really want to know is whether or not there was significant Swedish out-migration to places other than the United States. And here we encounter our fourth block of knowledge, the one most apt to be quickly, almost instinctively, rejected by the writers and the consumers of Swedish historiography. This is that, for our present purposes, the Swedish records are not very good. What? That borders on heresy. It certainly runs against the nationalist pride of some Swedish historians. For example, in a widely cited article, “The Country that Kept Track of Its Population,” Ann-Sofie Kälvemark rightly argued that for such activities as family-reconstitution studies, the Swedish data were remarkably useful, much more than for other European countries.10 Lars-Göran Tedebrand famously laid down a series of criteria-of-excellence and then concluded: “In all of these respects Sweden’s primary sources and its collection of em-

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igration statistics meet high demands throughout the period of mass emigration. Moreover, demographers in other countries have long been aware of the fact that the Swedish church book material is well suited for historical population studies. Swedish researchers as well as a number of their foreign colleagues in various disciplines have won international reputations by virtue of their analyses of Swedish population data.”11 Certainly, for demographers and economic historians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe, Swedish data are highly productive and inevitably find their way into international debates about such basic things as the wealth and the poverty of nations.12 The issue here, however, involves the magic lantern effect: simply because Swedish enumerations of human populations have been remarkably revealing on certain topics and in certain time periods when other European data are an unlit dead end, does not mean that the Swedish data should be projected onto the big screen of European history as being superior on every topic, or even very revealing. And for our evaluation of the existence (or not) of a Swedish diaspora during the era of the Great European Migration, the Swedish material is very spongy indeed.

(3) This judgement requires explanation. The Swedish enumerations in their ur-form began soon after the Reformation when scattered local churches began keeping population records, mostly concerning births, deaths, and marriages. A royal decree of 1686 required that all parishes keep such records, but manifestly this requirement was frequently ignored. A case in point is an ecclesiastical collection bureau, the Tabellverk, established in 1749 under canon law to winkle out statistical information from the records of each parish and to do so at regular intervals. The motivations behind this era’s effort at record keeping were threefold. First, in the mid-eighteenth century, most nations, dominions, satrapies, whatever, took national power to be directly dependent upon population numbers and knowing whether or not it was growing was an important measure of national well-being. Secondly, keeping records on individuals was a form of social control. And thirdly, the Tabellverk effort was a form of control over the religious opinions and practices of the populace – being based as it was on a house-by-house

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catechetical examination by the rector, accompanied if necessary by the local sheriff.13 Some of the original parish record books from the Tabellverk era survive and they can be very illuminating. The trouble is, each rector (or, if you prefer, parish priest) was mostly on his own in this endeavor, and anyone who has worked with the material knows how eccentric it is. Some rectors kept strict records, others did so sloppily; some handwriting is legible, some not; many priests used their own definitions of what information was worth recording – the medical cause of death, for example. So, though these records are rich as compared to the national records of most parts of Europe in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that is a statement of relative richness in a zone of informational poverty: remember that the Germanies were a jigsaw puzzle and not a single jurisdiction, Italy could scarcely have been more idiosyncratic, and that portions of both presentday Denmark and present-day Germany were bounced back and forth between various principalities. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become clear that the Swedish demographic data required regularization, and in 1858 the Central Statistical Bureau (Statistiska Centralbyrån) was created. From the 1860s onwards, national enumeration rules held. It is these enumerative procedures (augmented by other series of data collected by individual governmental departments) that cover the overwhelming majority of Swedish people who moved outside their own homeland in the period of the Great European Migration.14 The conceptual key to understanding both the virtues and the vices of the Swedish system of enumeration is to recognize that, unlike virtually every other national population count, the Swedish system deals with a de jure definition of personhood, rather than a de facto one. Thus, whereas the British Isles, Canada, the United States, and most European countries enumerated each individual according to where they actually lived – by parish, county, village, city etc. – the Swedish system counted where people should be living. Persons who had left one parish but had not officially registered in another were kept on a local role of the obefintliga, the “cannot-befound,” but were included in the parish numbers. Many of these persons were migrant labourers, or persons who had emigrated without giving notice to parish officials, or the dead whose demise had not been properly noted. In a typical year, these missing souls were well under 1 percent of the population total.15 Although among migrant populations, the error-

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proportions obviously were higher (most people were on the cannotbe-found list because they were engaged in some form of migration), one should not make a meal over this. Actually, more important than the numbers missing is the fact that a basic assumption of the Swedish enumerations was that such counts should be prescriptive rather than descriptive. This leads to the second unusual aspect of Swedish enumerations: they were not censuses in the same sense that they were in most nations because the individuals being enumerated had no input whatsoever into how he or she was counted – or not. The Swedish censuses (we will call them “censuses” while remembering their singular character) were not the product either of a person filling out a form (as in the present day in most literate nations) or of having a paid census taker to fill in a standard form. Rather, the clergy of the Swedish state church (a Lutheran church in everything save its official name) kept rolling records of the people in their parishes.16 Once a year, the population total was sent to the Central Statistical Bureau, along with tallies on births, deaths, marriages, and other things in which the government was interested. Every ten years, the parish clergyman had to fill in a name list17 of everyone in the parish and to provide basic information on civil status. From this, the central officials produced aggregate county and national figures and published a decennial census. Now, it is possible to special-plead that the local priest of the state church knew better than each adult person what his or her status was; but I think it is more likely that the census would have been more accurate if each adult individual had been given an opportunity to at least check what the rector had asserted. In the case of two categories of data, this fault has been shown empirically to be extant, and each of these is a pivotal variable in discussing outmigration in general and the matter of diaspora in particular. Notably, first, in the case of information the clergy provided on the occupation of the people, there was a high error rate. For example, a careful person-by-person comparison of the clergy records for the city of Jönköping has shown that in 1900 the church registers either had inaccurate or no information in 48 percent of their occupational designations.18 This is a whoppingly high rate – the match manufacturing industry in the city had grown quickly, and the clergy had lost touch with the phenomenon – but it had paler analogues throughout the country, any place other than purely rural parishes.19 The other area where there was an even larger systemic lacuna (in large part caused by the trust in the clerics of the state church to describe the

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population) occurred in the case of individuals who were dissenters from the established church. From the early 1850s onwards, the “free church” movement in Sweden had gained momentum. This was comprised of people who were not willing to accept the dictum (except under very special circumstances) that being a citizen of Sweden meant one was perforce a member of the state church. The First Dissenter Act of 1860, while on the surface seeming to be a step towards toleration, required groups of nonLutheran Christians to apply for royal approval if they wished to be licit. (No Roman Catholics or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints were permitted.) And even members of tolerated Protestant denominations were to be publicly read by a Lutheran minister a formal exhortation to turn away from their apostasy. Not many Dissenters put up with this, and in 1873 the Second Dissenter Act dropped the hortatory requirement and also redefined the children of non-Lutheran Protestants as being legitimate: previously they had been illegitimate unless a state church ceremony of marriage had been engaged by their parents. This same Second Dissenter Act also permitted entire denominations of non-Lutheran Protestants to register for state approval. However, the requirement of approval from the state so ran against the free church tradition that by 1920 only the Methodists and the Irvingites had requested and received certification.20 Now, the place this skein of religious fettering crossed the enumeration of the Swedish people is when one examines the decennial name lists that emanated from each Lutheran parish. The printed forms sent out by the Central Statistics Bureau required that every person be listed, but the religion of the person was required to be set down only in the case of foreigners resident in the parish!21 Everyone else was assumed to be a state church adherent, although sometimes in the rolling population register one finds indications of an individual or a family becoming nonadherents. This was nonsystematic, however, and only by other means (special inquiries, especially about Mormons, Jews, and Roman Catholics)22 did the state authorities gain a very rough idea of how many non-Lutherans there were in the country. The decennial Swedish censuses, therefore, had not so much an error-rate concerning religion, but rather a gross aporia. Considering that one of the deepest fractures in Swedish society in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the cultural divide between the state church and the free churches, this policy of denying reality compromised the value of the data, the more so for our purposes because the matter of

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religious affiliation was one of the key variables in the pioneering sectors of the migration movement. In one sense, several of the problems with the Swedish enumerations are a product of the data having been collected by amateurs. Using the state clergy as unpaid enumerators had one signal advantage. “In regard to cost of the state office, the Swedish method stands alone, as the material both for population enumerations and for the annual movement of population is provided gratis by the clergymen.” Thus wrote the head of the Central Statistics Bureau in 1918.23 The trouble was that many clergymen resented being forced to serve as civil registrars, and in areas of urban growth the amount of work involved was very taxing. Hence, in 1860, Stockholm had to be broken away from the amateur system, and data for the conurbation were collected by a professional municipal Registration-Taxation Bureau (the Mantalskontoret) on the basis of direct information from the individuals being counted. A modified version of this system was introduced into Göteborg in 1868.24 In the case of out-migration from Sweden, the rolling church registers were markedly unhelpful. Up through the year 1850, the information is useless as far as national totals go: the Emigration Commission of 1907– 13 gave up on the church records as a source of direct data collection and used a simple algebra to infer that between 1801 and 1850 inclusive, total out-migration from Sweden to all countries had been about 76,600, and the net emigration had been approximately 50,000.25 For the years from 1851 onwards, the Central Statistical Bureau tried to gain a clear definition of what was happening by collecting passport data (but, alas, passports were no longer required from 1860 onwards), returns from provincial civil authorities, fill-in material from ships records, and from the often-spotty material in the rolling ecclesiastical records. These techniques were reformed several times, but the interesting point is that when the Emigration Commission came to review the records, they found that the various registers only recorded formally approved emigration, and even then they often had a haphazard notation as to where the person or family actually was going. Thus, the head of the Emigration Commission, Gustav Sundbärg, estimated that the official Swedish statistics under-reported emigration to all non-European destinations (meaning transoceanic, mostly to the United States) for more than half a century: the 1850s by 119 percent; the 1860s by 32 percent; the 1870s by 12 percent; the 1880s by 10 percent; from 1880–84

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by 10 percent; 1885–93 by 1 percent; 1884–1900 by 8 percent; 1901–10 by 7 percent.26 This resulted in Sundbärg’s eventually increasing the inferred level of Swedish gross out-migration (to all destinations, both transoceanic and intra-European) to the following: gross emigration, 1851 to 1910 to 1,297,108, and net out-migration to all destinations for the same period to 1,035,195. 27 More recent studies have suggested that even these corrections for official under-reporting of out-migration were insufficient.28 In any event, the Swedish Central Statistical Bureau settled on rounded figures for the period 1851 to 1930 (out-migration dropped sharply after 1910 and was essentially over by 1930) as follows: gross outmigration 1,544,000 and net out-migration 1,144,000.29 Or, if one prefers, one can combine Sundbärg’s pre-1851 estimates with the revised emigration data provided for the Emigration Commission covering the years 1851 to 1910, to give the following approximation of Swedish movement beyond the national boundaries as follows for 1801 to 1910; gross emigration 1,373,700 and net out-migration 1,085,200. Those estimates are about as good as one is going to find as sum totals of the mass movement of Swedish people during the Great European Migration. And the raw data on which the grand sums were based is certainly useful for all sorts of purposes – just not ours. Why? Because in dealing with the idea that there may – or may not – have been a Swedish diaspora, the Swedish data lack sufficient granularity. Remember: (a) our agreed block of knowledge which states that the overwhelming majority of out-migrants who are covered in the sum-totals provided above went to the United States. The numbers were large – of a total of 961,509 registered emigrants, 1851 to 1910, to non-European destinations, 948,823 were recorded as leaving for the United States30 – and thus they leave little room for other destinations that would be the gps points for a true diaspora; and (b) in noting the eccentricities, vacuities, and strong deficiencies in the official registrations of out-migration (which is one of the things the Emigration Commission had to spend hundreds of pages trying to correct), we have to face two strong statistical possibilities. These are, first, that “smaller” destinations in terms of numbers were the least well recorded. If there was, as the Emigration Commission said, a 119 percent undercount in the 1850s, or even the 7 percent in the first decade of the twentieth century, that is large enough to have swallowed most recorded migration to the more exotic destinations. In other words, the situation for the smaller destinations is similar statistically to the

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position of a political party that finds it is, say, five points ahead, or behind, in a political opinion poll that has a standard error of 10 percent. Indeterminacy is larger than certainty. And, secondly, there exists the opposite possibility that quite a large diaspora spread to certain destinations so mundane that the migrants usually were not recorded. These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and I will argue that, indeed, a Swedish diaspora occurred on both these fronts and both have been largely ignored until very recently.

(4) So, first let us look at the possibility that a major tranche of Swedish outmigration – in many years actually the dominant phenomenon – had nothing to do with the drama of transoceanic travel, but instead was hidden in plain sight: migration to other European countries. Swedish31 intraEuropean migration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been paid insufficient attention until recently, in part because it was less dramatic than the trek to New Worlds and, equally importantly, because it has been so much harder to document. In examining this semiphantom phenomenon, it is useful initially to construct a probability-log and to see if these probabilities conform to empirical probability. 1. For the years before 1851 – the beginning of semiuseful attempts at counting out-migration – we have seen that Gustav Sundbärg calculated (by indirect evidence) gross Swedish emigration from 1801–50, inclusive, to be in total approximately 76,600 persons.32 No one knows exactly where these people went, but certainly not to North America. The 1850 United States’ census showed only 3,559 Swedish-born persons.33 The most reasonable suggestion would be that for the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the “Swedish diaspora” was to Denmark, the Germanies, and briefly, during the harvest failures of the later 1830s, to Norway.34 Indeed, I think it likely that at least into the 1860s, permanent emigration to Denmark and the German principalities exceeded the much more widely publicized emigration to the United States.35 2. Even if we were to take at face value the officially gross registered out-migration figures, they show that from 1851 until 1908 (when the Emigration Commission began its count), a pattern emerges as follows:36

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Number Percentage

Donald Harman Akenson to european destinations

to transoceanic destinations

197,535 17.6%

923,113 82.4%

Now, we know that both numbers were low in reality, but it seems likely that permanent migration to other European countries from Sweden was more apt to be lost from the records than was transoceanic emigration. A hint at this fact is that when Gustav Sundbärg did his correction of the records, he suggested that for the 1860s, the dispersal of Swedes to Europe was 27.5 percent of the total gross out-migration, not the 23.9 percent the registration showed.37 His corrections were probably insufficient, as previously noted, but here it is the metonymic aspect that is the signal: namely, that whatever the ever-changing form of the official out-migration records, they were more apt to lose the imprint of migrants to Europe than to America. And, indeed, Rolf Johansson’s source-study of ecclesiastically derived emigration records from 1840–90 shows a virtually systemic tendency to record American migration and to do tallies of European migration haphazardly at best.38 3. That this, indeed, was the endemic case is indicated in the fact that source-critical evaluations have shown that even after the Swedish recordkeeping for long-distance migration was improved in the mid-1880s, the parish records for migrants to European countries remained defective.39 A nicely framed study of Danish foreign-registration data conducted by Göran Ahlgvist has shown that the unrecorded permanent migration to Denmark and to Germany in the later nineteenth century had a much higher proportion of unrecorded movement than that to North America. Indeed, although the official registration figures miss this fact, migration from southern Sweden (Skåne, mostly) in many years in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was greater to Germany and Denmark than to the United States.40 4. The most likely reason that so much permanent dispersal of the Swedish population was unrecorded at the time – and thus has become “the Forgotten Emigration” in recent historical discussions – is that it was very difficult to distinguish seasonal migrants among Swedish labourers from those leaving permanently. As Lars-Göran Tedebrand noted, it was

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hard for the central authorities who sifted the various sources of migration data to make “the distinction between emigration and external migrations … However, as is to be expected, this confusion appears to have primarily affected figures for the extent of European migration.”41 This point becomes especially salient after the Great Deprivation for, as a continuing and general phenomenon, Sweden experienced a growing increment in geographic intracountry mobility. Much of this mobility was city-ward: the urban population (defined as persons living in towns of 2,000 or more persons) was 9.8 percent in 1815, 10.4 percent in 1855, and 26.8 percent in 1914.42 But whatever the direction – to other rural districts, to cities – this increased internal mobility had a spillover to other neighbouring countries. Some of this spillover was in the form of seasonal labour in Denmark and Germany (and, more rarely, to Norway, Finland, or even Russia), and on occasion these temporary moves became permanent migration. What was occurring was an almost perfect illustration of the hydraulics of migration flows first clearly defined by the brilliant, somewhat gnomic Ernst Georg Ravenstein, whose seminal work is discussed in chapter two of the present volume. Ravenstein’s basic theoretical breakthrough was to show that human migration has patterns that operate across national borders and that these patterns (his “laws”) dictate that local mobility, urbanization, seasonal migration, and international migration are all part of a single system of social physics. For our present purposes, the most important implication of Ravenstein’s work is that isolating transoceanic migration as a phenomenon from other forms of geographic mobility is an intellectual impossibility, even if it must, on occasion, be done on a fictive basis for reasons of rhetorical clarity.43 5. That most of the Swedish “diaspora” was to other European nations until at least 1860 is a suggestion I have made earlier.44 That a very strong, though no-longer-dominant, intra-European migration continued after 1860 followed because of two interrelated economic developments. The first of these is Swedish urban industrialization in the last one-third of the nineteenth century, an occurrence whose reality is hardly controversial.45 The salient point about industrialization is that it occurred contemporaneously elsewhere in northern Europe, so that skills that were developed were easily transportable to similar industries elsewhere in Europe. Secondly, but much less often noted, the Swedish “agricultural revolution” was not completed until the end of the nineteenth century, and certain aspects were

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remarkably late in comparison, say, to the agricultural revolution in England which is usually taken as a template for comparison. Specifically, the enclosure of small and scattered pieces of farm land into aggregates of larger, more efficient units – which in England was completed by the early 1830s – did not begin rolling in Sweden until the lagaskiftet, “land reform,” of 1827. There had been earlier, particularistic land redistribution acts in 1749, 1757, and 1807, but the national rearrangement took from the early 1830s until the end of the century.46 (Parts of Dalarna were still fighting against it up to the beginning of World War I.) As far as the intra-Swedish mobility and extra-Swedish emigration was concerned, the long-term effect of the agricultural revolution (and especially of the enclosure movement) was to increase rural social differentiation.47 Some small farmers and labourers did well, others lost out. Those who lost out looked for work elsewhere in Sweden or in the neighbouring European countries or across the ocean. Their physical mobility became part of a large Ravensteinian system. In the Swedish case, the moil of internal and external migration, all happening simultaneously, was first successfully dealt with both theoretically and empirically by the historical geographer, Eric de Geer, in 1967.48 6. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Danish economic migration historian, Richard Willerslev, published several articles and a pivotal book on the Swedish migration to Denmark. This emigration was chiefly from the provinces of Skåne, Belkinge, southern Småland, and Halland. It began in the 1840s, and gained considerable momentum during the Great Deprivation of the late 1860s. Thereafter, it constituted a somewhat smaller movement, primarily composed of poor farmers and farm labourers, and then from the 1890s became increasingly a movement of urban industrial workers. The overall movement made sense, as southern Sweden was linguistically close to Denmark – a virtual språkgemensak, “language community,” made it easier for many Skåne residents to understand the speech of persons from Copenhagen than that of persons from Stockholm, and this was especially likely in the case of people who came from the countryside. Willerslev worked diligently on determining the underrecording of Swedish migrants to Denmark, using both Swedish and Danish sources, and he concluded that between 1860 and 1920, approximately 200,000 Swedes moved permanently to other countries in Europe. Of these, eighty to ninety thousand were persons who moved permanently from Skåne and Småland to Denmark. His figures were for net emigration, and they exceed the pre-

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viously accepted numbers.49 In 1985, Claudius Riegler presented a significant study of Swedish permanent migration to Germany, within the context of seasonal migration. His basic observations were that the Great Deprivation of the later 1860s sent a wave of rural proletarians to Germany – some seasonally, some permanently – and that this wave continued until replaced by cheaper eastern European workers in the 1890s. At this time, a smaller, but significant stream of trained industrial workers moved from Sweden to Germany for higher wages and better working conditions than they could find in their homeland. A maximum of forty thousand persons moved permanently from Sweden to Germany between 1851 and 1915, but that number is very wobbly.50 7. In 2008, Dr Lars Hansson, the well-known scholar of labour history and formerly director of the Svenska Emigrantinstitutets in Växjö, opened an exhibition entitled “The Forgotten Emigration” (Den Glömda Utvandringen till Danmark och Tyskland, 1850–1914).51 This was the product of several years’ research and was a brave attempt to bend the Växjö Institute – which already was the primary repository for data on Swedish migration to North America – towards a wider perspective. In particular, the intention was to show that during the Great European Transoceanic Migration a set of swirls and eddies of migration within Europe was also occurring – and in the case of southern Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, a portion of Europe’s international working class was being formed. Simultaneously, commercial ties between the business classes of northern Europe were being articulated into a series of tight networks. The quality and amount of research behind this single archival exposition was virtually panoptical: ranging from migrant female workers engaged in stoop labour in the Danish beet fields, to masons and brickmakers in Denmark and Germany, to the ubiquitous Swedish domestic servants in Copenhagen, to Swedish engineers in German industrial centres, and on and on. Persons in each occupation were tied together by transnational webs of information, by employment agents, and – as more and more Swedes settled down and became Danes or Germans – by ties to cousins, brothers, sisters, who were now a beachhead in a newish land. Now, none of the segments of the probability-log that I have constructed proves beyond doubt that there was a large Swedish dispersal in Europe, but each segment is a probability statement. And taken together, the additive probability becomes quite high. Granted, the intra-European trip was

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at first glance far less consequential for an individual than migration to the United States would have been. But it was not a minor move. For example, for a young woman to move from a small croft outside of Kristianstad to serving as a maid in a bourgeois house in the huge (to her) metropolis of Copenhagen was probably as sharp a transition as, say, a male farm labourer moving from the grain-growing plains of central Skåne to the wheat fields of Isanti County in Minnesota. (I use the example of a household servant, because roughly half the intra-European migrants were female.) Thus, intraEuropean migration was both socio-culturally consequential and numerically significant. Indeed, this promises to be the cutting edge of Swedish migration studies in the near future – and of the delineation of the nineteenth-century Swedish diaspora, if such a concept ever attracts approval. To project the potential latent results onto the larger screen: historians of Europe’s Great Migration of 1815 to 1914 eventually will speak of it not solely as a migration from Europe, but as a migration within Europe.

(5) Yet, what about the other form of “forgotten emigration,” to small, seemingly exotic locations? Some of these were the sort of places where migrants went in a stepwise pattern – travelling first to one of the major destinations and then moving along until they ended up at some point they never would have guessed when leaving home. Men in mining were like that, hitting the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as these places had their sequential mining booms. However, there were three Swedish colonial ventures that were small, but quite different from the stepwise flow. They were colonies in the strict sense of the word. Of these, the first two long precede the Great European Migration and therefore here require only brief mention, and the third was a miniscule mixture of the farcical and the epiphenomenal. First, “New Sweden” in the rich Chesapeake region of North America (roughly identified with the present state of Delaware) was a brief attempt (1638–55) to play with the then-big boys of New World colonization, the Dutch and the English, and it left little mark – save upon the Swedish royalty and aristocracy who developed a sense that the mixture of colonial settlement and the business of slavery might be a profitable combination. Secondly, following this initial venture, a series of haphazard efforts (1650–63) around Cabo Corso,

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in what is now Ghana involved Sweden’s attempt to gain a foothold in the supply end of the African slave trade. On the ground, Sweden built some small harbour fortresses for the shipment of Africans, made a treaty with an indigenous leader permitting access to the supply of slaves, and then lost the whole business to the Danish who later lost it to the British. These two adventures, New Sweden and Cabo Corso, were not quite as quixotic as they now seem, as Sweden in the seventeenth century was a significant imperial power in northern Europe; they show, however, that the logistics of the Swedish Empire did not extend much beyond the Baltic.52 A third, longer-lived attempt to get into the slave business involved the leeward Island of Saint-Barthélemy (English variant: Saint Bartholomew; now a luxury tourist island usually referred to as Saint Barts). Trade in the West Indian slave islands involved not only human trafficking, but trade in slave-produced goods, mostly sugar, rum, tobacco, and indigo for the mainland North American colonies, and also the provisioning of the islands with European goods, ranging from wine to salt fish. The Saint-Barthélemy venture is instructive historiographically as it points clearly where not to look for any possible Swedish diaspora in the era of the Great European Migration: in formal Swedish colonies. The only bit of Swedish Empire to survive into the mid-nineteenth century was the product of the absolutist monarch Gustavus III (1771–92). Today he would be seen as a combination of minor league megalomaniac and petulant diva, so it was not inappropriate that in 1792 he was assassinated by one of his disaffected nobles while attending a masked ball at the Royal Opera House. However, before that Gustavus III had been deeply engaged in his own theatrical enterprise – namely, trying to project Sweden’s vestigial power of empire into the world of the transatlantic slave and carrying trade. In 1784 he acquired from the French the island of Saint-Barthélemy as a quid pro quo for the renewal of the FrancoSwedish commercial treaty of 1741, which provided France with useful amounts of Swedish iron. The Swedish government took over the island in 1785, and in 1786 the Swedish West India Company was formed, with the crown prince of Sweden as the principal shareholder. Although it dealt in various goods – herring and iron from Sweden among them – its primary money-maker was a royal concession to deal in African slaves. This traffic was sharply reduced (although it continued in a clandestine stream) after 1813 when Great Britain (which had renounced trading in slaves in 1807, albeit not their possessions in the empire), forced the Swedes, Danes, and

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Dutch to cease the trade in human chattels. However, the actual emancipation of the existing slave population on Saint-Barthélemy did not occur until 1846–47, and was a messy business because of initially insufficient funding of compensation to the slave owners upon abolition.53 When the Swedish took full administrative control of the tiny colony in the mid-1780s, it had about 500 African slaves, and the European population consisted of 519 French Catholics and 443 Protestants, of whom only twenty-one were Swedish Lutherans, the rest being mostly English speakers.54 So, the island ran as a francophone administration (the Swedish rulers were French speakers) and an English-speaking commercial class. During the 1790s and the early nineteenth century, the colony did well, and grew to a total population of roughly 5,000 in 1812, with about 2,500 being slaves. The white trading class attracted a significant proportion of Swedish merchants, factors, and a Swedish administrative compliment, including a full consulate.55 But then, Great Britain’s forceful stoppage of ocean slave trading by the Swedes in 1813 permanently undercut SaintBarthélemy’s reason for existence. This, combined with the economic downturn at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, put the island economy in sharp decline. So unimportant did the island become that in the early 1840s the Swedish ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland claimed to be unaware of the existence of any slaves on SaintBarthélemy56 and he may not have been merely diplomatically amnesiac. In any event, in 1847 the government paid compensation for the emancipation of 523 slaves, although there may have been as many as 1,800 on the island.57 The racial composition of the island is not specified at that date. What is certain is that once slaveholding was prohibited, the colony’s white planters were harrowed by bankruptcies. In 1860, there were 2,802 inhabitants, and only six of these were reported to be Swedish speakers. The majority of the islanders, one infers, were impoverished former slaves, and most of the residual white population probably would have been British- and European-derived traders and small landholders. The total island population was down to 2,400 in 1872, and only fourteen of these were Swedish Lutherans.58 Just before Sweden had taken over Saint-Barthélemy, the French minister of marine affairs, the Marquise de Castries, had asserted that the island was totally worthless and should be given away.59 Almost a century later, the Swedish government had come to see the wisdom of his opinion. Be-

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ginning in 1868, it tried to sell (actually, virtually to give away) the island to the United States, to Italy, and to its old owner, France. Eventually, the French accepted the island. The transfer was dressed up as a face-saving purchase. The French paid 400,000 francs, of which 320,000 went to pensioning former officials of the Swedish administration, and eighty thousand for a new hospital and a few minor charities. A certain democratic gloss was put on the process by having it approved by a plebiscite conducted among the islands’ overwhelmingly white electorate of 352 adult males. And, thus, on 16 March 1878, the Swedish Empire straggled to a definitive end.60

(6) Obviously, then, if any further dispersal of a significant number of Swedish persons to “exotic” locations occurred during the Great European Migration, it happened in someone else’s empire, or former empire. (We will accept that from 1787 onwards, the United States was an expanding empire in North America, but Swedish migration to the United States has already been taken as a given fact in the present discussion.) For Swedish migrants, the only empires in play for most of the relevant time period were the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America and the burgeoning British Empire which was growing in a topsy-turvy fashion, seemingly all over the globe. Take first Central and South America. Into all these places – but especially Mexico and its immediate southern neighbours – a straggly line of Swedes who had originally migrated to the United States came by way of “stepwise” migration. A Swedish colony on the Rio Grande was formed just before World War I,61 but well before that (by 1880, certainly) Swedishborn persons were found in every American state and territory.62 Although Swedes concentrated in the Midwest in their original nineteenth-century settlement, they were no more immune to the American habit of geographic mobility than was any other major ethnic group. And given the high fertility rate of the immigrant generation, their children had to move onwards as empty farming land became scarce. So part of the drift was to Mexico and southwards, and it went virtually unrecorded. The Central American countries kept nothing approaching useful in-migration records; their borders were porous in any case. Thus, someone who had left Sweden in, say, 1869,

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and eventually followed the expanding American Empire into the American southwest, and then moved south of the Rio Grande, comes up in the Swedish records as an emigrant to the United States, and in the American records, for a time as a foreign-born resident, and then simply disappears. (And the American-born offspring of such a person, if they accompanied the migrant south of the Rio Grande, also disappear.) These sorts of dispersed Swedes, fascinating as many of them may have been as individuals, are beyond our purview. So too are Swedish sailors who jumped ship in Latin American ports and thereupon vanished into the lands of call.63 What we can see with reasonable accuracy is a set of boundaried migrations from Sweden to Brazil, with spillover to Argentina.64 Between 1815 and World War I, approximately 5,500 Swedish persons migrated to those countries. The background is salient as far as Brazil is concerned. First, obviously, it was a huge land mass (the largest country in South America), and it was labour-short, as were almost all New World nations. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, it had depended upon the slavery of former Africans as its main labour force. This was because the Amerindians had not proved to be useful slaves, and in any case the Catholic church had condemned enslaving the indigene as early as 1542. (This doctrine affected both the Spanish and the Portuguese Empires.) The ironic aspect is that the protectors of the Amerindians had suggested the import of Africans as a way to keep the New World natives safe.65 The magnitude of the resultant slave trade as it concerns Brazil is that by the middle of the eighteenth century, Portugal had shipped from Africa 1.7 million persons as human chattels, the majority to mainland South America.66 Under international pressure, Brazil outlawed the importation of slaves in 1850, but there were about 2.5 African-descended slaves in hand. It became clear to the Brazilian government that abolition, though it could be delayed, was inevitable, and in the 1860s the recruitment of a new labour force began. Mostly this consisted of southern and eastern Europeans, but German agents were engaged to bring in northern Europeans. Germans were the most-desired immigrants to Brazil, and the German emigration agents tried to attract Scandinavians as their outriders. The Great Deprivation of 1867–69 was a recruiting opportunity, and between 1868–73, roughly 300 Swedes took assisted passages to Brazil. Mostly these were men in their twenties, largely from Stockholm, but with some representation of families from the depressed provinces of Västergötland

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and Småland. The Swedes were shuttled to a dead end settlement in the middle of nowhere in the southern frontier state of Catharina, where there were few skilled jobs and little chance of acquiring land. Most of the Swedes drifted away, becoming itinerant labourers and, probably, indistinguishable from other members of the Brazilian white population. A few of the Småland families clung together and managed to preserve some sense of their ethnic identity. Not much of a migration, really. The process of Brazil’s attempted Europeanization of its labour force accelerated with the abolition of slavery in the years 1885–88 and, simultaneously, with the need to build an infrastructure around the country’s new miracle crop, the coffee bean. Southern and Eastern Europeans poured in, especially from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Yet, the Brazilian government still worked with German firms to bring in northern Europeans. From Sweden, a trickle of migrants continued, and numbers began to grow markedly in the mid-1880s. Then, the winter of 1890–91 was extremely harsh and this, combined with an economic recession in commodities, was especially hard on the Stockholm working class and upon the counties of Gävleborg and Västernorrland. In particular, conditions were severely painful in the sawmill district of Sundsvall, where labour-management conditions were endemically nasty. (A famous strike of 1879 in Sundsvall, broken brutally by the government, provided one of founding stories of the Swedish labour movement.) Thus arose “Brazil fever”: accelerated by emigration agents engaged by the Brazilian government, it took hold amongst the economically vulnerable. In the period of one year almost two thousand adult persons (plus children) left Sweden for Brazil: nearly 700 from Stockholm and region, 600 from the Sundsvall region, and 250 from the area north of Sundsvall. Every county of Sweden was represented, however.67 In contrast to the parties that had left for Brazil as a consequence of the Great Deprivation, this migration was comprised mostly of families. The head of each family signed a contract with an emigration agent. The migrants were assembled in Malmö, then brought to Hamburg, and thence shipped by steamer to Rio de Janeiro. Transport costs and the agents’ fees were funded by the Brazilian government. The migrants in this period were sent to yet another of Brazil’s underdeveloped areas, the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. There the families stayed intact, but the Swedes were not allowed to form a compact settlement and social anomie became the common experience.

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The third and final group migration to Brazil took place in 1909–11 and stemmed directly from the Great Strike of 1909. The working class of the mining town of Kiruna in “Lappland” (strictly speaking, in the administrative county of Norrbotten) was both impoverished and embittered by the strike. They were targeted by emigration agents and approximately 700 persons, in family groups, chose to go to Brazil. (The other alternatives were Canada, which was recruiting hard, or Australia.) If anything, they were treated worse upon arrival than were their predecessors of 1890–91. Their impoverished condition became a major embarrassment to the Swedish government by virtue of “letters-to-home” which were published in the press. Hence, in 1912, what was essentially a rescue mission brought 600 of the 1890–91 and 1909–11 Brazil migrants back to Sweden. But most remained. One large group crossed the Uruguay River and was permitted to found a colony in Argentina near Buenos Aires. (This “Misiones colony” was so named because it was located in what had once been a Jesuit mission province.) As late as the 1930s, a Swedish-speaking colony of over 900 persons was extant in Misiones and seemed to have achieved a viable degree of social and economic cohesion. Its survival had been helped by the fortuitous establishment in 1906 of another colony in the Misiones district, comprised of Swedo-Finns.68 Called “Colonia Finlandesa,” it was made up chiefly of “intellectuals” who were dissidents against the Russian regime that held suzerainty over Finland. It began with 150 people and grew. Its virtue for the Swedes who previously had been in Brazil was that it helped to keep alive Swedish language cultural patterns. Göran Friborg has convincingly contended that of the roughly 5,500 recorded migrants to Brazil (again, the term “recorded” is a limiting clause to any conclusion) in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, one-quarter eventually moved to Argentina. (Not all of them went to the Misiones colony, but probably most.) And, given that 600, or so, of the migrants to Brazil were repatriated in 1912, this means that fewer than four thousand of the Swedish migrants to Brazil between 1815 and 1914 actually remained for a significant period of time in that country. What happened to them is unknown: some must have had families; probably most eventually married other Europeans or persons of mixed race and reared families; and, as always happened in migrations, some became diseased or alcoholic or mentally unfit to work. In Brazil, few marks have been left.

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(7) Thus, we are fining down our focus to the geographic constellation which, in addition to northern Europe, was the only other receptor of members of a Swedish “diaspora” – namely, the British Empire. Although this empire was depicted in nineteenth-century maps (which habitually used muddied scarlet for a signal-hue) as painting one-quarter of the land surface red by the end of World War I, the parts that counted for settlement were quite discrete. These were Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa, and Canada.69 Australia is a sharp contrast to the case of Brazil in that virtually no family or group parties migrated there. According to the best authority on the matter, Olavi Koivukangas, there was only one group of real significance in Australia. This was the settlement that coalesced at Emerald, Victoria, around the orchards of the Gävle-born Carl Axel Nobelius. He had emigrated with his wife in 1872 and in 1884 he founded a nursery of nearly 300 acres in fruit trees, perhaps the largest single orchard block that existed anywhere in the English-speaking world, at least until he planted 600 acres of fruit trees in Tasmania in 1908. Through what Koivukangas calls “gravitational settlement,” a dozen Swedish families came to work for Nobelius in a very small Swedish-derived community.70 That concept, “gravitation,” – a two-way concept that can involve either strength or weakness of attraction – explains the only other even quasi-Swedish settlement. This was the Swedish Camp at the gold field around Ballarat, where two dozen Swedish immigrants lived and clubbed together to find a Lutheran clergyman, the Reverend Pehr Wideman, who conducted the first Swedish-language church service in 1856.71 The idea of “gravitation” is a good one in that it allows us to see that Swedish ethnic and religious affiliations, to the extent that they existed at all, were things that happened in the orbit of Australian colonial life and were not imported, as in parts of North America, directly from Sweden.72 Embedded in the character of Swedish migration to Australia were a set of characteristics which dictated that the Swedish “gravitational field” would be very weak. First, much of the early movement came from former merchant seamen. During the 1850s and thereafter, many Swedish seamen either chose to be paid off in one of the Australian counties or simply to jump ship. Second, the details of the assisted migration schemes that the various Australian colonies (especially Queensland) attempted encouraged only individual settlers. Queensland had an on-again, off-again record of

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assisting migrants. Programs of assistance, involving payment (or at least part-payment) of the very expensive passage to Australia and employment assistance upon arrival, operated in the early 1860s, then in the 1870s, and 1880s. These were reduced in 1887, abandoned in 1892, and then restarted in 1897.73 Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania all had their own assistance schemes, albeit less ambitious than those of Queensland. Note what these assisted passages schemes did: they attracted individuals, not groups, and in fact, almost overwhelmingly they brought over males. The same held for self-paid passages: it was a long and expensive voyage, one suitable for adventuresome young men, but not so attractive, and certainly very expensive, for families. Thus, to take the early period: the knowledgeable newspaper editor, Corfitz Cronqvist, a native of Malmö, estimated that in the period between 1857–58 there were 1,500 Swedes in the Victoria area, but only six of them were women.74 An effective summation of the gendered nature of Swedish migration is indicated by the fact that in 1901 slightly more than 90 percent of Swedish-born persons in Australia were male.75 Thus, third, the inevitable result was that the Swedish population did not marry within its own ethnic group. One historian has suggested that, as far as New South Wales was concerned, at the turn of the nineteenth century most Swedes saw few of their fellow countrymen and that “by marrying local Australian women in general, and Roman Catholic Australians in particular, they surrendered, albeit willingly, their difficult-to-define Swedishness.”76 This may be a touch overstated on the intermarriage of Swedish Protestants with Catholics (in Australia, mostly persons of Irish background in the period before World War I), but it is spot-on concerning general marriage patterns by Swedish immigrants. A tally of all the registered marriages in Australia from 1908–22 shows that 26.7 percent of Swedish-born men married Swedish-born women. And of Swedish-born women, an astonishingly low 3.1 percent married Swedish-born men.77 Each group mostly married native-born Australians. But even if one makes a generous augmentation to these percentages to cover the cases where Swedish-born men and women married people of Swedish ethnicity who were second or third generation in Australia, the conclusion is unavoidable: the “gravitational field” of the Swedes in Australia was weak indeed. And this fits with a fourth factor, namely governmental policy. The Swedes (along with Danes and Norwegians) were thought by the Australian

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authorities to be desirable immigrants because they melted so quickly into the Anglo-Celtic population of Australia. Charles A. Price, the intellectual godfather of Australia’s serious scholars of ethnic studies, summarized the situation as follows: “Non-British immigrants were looked at suspiciously, being expected to learn English immediately, to refrain from forming immigrant groups and societies, and to intermix and intermarry with BritishAustralians. Complete assimilation in one generation was the philosophy behind Australian attitudes to newcomers.”78 The Swedish immigrants for the most part did exactly that. Fifth, and finally, the Swedish gravitational field in Australia was so weak because it lacked mass. Harald Runblom estimated that between 1850 and 1940 about ten thousand Swedes migrated to Australia.79 I suspect that the numbers were somewhat higher, but his guesstimate is certainly in the range of reasonable possibility. According to Charles A. Price’s analysis of the various Australian censuses for 1891, there were 6,518 Swedish-born persons in the Australian colonies, and a notional total of 13,037 persons who either were Swedish-born or had at least one parent who had been born in Sweden.80 Given that there had been a fair degree of Swedish migration in the 1850s and thereafter, and also given that people died, or moved on to another country to try their fortune (New Zealand was a common next step), then the roughly 6,500 Swedish-born persons in Australia in 1891 were a surrogate for a significantly larger cumulative total migration to Australia up to that date. The Swedish-born population of Australia was down to 5,586 in 1911.81 (It kept dropping into the 1960s.) How many people actually migrated to Australia during the era of the Great European Migration is unknowable beyond the basis-ofguesstimates made from the data given above, and so too is the subsequent demography of the Swedish migrants’ offspring. Charles A. Price’s heuristic estimate was that 49,700 comprised the “ethnic strength” of the Swedishderived population in 1987, and this includes several generations of descent as well as the small number (under four thousand) of Swedish-born persons living in Australia in that year.82 Sixth, and finally, by noting the small gravitational mass of the Swedish immigrant population, the overwhelmingly male and therefore mobile character of the migrants, and the overwhelming propensity of Swedish migrants to Australia during the era of the Great European Migration to marry nonSwedes, plus the Australian government’s ambiguous-to-borderline hostile

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attitude towards immigrant associations, we can hardly be surprised that the average migrants’ ethnic associational life – clubs, Swedish-language churches, etc. – ranged from minimal to nonexistent.83 This is not to gainsay the heroic digging for cultural artifacts by persons whose work is cited in the notes to this discussion (most especially John Stanley Martin), but one cannot make a tapestry out of so few threads. Probably the most durable association was the Swedish Chamber of Commerce, founded in Sydney in 1911, just at the end of the period of the Great Migration, and in fact, it was as much a trade association as an immigrant society. The chamber’s creation followed immediately upon the establishment of a direct trade link between Sweden (and Norway and Denmark) and Australia in 1907. Two steamships, the Tasmanic and the Australic, each 7,300 tons dead weight, were built specially for the Pacific trade, which included not only Australia, but New Zealand and the Far East. Thus, it became profitable to have Swedish commercial contacts. The paper trade was the heart of most voyages to Australia, but all sorts of other cargoes were exported, including the occasional migrant. The Swedish Chamber of Commerce was only useful for a commercial elite, but it was well funded, and nothing if not patriotic about Sweden (and, one suspects, particularly patriotic about Swedish-imported goods).84 New Zealand resembled Australia in the weakness of the Swedish ethnic “gravitational field,” but Swedish migration there had a rather more textured narrative line. This follows from: (1) there being some attempts at pan-Scandinavian group settlements that involved Swedes. These attempts fit with the general New Zealand pattern. Like Australia, New Zealand was mostly populated by “infiltration” migration, but unlike Australia, voluntary (not prisoner) settlement parties organized in the British Isles had played a significant role in the axial period of immigration, when New Zealand was being transformed from a set of coastal sea-faring ports to a settler society: Christchurch, early Dunedin, and portions of Wellington are obvious examples. (2) From early on, and especially since the New Zealand gold rush that began in 1861, a significant portion of Swedish migration came from persons who had first gone to Australia and then, for whatever reason, decided that life looked better across the Tasman Sea. This included as persons-from-Australia emigrants in port records, men (mostly) and women who had left Sweden and first landed in Australia. And this, of course, included as Australian-born in census records, the chil-

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dren of Swedes who had gone to Australia and then had their children move across the Tasman Sea. There is nothing unusual about this presumed Swedish pattern: the Australian-born in New Zealand comprised 7.9 percent of the New Zealand population in 1861 (the high point); 5.3 percent in 1881, and 2.6 percent in 1911,85 and in each of those years the percentage of Australian-born, plus foreign-born who previously had lived in Australia would have been higher. Among other things, this means that the official statistics of out-migration are even less useful than one would have predicted. The famous emigration commission of 1907-13 had lumped New Zealand under “residual places,” and later governmental historical data simply put New Zealand with Asia and other places that were, from the Swedish perspective, arcane. The earliest New Zealand census to provide information on Swedish-born was for 1878, and the Swedish-born for 1878 to 1916 were as follows:86 year 1878 1881 1886 1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1916

swedish-born 1,162 1,264 1,439 1,414 1.514 1,548 1,618 1,518 1,391

Although New Zealand authorities never conducted a full ethnic census, in 1921 they asked everyone where their father had been born. The result was a rough surrogate for the first and second generation of each ethnic group. In the case of Swedes, one can infer that for every Swedish-born person who showed up in the census, there were roughly 2.5 others who had Swedish paternal origin, but had been born outside of Sweden.87 As was the case for Australia, the Swedish-born were a rude proxy for an entire immigrant stream, but what that was is indeterminate. Sten Aminoff, in a remarkable exercise in detective work, has found direct records of roughly 3,300 individual migrants and seamen who settled in New Zealand, and has the name, Swedish home parish, occupation, and

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often other information for 2,458 of these individuals, from earliest days to 1940.88 If, as Aminoff suspected, his name-list of 3,300 was about half of all emigrants, than something between six to seven thousand persons probably had migrated from Sweden to New Zealand by the time of World War II. Aminoff’s impressive data set implies a time-stratigraphy of Swedish arrivals. One key point is that about half of the settlers had been seamen, everything from able seamen to marine engineers, shipwrights, and master mariners.89 And, not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of all migrants he could identify came from coastal locales, ranging from the coast north of Göteborg to the tip of Malöhus län up to Kristianstads län, with smaller clutches from Stockholm and the Gävle areas.90 This makes sense as even those migrants who were not seamen were likely to have been influenced by their friends and relatives in marine enterprises. So, the inferred time-layering is this: (1) In all periods, New Zealand was open to seafarers who jumped ship or were paid off in New Zealand ports. That can be taken as a constant. (2) However, from 1861 until the early 1870s, the New Zealand government began an intense period of recruitment of settlers. In the Swedish case, they directed as many as possible to specific Scandinavian settlements in the bush. There they were a minority among Danes and Norwegians, but were part of viable small group settlements. (More about these settlements in a moment.) (3) From the early 1880s onward, most Swedish in-migration to New Zealand was by what was referred to in the Australian case as “infiltration,” meaning small numbers of individuals, acting as self-agents, and this pattern (or, really, lack of pattern) continued until World War I. There may have been a bulge in Swedes-from-Australia in the early twentieth century, as Australia experienced a sharp trade recession, but that is speculation. Now, back to the 1870s. In ethnocultural history, the decade is often called the Vogel Era, after Julius Vogel, treasurer of New Zealand, 1869– 73, prime minister, 1873–76, and then agent-general for the colony in London, 1876–80. Vogel was enthusiastic, indeed almost maniacal, in pressing his conviction that large-scale in-migration was the best way for New Zealand to develop economically. Through a series of assisted migration schemes by a phalanx of emigration agents, and aided by widespread advertising in the British Isles and in selected northern European locales, the volume of annual immigration in New Zealand was raised from ten thou-

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sand for the year 1870, to almost forty-four thousand in 1874, and to an average of more than 20,500 per annum in the years 1875–79.91 Most of the recruits who came directly from Sweden (as distinguished from the constant stream of paid-off merchant seamen) fit into Julius Vogel’s grand scheme. This enterprise involved several communities being created inland in the middle of the North Island, areas covered with dense bush that served to make road communication very difficult. Thus, there was a range of Scandinavian communities (mostly Danish and Norwegian, but still with a notable Swedish presence). The first community, the Manawatu, was created in 1871 around Palmerston (now called Palmerston North) in the north of Wellington province. The following year came the Seventy-Mile Bush settlements that ran north and south up the spine of the North Island, which was as close to being impenetrable as a tropical hardwood forest can be, especially because it surmounted steep hills and descended into deep valleys. Three settlements in the northern part of the Seventy-Mile Bush – Norsewood, Dannevirke, and Makaretu – were originally planned as being separately Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, but they each became ethnically mixed. In the southern end of the Seventy-Mile Bush, settlements were begun in 1872–73 at Mauriceville and Eketahuna. The total number of Scandinavians involved was not large – 3,294 in 1871–73, of whom 656 were Swedish.92 Considering all in-migration, not just the bush settlement, roughly 900 Swedish men, women, and children emigrated to New Zealand in the years 1870–76, the high years of the Vogel Era.93 (Uniquely among colonies of settlement, Danes in New Zealand – throughout the country, not just in these colonies – outnumbered Norwegians and Swedes.) Part of the impetus for the Scandinavian settlements came from Ditlev Monrad, a bishop of the state church and for a time the prime minister of Denmark. He had been head of a government that had tried to solve the interminable Schleswig-Holstein question by attacking Holstein. After the Danes were badly beaten and lost both Schleswig and some 200,000 formerly-Danish citizens, Monrad had set sail for New Zealand where he was not well known. He settled near Palmerston and continued to think big. He talked to New Zealand government officials about a Scandinavian settlement; they had already thought of the idea. More importantly, Monrad attracted to the idea Bror Erik Friberg, a trained forester from Kristianstad in Skåne who had been a successful commercial agent in Lübeck and, recently

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married, had emigrated to New Zealand in 1866. In 1871, Friberg was appointed as a special emigration agent and was sent to take over a shipload of Norwegians from (now) Oslo to Napier and thence on to Norsewood and Dannevirke. Besides being a recruiter, he served as guardian, facilitator, and godfather for most of the Seventy-Mile Bush settlers. He was immensely conscientious, dealing with everything from land disposition to health matters to education. He ground himself down and died at age thirty-eight in 1878, worn away by work, as were more than a few of his settlers.94 In comparison to, say, the Swedish settlements in Brazil, the constellation of small group migrations to New Zealand from Scandinavia was extremely well organized. Most of the settlers shipped directly on vessels that were subject to the health and safety requirements of one or the other of the Nordic countries. The agents for the scheme in Scandinavia favoured married couples over single men, and the land-grant schemes provided twice as much land for families as for single men. In essence, the settlers were brought to New Zealand to be road makers. Once the bush tracks were turned into wagon-bearing roads, the settlers turned to saw milling, and when sufficient land eventually was cleared, to a mixture of farming and lumbering, and later to full-time farming. By the 1880s, non-Scandinavians bought into the region, and the settlements became Anglo-Scandinavian in character. If the time-stratigraphy of Swedish migration to New Zealand was (always keeping the mariners’ input as a constant), first, the gold rush period of the 1860s and second, the 1870s, the Vogel Era of heavily recruited migration, then the 1880s until World War I comprised an era of families and individuals migrating on their own, often having been in Australia as a way station (Queensland with its heavy recruitment in the 1880s was a way station for many). Whereas until the 1880s, the Swedish migrants had overwhelmingly settled in rural areas, now as many settled in towns and cities as on farms. (Mind you, towns in New Zealand were not an “urban experience”; they were small and blended at their edges into the countryside.) The Seventy-Mile Bush settlers were a minority of the entire Swedish immigrant cohort, but they provided for a time a well-publicized sense of people from their part of the world being a moderately cohesive, reasonably successful set of families – just as the Kiwis of the time liked to think of themselves. Although the sense of Swedish ethnicity was stronger in New Zealand than it had been in Australia – the bush settlements were a core area, and, by combining with Germans and with other Scandinavians, the Swedes

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were able to keep a Lutheran presence alive – yet even the church was not robust. In the Seventy-Mile Bush range there were seven Lutheran congregations in 1888, served by five pastors, none of them Swedish.95 In 1896 there were fifteen Lutheran congregations in New Zealand, counting both German and Scandinavian. By 1926 the number was down to ten and the leakage to Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican communions was the trend of the future.96 And that is metaphorical for the entire Swedish cohort in New Zealand. Although for a time its members had a stronger sense of ethnic identity than did the parallel group in Australia – thanks largely to the group settlements – the Swedes intermarried and disappeared into the larger AngloCeltic majority. This propensity for intermarriage was almost inevitable for, if one examines the cohort of Swedish-born in New Zealand in every census year from 1878 to 1916, one finds that Swedish-born men outnumbered Swedish-born women by a ratio that ran roughly from fiveto-one to seven-to-one.97 Writing in 1951, R.A. Lochore, who had pulled off the unlikely double of earning a doctorate from the University of Bonn and of serving for years as a naturalization officer in the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, wrote a survey of how the various European groups had fit into oh-so-British New Zealand. (He saw the nation as white, the Maori being beyond his horizon line.) “Perhaps it is this [geographic] distance from the Anglo-Saxon world that has caused our three to four thousand Swedish settlers to be reserved, polite, law-abiding people who keep their thoughts for the family circle, and perhaps it is their very reserve that has enabled them to blend so well with our British community.” He meant that as a compliment, and concluded: “They have succeeded in a variety of occupations, but have made something of a specialty of everything connected with the timber trade.”98 Southern Africa was the site of a movement of Swedes that contrasted not only with that of New Zealand, but to the worldwide Swedish pattern. The regions in southern Africa throughout the period 1815 to 1914 – and especially after the Witwatersrand industrial gold field boom in 1886 – have had a variety of geographical denominators. For our purposes it is best to be a bit anachronistic. The jurisdictions that counted in the era of the Great European Migration (and particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onwards) were those that today make up the Republic of South Africa and its neighbours. With a bit of simplification, Southern Africa can

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be described as consisting of the provinces of the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River. What is now Zimbabwe was formerly Rhodesia. Namibia is the term we will use for a region that for a time was German Southwest Africa. Various regions such as Swaziland, Basutoland, and Bechuanaland have been redefined and renamed over the years. In our time period, up to the end of World War I, what counted most in regard to Swedish migrants was the four major states that came to be the Union of South Africa in 1910 (a dominion in the Commonwealth and Empire), and also Namibia. Not that Swedish men and women were not engaged elsewhere in Africa, and well before 1886, in some fascinating small events, several of which would make very improving historical novels. For example, it is hard not to be beguiled by the slightly lunatic mixture of religious mysticism, scientific fanaticism, commercial ambition, and moral idealism which characterized the attempted Swedish contribution to the Sierra Leone colony of freed and repatriated slaves that Great Britain founded in West Africa in 1787. It became a crown colony in 1808, but from 1791 until 1808 it was run by the Sierra Leone Company. During this decade-and-a-half of company rule, Swedish adventurers tried to intervene and plan a Swedish subcolony in the new jurisdiction. A striking degree of spiritual force was behind this effort. One source thereof was the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, sometime professor of theology at Uppsala and bishop of Skara, who had died in 1772 but had left a body of mystical writings that held a forceful attraction for some members of the Swedish upper classes. He had declared that the Last Judgement had occurred in 1757 (he had been there to observe it) and that the New Jerusalem must be founded on earth, coequal with the heavenly Jerusalem. He had drawn the outlines of a utopian New Jerusalem in western Africa. In the heady political-intellectual atmosphere of the late 1780s, his followers inhaled deeply of the fumes of infinite-possibility and began planning just such a New Jerusalem.99 Simultaneously, the zealots of another faith, the much less mystical followers of Carl von Linné, were extremely keen to have a base in western Africa. Writers of the time talked of Linnaeus’s disciples and, even, of his apostles, and that was not overstatement.100 Add to all that the fervor of Swedish proponents of the abolition of slavery and the necessity of uplifting its former sufferers (not an attitude shared by King Gustav III, as we noted when discussing Saint-Bartélemy), and add some commercial interests to the reasons for attempting in 1792 to

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initiate a Swedish settlement in a British-controlled portion of western Africa. To shorten what could be a nice novel or film: some compelling figures made the journey from Sweden to Sierre Leone. Some died, some collected bales of botanical specimens, some made money, some did a bit of charitable work with the new black residents, and no Swedish colony emerged.101 One would also not wish to ignore the Swedish ethnographical expedition of 1884–85 to the Congo;102 or to sell short the Swedish missionaries in what is now Ghana.103 Nor would one want to miss the surprising dominance of Swedish missionaries, especially those of the Mission Covenant in the Lower Congo region. There the Swedes entered the world of Stanley and Livingstone (who had a large public following in Sweden) as mephitic a site as existed in Africa. In the quarter century after 1878, more than 100 missionaries of all faiths poured into the Congo, and the largest cadre (twenty-five or so) was Swedish. These colporteurs were in fair degree riding on the bow wave of sea captains and mariners who had voyaged to Africa and traded with the Congo on the vessels that had replaced the Belgian merchantmen after that country lost its ports and merchant navy in 1830.104 Nor should one ignore the uneven but principled opposition by E.V. Sjöblom, Swedish missionary with the American Baptist Missionary Union, to the monstrous behaviour of the royal colonial regime in the central Congo.105 But for most Swedish migrants to Africa, the real story was in the south. Only a little of that narrative took place before 1886. Still, one can draw a tenuous tie between Sweden and the self-consciously biblical exodus of the Afrikaner people from the Cape Colony into the previously unconquered portions of inland southern Africa. The Great Trek spanned 1834– 40 and involved a total emigration of somewhat more than fifteen thousand persons who made the formidable journey out of the Cape and, among other things, smashed the Zulu confederacy at Blood River 16 in December 1838.106 The iconic leader of the first Voortrekkers to the Transvaal was Louis Trichardt (var: Tregardt.) He was the great-grandson of a captain in the Skånska cavalry and the grandson of a Dutch East India Company functionary from near the seacoast trading town of Ängelholm, in the region of Helsingborg, who settled in the eastern Cape colony in the 1740s. His own father had spent a spell of time in prison for opposing the British in the Cape. All this was not a very close Swedish tie, but it was preserved because of Trichardt’s self-sacrifice in leading his party over the

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Drakensberg mountains in 1837–38. The trek leader and his wife died of malaria in 1838 in Lourenço Marques. His heroic leadership was being celebrated in Afrikaner schools and civic functions well into the second half of the twentieth century.107 At the other end of the spectrum of racial attitudes (the Afrikaners, however heroic as individuals, certainly could never have been accused of being problack) were the Swedish missionaries. Undoubtedly, they served as the outriders of European imperialism, but their motives were not directly exploitative. The missionaries, indeed, believed that indigenous Africans had the same souls as did Europeans, a concept adumbrated by Dutch Reformed theologians, but not one that had much traction amongst the nineteenth-century Afrikaner farming community. Moreover, the missionaries did found schools (sometimes over local Afrikaner opposition) and medical stations. The first Swedish missionary in southern Africa, Hans Peter Hallbeck, arrived in 1817 and served at his base in Genadendal, outside Cape Town, until his death in 1840. He came from the Bohemian Brethren (known usually in English-speaking countries as the Moravian Brethren). These were pietists who followed the teaching of Count von Zinzendorf. Hallbeck got along well with the London Missionary Society’s leaders in southern Africa, and this multiplied his influence, as the society was the corporate representative of most of the early nineteenth-century missionaries in the British Empire. In 1874, the state church of Sweden formed the Svenska Kyrkans Missionsstyrelse and between 1876 and 1920 it sent forty-five missionaries to southern Africa, mostly to Natal. The Svenska Baptistmissionen began in 1892 when two women were sent to Natal.108 The key point about the various Swedish missions is that they were not meant to serve the Swedish emigrants, but primarily the indigene, particularly the Zulu. Thus, they were not agencies of Swedish ethnic continuity, a fact that became obvious after the gold mining boom in the later 1880s. The only nineteenth-century case of a Swedish pastor clearly being sent to serve his own countrymen involved the Reverend F.L. Fristedt, who served in Potchefstroom in the Transvaal in the 1880s. In that town, there was a Swedish community to be served because of a failed attempt in the 1860s to found a Swedish farming colony – to be called, modestly, “Scandinavia.” This was the scheme of Oscar W.A. Forssman, a marine engineer from Kalmar who had visited southern Africa in the mid-1840s. He shrewdly reckoned that the Great Trek would provide trading opportunities

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and he set up in Potchefstroom as a wholesale merchant. He was successful and purchased large blocks of frontier land. Then, in 1862, he returned to Sweden and proposed the colony of “Scandinavia.” Thirty-five persons enlisted in his project, and he brought them back to settle on his lands. They did very badly indeed, veldt farming being about as far from the accustomed pattern of Swedish agriculture as one can imagine. The settlers moved away, some to Potchefstroom, some to other towns, and others straggled back to Sweden.109 The Swedish colonists’ problems with dryland farming were not, however, the chief reason so few Swedes were tempted by southern Africa. The basic reason was simple: the journey was very expensive. Eero Kuparinen has documented that in the period from 1886 to 1900, the journey to South Africa cost twice that to the United States. And early in the twentieth century, the comparative cost for an individual to travel to South Africa was four times that of the journey to the United States.110 There were 420 “Scandinavian” persons enumerated in the first southern African census, that of the Cape Colony in 1875, and that represented the general pattern of Nordic migration wherein the Swedes were probably less than one-quarter of the total.111 The great Witwatersrand gold boom of 1886 and thereafter attracted an interesting sort of migrant from Sweden. The total numbers were not huge. Eero Kuparinen, through noteworthy research in shipping records and in several other sources, has identified 1,454 individuals who emigrated from Sweden between 1886 and 1914, inclusive. This is crucial information, because the southern African colonies did not keep immigration statistics in the nineteenth century, and the Swedish out-migration records were low, probably an error rate of 100 percent in the direction of underestimation.112 From the viewpoint of the “diaspora,” what counted most about the Swedes who went to southern Africa, however, was not their numbers but their socio-economic character. They were heavily filtered. First, the price factor was operative. The price-of-entry into the gold boom was high, requiring self-funded sea passage and inland travel to the Transvaal. Secondly, the migrants faced a capital-filter. That is, if they intended to engage in mercantile activities, they needed money and credit facilities in hand. Otherwise they required social capital in the form of technical expertise or, at minimum, artisanal skills of some significance. This followed because of the nature of the southern African economic and social structure: (a) the

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mining boom was not like, for example, the Australian gold rush where individuals working on their own might get lucky; rather, it was industrial gold mining and therein engineering and related technical skills were in demand. And (b) the racialized nature of the society meant that there was very little room at the bottom for unskilled labourers. The indigenous peoples were used for that. Thus, in Kuparinen’s sample of Swedish migrants to South Africa,113 they were found to be sharply different from the overall out-migration from Sweden in the same period between 1886 and 1914: (1) they were onethird as apt to come from the farming section; (2) they were more than twice as likely to come from artisan occupations; and (3) nearly six times as likely to come from trade and communications sectors and two-and-ahalf times less likely to come from the cohort of unskilled labourers and servants. To put this together, less than 30 percent of all those who migrated to South Africa were farmers, farm labourers, servants, or unskilled urban labourers, whereas those groups made up nearly three-quarters of the overall Swedish emigration, 1886 to 1914.114 Therefore, it appears that southern Africa received the most select group of migrants of any place to which significant numbers of Swedes went. As an ancillary set of characteristics, there were proportionately fewer women than arrive at most destinations: less than 30 percent of the migrant stream, 1886 to 1914, compared with a bit over 44 percent in the total migration. What we are viewing here, I think, is the first phalanx of the twentieth-century’s movement of technical and managerial migrants: not all of the Swedish migrants, to be sure, but most of the men. By the nature of gender roles at the time, the overwhelming majority of the female migrants were there either as wives or dependent daughters of the technical and managerial class and the derivative mercantile group; or they were there to engage in “ladylike” occupations, on the road to finding husbands and, given the nature of southern African racialized society, to never having to do housework again. Yes, there were exceptions, but there was virtually no place for female domestic servants or unskilled female migrants in southern Africa, because those sectors were allocated to very poorly paid black and coloured Africans (to use some of the less opprobrious labels of the time). For all their singularity in the Swedish “diaspoara,” the southern African migrants were similar to the self-selected migrants from other European countries, and cumulatively they made

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southern Africa the most clearly elite of any destination during the Great European Migration.115 That conclusion being distinctly demonstrable statistically, it should not be turned into a stereotype. And here two episodes indicate that not all Swedes fit into the same box. The first of these was the eruption of the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. (The previous such war was 1880–81, and in Afrikaner historiography they were jointly denominated the “First and Second Wars of Independence.”) The position of the Swedish migrants to southern Africa was not simple, and the reaction in the homeland is easy to gloss over. In Africa, the Swedish migrants split three ways: one group – probably no more than fifty persons – joined the Scandinavian Corps which earned a fearsome reputation fighting on the Afrikaner side against the British. A somewhat larger group joined the British forces fighting the Afrikaners. And, mostly, the Swedes tried to stay out of it, especially those in the Cape Colony, who were in trade or the professions. The part that is easy to miss is that the Swedish press at home seems to have been mostly on the Afrikaner side, and that view represented popular opinion on the issue, to the extent that there was such a thing. Memory of the widespread support for the Afrikaners and the lionization in Sweden of the Swedes who fought for Afrikaner independence is usually suppressed in the present day, because the Afrikaners eventually were politically victorious in South Africa (1948 is the key date) and they articulated and implemented apartheid. Yet, in the context of the times, there were reasons for being sympathetic to the Afrikaners: they appeared to be fighting for their economic and cultural independence against the bullying and thieving might of the British Empire; they were depicted as simple, hard-working pioneers, good Christians and thrifty; and they fit the particularly romantic-nationalist vein that ran through the Swedish middle class in the early twentieth century, an era when old folk traditions were increasingly venerated and, where they were not already in existence, were being invented. Thus, the fit was tight when the Aftonbladet declared that the Afrikaners were the Dalakarlar of Africa – that is, stubborn, honest, patriotic, and romanticizable like the hardy “proles” of the province of Dalarna.116 In the end, with their cause lost, the members of the Swedish Corps mostly returned home, though some moved on to the United States and a few clung to backland niches in South Africa. As for the rest of the

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Swedish migrants, the war over, they got back to business – which, primarily, was doing business. The other group that does not fit with the Swedish migrants in the world of industrialized mining and its mercantile support, was a disparate, intriguing bunch that largely preceded the 1886 boom and who spread widely over southern Africa, and here we especially need to take into account Namibia, the western neighbour of the British southern African colonies. (The areas that now are Botswana and Zimbabwe were also involved, though less centrally.) These Swedish migrants were a mixture of devotedly assiduous Linnaean searchers for new species, big game hunters (who sometimes were also specimen collectors), and assorted frontier merchants with quick eyes for opportunity. And of course, there were the missionaries, whom we have already mentioned. Not unkindly, a Swedish observer of this heterogeneous group in southern Africa described them as “brewing Swedish beer, spreading the Gospel, and looking for birds.”117 The earliest, direct apostles of Linnaeus were active in the Cape and into Namibia as early as the 1770s, and the tradition of Swedish exploration and simultaneous specimen collecting was alive and strong well into the second half of the nineteenth century. I would like to mention just four persons, and their variegated careers. First, Charles John Andersson, born in Vänersborg, of mixed Swedish-English parentage, explored in the years 1850–67 all the way north to the Angola border and east to Lake Ngami in Botswana. He reported to the Swedish Academy on the ethnology of several indigenous groups, collected a fortune in saleable ivory and animal skins, became superintendent of the Walvis Bay Mining Company, and founded the town of Omaruru in Namibia, which became the unofficial Swedish base in the region. He eventually wrote a travel-adventure book and compiled a major bird catalogue.118 All in a life’s work. Second, and similarly flexible in his self-authored job description, was John August Wahlberg who in the early 1850s combined being an expert naturalist on the Cape Namibia ecosystem with operating at the same time as a commercial elephant hunter. In the latter capacity, he was trampled to death in 1856, and in the former he was posthumously elected to the Swedish Academy (Science), and a medal was issued in his memory.119 Third, also from Vänersborg, was Axel Wilhelm Eriksson, who had learned taxidermy before leaving Sweden for Africa in 1865. He collected some specimens for Swedish scientists, but soon realized that killing big cats, elephants, and

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plumed birds for their skins was more profitable. He also took up trading in Omaruru and handled bush clothing, guns, liquor, and other supplies needed to survive as a great white hunter. Eventually, he became a purveyor of game-shooting safaris to European and British aristocrats, as well as a large landowner in the Transvaal. Eriksson for a time had a commercial partnership with the fourth man we are observing, Anders Ohlsson, of Skåne origin. Ohlsson had emigrated to southern Africa in 1860 and became a general trader. He and Eriksson formed a joint operation, a commercial conduit for supplies being sent from Cape Town and skins and feathers and ivory going south from Omaruru. Ohlsson owned his own ship so that goods could go from the Cape to Walvis Bay and then be transported inland. For a time, this was a very profitable venture, but it was damaged by the so-called “Herero War” of the early 1880s and then necessarily was severed when Germany exercised trading rights over southwest Africa in 1885 and took formal control of Namibia in 1892. From the 1880s onward, Ohlsson put most of his energy into brewing, and his firm became far and away the largest brewer in southern Africa. (The best known of the firm’s trademarks has been Ohlsson’s Lager and Lion Beer.) Ohlson died one of the Cape’s richest men.120

(8) When dealing with Swedish migrants during the Great European Migration, Canada (and its predecessor, British North America) is the place that almost breaks an historian’s heart. Not because its national records are so poor but, rather, because the records are so rich. And here is the heartbreak – because, (a) most Swedes arrived in Canada late in the Great European Migration, 1815 to 1914, or when the big migration was over. And, (b) so little serious scholarly work has been done in the Canadian records concerning Swedish migration. To explain: the original segments of British North America that became the Dominion of Canada in 1867 – Canada West (now Ontario), Canada East (now Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia – each had serviceable censuses before their federal union. Their confederation under the British North America Act, 1867, forced a major reconceptualization of the polity north of the United States and, among other things, implied a need for precise and standard definitions of the characteristics of what had previously

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been four separate colonial entities. (This need for standardized social bookkeeping was only increased by the adhesion of Manitoba in 1870, British Columbia in 1871, and Prince Edward Island in 1873; and confirmed by the addition of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905.) The need for an accurate in-depth description of the new nation’s population came at a fortunate time. The British Isles and some European countries had engaged in censuses since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and, with their weaknesses mitigated, a good deal was to be learned from their methods. Statistical techniques had improved radically from, roughly, the 1830s (when the first population analyses that today would be recognized as social scientific were engaged in the United Kingdom) and thereafter. Thus, the new Canadian government was able to set up de novo the best system of enumeration in any jurisdiction of significant size in the world. For our purposes, it covers the time period up to the end of the Great European Migration, though of course, it continued thereafter. These decennial enumerations were not perfect – and anyone doing a major study will face some not insoluble technical problems – but they do provide accurate data on so many things historians cannot learn in other countries or in the homeland. The primary characteristics of the Canadian censuses, from 1871 onwards are the following: (1) The enumerations were done at a specific date, or, in the early days, within a reasonable period around the focal date. (2) The data were collected directly from the persons enumerated. (3) The forms-of-record and the standard instructions to enumerators were published as part of the printed reports of the censuses. (4) Information was collected by persons paid for the job (with some exceptions in the early years), which is to say by enumerators trained and supervised by recordsmanagement professionals. (5) A strong effort was made to acquire some information on every nonindigenous human being in the country. (That white children were listed, but entire bands of Amerindians were just lumped together, was a problem, but not one that directly affects our discussion of Swedish migrants.) And (6), most of the primary data were retained in manuscript form. Blessedly, the Canadian enumerations quickly came to include a wide, and ever-increasing, spectrum of information: family structure, occupation, place of birth, birthplace of parents, primary ethnicity (“national origin” – or “racial origin,” in the language of the time), length of time in Canada, religion (an essential item for any meaningful ethnic historiography, an item never directly collected in the United

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States or the Swedish censuses) and, in later censuses, such things as first and second home language and detailed enumerations of agricultural wealth and productivity. Great material, entirely. The inevitable difficulty is that, although they collected and sometimes cross-tabulated data on so many matters, the census authorities often did not do the cross-tabs that later historians most desire: the cross-relationships of religion to ethnicity for example, or of place-of-birth to occupational status. And a score more tantalizing matters. The pioneering breakthrough occurred in 1980 with the publication by A. Gordon Darroch and Michael D. Ornstein of an article in the Canadian Historical Review, in which they reported on what was essentially a retabulation of the original data from the first Dominion of Canada census, that of 1871.121 This was accomplished by their drawing off a random national sample of roughly ten thousand individual households, a very large sample by any standards. The new conclusions upset a good deal of the conventional wisdom about Canadian social history, especially on the issues of occupational stratigraphy, religion, and the main ethnic groups in Canada. Then, not much later, Darroch and Ornstein expanded the new crosstabulation longitudinally. That is, using the original federal census and, crucially, the enumerations that were conducted by individual provinces before Confederation, they linked thousands of statistically representative individual histories. In this longitudinal approach, they traced large numbers of individuals over time, and therefore were able to deal quite precisely with how various ethnic and cultural groups acted over time in Canada.122 Subsequently, other historians of Canada have used later censuses to accomplish similar paths. The most notable is the Canadian Families Project which has drawn off a 5 percent sample from the Canadian census of 1901 and redirected the original manuscript material to new questions.123 Within the context of the Swedish “diaspora,” the Canadian censuses provide the one chance to find at minimum a half dozen pieces of information (and usually a lot more) about every single Swedish-born person who was living in a receptor site in a new world: Canada at the time of censustaking, from 1871 onwards. And in the twentieth century, this included not only the immigrants, but the Canadian-born of Swedish parents, their home language, religion, ethnic identification, and marital patterns. The limitations are that because the Swedes arrived late in the Great Migration period, one would probably redefine the period of interest to run from 1871 to 1931.

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But the original data are there, and the technology makes possible an ethnic history of Swedish migrants and their children that would be both deep and comprehensive and would be unmatched elsewhere in the world of Swedish emigration. (Without being arch, I am offering this project to the attention of anyone who can assemble a competent research team; one hopes a team with a knowledge base of both Swedish and Canadian historiography.) What do we have now? At present one finds several fugitive articles that are smart and well focused (some of these are cited below), but only two pieces of broadly based research on the Swedish in Canada. One of these is Lars Ljungmark’s fine study of the Swedes in Winnipeg, Manitoba.124 The second is the recent publication (2015) of a splendid gatherum of bibliographic and anecdotal material by Elinor Barr, longtime local historian of northwestern Ontario, under the title Swedes in Canada. Invisible Immigrants.125 Manifestly, the granular collective study of Swedish migrants to Canada and of their children and grandchildren, which I have mentioned above, is a generation in the future. So, for the moment, I should like to suggest that even the printed Canadian census data as collected from, say, 1871 to 1931, provide information on more variables than the enumerations conducted in any other receptor nation – including the United States: not nearly as many people as the United States, but, on some fronts, superior data. Two quick and brutal swipes of brush-clearing are necessary to clear our sight lines on the Canadian census reports. First, for the period of the Great European Migration, forget all the Swedish official records concerning emigration to Canada before 1921 – thereafter they become fairly accurate. This excision is necessary because migrants headed for Canada often were recorded on primary records as going to “America,” which was taken as meaning the United States and its territories. Before 1881, even if the local registration of migrants recorded “Canada,” it was tallied in the official statistics as the “United States.”126 And, a concurrent source of error was that around the turn of the century, migrants from Sweden began in significant numbers to use the United States as a way station to open lands in Canada. These two sources of error, however, were not self-cancelling. The second piece of brush-clearing is that we need to forget for our present purposes Canadian immigration records as they appertain to the Swedes. This sounds perverse but it is necessary. Until 1901, everyone mak-

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ing landfall in Canada was counted as being an immigrant to Canada, even if they were ticketed to continue to the United States. And it was not until 1926 that migrants from Sweden (and other European-born) were counted as Americans when they came across the northern border to live in Canada. The results of this Swedish and Canadian set of weird counting procedures is that, as Lars Ljungmark made clear, one needs to trust the moment-in-time picture of the Canadian censuses for the macropicture and should avoid the flow-over-time assertions of the migration data. To make that point, a simple table, is included here:127 swedish migration to canada

swedish-born in canada

Year

Swedish Sources

Canadian Sources Decennial Census

1881–90 1891–1900 1901–10 1911–20 1921–30

50 480 3,150 2,970 11,860

11,860 8,056 11,215

1911 1921 1931

28,226 27,700 33,705

Ljungmark’s point was that it is intuitively obvious that if one adds together the total migration to Canada shown in the official Swedish sources, there is no way that one can reach a total of the number of Swedish-born persons living in Canada in 1911, and that is even setting aside that many of those who had migrated to Canada had returned home or had gone on to the United States or other destinations. As for the Canadian data on migration flow, they are not useful because, as mentioned already, before 1901 the flow of migrants to Canada was massively overstated (due to the practice of counting through-traffic as immigrants) and then, until 1926, was significantly understated by not counting the foreign-born who came through the United States to Canada as foreign-born, but rather as Americans.128 So, at this stage our knowledge is so limited that it is best to stick to the decennial enumerations, which had the great virtue of dealing directly with each individual and assembling information through a careful process of aggregation. Not that these were perfect collections of data – far from it –

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but the technical flaws are soluble and actually will be more easily dealt with when a retabulation from the manuscript data redoes the various tabulations and cross-tabulations that in the contemporary printed reports are obscured by the way the social accountants of the time lumped together categories or ignored cross-tabulations that we now find salient. Still, what can one winkle out from the printed documents? To my mind, the more revealing facts, documented across the entire Swedish migrant group in Canada, are sketched below. First, using the 1931 census, one can gain an idea of the relationship between the Swedish-born and the entire ethnic group that thought of itself as Swedish:129 Swedish born, 1931 Swedish ethnicity, 1931

33,705 81,306

This is the first year for which Swedish ethnicity is available (and 1911 is the first date for Swedish-born without the Norwegian-born being included). Both of these matters can be defined as far back to 1871 in the original manuscript sources, but they are not assembled in the aggregate printed material. For the present, it is useful to recognize that being “Swedish” in the sense of ethnicity was an identity preserved amidst widespread previous dispersal. Thus, the ethnic group in 1931 had its birth-sources as follows:130 Born in Canada Born in Sweden Born elsewhere

34,632 33,705 12,969

What was “born elsewhere?” It consisted of the United States-born (13.2 percent of the ethnic total), Finnish-born (the “Swedo-Finns,” 1.1 percent), and Swedes born in Norway (0.7 percent), plus a smattering of individuals of Swedish ethnicity born in Russia, Denmark and, indeed, all over the world, including five persons born in China.131 Paradoxically, given the wide range of origins of the Canadian-Swedish ethnic cohort, the group was quite stable in the sense of persistence within Canada. Thus, of the Swedish-born men and women who had been living in Canada before 1911, 53.0 percent still were doing so in 1931.132 That is a notable degree of stability, considering that a fair number of them must have died natural deaths, that there had been a World War in which Cana-

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dian residents had been pushed hard to participate, and that there had been opportunities to remigrate to Sweden or to take up residence in the United States or elsewhere. In all probability, the Swedish-born living in Canada in 1931 comprised one of the oldest groups in the country in terms of their age profile. For Canada as a whole, 71.5 percent of the population was under forty years of age; for immigrants from all of the Scandinavian countries enumerated in 1931, the figure was 48.6 percent.133 The inference that the Swedishborn population was relatively old actually is helpful. It means that we are observing in 1931 a cohort that has its roots in the late years of the Great European Migration, and that data on them serve as a summary of many of the characteristics of the earlier Swedish migration, matters frequently undocumented elsewhere. The quasi-museum aspect of Swedish migration to Canada – it is in many ways a reenactment of the patterns of Swedish migration to the United States two or three decades earlier – is shown in the rural-urban pattern of settlement. Many of the Swedes came to Canada as the last big frontier where land was available virtually free to settlers. Indeed, the Canadian government heavily recruited Swedes to help stake out the vast lands of the Canadian prairies.134 Hence, in 1921, just over three-quarters of the Swedish-born in Canada lived in rural areas: 75.4 percent of the entire group (77.75 percent of males and 71.1 percent of females).135 And, it is hardly a great leap to say that most persons of Swedish ethnicity (first, second, and subsequent generations) were engaged in farming. In 1931, the census lumped together the multigenerational groups of all the Scandinavian countries, and even that late, and even including all the children and grandchildren of immigrants, 53.9 percent were farmers.136 Undoubtedly, the drift to the city was much slower and later in Canada than in the United States. Again, in the residential and occupational spheres, Canada serves as an observable museum area in North America. A generation ago, Harald Runblom, the dynamic force behind the splendid Uppsala project on Swedish emigration to the United States, wrote an article entitled “The Swedes in Canada: A Study in Low Ethnic Consciousness.”137 It is one of the few wide-angle assessments of the Canadian Swedishderived population that has an actual data base, not just encyclopedia-level undocumented generalizations. Runblom contended that the Swedish migrants and their descendants in Canada had a weaker sense of ethnic consciousness than did their counterparts in the United States. On this I think

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he is correct, but not quite in the way he thought. His basic observational points were: (1) that unlike the Swedes in the United States, the Swedes in Canada did not memorialize themselves in documents and in self-history, and on this he certainly was correct; and (2) that the highly localized Icelanders in Canada had a strong sense of their own solidarity, a point that is accurate but is completely irrelevant. Yet, certainly there are several empirical indicators that might well point out that the Swedish migrants and their offspring had a low ethnic consciousness. For instance, (a) in 1921, 67.4 percent of Swedish-born persons in Canada had become naturalized citizens;138 (b) in 1921, only 2.3 percent of the Swedish-born over ten years of age were unable to speak sufficient English to classify them as functional English-speakers; (c) for persons aged ten and older in the Swedish multigenerational ethnic group, in 1931 only 1.2 percent were not literate in English;139 and (d) as for religious patterns, one might infer that they show an ethnic declension. In 1931, only 62.2 percent of the multigenerational Swedish ethnic group was Lutheran, the denomination140 that, faute de mieux, was the inherited faith of all save the Free Church emigrants. Thus, Harald Runblom probably was right that the Swedish-derived population of Canada had a low ethnic identity, one that he initially noticed because of their relative lack (as compared to Americans) of self-generated ethnic records and the dearth of self-vaunting publications such as those which issued from the Swedish-American heartland, especially Minnesota and Illinois. Runblom had a partial explanation, one that can be documented in the Canadian censuses: that there was a gender imbalance. His suggestion was based on a skein of migrants from Långasjö in Småland whose migration to Canada between 1880 and 1930 was composed of nine men for every woman who made the trek.141 That over-eggs the pudding considerably and illustrates the danger of reliance on small-sample microstudies as the basis of large generalizations. The 1911 Canadian census shows that actually among the Swedish-born in Canada there were 2.4 Swedish-born men for every Swedish-born woman.142 Presumably this gender imbalance would have made ethnic in-marriage more difficult and therefore reduced the ethnic consciousness of Swedish-Canadians; at least that is what Runblom believed. However, other segments of the Canadian data set warn us against either over-stating the valetudinarian character of Swedish-Canadian ethnicity or

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of seeing gender imbalance as crippling. For example, observe that in 1931 the men in the Swedish ethnic group – immigrants, plus the sons and grandsons of immigrants, or more – had the following marriage patterns:143 ethnicity of wife Swedish English Norwegian Scottish All Others

40.7% 17.2 10.0 8.2 23.9 100.0

That is not the picture of a group that practices exogamy and, given that it includes at least three generations in the New World, is remarkably high. And, the linguistic pattern in 1931 of that same group of adult males is also striking:144 “mother tongue” Swedish 66.8% English 30.3 Norwegian 1.7 German 0.4 All others 0.8 100.0 It is remarkable that as late as 1931, two-thirds of immigrants and the sons and grandsons (and in a few cases, great-grandsons) of Swedish immigrants were still using Swedish as their home language.145 It argues strongly against any essentialist interpretation of the difference between Swedish-Canadian and Swedish-American culture. Something else was going on here, other than a simplistic notion that people of Swedish origin in the United States were naturally proud and those in Canada were intrinsically quiet on ethnic matters. To put the case in a somewhat more adversarial fashion, it is extremely difficult to see how an essentialist explanation of divergence between the two cultures (such as was posited by Runblom) can be maintained when so many of the Swedish-Canadians had at one time been Swedish-Americans.

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Recall that in 1931, 13.2 percent of the entire Swedish ethnic group in Canada had been born in the United States. Further, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant (but at present unknown) portion of the Swedish-born in Canada had spent time working and residing in the United States before engaging in a “secondary migration” to Canada. The phenomenon was based on the exhaustion of the supply of cheap farming land in the Upper Midwest. A pattern of new settlements moved from the eastern and southern portions of Minnesota to the Dakotas, and then on to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and, to a lesser degree, to northern Ontario and to British Columbia. The Canadian border-crossing statistics being a mess, Runblom is right to catch this phenomenon by the fact that when these procedures were improved in 1907, a pattern immediately becomes clear: in 1907–09, one finds that Minnesota, Washington, and North Dakota were the three states that contributed most to the cross-border movement – one-half to two-thirds of immigrants to Canada via the American-Canadian border.146 And these were the receptor sites of a high proportion of Swedish-born arrivals in the United States. We are here observing a classic case of social time-lag and should not misinterpret it: the Swedes in Canada in the early twentieth century were acting like the Swedes in the United States in the period 1867 to 1890: taking cheap land and farming, mostly. And there was a bit of urban concentration: Winnipeg was to Canada what Chicago and Minneapolis were to America’s Swedish immigrants. As Swedish migration to Canada developed, it became a topological duplicate of the American pattern of a generation earlier. Therefore, I do not believe there is a separate history of the Swedes in Canada and the Swedes in the United States. There is only a single continuous history of the Swedes in North America (north of the Rio Grande), and to segregate the story into two compartments is to impoverish our historical understanding. Nevertheless, Harald Runblom was correct to note that the Swedish migrants and their descendants in Canada produced much less in the way of self-generated paper records and published accounts of themselves than did those in the United States. Nor should they have, and the reason is a simple threshold-effect. For a self-identity industry to develop in any ethnic group, one needs a large number of people in a limited geographic space. Places such as Chicago, Minneapolis and its northern counties, and southern Minnesota, were ideal. Yet, to mention a countercase, the Swedes in Texas (not an ephemeral group), produced very little in the way of ethnic

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records. And neither did those in most of Canada: for look where they settled. In 1911, the Swedish-born (n=28,226) were distributed as follows:147 province percentage British Columbia 25.2 Alberta 22.5 Saskatchewan 22.0 Manitoba 13.7 Ontario 13.0 All others combined 3.6 100.0 The Swedish-born were overwhelmingly settled in rural areas that covered vast tracts and were primarily involved in farming or (especially in British Columbia) in resources-stripping, particularly timber. In this arena of exceptional spatial dispersal, it would be supererogatory for them to have formed churches, clubs, and voluntary associations and to have written selfmemorializing heritage documents. Nevertheless, the remarkable endurance of the Swedish language (as late as 1931 as the primary “mother tongue” of most adult Swedes of the entire multigenerational ethnic group) indicates that a sense of ethnic identity can exist, and that a process of cultural transmission can be operative, without all the paraphernalia of an ethnic inheritance industry. The clear and reliable indicator of this is the mother tongue and, indeed, that can be both sotto voce and very persistent.148

(9) So, was there a Swedish diaspora in the era of the Great European Migration? It is hard to find much direct indication of one in the Swedish official records, not even in the admirable, sprawling, exhaustive, and exhausting report of the Emigration Commission of 1907–13. Seemingly the United States was the only destination worth specification over any long stretch of time. The attitude of the registrars and statisticians seems to have been similar to that of the classic English sergeant majors in the old empire who would divide the common soldiers on church parade into Church of England and “odds-and-sods.” Similarly, in Swedish official discussions it was either “America” or odds-and-sods.

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Nevertheless, oblique reading of the Swedish emigration data, when combined with information from various receptor countries around the world, indicates that a large and heterogeneous assortment of Swedes dispersed around the globe. Undeniably, they are a challenge to follow, which is why the long conspectus of their spread has been necessary. If the plinth-characteristic upon which any diaspora is based consists of a group of people being dispersed from a homeland to several destinations (as distinct from simple Point A to Point B migration), then there was a true dispersal: several hundred thousand Swedes and their offspring moved to locations other than the United States, thus establishing a multipole dispersal pattern. The logic of our argument operated by removing temporarily from the discussion the United States as a determiner of the situation, since it was only a single Point B according to the way Swedish emigration was organized in the nineteenth century. However, having escaped from the spancel of the monopoly in the historical literature of the chronicle of the American migration, things change. Since we have demonstrated that in the era of the Great European Migration several hundred thousand persons and their dependents left Sweden for other Baltic countries, for places in the British Empire, and, to a lesser degree, to locales in South America and sub-Saharan Africa, then one can legitimately reincorporate the United States into the picture. The result is a world-circling map that shows persons of Swedish origin migrating, singly and in groups, to a striking array of new homelands: a map that looks very much like a diaspora.

7

An “Invisible Diaspora”?: English Associational Culture in Nineteenth-Century North America* Donald M. MacRaild

During the nineteenth century, European emigrants to the United States and the British Empire laid down many markers of their ethnicity. In so doing, they demonstrated a desire to maintain traditional culture as a strategy for integrating into their new homes. Collective self-help and care for the wider national group lessened the risks of alienation and struggle. Among the immigrants’ many efforts was a plethora of clubs, societies, and organizations that combined national pride and ethnic celebration with collective self-help and charity. Such associations were both sites of local collaboration and foci for broader networking.1 The Irish, Scots, Welsh, Germans, and many others formed societies bearing the names of their national saints in what were clear reminders of their origins. The English were no different. They formed societies named for their patron saint, or else for Albion, or England. None of these names could but enhance the knowledge of origins. The English also met on their saint’s day to celebrate England, to hear tales of her history, and to describe the personification of national values in the mytho-poetic persona of Saint George himself. These essentially modernist uses of the saint contrasted with medieval veneration and exploration of Saint George, but nevertheless utilized him as focal point for identity and activity, a coalescing force.2 *The author wishes gratefully to acknowledge the generosity of the ahrc (project grant ah/i001042/1), which facilitates the research on this project, and the support and advice of David T. Gleeson and Tanja Bueltmann, who are the project’s coinvestigators. He also wishes to recognize readers’ reports which strengthened the final version.

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Despite their efforts in this regard, and in clear contrast to these other nationalities, the ethnic exertions of the English have garnered precious little historical interest. Such societies celebrated their nation, revered the longestreigning monarch their country had known, and expressed pride in Her Majesty’s extensive empire and loyal dominions. These Englishmen of the diaspora also aided their poor fellow nationals, offering succour to the hard up and out-of-luck individuals who sought a foothold in new lands. In their hour of need, immigrants could expect help from a thoroughgoing system of small cash payments, train tickets, hospital beds, and meal vouchers. Market intelligence and contacts in other towns were commonly offered to immigrants to help them decide where next to head for work. Stewards, doctors, and general members of North America’s many Saint George’s societies thus could offer immigrants many services in their hour of need. Why, then, are these English examples overlooked, or placed in a box marked other than ethnicity? The reason is shaped by an assumption on the part of scholars of ethnicity in America that the English were part of the dominant ethnoculture against which immigrant ethnicity was defined. According to this viewpoint, the English were part of the hegemonic mainstream and so could not have created a diaspora. Amnesia about English ethnicity is partly also a function of the mixing of English and British identities. The tendency to equate English ethnicity with imperial patriotism rather than state-based nationalism further diminishes the case for ethnicity. Whatever the English felt or did, it is generally considered to be something different from the anticolonial nationalism that shaped the diasporic consciousness of, for example, the Irish.3 As with all generalizations, there are elements of truth here. Undoubtedly, many of the moments of English collective celebration focused on empire and monarchy, such as in 1897 when the Sons of England Benevolent Society organized a global singing of the National Anthem – a “wave of song” – for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.4 The anniversary of a queen empress had less purchase, from the point of view of ethnic history, than the marking of a fallen revolutionary hero or the unification of a formerly divided nation-state. Yet this is a simplistic view. Imperial monarchy may have lacked the resonance of a bitter struggle against imperial overlords, but it was still a marker

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of collective identity. Moreover, the 1897 case saw impressive, coordinated jubilee celebrations that brought together English ethnic societies, the Anglican Church, and many other organizations that were English in origins and feelings. The “wave of song” in 1897, moreover, was not restricted to imperial subjects in the colonies and empire; it also embraced the English in the United States. It embraced a diaspora as opposed to just an empire; the wider Anglo-world, not only the British world. Furthermore, 1897 represented just one set of events and remembrances, among many, that presented the English as a distinct group – not merely a subset of the British, or as an invisible fragment of a global Anglo-culture. What follows is a discussion that suggests the English deserve greater scrutiny for their potential to sit alongside other ethnic groups. The chapter has three aims. First, it asks why the English, unlike the Irish and Scots, have no diaspora and whether, despite this observation, they deserve one. The chapter does not wish to add another proper noun to what some feel is becoming “a promiscuously capacious category.”5 Rather, it suggests a looser, federal approach, by which the English fit quite happily within Rogers Brubaker’s three-part typology of diaspora: dispersion; homeland orientation; and the maintenance of a distinctive identity abroad.6 Secondly, the chapter provides a sketch map of the development of English associations, focusing on orchestrated expressions of English ethnicity in North America. Thirdly, it focuses on one particularly important instance of transnational, transcontinental Englishness: the North America St George’s Union (nastgu) – an organization which demonstrated the salience of English organizational activity across the Canada-US border, and the shared objectives of Englishmen whether they lived in Baltimore, Maryland, or London, Ontario. The chapter ultimately evidences J.R.C. Young’s claim that Englishness was manufactured, not in England, but in the wider anglophone world by people of English birth or extraction. If Young is correct – and this chapter suggests he is – then the English were not unlike their Irish peers, whose diaspora, Declan Kiberd asserts, was principally the creation of expatriate Irishmen overseas.7 Before moving on to look at some of the ways in which Englishness was expressed through expatriate associations we must first consider why, within historical writing and social science research, there is no English diaspora.

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the invisible diaspora at home and abroad Despite the proliferation of interest in diasporas, even the most comprehensive general account of the world’s great transnational communities makes no mention of the English. This is, in part, due to the hegemony of a particular notion of diaspora, derived elementally, as it is, from the Jewish experience. Here, diaspora is a site of homelessness, victimization, exodus, and struggle.8 Amnesia about an English ethnoculture is shaped by an absence of this very attribute of victimhood and is further hardened by an emphasis upon the diaspora as a reaction to imperial oppression. Since the English were prone to perpetrate the subjection of other peoples in their imperial and colonial projects, they feature on the other side of the diasporic coin. Within Diaspora Studies, the English were oppressors rather than the oppressed, colonists not the colonized. In short, the English are the type of people against whom other nations’ diasporas are defined.9 Conditions in the United Kingdom do not aid the English case. England is arguably Europe’s oldest unitary state, with historically an ancient sense of nationhood.10 The antique provenance of England stands, somewhat perversely, in contrast with England’s contemporary national identity, which plays only a limited role in current debates about the state of the United Kingdom. Even with the prospect of the breakup of that federal entity, no clear or singular Englishness has emerged. The spectre of the political far right, in the form of the English Defence League, or the British National Party, draws disdain from liberal English spirits and causes widespread disassociation from an idea of one England. Englishness thus lost out in the recent vogue for what we now term identity politics, with its people experiencing “cultural cringe” against anything which separates the English from the British. Furthermore, this “cultural cringe” will only be replaced by a practical response and a stress upon practical notions of the nation, if Scotland achieves independence and reduces Britain and Britishness to a husk of its former self.11 In other words, Englishness may only truly emerge in a reactive way. Unlike either Ireland or Scotland, there is no sense in England of a diaspora – an extension of the homeland that continues to live and breathe through adherence to old world ties. England has expatriates, not a diaspora; it had an empire, but not an international community of emigrants; and this sense of things is reflected in the historiography. Robert Colls’s landmark

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study of English identity recognizes the importance of empire in the shaping of identity, but does not explore Englishness in the colonies or America.12 Jeremy Paxman’s evocative description of an “English Empire” solely examines the country’s relations with the “Celtic Fringe,” and the process of internal expansion from Englishness to Britishness.13 Even key symbols of Englishness – the English language, the Magna Carta, the common law, and the Book of Common Prayer – developed such all-encompassing appeal that they lost any unique value as England’s cultural seed. The Magna Carta, for example, became a global symbol of freedom and peace not merely an assertion of English ethnic expansion. The great charter influenced swathes of peace-promoters in the post-1918 world and inspired the United Nations, but it was not considered to be an export of the English diaspora.14 If, as will be argued here, the English abroad behaved ethnically in ways that mirrored their Scottish and Irish counterparts, why was this not noticed at home? Such behaviour was, after all, lauded in Ireland and Scotland, where “exiles,” “adventurers,” and the “genius” of both races in their achievements overseas were regularly commented upon in Edinburgh and Dublin. We will see presently that the exploits of the English in the United States and the British world did elicit some comment from those, like the imperial historian, J.R. Seeley, who recognized that emigrant communities were the incubators of Victorian Englishness.15 Levels of recognition were also quite practical: in the form of the Royal St George’s Society, for instance, which was founded in 1894 to assert an English identity in full recognition of its global flavour. Dominant thinking in European ethnic studies emerges from academic traditions in the United States, where the English faded from fashion as interpretative positions change. Even at the point of the nation’s foundation, the “germ theory” of American society, which saw a democratic American culture inherited from the forests of ancient Germany via Britain, viewed American culture as a subcategory of England’s, which in turn left little room to differentiate one nation from the other. In the later nineteenth century, the “germ theory” was superseded by Turner’s frontier thesis, with its model of American exceptionalism that laid emphasis upon the remaking and transformation of peoples as they arrived in America. Under such stresses, English roots were entirely hidden in, or obliterated by, unique American soils. Exceptionalism prevented pioneering American folklorists like Dorson from recognizing the continuities between English and American folk culture.

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Moreover, the English dimension faded still further when the migration thesis replaced Turner’s idea. Propagated by pioneering ethnic historians from the 1920s onwards, the migration school emphasized how essentially nonBritish immigrants created a hyphenated, plural America, which relied neither on “Albion’s seed” nor on the melting pot.16 Debates about the benefits of immigration in American society, marked most strikingly by the enormous, and critical Dillingham Commission (1907–10), saw a reactive emphasis on the contributions made to the new Republic by hyphenated Americans. Moreover, as the historiography turned this way, the cementing of processes of hyphenation left no room for the idea of the English-American.17 In this world, the English-American was an Anglo-American who was, in turn, simply a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant – the hegemonic wasp – the American par excellence. The invisibility of English ethnicity is not restricted to the United States. It also is reflected in the historiography of migration in the wider anglophone world. For Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, “the lack of recognition given to English settlement in Canada is remarkable.” Indeed, “their profile seems to have suffered from a perception that they were founding people rather than an ethnic group.”18 Moreover, it is claimed, sojourning was highly prevalent among the English overseas, meaning many were locked in a mind-set of transience and did not put down roots.19 Overlooking or underplaying the English in Canada hides a more severe problem. The general assumption is that this group was the dominant presence against which ethnicities were defined. That said, we must acknowledge that some Canadian scholars, for example, Ross McCormack and Amy Lloyd have argued persuasively for the ethnicity of the English in Edwardian Canada through endogamous marriage, residential segregation, Anglicanism, and the maintenance of the numerically impressive Sons of England Benevolent Society. If McCormack’s and Lloyd’s research militates against simplistic notions of English integration, Canadian statistics make the English an important overall presence. English emigration to Canada was less significant than that of comparable groups.20 The 300,000 English immigrants in the pre-Confederation period comprised only one-third of the 850,000 Irish who made the same journey. Indeed, in 1871, a large minority (35 percent) of Ontario’s Europeans hailed from England. The pace of settlement picked up once more – and between 1900 and 1930, some 1.6 million English migrants went to Canada.21 To the south, in the

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United States, the English were the largest immigrant group in the American colonies in the seventeenth century and constituted 80 percent of the 2,760,360 people (of specified national origins) who left the British Isles (thus excluding Ireland) for the United States between 1820 and 1910.22 Despite these large numbers, relatively little is said about English ethnicity in existing accounts. Ethnic culture is downplayed with little acknowledgment of the ethnic roots of the English.23 While scholars such as David Hackett Fischer (on the colonial period) recognize the sheer weight of English immigrants, ethnicity is not considered. In spite of large overall numbers of English arrivals in the United States and their importance to the growing American industrial economy, scholars of immigration to America generally have not aligned immigration with ethnicity in their case.24 Charlotte Erickson saw the English as “invisible immigrants” who either blended in rapidly or else forged an Anglo-American culture that removed the need for ethnic self-expression.25 Specialists on the history of ethnicity have largely concurred with this approach. Kathleen Neils Conzen et al. argue that immigrants themselves defined their ethnicity as part of negotiations with a dominant Anglo-American “ethnoculture.”26 For most immigrants, such negotiations involved conflict as well as conciliation; but not, it seems, for the English. For them, cultural rituals quickly blurred into wider national rituals – wherever they settled. As new nations took shape in colonies that once had been but extensions of England, the new English arrivals found a culture that once was theirs, and which they still adhered to at home, but which Americans had coopted into their own culture. This can be seen in the usages of English folk culture. By the later nineteenth century, and with greater intensity in the twentieth, English historical figures (“Good Queen Bess,” Walter Raleigh, etc.) and folk characters (Maid Marian, Robin Hood, and Friar Tuck) had been blended into American May Day celebrations. Borrowed from “Merrie England” in the days before industrialization, English folk had become an integral part of American sorority life – one very much still adhered to today.27 While the historiography of ethnicity in the United States has tended to dismiss the English dimensions, some scholars have problematized this idea that the English followed a simple path of integration into the host culture.28 This chapter suggests that it is far from certain that the mass of English immigrants settled unquestioningly into American life; nor is it the case that their passage into the mainstream was always smooth. Wilbur Shepperson

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suggested a long time ago that the Arcadian American dream, of a life in the land of opportunities, failed to materialize for many of the English.29 We can also see something of this failure of promise in the responses of Englishmen on the ground. Middle-class men of the numerous ethnic societies formed by the English offered a response to what was, for some, a rather more dystopian reality by establishing structures to help their unfortunate immigrant countrymen – new arrivals and long-settled families who found themselves pinched by want in the United States. The handloom weavers escaping the wage-crunching effects of mechanization at home found little to comfort them in a country whose poverty of skilled labour ensured that the machine would be more dominant in the United States than it was becoming in England. Chartists, trade unionists, widows, orphans, the sick, and infirm characterized a disparate set of groups, families, and individuals for whom American reality was like a chill wind blown through dreams.30 Emigrant English workers realized the practical limitations of utopian idealism and responded in one of two ways. First, many travelled back to England with the consequence that their return rates were very high. In the late nineteenth century, as many as one-third did not settle in the United States, thus suggesting a quite remarkable balance of conscious sojourners and determined rejecters, neither of which spoke highly for the permanence of America’s appeal.31 Secondly, others tackled the lack of utopian opportunity the same way they had confronted class privilege, social hierarchy, and economic inequality back home: they stood up to American capitalism, formed trade unions and led them, and spread them, emphatically and determinedly across the industrial regions, and among new immigrants. Appalled by the lack of workers’ rights in the United States, and confronting the power of rampant capitalism in the “Gilded Age,” the English ethnic group look as much like a diaspora as any other, only perhaps expressing themselves through an ethnicity obscured by class consciousness. In the great mill towns of Massachusetts, the English established a powerful union tradition that would have been at home in the Lancashire mill towns whence many of them came. English workers in America complained about the climate, working conditions, and the forces resistant to labour organization.32 Ethnicity also featured in the equations of negotiation. In the late 1860s and 1870s, with the Irish-Catholic trade union and secret society known as the Molly Maguires attacking and killing Welsh and English foremen in the Pennsylvania mining regions, an axis of British and Amer-

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ican workers formed an organization, the Order of the Sons of St George, which strove to counter the effect of Irish aggression.33 Similarly, the mostly Lancashire workers in the mill regions of Massachusetts, set up, in 1876, the English American Club, with the purpose of registering voters and developing a political bloc, once again to counter the Irish.34

association-forming as a locus of english ethnicity Following their migration to the American colonies and the United States, the English, like the Irish and Scots, spawned a variety of associations that consciously bore the imprint of their nationality. Historians have fleetingly studied these English societies; most, though, dismiss them as aloof, elitist groupings made marginal by their limited size and range. While an essentially middle-class character cannot be gainsaid, it is debatable whether their Irish or Scottish equivalents were staffed by horny-handed labourers and artisans either. Indeed they were not. As Kerby Miller has admirably shown, Irish ethnic associations were largely under the aegis of middleclass Irishmen with a standard desire to manoeuvre their social inferiors into positions of which they approved: new land political power with the Tammany Hall machine being just as important as the furtherance of homeland struggles.35 For reasons of adjustment and collective responsibility, the English immigrants formed many different organizations, some of them short-lived, others much hardier. Among them, the St George’s and Albion societies and the Sons of St George were commonest; whereas the more proletarian Sons of England were very strong in Canada and South Africa from the 1870s, they enjoyed no traction anywhere else. It has been said that such societies and associations “were less prevalent among the English than among other nationalities.”36 It is undoubtedly the case that Irish immigrants formed political organizations containing sociable dimensions, whereas the English did not; but then the English had no reason to compete with O’Connell’s repeal association, the Fenians, or the Land League. Nor did the English organize ethnoreligious charities and friendly societies, such as the St Vincent de Paul Society or the Friendly Sons of St Patrick. Instead, they targeted their collective self-help to Oddfellows and Foresters, and the like.

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However, when it came to specifically ethnic, largely secular, charities set up for the aid of immigrants – which is what all these English organizations were – then they look hardly less numerous than their Irish equivalent (either the St Patrick’s Society or the Hibernian Society) and are at least a match for the Scots’ St Andrew’s Society. The figurehead of English associational life in America was Saint George, the commonest name attributed to the many societies that Englishmen developed at the same time as the Irish and the Scots planted societies for Saint Patrick and Saint Andrew, and the Germans founded societies named for Saint Herman. Examples such as these were many in number in the nineteenth-century North American city, as each society was highly active. The Royal Society of St George (rsstg), formed in 1894, appeared long after the American variants and was, in some respects, a response to their long-lived work. The rsstg had a central organization in London, which provided a vehicle for global communication between Australian, Canadian, and American branches. Its context was a complex interplay of imperial and national questions. Competition between the European powers, the rise of America, and the threats from Russia and the East, all added value to a British world stock-taking exercise. What we learn from the spread to England of a coinage first minted in the colonies, is that the critical phases of diaspora-formation occurred, unsurprisingly, in the diaspora, not at home. What is clear in all this is that, in an age of mass migration and epic continental expansion, these types of societies simply spread, through identified necessity, in line with European growth in the United States and colonies. The process of association forming began in the earlier colonial age, when the English actually were quick to organize immigrant aid charities, and several histories of this early phase exist.37 In 1733, the English of Charleston, South Carolina, founded the St George’s Society in 1733. New York’s St George’s Society appeared in 1770.38 Philadelphia’s Sons of St George’s Society (1772) was only two years behind its New York counterpart.39 These societies were signs of collectivism in an age of clubbable conviviality.40 Though they acted as dining clubs and sites of sociability, their principal purpose was dispensing charitable aid to poor and unfortunate English immigrants. Canadian developments flowered later, primarily from the nineteenth century – a factor that was entirely to do with key moments of colonial

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and early national development. The first instance we find in Canada is not of an English society, but of the British-American Society (1830). Plainly a hangover from the United Empire Loyalists, who had fled the American Revolution on account of their support for the king, the British-American Society was founded for “those born in any of the British American Colonies and their Descendants, being British Subjects.”41 Similar membership principles endured in later organizations. Canada’s first St George’s Societies appeared only a few years later, in Toronto, in 1834. Ottawa followed suit in 1844. Where records do not survive we are less certain of precise establishment dates, though newspapers are rich sources of knowledge about when these societies spread, and how quickly, to other parts of the Anglo-world. Indeed, such knowledge would become important not only in encouraging Englishmen in other places to form their own such societies, but also to enable some degree of coordination. Though transnational organization was not a feature of associational life until the second half of the nineteenth century, the press quickly took notice of activities, by plundering news from sister papers. Thus, the activities of the St George’s Society of Toronto were being reported only a few days later by the press in Bermuda and elsewhere.42 A year on, the activities of the Quebec St George’s Society were similarly recorded.43 In 1840, similar reports relayed how the departure of the former governor, Sir Colin Campbell, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, was marked by a considerable gathering of individuals and organizations, including the North British Society, the Highland Society and the St George’s Society.44 Englishmen also established less well-known societies in the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, Philadelphia had an Albion Society that was occasionally referenced in the Sons of St George’s minutes.45 The Sons of the St George’s Society also enjoyed some commonalities in membership and among officers, such as John Thomson, English-born librarian of the Free Library in Philadelphia, who sat on many committees and organizations, including the Sons of St George and the Albion Society, both of which enjoyed his services as officer.46 Like the St George’s Society, the Albion Society supported hard up immigrants through its association with other English benevolent organizations. However, the absence of records makes it difficult to explore this issue further.47 In both the United States and Canada, a common continental picture was emerging that transcended locality, region, and country. At midcentury,

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English associations were proliferating quickly. Societies and clubs appeared in communities large and small, both urban and rural. In both countries, developments occurred in a broadly westward direction – though in the American case, there also was a southerly drift. Equivalent societies appeared in Kingston and Ottawa (both 1859) and Baltimore (1866). These three societies have maintained high levels of activity and, for the historian, rich records.48 Thereafter, new emphases can be seen as the flow of immigrants moved away from the eastern seaboard, the Maritimes, Ontario, and Quebec. Connections to the homeland often were expressed through responses to visiting vips from the old country. Among the throngs of people and groups who welcomed Prince Albert as he visited Newfoundland in 1860, as part of his tour of the empire and colonies, were members of the St George’s Society, who paraded along with the masons, the Benevolent Irish Society, the St Andrew’s Society, and several others.49 Such ceremonial events marked bright spots on otherwise dull associational records. In fact, we learn much about the organizational mechanisms behind such public expressions of support by associations through the minutes of the Ottawa St George’s Society. In preparation for the prince’s visit to their city, the men of the St George’s Society called a special meeting of officers and members utilizing advertisements in the press to ensure a full turnout. The meeting’s purpose was to agree on an address to be forwarded to the governor general in good time, so that he could ensure that the prince received it through his personal private secretary. One of the members, Mr Lee, wished the address to ask the prince to be their patron, “just as his father was of the German Society of Montreal.”50 As the Midwest was opened up, the western Great Lakes’s communities also welcomed thousands of English settlers. In 1856, for instance, Madison, Wisconsin, reported the existence of St George’s societies. Two years later the tradition had made its way east to Milwaukee, as the number of English settlers proliferated.51 The prominence of English societies, as evinced by the press, suggests that the established pattern of middle-class leadership remained key. Thus, in 1858, with their society newly formed, the Milwaukee English held their first major Saint George’s Day dinner.52 In Chicago, the St George’s Society was founded in 1860, and, in 1864, members made an impressive splash with their sustained celebrations of the tercentenary of the birth of the bard, William Shakespeare.53

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Beyond the middle decades of the century, several of the towns of the Canadian prairie territories also nurtured thriving English associational culture, including the Sons of England – a generally more working-class masonic-style organization that, with its rituals, paraphernalia, and marching, bore as many similarities to the Orange Order as to the St George’s societies. The Sons of England was a numerically impressive outfit established in 1874 by G.B. Brooks, a Nottinghamshire immigrant. Most of their early leaders were foremen or lower middle class, rather than the true men of influence who ran the St George’s societies. Brooks determined that they would correct the “haughtiness” he observed in the St George’s Society of Toronto as they distributed their “Christmas Cheer” to the hard up English of the city. He also was inspired by a sense of ethnic rivalry with others, especially the Irish. He had thought it was demeaning that the English of Toronto “were then the only people out of all the nationalities who had to parade their wants and sufferings to the gaze of others and be made recipients of charity in a public manner.”54 Brooks saw the English in direct competition with the Irish and Scots in this respect, and so failing their countrymen by comparison. Setting up Court Albion No. 1 of the Sons of England with seven Middlesex men, all but two of whom were unemployed, Brooks and his organization (Bruce Elliott correctly deduces) sprang from an English tradition of mutual self-help, within which confraternity and collective self-help were favoured over the acceptance of charity. The organization specialized in finding work for members; but, like other ethnic groups, the Sons also held social functions. As with the fraternal orders, the Sons enjoyed elaborate and mysterious initiation ceremonies, paraphernalia, and ritual.55 Their local organizational unit was the “lodge,” and members were “brethren,” thus echoing the Orange Order. The Sons represented a new layer of English organization, and one quite different from the more genteel St George’s societies. Spreading westward from their Toronto base across Ontario, Quebec, and the prairies, by the early 1890s they were moving eastward to the Maritimes and Newfoundland. The organization also made landfall in South Africa and Rhodesia, for reasons as yet unknown; but they had no purchase in the United States, Australasia, or indeed in England itself. Across British North America, however, they were vastly more numerically popular than the St George’s or Albion societies. In the prairie provinces, they thrived: Winnipeg, Manitoba, announced the organization of a branch in May 1882. Described as

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“essentially a mutual benevolent society,” the press felt that it would “no doubt obtain many recruits from the ranks of Englishmen in the country.”56 In the years preceding World War I, the Sons had over 300 lodges and 25,000 members in Canada and Newfoundland.57 With around seven to eight thousand members in the 1880s, the St George’s Society across the United States clearly could not match the popular and populist power of Canada’s Sons of England.58 They did, however, match their northern neighbours in geographical range, as well as financially, with over $100,000 collectively in investments with up to fifteen thousand dollars annually disbursed in charity.59 In the United States, they spread initially across the east and upper south. Then they moved through the Midwest as Englishmen gathered under the banner of Saint George in Cleveland, Ohio, Racine, Wisconsin, and Little Rock, Arkansas.60 In the following decades, the group spread further west, finding its way to Anaconda, Montana, and southern California at both Los Angeles and Pasadena.61

continental connections: the north america st george’s union An active diaspora is denoted both by the geographical range of its adherents and transnational communication between them. The English, with their growing North American associational culture, demonstrated both of these facets of diaspora. Furthermore, their vitality and range soon led to the formation of an overarching, continental structure. The focal point was, however, on the Great Lakes region, spanning from New York in the east to Chicago in the west, but strongly clustered in towns in New York State and Ontario linked by waterways, improved roads, and railroads. The Great Lakes was, at midcentury, emerging as a well-defined transnational zone of economic development, social exchange, population, and shared culture.62 English associational culture was just one example of the crossnational connection. There was nothing new in this, for many such friendly societies – the Orange Order, Catholic confraternities, and societies and groups of every conceivable kind – maintained national, continental, and global structures in what was one of the surest measures of the ability of cultures to survive mass emigration.63 The Orange Order in Ireland, for instance, formed the Triennial Council in 1865 in order to maintain standardized structures and

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to ensure that a scriptural Protestant message endured.64 Though the St George’s societies and the Sons of England across North America at times appeared like localized, individual, almost masonic organizations, they also had limited sentience concerning the existence of kindred societies elsewhere. Though some knew of each other, others did not. Growing communication changed this. The St George’s societies, who celebrated their saint’s day, in 1883, “throughout the eastern provinces,” exchanged telegrams of mutual good wishes between themselves and some American societies.65 Later on, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the English associational scene diversified further, with several smaller organizations, including the Albion Society and other lodges, being established. Moreover, there were moves to merge the St George’s societies and the Sons of England, and, though they worked quite harmoniously in concert, no union had occurred by the 1920s. Unifying these organizations in any way did not occur till the second half of the nineteenth century. Even then, the St George’s societies operated in reverse of the normal pattern of development we see with many other confraternities: rather than being nurtured in the homeland and exported, they, in fact, began locally in the diaspora, developed organically, proliferated in a series of local parallels, and then connected nationally and transnationally – first, with each other, and then with the homeland. This made them quite different from the Oddfellows, Freemasons, or the Orange Order, each of which sprang from a common origin and, in their new sites of settlement, largely conformed to established practices and consciously answered to the homeland headquarters. St George’s societies close to each other – Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington – clearly had good working relations and knew of each other. They often received notes of congratulations and good wishes from much further afield, especially on Saint George’s Day, so they had a clear enough idea of their mutual existence. What they did not do was to federate; what they never sought, let alone achieved, was a common central authority spanning both countries. There is little doubt that the British world’s friendly societies had greater global coherence and more centralized practice than this variety of English associations. In the first instance, joining up and uniting was done in a small-scale and individual way. For example, the relief committee of one St George’s Society would provide the poor onward migrant with the name and address of a kindred society in another town or city. On the big social

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occasions, such as Saint George’s Day, the society in one town would invite the senior officers from another to their dinners and galas. All this connecting took on much firmer shape in the 1870s, however, when the nastgu was founded. In one sense, this was a precursor to the London-based (Royal) Society of St George,66 which came into being in 1894 as London’s response to a noticeable proliferation in English ethnic associational activity around the world. The nastgu was, in terms of the English associational tradition, the earliest foray into developing the transnational structures enjoyed by other organizations. The initial aim of the St George’s Union was relatively modest and tidy. Of course, its annual conventions extended the ethnic function of the constituent societies by promoting Englishness throughout North America.67 Discussion, new branches of their societies, charity and benevolent aid, Anglo-Saxon unity, and crossborder amity were among its stated objectives.68 However, the principal concern that brought them together was not initially nationalism or patriotism, but instead a practical matter, and one which exercised many of their annual meetings: the need to share information on the needs of new immigrants, focusing on labour-market intelligence and charity. At heart was a critique of modern capitalist society. At the gathering at Hamilton, Ontario, in 1876, in order to prevent labour unrest, attempts were made to promote arbitration over confrontation.69 As the 1889 convention, also held at Hamilton, was told, the society had one ideal: to maintain the organizations’ collective benevolent character and to disburse charity to those less fortunate.70 The St George’s Union was “modelled on the plan of our American general conventions” and appeared to be strongly endorsed from its inception by local and regional units such as the St George’s Benevolent Association of Chicago, whose members were addressed directly by Mr G.G. Jones, secretary of the federating society.71 No rewriting of constitutions or common rituals was suggested. The nastgu was not a replacement organization. Although there was some talk of making Philadelphia the base for all nastgu meetings, in organizational terms, the Union adopted the principle of holding its annual convention on a roving basis.72 For three decades or more, conventions were held in a different city each year. Although focused on charity and Englishness, there also was a political element in the form of an emerging desire for the regulation of labour disputes by way of “a system of arbitration into the mixed struggles of capital and labour.”73 Here we begin to see ethnic formulations as serving

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broader civic functions and pointing more towards communal integration and wider persuasion than to ethnicization and difference. Meetings of the nastgu expressed a desire to import English models of social harmony, thus suggesting that capitalists as well as workers perceived differences between their culture and that of America. All the talk here was of Englishstyle labour relations: the inference of English superiority was inherently clear. Interestingly these societies, which mixed the wealthy with the more modestly monied, were promulgating similar concerns as those of English workers. If labourers from England reviled the lack of workers’ rights in the United States, the employers and professionals who ran the St George’s Union were greatly agitated by the underlying conflict and sometimes open hostility of labour relations at the dawn of the “Gilded Age.” As societies that were originally founded by immigrants for immigrants, they naturally looked outwards to England and their fellow nationals elsewhere. The nastgu appeared when it did with the express intention of bringing together diverse American and Canadian English organizations, and, in so doing, helping them to face challenges presented by, for example, professional beggars passing from society to society living off their generosity. In one sense, this federal venture was only a formalization of the regular communications that we see in the minute books and charity ledgers of such organizations. When trying to place poor or unfortunate Englishmen and women to work, they would often pay a train fare from one town to another, with a note to say that their counterparts at the point of destination had been informed. According to the address of President George Francis Dawson at the Washington convention of 1882, the idea for the Union first sprouted in Onondaga, New York, in autumn 1872. The original planning meeting gave rise to a further gathering, also at Onondaga, in February 1873, which established the nastgu proper.74 The following year, the convention met in Utica, also in New York state, and declared itself “expressive and advisory,” without any attempt to “govern” or “control” the individual societies.75 The sole aim was to help societies that “are for the most part officially unknown to each other” to avoid repetitive fraud and support worthy migrants who would benefit from tramping between towns and societies, seeking support in each. The next convention, in 1875, was also in New York state: this time at Buffalo. Here travelling cards of membership were proposed and ordered. In 1877, the issue was, however, raised again,

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suggesting imperfections in the system.76 Moreover, a committee was appointed to “show the legislature of New York the propriety of restoring the capitation tax on immigrants at the ports of New York from $1.50 to $2.50 per capita to prevent the crippling of the New York Commissioners of Emigration.”77 The same convention also expressed a wish to develop links with Englishmen in South and Central America, but there is little evidence that this subsequently came to pass. Disraeli’s performance at the 1878 Congress of Berlin was the major talking point, in 1879, at the seventh convention, which was held at Bridgeport, Connecticut.78 Having sent congratulations to the queen and government on the triumph of British diplomacy, friendship between “the elder and younger Englands” was marked in the formation, in London, on Saint George’s Day, 1879, of the St George’s Society of London.79 If this transnational activity occurred within the Scots or Irish groups, it would be accepted unquestioningly as evidence of strong ethnic identity and actual or emerging ethnic power. It follows that similar acknowledgment thus needs to be given to the English. At its meeting, in 1876, the St George’s Union discussed and supported a large-scale celebration of Queen Victoria’s fifty-eighth birthday that the British Association of Virginia was organizing. By seeking audiences with consuls and ambassadors, and writing to St George’s and Albion societies, the British Association of Virginia organizers ensured high interest and many promises of attendance, including that gleaned at the nastgu from members in Kingston, Toronto, Bridgeport, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and several others, all of whom pledged support.80 In the following year, 1877, some members of the British Association of Virginia attended the fifth annual convention, held in Philadelphia, though the local press expressed a little disappointment that not more would be heading north for the “very attractive programme” advertised.81 In addition to the delegates counted here, there also were the ex officio officers of the Union, and sundry men of western Ontario, who were neither delegates not officers. Overall, geographical origins among delegates reflected the vastness of North America. There was no one from further south than Philadelphia; none from further west than Chicago – even though societies thrived well beyond the Middle Atlantic, New England, and Ontario. Baltimore and Charleston had societies, but sent no one. New York also was absent, and

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seemingly remained so throughout the period. Eight years after the convention with the representation denoted above, New York still was not there. Moreover, delegates “voted down” a proposal to ask New York “to come into the union” because “neither the union nor their own societies had received courteous treatment from the New York societies.”82 Clearly, then, the New Yorkers were, for whatever reason, aloof from their peers. Whatever limits there may have been, delegates to the 1878 convention wished to stress the true extent of the branches of the nastgu. Apparently, Canada had twenty-five such societies; the state of New York alone had over twenty; while “Pennsylvania and each of the Eastern States [had] a proportionate number.” Because “an Englishman’s heart beats more warmly for the Old Home as his travels bear him from her and lessen the number of his associated brethren,” there were also branches in “far distant California, Omaha, Nebraska and Georgia.” Moreover, “Hannibal, Missouri, during the past year presented an English celebration on a grand scale, one that would do honour to any city in the Empire, the centre of British loyalty and affection.”83 The delegates came away from these conventions with many papers, presentations, and ideas. They were surprised by “the fervour of affection for England” shown by American speakers. They also came away with a strong sense of what concerned the Union, “the fostering and introduction of clubs for literary and personal benefit.”84 When longstanding activist, G.W. Longstaff of Bridgeport, Connecticut, rose to address the convention of 1880, he commented positively, as they all did, on the nature of the English, before expressing a wish for expansive growth: “Scatter the Englishmen where you may, he will still retain his national character, his love of country. He hoped the gatherings would long continue, and the St George’s Union extend from Canada to Mexico, and from the Atlantic and the Pacific.”85 In the following year, the members of the Philadelphia Sons of St George heard “accounts of the operations of sister societies at San Francisco and Winnipeg.” Overall, the range of individual associations, stretching from southern California to Nova Scotia, and many places in-between, suggests that the ambitions were not misplaced. Whilst societies were numerous, and though some had hundreds of members, the nastgu gatherings were small because each society only sent between one and four delegates. We know this from the minutes of the St George’s Society of Kingston, which contain an important printed handbill produced by the president, E.J.B. Pense, and the first vice-president, R.W.

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Barker, who attended the Annual Convention of the nastgu on behalf of the members.86 The handbill shows that, in 1878, forty-seven delegates of St George’s societies attended the nastgu convention in Guelph, Ontario. Members were drawn from Toronto, Philadelphia, Oswego, Kingston, Waterloo, and many other places; some of the members made long journeys to be there, but, while there were societies across the Midwest by this point, distance determined that none attended from beyond Ontario and the American Northeast.87 At the Bridgeport gathering in 1879, the “influential delegates” were drawn from Ottawa, Utica, Bridgeport itself, and Chicago. The gathering “hope[d] to take such action as will bring all the St George’s societies in this country and Canada into the Union.”88 In 1880, Ottawa, “capital of the Dominion,” hosted the eighth convention. President Dr Sweetman spoke of the purpose of the Union. His words reaffirmed the core spirit of the union. They were gathered, he said, “not for political, communistic, or religious principles, but to endeavour to devise some means to secure relief for their suffering countrymen.” He welcomed delegates from far and wide: from America in the south to this city, “on the very outskirts of civilization.” The men from Philadelphia, one of the more southerly delegations, were drawn from both the Albion Society and the Sons of St George.89 Meetings expressed mutual appreciation and visions of unity. They also reported shared culture through more mundane actions. The Ottawan gathering, for example, heard reports of many events organized by the St George’s Union. These included meetings, picnics, and gatherings, and were reported as far afield as San Francisco and Petersburg, Virginia.90 The ground-level work was revealed in the local minutes of, for example, the St George’s Society of Kingston, whose stalwart activist, Brother E.J.B. Pense, was elected to the executive committee.91 In July of the same year, 1880, at a meeting of the St George’s Society of Baltimore, “it was moved + seconded that the president be authorized to subscribe for the Soc[iet]y to the North American St George’s Union, if upon investigation he thought it advisable to do so.”92 The result was not the attendance of Baltimore men at the convention; nor were they listed in any other year. Connections with other, similar societies were not much in evidence in the records of the Baltimore St George’s Society, though in 1883 they did invite Reverend Dr Parker Morgan of the New York society to preach to them at their Saint George’s Day church service.93 Another minute, this time in 1883, noted

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that a telegram was being sent to their sister organization in Toronto apologizing that business engagements prevented more of them from attending a convention in the Ontario city.94 In 1881, the press reported a strong showing among the Englishmen of Washington whose St George’s Society was growing strongly, doubling since it was inaugurated on Saint George’s Day in 1879. A well-attended six-course dinner on the saint’s day two years later announced they would host the nastgu in the national capital.95 Only a couple of months later, and over a year from the event itself, the Philadelphia Sons of St George elected its delegates in Washington.96 The delegates had been expecting to travel to the convention in the autumn of that year, but the murder of the president caused the St George’s Union to postpone it: Washington, of all places, was heavily shadowed by the events that “saddened every AngloSaxon heart on the globe.”97 In May 1882, the Canadian press noted the intention of numerous branches to be represented. Moreover, since “each of the Toronto, London [Ontario], and Winnipeg societies have passed resolutions inviting the members to hold the next convention [1883] in its city, a lively struggle is anticipated.”98 In the same year, the Union lost three stalwart officers: former president, Lewis Thompson of Philadelphia, Captain J.A.H. Andrews, “a leading member of the English colony in Virginia,” and William Tomlin, past secretary, of Bridgeport, Connecticut.99 Washington, then, hosted the ninth convention, in 1882, at the Willard Hall. Attendees came from all of the major centres of St George’s society activity. The president, Mr Dawson, described how the number and strength of their individual societies was greater than ever before, with some of them individually having 600 members. Although the attendance was small, he said, compared to other conventions, “we really represent very many thousands of English Canadians and English Americans banded together in societies, for purposes benevolence and philanthropic and patriotic to both the motherland and the Lands in which we live and which we love so dearly.”100 The president also had some clear recommendations to ensure stronger governance: president and secretary should be from the same towns, national as well as transnational unions, a push for union with all similar societies, not just St George’s societies, the appointment of a roving lecturer to visit all such societies, a charge of ten cents per capita on all members to provide funds, and the selection of a particular newspaper to be their organ for communicating good information. One of the recommendations

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contained an interesting and lofty ambition: that the word “international” replace “North America” to reflect an expectation of expansion beyond North America. He also sought the official laudation of both the Canadian Parliament and the American Congress, and a policy of lobbying both polities for protection for new immigrants. In a preecho of later global developments, he also expressed a deep desire that, “St George’s Day should be celebrated in all lands by people of the Anglo-Saxon race as our common race-day.”101

identity, imperialism, and anglo-americanism: limits on diaspora? If the argument has so far been made in favour of the ethnicity of English communities that formed so many societies and a transnational structure to unify them on key issues, a note of caution also needs to be sounded. In the second half of nineteenth century, especially in times of tension between England and the United States, identity politics could be a tricky business. Open declarations of Englishness were almost always laced with proud and commodious expressions of pro-American feeling since there was plenty of hostile opinion about England, Britain, and the empire, and not just from the Irish American press. Consequently, the conventions always emphasized the cultural commonalities that connected them: the ties that bound. Some went further. In 1869, the secretary of the Baltimore St George’s Society, an organization founded by the British consul and businessman, Andrew Darrell, and his brother, declared that their society was, “essentially an American patriotic society.”102 This was so, he reckoned, because they took responsibility for their own poor and so preventing burdens from falling on Americans. Such claims were, however, political, since in the 1860s and 1870s these gatherings of Englishmen and Anglophile Americans clearly feared conflict between their nations. Such an eventuality appalled and frightened them. At the Baltimore Saint George’s Day dinner in 1878, Reverend. Dr Kirkus, a regular lecturer on politics, religion, and other topics, followed the toasts with a response that mixed amity and defiance: […] for either England or America to go to war would be a calamity, and nothing short of absolute dishonour would justify either nation

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in engaging in strife. […] He believed the time had passed when Americans talked of John Bull as they did of old. Some people have a habit of saying every time England seeks mediation in the interests of peace that John Bull has pocketed his pride. The English bull is a rather formidable sort of dog, and when he don’t get justice and is driven to extremities he generally takes a grip, and never lets go until he hears a bone crack [Applause]. If that bull dog be let loose may he never let go until he does hear that bone crack. [Applause and cheers.]103 It was because of this underlying fear that both countries, Canada and the United States, and not just England, formed part of the toasting arrangements. Equally, the American branches repeatedly ensured that the president, as well as the queen, always received a glass raised with gusto at Saint George’s Day dinners. More than anything, these societies managed their hybridity, being composed of the English-born and the Englishderived, in ways that were less necessary for the offspring of lesser powers. Consequently, Anglo-American connections and similarities were regularly stressed. During the many times of diplomatic difficulty between England and the United States, expressions of English loyalty could invoke criticism, indeed sometimes bile. Most of these organizations were very keen to stress the complementarity of their identities: many were American- or Canadian-born; those who were English-born were often naturalized; and those who were neither were nevertheless keen to stress their loyalty to the United States. Canadian loyalty, being subservient to British imperial identity, carried no such risks, and did not require public announcements of devotion. Indeed, “imperialism was Edwardian England’s nationalism,” as McCormack correctly states, and “Canada was an overseas manifestation of it.”104 Americans might have bridled, but the United Kingdom felt a warm glow from neo-British loyalty. Remarking on the connections between England’s constitution and those of both the United States and Canada, he drew warm applause when he noted the amity, “not only between Canada and the United States but also between the United States and Great Britain.”105 The second vice-president, Edward C. Barber, stated how he felt like he was “speaking to men who were born and lived within the sound of Bow Bells.” Barber described the Union as honourable and selfless since no political gain could be had from travelling hundreds of miles to attend a

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convention with “no prizes to offer.” Mr Lawson of Philadelphia then praised the development of civilization in Ottawa, the “enterprise displayed by Canadians” and “the success of Englishmen in every sphere of life.”106 These meetings were indeed about developing a unified response to the problem of indigence among English migrants. However, they were also about forging a group identity. As a result of both, they involved speeches demanding togetherness while celebrating their common ancestry and values. The nastgu was no different from other ethnic organizations in stressing the commonalities of blood, history, and mentality that united the nations they represented. At Hamilton in 1876, the focus was on animating common bonds between the “two great English-speaking races.”107 In his detailed historical lecture to the Washington convention in 1882, President Dawson focused on the north-south connection as well as the Atlantic one when he suggested that their gathering was a clear expression of friendship from the United States and Canada and had played a vital role in this development in the old country.108 These emotions were wrapped up in celebratory aspects, for example, cooperation with the British Association of Virginia concerning the Queen’s birthday celebrations. At Philadelphia, in 1877, the fifth convention, a constitution was agreed upon that encompassed basic principles, but to this was added official endorsement of “amity between the English-speaking nations.”109 By the early 1900s, the emphasis was increasingly on the principle of Anglo-American amity. Geopolitics was an overarching cause of the nastgu’s many declarations of “Anglo-Saxon unity.” At a meeting in 1902, the recent death of Queen Victoria and the assassination of President McKinley were unifying themes due to the “spontaneous interchange of sympathy between the two nations upon both occasions.” British support for America’s imperialist claims against the Spanish Empire, and America’s reciprocal support for Britain in the South African war were duly commented on as signs of transatlantic comity as well as of what President Alfred R. Wiggan called, “stern, unfaltering determination […] to fulfil the obligations of enlightened civilization in rendering justice and equality to all men”; “united,” as they were, “in the same resistless manner the two countries will wage a relentless and successful war against the foul doctrine of anarchy as a dangerous menace to true liberty.”110 These were powerful, stentorian words; but they were not untypical of the age.

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conclusion In terms of their symbolic identifications, Englishmen in the United States and Canada upheld devotion to empire, monarch, and homeland, but also utilized their togetherness to further ambitions within the new country. By the mid-nineteenth century, moreover, many of those supporting these societies were second-, third- and later-generation descendants of England, and their ritual Englishness harboured clear tones of civic pride. On a scale from cosmopolitanism to “virulent ethnic nationalism,”111 they were nearer the former, albeit laced by national chauvinism that suggested superiority. In many ways, they celebrated their hybridity through historical connections of current identifications. Were homologous ethnic groups any different in using their Old World amity to further their New World ambitions? It seems unlikely. For the surest test was their passage from old ethnic diaspora to new civic nationalism. Yet, in its operation, English associational culture bore many of the hallmarks of the ethnic awareness that scholars view as critical to demonstrate the existence of diasporic identities in other nations. It is true that Englishmen abroad had no national struggle at home to occupy them or to give them reasons to unite within the diaspora. But neither, at that time, did the Scots. Moreover, if we look purely at organizational expressions of identity proffered by Hibernians, St Patrick’s, St Andrew’s, and St George’s societies, then they all look very similar. Dinners and galas based around their saints’ days; the presence of clerics prepared to cast religion in the context of nationhood; songs, speeches, and lectures; and determined charity work – each of these features was common to all ethnic or national societies. The principal first aim of all ethnic societies was to protect their national group. In this sense, the English seemed to cover most dimensions. They allied the conventional, middle-class charitable work that was done by the St George’s societies to the collective self-help of Canada’s Sons of England Benevolent Society and of the Benevolent Order of the Sons of St George. Their vistas were broad when embracing the overarching, federal, transnational impulses of the St George’s Convention, with its aim of standardizing procedures and sharing intelligence. Each of these things was a rough-hewn mirror of the work of so many kindred organizations brought

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together by other nationalities. The Irish, Scots, French, Germans, and others, did precisely the same. The importance of the provision of charity, travel tickets for those seeking work elsewhere, hospital beds, and burial plots, demonstrates a diasporic sense at the most basic but most vital level. For all of the interest in the idea of diaspora as a political concept – extensions of freedom movements and antiimperial struggles at home – the sinews of any international community existed most robustly in day-to-day, prosaic, mundane support for countrymen and women. While it is true that the driving force behind English societies was, in most (though not all) cases, middle-class and affluent citizens, the same is true of the St Patrick’s or St Andrew’s societies. If we prefer to assess the English as demonstrating a form of civic ethnicity, as much driven by considerations of moral obligation as national identity, then we must carry the charitable associations of most other nations with us. If, however, we recognize a chink of ethnicity within the darkness of current interpretations, and if we acknowledge that working diasporas were mundane and prosaic, but also therefore measurable through institutional records and press reportage, then the English must be considered too. Only in the sphere of political nationalism did the English fall short. Where the Irish stressed nationhood, the English stressed empire. Where the Irish hoped for conflict between the United States and Britain to further Irish nationalist ambitions, the English stressed amity with Americans for precisely the opposite reason.112 Where the Irish acclaimed state-level nationalism, the English were imperial nationalists.113 A multiethnic, multinational conglomeration, the British Empire was their unit of ultimate identity. On each level, politically, the English confused their ethnicity with British and English, and nation and empire blurred together. However, on several other more practical levels they embraced the tactics and approaches that, in the case of other nations, are viewed as signs of transnational ethnonational consciousness – that is, a diasporic identity.

8

Ulster Presbyterians, the Great Famine, and the Historiography of Early Irish America Rankin Sherling

(1) In every diaspora, there is a distance between the historical events that triggered the diaspora and the popular memory of what those events were, often generations later. That is only natural, and the dissonance between the original events and the memorial heritage provides a rich arena for research on cultural retention. A more complicated matter occurs when the historiography of the triggering events seems resistant to the verifiable evidence concerning the initiation and dimensions of the diasporic flow. To some degree, this latter matter is the case concerning the Irish diaspora, for to a remarkable extent, the historiography of the Irish in America remains rooted in motifs of exile and of victimization. To note this characteristic of the American historiography is not to criticize it so much as it is an attempt to understand the dominance of these motifs. An Gorta Mór, “The Great Hunger,” in Irish Gaelic, was without a doubt the most devastating and soul-scarring event in modern Irish history. Its memory is seared into the minds of Irish men and women even today. It is pervasive, and its dominating presence is particularly noticeable in discussions of history – and of course at times this is as it should be. However, it will never do to view all of Irish history before or after the Famine through the lens of the Great Famine, for while the Famine may be examined through many lenses, the lens of the Famine does not necessarily explain all else.

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(2) The documentable history of Irish migration to North America begins with two very different long-lived streams of human movement. The origin of these two outflows is situated just before the start of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Thus, although the story of consistent Irish migration to North America is not as long as that of the Spanish to Central and South America nor as that of the French and the English to North America, it still makes for a very long history of transatlantic movement. To put it into some chronological perspective, King Charles II – along with those men of sufficient money and rank practically forced to follow in his fashionable footsteps – was still wearing high-heeled, platform shoes; the Pilgrims had only been settled at Plymouth for about fifty-five years; and the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV was still the governmental model for the British monarchs. Irish migration to North America has been a near constant ever since that era. That the two streams of migration were so very different in character allows for a good juxtaposition of the Irish or Irish American identities of the migrants. Crucially, the two inaugural strands, though different in many matters, were strands of Irish migration involving two different Irish identities. One left Ireland and went to Newfoundland, now part of Canada, and the other to the Delmarva Peninsula – a prominent peninsula on the east coast of what is now the United States, made up of portions of Virginia, Maryland, and all of Delaware – and the region immediately around it, including eastern Pennsylvania and the southern tip of New Jersey. By 1675, significant numbers of Irish migrants were travelling to Newfoundland for work during the cod fishing season and would then return home for the rest of the year. Soon thereafter many began to stay all yearround, and the European settlements of Newfoundland began to take on a markedly Irish character. The majority of these Newfoundland Irish migrants were from the counties around the port city of Waterford. Most were Catholic, and many were Irish speakers. In fact, Newfoundland is said to be the only place outside of Europe that has its own name in the Irish language: the Irish name for Newfoundland – Talamh an Éisc or “land of fish” – is descriptive and developed organically, like the place names in Ireland itself (e.g., Donegal which is from Dun na nGall or the “fort of the foreigners;” or Tandragee which is from Tóin re Gaoith or “backside

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to the wind”). The Irish of this Newfoundland migrant stream are easy for historians interested in Irish identity to work with. They were from the south of Ireland, they were largely Catholic, and a great number of them spoke Irish Gaelic. So “Irish” were they that the Irish journalist, Tim Pat Coogan, has asserted that “outside of Ireland itself, there is probably no more Irish place in the world than Newfoundland.”1 There is indeed little or no problematic issue of Irish identity for historians to wrestle with. Cultural historians have slotted these migrants into the romantic, nationalistic, and Catholic conceptions of Irish identity popularized during the Irish cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, a second stream of Irish migration that has its roots in the seventeenth century does not fit easily with the prescriptive standard definition of the character of Irish identity as it affects the study of the Irish diaspora. This is the stream of Irish migration to the Delmarva Peninsula on the mid-Atlantic coast. It was overwhelmingly made up of Presbyterians and came from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. Unlike the Irish who went to Newfoundland – who were native Irish or the descendants of Gaelicized Anglo-Normans or even Gall Ghaeil, “Gaelicized Vikings” – many of these migrants were the descendants of Scottish settlers. While they migrated to the Thirteen Colonies and the United States from Ireland, the “Irishness” of their identity is contested – not only by people with narrow definitions of what it is to be Irish, but by some of their descendants as well. They have become known in the United States as the “ScotchIrish,” or “Scots-Irish,” and in the homeland the preferred term in the historiography is “Ulster Scots.” In any case, these terms can be problematic, because at various times they have been used both to include and to exclude them in discussions of Irish identity. Our practice here is to discuss them as being Irish, but of a specific sort, in the same way that historians distinguish between the “Old Irish” and “New Irish” in the historiography of large swathes of the south of Ireland. The primary reason to include them as being part of the history of the Irish diaspora is that undeniably they were deeply embedded in the social system that was seventeenth-century (and of course, later) Ireland. Whether or not the Ulster Scots got along well with the native Irish (mostly they did not), both they and the native Irish were locked into a dyadic relationship that enhulled the cultural identity of both groups. And the decision of many Ulster Scots to leave for the New World was made on the basis of a comparison of the likely future within

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the Irish social and economic system to several possible places for their future life. Making these multipolar comparisons, myriad Ulster Scots migrated to North America and became part of the cohort of Scotch-Irish. The migrants who began this early stream of Irish migration seem to have been from east county Donegal and west county Derry. They did not leave Ireland to fish or to capitalize on the maritime industry (which was the case with the migrants from the south of Ireland to Newfoundland) but left, at least partially, because Presbyterians in these regions of Ireland’s north were being persecuted for their religion (or, at least perceived that they were) by the established Church of Ireland.2 Such migrants do not fit very well into the neat, romantic, and nationalistically anachronistic identity boxes. Moreover, they are hard to identify. Who were they? Scholars have long disagreed. That ultimately most of the Scotch-Irish were descendants of Scottish settlers in Ulster is not in dispute, but had they intermarried with the native Irish to any significant degree? Did their cultural heritage harken to origins in the Gaelic Highlands – a culture very similar to that of the Gaelic, native Irish – or were they almost exclusively of Lowland background only? Depending on the scholar one consults, one will receive a different answer. Charles A. Hanna wrote that they fought off intermarriage, that they staunchly resisted the “invincible Roman Catholicism of the Irish women,” and that they were thus of “unmixed Scottish blood.” As far as what type of Scot, Hanna held that they were without question the descendants of lowlanders.3 Ruth Dame Coolidge asserted that if they did have Highland ancestry and if they still retained any “evidence of the Celt, and if, though very improbably, they intermarried with the native Irish, they were more strongly Anglo-Saxon.”4 Wayland F. Dunaway was convinced that “Irish Presbyterians were merely sojourning in Ireland, just passing through to the usa.”5 Thus, he dealt with them as Scottish migrants, and not Irish migrants at all. William Forbes Adams contrasted Ulster Presbyterian migrants with the native Irish. “The Scots-Irish peasants of Ulster, and to a less extent the English and Welsh settlers in Leinster,” he wrote, retained habits and traits which set them apart from the native Irish, and checked the growth of common sympathies or the realization of common interests. They were energetic, moderately clean, and less volatile and susceptible to mass emotion than their mercurial neigh-

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bors. A stern and narrow morality cut them off from friendly fighting, to dancing and the enjoyment of the harpers. But the most vital distinction lay in that indefinite quality called morale. The Ulster [Presbyterian] peasant inherited something of the dour pride and stoicism of his ancestors. The native Irish had developed no such armor, and the self pity, the unending note of sorrow which has sounded in their literature from its earliest days, deepened and strengthened after 1815.6 Even for a reader well aware of the widespread popularity in the academy of the nationalistic-racialist theories of the 1920s and 1930s when Adams wrote, the essentialism of these statements is simply staggering. Adams, for his part, seems to try to back away from his offensive, blanket characterizations of large masses of people – but manages to somehow make it worse by following the lines above with, “these differences were less than the essential similarities of a common poverty, general insobriety, and a national consciousness which made native Irish, Scots-Irish, and Anglo-Irish call themselves Irish, and resent in common all interferences from across the Irish Sea.”7 The above are merely examples, but one is not being glib in noting that they exemplify a time in which Irish Catholic nationalists created a limiting, idealized stereotype of an Irish person; and, in their own cohort, later enthusiasts of the “Scotch-Irish” created a limiting, idealized stereotype of early Irish Presbyterian migrants. Yet, as far as the Irish Presbyterians were concerned, many of them did not fit into the stereotype of the “ScotchIrish” in the United States. Many of the Scottish settlers in Ireland were indeed Catholics who were Gaelic-speaking Highlanders,8 some of whom had become Protestants while in Ireland. There was intermarriage between Irish Catholics and Scottish Presbyterians,9 and there was also conversion of native Irish Catholics to Presbyterianism.10 Not only were Irish Presbyterian migrants a mixture of Highland and Lowland backgrounds, but recent dna evidence has the potential to shake up agendas and identities built upon the alleged segregation of Scots and native Irish in Ulster. It appears for the moment that the dominant dna group for all of Ulster and essentially all of the Scottish Lowlands and a smaller part of the Highlands is the same: they are grouped genetically under the “m-222” haplo-group. Interestingly, this haplo-group is labelled as “insular Celtic,” which is considered to be hyper-Gaelic: so Gaelic, in

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fact, that the haplo-group was once called the “Niall of the Nine Hostages” haplo-group.11 As with all science, interpretation of data changes as quickly as new data come in, but if this particular interpretation turns out to be correct, it could have a direct impact on the study of Ulster, Ulster migration, Irish and Scottish migration, and Irish and Scottish identity.12 Although historians are instinctively leery of anything that hints at scientific reductionism, an intermixture of tightly identifiable genetic material between two groups that often are presented as being culturally segregated implies strongly that a considerable degree of cultural (and physical) intimacy existed.

(3) At present, the historiography of the Irish in America is in a strange position. The study of the eighteenth-century Irish diaspora in America is dominated by the study of Irish Presbyterian migration, and the study of the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora America is dominated by the study of Irish Catholic migration. In other words, a tacit position of segregating cultural groups into bordered historiographical entities is operative. This distancing of major constituencies of the Irish historical experiences from other, related groups is not the product of any explicit theoretical exercise but instead is a matter of unexamined praxis. This historical segregation occurs in spite of the facts that, (1) if the religious makeup of the eighteenth-century migration matched the religious makeup among non-Catholics in the province of Ulster, a very large portion of those migrants would not have been Presbyterian, but Anglican (Anglo-Irish and not Scotch-Irish);13 (2) that many eighteenth-century migrants were not Protestants at all, but Catholics;14 (3) that during and after the popular revivals of the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, the vast majority of the Ulster immigrants or their descendants who actually were Presbyterian left the denomination to become Baptists and Methodists.15 And (4), when the Irish migrant flow is traced into the nineteenth century, it is clear that the stream was not solely Catholic, and indeed, that Irish Presbyterian and Irish Anglican migration actually increased over its eighteenth-century base.16 The unavoidable conclusion is that the eighteenth- and the nineteenth-century migrations are thus more complicated than the dominant historiographical practice would lead one to believe.

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Accepting the validity of the above qualifications, and, in particular, granting the value of recognizing pivotal Catholic colonial locales such as Lord Baltimore’s colony of Maryland, I am here focusing on the ScotchIrish of the Delmarva Peninsula because, when examined closely, their experience unsettles a good deal of what we thought we knew about the early migration to the Thirteen Colonies. The Delmarva migrations have a broad significance because, unlike previous unstructured migrations from Ireland, their entry into North America laid down a pattern that became a broad and stable highway. The Delmarva Peninsula region was a primary destination for Irish Presbyterian migrants whose descendants would mythologize them – almost beyond recognition in some cases – as the “Scotch-Irish.” For many years, histories of Irish migration to the Thirteen Colonies – and specifically Ulster migration to the colonies – began in the year 1717, when an unprecedentedly large wave of immigrants from Ireland’s northern province hit American shores. However, recent research has demonstrated that Irish migration from Ulster to the Delmarva Peninsula actually began about forty years before that date.17 The migration was small in comparison to the post-1717 migrations, and this is probably why it was missed for so many years. Some scholars have suggested that about one thousand migrants had settled in and around the Delmarva Peninsula by 1700,18 but due to a dearth of records it is simply impossible to know for sure how many had actually arrived by that date. What we can know for certain is that it was an important episode in the overall, centuries-long Irish migration to America in that it helped to significantly shape, influence, and direct the future flow and character of migration from Ireland to America in the eighteenth century.19 Some of the earliest personally identifiable Irish migrants to the Delmarva Peninsula were Presbyterian ministers from the Laggan Presbytery in eastern county Donegal. Prominent scholars formerly disregarded this migration of ministers as isolated from or not related to any significant lay migration from Ireland or Ulster.20 However, it is now clear that the earliest general movements and the specifically clerical migrations from Ulster to the Delmarva region were related. In late 1680, a letter arrived in Donegal from a Colonel Stevens, who was an Anglican landlord in Somerset County, Maryland, which was situated on Maryland’s eastern shore on the Delmarva Peninsula. The letter was addressed to the Laggan Presbytery on the behalf of unnamed tenants on his

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Delmarva estate and offered to help defray the costs of a minister’s salary if the presbytery would send a minister for them. There is no record of his writing to a different presbytery, although the Laggan Presbytery did pass word of the request to neighbouring presbyteries. It may be that Colonel Stevens chose to write to the Laggan Presbytery because his tenants were from there, but certainly the migrations of ministers and laity from Ireland seem to have been related. Just over a decade after Stevens’s letter (by 1692), there was a good number of Irish immigrants in the same area of Maryland. Colonel Stevens’s land was in Somerset County, and Edward Randolph, a Virginia official and a member of one of Virginia’s most prominent families, described Somerset County in 1692 as a place “pestered with Scotch & Irish.”21 He also wrote that in the years 1690 to 1692, inclusive, about 200 families had arrived from Ireland and settled in Somerset County, and that there were about 100 families there before. According to Randolph, these “Scotch-Irish” were engaged in illegal trade with Irish vessels that made stops in the area and were thus edging out the English trading vessels which, alone, were permitted by law to trade there.22 Although Colonel Stevens’s call makes it seem as if only one minister was needed, four Irish ministers with connections to the Laggan Presbytery migrated to that area of Maryland in or shortly after 1683. They all set up meeting houses and served congregations, so there was a need for Presbyterian ministers in the area.23 Clearly, some Presbyterian laity travelled in concert with the clergymen to the mid-Atlantic regions – not necessarily in the same vessels, but as part of the general migration. Thus, many names commonly found in the Ballindrait and Lifford area of Donegal, the exact area ministered to by one of these immigrant ministers (William Trail), can be found in the historic records of Somerset County, Maryland during the thirty-year period from 1683 to 1713.24 Further, in a petition for a minister sent to the Church of Scotland from Presbyterians in New Castle, Delaware, in February of 1706, the signers of the document claimed that, “We undersubcribers and the greatest number of us born and educated in Ireland under the ministry of Mr William Traill presbitierian minister formerly at liford [Co. Donegal] are by a Divine providence settled with our families at Newcastle and about it in the province of pensilvania.”25 William Trail was one of the first Irish Presbyterian ministers to arrive in America. He left Ireland for the Delmarva Peninsula in 1683 and recrossed the Atlantic after the cessation of

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Jacobite hostilities in 1690. If the majority of these men and women stated that they were “born and educated in Ireland under the ministry” of William Trail, then they probably left Ireland at around the same time, and in any case, they were expressly aware of his cultural leadership. Irish Presbyterian congregants had certainly begun streaming into the Delmarva region soon after the initial settlement of Irish Presbyterian ministers there in 1683. Francis Makemie was one of the ministers who arrived in 1683. Eventually a large landowner on the Delmarva Peninsula, Makemie is known to have obtained fifty acres in 1692 on the eastern shore of Virginia for the settlement of immigrants.26 He did so in the same year that Edward Randolph complained that Somerset County was pestered with Irish settlers. Further, the research on shipping records done by scholars such as Graeme Kirkham and Marianne Wokeck confirms that the Delmarva Peninsula area, and particularly New Castle, Delaware at the mouth of the Delaware River (which connects it to Philadelphia), was the original area of settlement for Irish Presbyterians in America.27 All of these facts point to the conclusion that Irish Presbyterians were settling on or around the Delmarva Peninsula well before that traditional 1717 start date of the study of Irish Presbyterian migration to America.

(4) Undeniably, however, the year 1717 marks a remarkable change in the magnitude of migration from the north of Ireland to the American colonies. A veritable flood of migrants from Ulster began – to the point that it became the largest wave of in-migration in recorded North American history to that point. Scholars long argued that the wave was characterized by a two-stage process of migration: that when the great wave began, most of the migrants went to New England, where they suffered persecution, and that only later the stream redirected itself and began to go to the Middle Colonies, mostly to Pennsylvania. While keeping an open mind concerning that two-stage concept, I would suggest that a somewhat different pattern was more likely to have prevailed. Remembering that by 1717 Irish Presbyterians had been settling in and around the Delmarva Peninsula (which is in the Middle Colonies) for at least forty years, it seems likely that when the great surge of migration began in 1717, a second stream of migration then developed. A large, new

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stream went from Ireland to New England, and the original stream simply continued on a much larger scale from Ireland to the Delmarva Region. Within the context of the two Ulster-to-North America migrant streams, it is undeniable that the Presbyterian newcomers to New England had a hard time, much of it the result of their being treated with suspicion and occasionally with outright hostility. One example is seen in the experiences of the Reverend Edward Fitzgerald, who arrived in Worcester, Massachusetts along with an entire congregation of Irish Presbyterians sometime between 1718 and 1724. Soon after their arrival, the congregation began to build its own church. This would be the second Protestant church in town and therefore was considered a great inconvenience to the townspeople. The New Englanders were fellow Calvinists, Congregationalists rather than Presbyterian, but the tension arose not from theology but from civic practice. At this time in New England, there was a custom of paying for the upkeep of ministers and meeting houses through public funds. To the resident New Englanders, another minister and meeting house meant higher taxes. Thus, while the Presbyterian church was still under construction, a mob of townspeople led by some of the town’s most eminent citizens – the mob included at least one deacon of the town’s Congregationalist church – tore down the partially completed Presbyterian meeting house. Demoralized by the hostility and the destruction of their meeting house, most of Fitzgerald’s Irish congregation trickled out of Worcester and into nearby Sutton, Massachusetts, where there was another fledgling congregation of Irish Presbyterians under another Irish minister named John McKinstry, who had been in Sutton since about 1719. Others of Fitzgerald’s Worcester congregation left Worcester for an Irish Presbyterian settlement at Londonderry, New Hampshire. The Irish there included the Gaelic-language preacher, Reverend James McGregor, who, with the help of John McMurphy (who would eventually become a member of the New Hampshire colonial legislature), had carved from the wilderness the strongest of the New England Irish Presbyterian communities.28 The relative prosperity of the citizens and the community at Londonderry, New Hampshire suggests that success in New England depended on the ability to secure lands for the settlement and creation of an Irish Presbyterian community from scratch and not on the assimilation of Irish Presbyterian immigrants into an already established, New England, Congregationalist city, town, or frontier village. As for the Reverend Fitzgerald, himself, after the

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forcible dismantling of his congregation at the hands of Worcester’s “best,” he continued his ministry in near historical anonymity. He remained in New England at least until 1729, and occasionally shows up in the records as sporadically arriving in Worcester to preach to a small remnant of his Irish congregation that decided to stay there. Nothing is known of him after 1729.29 Some ministers led their congregants to the newish, frontier settlements in Maine, begun not long before their arrival. The Reverend James Woodside – invited to New England by the famous Cotton Mather himself – brought with him 160 congregants, but the approval of Mather made little difference to their reception by the locals. In Maine, Woodside and his congregation suffered many hardships. In the face of Indian attacks and the threat of winter starvation, many of the newly arrived Irish settlers are reported to have been left to die of cold, hunger, and illness by New Englanders reluctant to expend the effort to help them.30 All were at risk. It was better to let the immigrants from Ireland die first, it seems. Woodside left New England and recrossed the Atlantic not long after his arrival. It is now unclear whether any of his congregation went with him. By the late 1720s, the Irish Presbyterian migration from Ulster to New England had slowed to a trickle, as had a much smaller migration to South Carolina. After being promised the lands of the recently defeated Yamasee tribe, Irish settlers from Ulster, upon their arrival in South Carolina were informed that the South Carolina legislature had changed its mind and they would not be allowed to settle there after all. Without good land to settle on, they were forced to live however they could. They thus found themselves in a desperate situation in which they faced many hardships due to weather, lack of food, Indian attacks, and hostile South Carolinians. After their first winter or two, many of the survivors made their way “north” to friendlier areas. While we do not know where exactly they went, there can only have been one place in colonial North America where their arrival would have been treated with complete sympathy and welcome, and that is in the well-established Irish Presbyterian communities located in and around the Delmarva Peninsula. Clearly, the experiment in creating new destinations for the Ulster migration had not worked. The new immigrants were treated like an “other” in both South Carolina and New England, and suffered the consequences of being outsiders in a time and place in which community support was a necessity for survival.

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This hostile reception was not the case in the Delmarva region, however, where a continuous stream of Irish Presbyterian migrants had been settling since at least 1683 and probably decades before. Indeed some immigrant ministers, such as the Reverend Thomas Craighead, a former Moderator of the Synod of Ulster, migrated with their families from New England to the Delmarva. Nevertheless, the majority pattern was not a two-stage migration from Ireland-to-New England-to Delmarva, but rather a continuous enlargement of a conduit that had its origins in the seventeenth century. After 1717 a massive number of Ulster migrants, including Quakers, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Catholics, directed their transatlantic migration toward the Delmarva region. Initially, New Castle, Delaware, at the mouth of the Delaware River, seems to have been the preferred point of disembarkation, but eventually Philadelphia, its larger, sister city at the upstream end of the Delaware River, became the primary entrepôt for Ulster migrants in the eighteenth century. Scholars have long debated the exact numbers of migrants that came from Ulster before the American Revolution, but all agree that eventually the Delmarva region, and particularly Pennsylvania, became the locus for Ulster immigration. R.J. Dickson’s number of 120,000 total immigrants long held sway, and influential historian, James G. Leyburn, agreed with that number. Graeme Kirkham, who was the first recent scholar to point out the earliest migration to the Delmarva region and push the start date of the study of Ulster migration to America back to the 1680s, thought that number to be too low. So, too, did Kerby Miller at the time of his 1985 publication of Emigrants and Exiles.31 These higher estimates are in line with the work of Maldwyn Jones, which claimed that about 250,000 Ulster migrants arrived just in the years 1725–75 alone.32 L.M. Cullen and Marianne Wokeck, however, have separately worked out much lower figures. Cullen claimed that only sixty thousand migrated during that time, while Wokeck found records of only 52,695 immigrants on Delaware river ports, including Philadelphia, during the period from 1729–74, and therefore concluded that the estimate of 120,000 is way too high.33 The lower estimates are all largely based on American port records. The higher estimates are based upon records of shipping tonnage and passenger lists. The recent joint work of Kerby Miller and Liam Kennedy calls into question the use of American port records as a sole indicator of the number of immigrants. They use an improved version of the method em-

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ployed by R.J. Dickson, but they report having found more voyages, more departures, and more arrivals than were previously known. Thus, Miller and Kennedy conclude (like Maldwyn Jones before them) that Dickson’s number of 120,000 pre-American Revolution Ulster migrants is far too low and claim that the number should be 250,000 or more.34 With such dissention among the leading experts, it might be best to provisionally accept the advice of Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, who write, “with little prospect of the available evidence yielding greater precision, we may at least proceed confidently with this indicative range for the total numbers emigrating from Ireland to North America between 1700 and 1775: 100,000–250,000.”35 Within a very few years of 1717, immigrants from Ireland’s northern province pushed further and further into the backwoods of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. There are reports that as early as 1760, Ulster migrants could be found as far south and west as Natchez, in what would one day become the state of Mississippi.36 As they established themselves in these new places of settlement, Irish Presbyterians encouraged more immigration from Ireland, often by writing letters home and urging loved ones to join them in America. Further, power brokers looked to set up more official channels of migration. Arthur Dobbs, for example, was a wealthy landlord from county Antrim who left Ireland and became the governor of North Carolina. Once established in his office, he worked to make it easier and more profitable for Ulster migrants to settle in North Carolina. Over the course of the century, the manner in which Irish migrants, of whatever cultural background, came to America changed. The earliest migrants were likely to come as indentured servants, to work on an estate for a number of years, and then be granted the freedom to claim and work their own land. By the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, however, most migrants were transatlantic-fare-paying, independent individuals or families. According to some historians, the mode of immigration had moved from “early modern” to “modern.”37 Also over the course of this century, Ulster Presbyterian immigrants became legendary in American history, and – even if often overmythologized and romanticized as the heroic “Scotch-Irish” – they helped to make America what it is today. They brought with them the knowledge of how to make whiskey, and their descendants still provide us with some of the best

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of American whiskeys (as well as the tradition of making moonshine whiskey); they brought with them the music that fermented in the Appalachians into a distinctive American form of music called bluegrass. By no means all, but apparently many were whiskey-drinking, leather-stockinged, rifle-bearing, and Bible-toting backwoodsmen of the Davy Crockett type. Several Presbyterian ministers, most notably the Reverend John Elder (known as the fighting parson), are said to have preached to their backwoods congregants with a loaded rifle leaned against the pulpit. Yet, during the eighteenth century, many Ulster migrants gradually left their Presbyterian denomination. In part, this “declension” stemmed from a scarcity of Presbyterian ministers on the frontier because of the denominational requirement that a Presbyterian minister have a university education or its equivalent. Further, the structural characteristic of the Presbyterian religious polity – which, though based on congregational units, nevertheless had a hierarchical aspect in synodical government – was not as swiftly adaptive to frontier conditions as were the Methodist and especially the Baptist, faiths. It is fair to suggest that those two denominations owed much of their success in colonial America to Presbyterian immigration.38 By the time of the American Revolution, the Ulster community in America was spread throughout the colonies, but was most commonly found from Pennsylvania southwards. And although they did not all support the American cause, the vast majority seems to have done so. Many Irish immigrants from Ulster, and especially the most recent arrivals, were merely engaged in a continuation of an older fight. Historian Peter Brooke considered that, in migrating to America, Irish Presbyterians “were exchanging a situation in which their ambitions were cramped for one in which opportunities appeared to be boundless. [In Ulster] they had been virtually excluded from politics, they were living under and required to support an alien church establishment, and in many cases, especially in the period immediately preceding the American Revolution, they had been engaged in intense agrarian warfare to establish rights as tenants in opposition to their landlords.”39 Many of the most recent migrants would have been victims of the Earl of Donegall’s massive clearance of his Ulster tenants and were thus very willing to fight against a government which had allowed for their mistreatment in Ireland. In fact, some have surmised that the “rebel” army was made up of a significant amount of Lord Donegall’s own former tenants.40 So heavily were Irish Presbyterian immigrants involved in the

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conflict that one British general testified that half of the rebel army was from Ireland,41 and another officer declared, “Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian rebellion.”42

(5) There was a lull in migration from Ireland to America during the years of the American Revolution, but as soon as the fighting was over it rampedup to unprecedented levels. Not only did transatlantic movement from Ulster increase, but migration from the rest of Ireland began to swell to significant levels. According to Maldwyn Jones, Irish immigration numbers between the years from 1783 to 1815 – the years between the end of the American Revolutionary War and the end of the Napoleonic wars – equaled his estimated total of Ulster immigration from 1725–75. Jones estimated that 250,000 Ulster migrants made it to the Thirteen Colonies in the fifty years from 1725–75 and that another 250,000 migrants moved to the United States in the thirty-four years between 1783 and 1815.43 That is a marked jump. Earlier, I emphasized that segregating Ulster Scots migration and Irish Catholic movement to the American colonies into two sharply separate periods of time (conventionally, the break occurs sometime in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries44) is a mistake. Both sorts of persons were represented from the earliest days to the late 1920s (when our discussion stops). However, in the early federal period, Catholic migration, initially from the more economically advanced portions of Leinster and Munster, grew, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of overall Irish migration. This Catholic growth is apt to mask the fact, mentioned above, that Irish Presbyterian migration actually was increasing in the immediate post-Revolutionary era. So, one observes an interesting, but quite slow, change in the overall flow pattern. Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin estimate that in 1800 around two-thirds of all the migrants from Ireland to the United States were still Ulster Presbyterians.45 However, by 1825 Catholics had become the majority.46 While immigrants from Ireland immediately before and immediately after the American Revolution were not markedly different, by the 1790s changes in Ireland had made some significant alterations in the general

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character of the Irish migrants. Not only were there more Catholic migrants coming from provinces of Ireland other than Ulster – a fact which cannot have helped but to have distinguished them from the earlier, mainly Ulster migrants – but by the 1790s a type of political radical was arriving on American shores from Ulster and from the rest of Ireland, too. They were republicans, many of whom were forced to flee Ireland for their lives in either the build-up to or aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen. A secret society, the United Irishmen, adopted the ideals of both the American and French Revolutions, and under the sway of romantic idealists like Wolfe Tone, dreamed of uniting in revolt Test-Act-crippled Irish Presbyterians and Penal-Law-thwarted Irish Catholics against a common British oppressor. In 1798 they rose in rebellion, but the rising was doomed from the start. For a number of reasons, there was no single, concentrated, and coordinated uprising of the United Irishmen and their Catholic allies, known as the Defenders. Instead, geographically and chronologically separate risings occurred throughout Ireland’s rebellion of 1798. The rising in counties Down and Antrim was “very much a Presbyterian affair,”47 while the one in county Wexford descended into little more than the massacre of local Protestants by local Catholics.48 The culmination of thirty years of political agitation, the 1798 Rising resulted in a sectarian nightmare rather than the nonsectarian utopia of which so many had dreamed. An estimated thirty thousand people, the majority rebels, were killed in that one, single year.49 Undoubtedly, this nightmare affected the nature of the emigrants fleeing from it. They tended to be antimonarchical, antielitist republicans, and therefore on arrival they supported the ideals of Jefferson and the Antifederalists. The United States’ government under the Adams administration was engaged in a quasi-war with France and was not at all pleased with the large influx of Irish, republican, political refugees who supported the ideals of the French Revolution. In 1798, the administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts which were designed to limit the “damage” that new immigrants could do. The acts changed the naturalization period from five to fourteen years and authorized the president to expel any immigrant he deemed dangerous. Not surprisingly, journalists sympathetic to the Federalist party portrayed the new immigrants as dangerous, scheming revolutionaries. In particular, the new republicans were said to insidiously position themselves within the education system, enabling them to pass on

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their radical ideals and beliefs. The Anglo-American journalist, William Cobbet, speaking of Irish political exiles forced to America in the 1790s, wrote, “These miscreants, not by their superior knowledge but by their superior impudence, get admission into almost every country school that they fix their eyes upon … Thus, one way or the other, almost every part of Pennsylvania is more or less stocked with their lousy-looking breed and their infamous principles.”50 Despite the journalistic fulminations against post-1798 republican immigrants, they seem to have turned the tide in favour of Jefferson and to have helped to build the strong sense of Anglophobia that characterized the first decades of the nineteenth century in the United States.51 They also laid the foundations for the Irish American nationalism that has so strongly characterized segments of the Irish American community from the turn of the nineteenth century up to the present day. Jefferson, for his part, became close with a number of the newly arrived radicals, including the United Irishman, the Reverend John Glendy, who thanks to his close connection with Jefferson, eventually became the chaplain of the United States’ Congress.52

(6) The years from 1815–45 are legitimately considered a boundaried period as far as Irish migration to the United States is concerned, beginning with the opening of reasonably clear ocean passages from the end of the Napoleonic Wars and running up to the eve of the Great Famine. During this period, the Catholic proportion became more and more predominant (a majority, probably from 1825), but, crucially, the total flow increased and thus the absolute numbers of persons in each of the main cultural groups was increasing. The social composition of the emigrants cannot be precisely stated, but transoceanic travel required a fair degree of funds, particularly if entire families moved. Small to moderate farmers made up a significant portion of the emigrant flow; the other significant component was composed of unmarried men and women, healthy and able to chance fortune in a new land. The pre-Famine migration was not primarily a movement of the destitute, but of the working poor and the middling classes. It was during these years – between 1815 and 1845 – that Ireland became a country of mass migration, not after the destruction of the Great Famine. A rough estimate is that approximately one million persons left Ireland in that period for overseas

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destinations.53 This was facilitated by the emergence of Liverpool as the major transatlantic emigrant gateway. While ports such as Belfast, Derry, Dublin, Sligo, and Cork continued to run direct emigrant passages to North America, by 1830 most Irish ports were linked by steamship to Liverpool, where, largely because of the volume of outgoing North American migrants, the price of passage to America was far cheaper than direct passages from Irish ports. Access to Liverpool was easy, passage was cheap, and emigration grew. By 1815, Ireland was sending migrants all over the English-speaking world and to some non-English speaking areas as well. Hence, at this point a recognition of the global pattern of Irish migration is a necessary perspective. First, although the history of the Irish diaspora is still (somewhat misleadingly) presented as the history of migration to the United States writ large, in the period 1815–45, the primary destination of choice was British North America. And from 1920 onwards, the first choice of emigration destinations for the Irish was Great Britain. Secondly, a complication arises concerning the migration to North America in the half century before the Famine, composed as it was of persons in transport to British North America and to the United States. Although the primary destination for most individuals was a port in British North America, there is good evidence that a secondary destination was a cross-border move to the United States. (And, to complicate things further, a smaller, but strong counter-stream ran from New York and Philadelphia to long-term settlement north of the border.) Given the fluidity of migration between the United States and British North America, at some moments it is best to consider the transatlantic movement as a single North American flow. This has the advantage not only of improved descriptive accuracy, but of allowing empirical tests of migrant adaptability which are made possible by Canadian data sets that are considerably deeper and more accurate than those available for the United States in the same period. The downside is an additional workload for scholars. Unless historians of Irish migration to the United States know the Canadian data set well, they do not understand the full meaning of the information on the United States.54 From the mid-1830s up to the eve of the Famine, it is likely that the majority (perhaps as high as three-quarters of the North American flow) eventually settled in the United States.55 It was the United States that had captured the hopes of many Irish, particularly western Catholics from poor

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and Irish-speaking Connaught, who now began to make up a substantial portion of the migration (although it now seems clear that they were not the majority).56 Letters and remittances, returned émigrés wearing gold watches, stories of built fortune, and even glory garnered – all of these had helped to create an idea of the United States that was simply unrealistic. It was a place of caisleáin óir, “castles of gold.” There is no wonder, then, that many Irish were willing to take the cheaper passage to British North America and Canada and then move the relatively short distance south to the United States, which one Irishman described as a country of “fine streets and great high houses, some of them so tall that they scratched the sky; gold and silver out on the ditches, and nothing to do but to gather it.”57 Keeping in mind the wider perspective of the North American flow of Irish migrants, one must recognize what we do not know with any precision: the actual number who settled in the United States at any time before mid-nineteenth century; and, crucially, we do not know at any time in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries the actual religious composition of persons of Irish birth or of multigenerational ethnicity. The first hole in our knowledge is the result of the American census, which did not ask a nativity question before the Great Famine, and thus we have no really reliable pre-Famine baseline. A much greater handicap is that because of Article 20 of the Constitution of the United States, as juridically interpreted, the government has been forbidden in its enumerations of its population to collect any direct (that is personal) information on religious preferences. In fact, the United States is the only major advanced country to refuse collection of this most central of all pieces of cultural information, and its absence is particularly limiting in regard to the history of the Irish migrants and their descendants.58 To some degree, historians can escape from this darkened corner of diasporic history by engaging the concept of the single North American flow. On economic and educational levels, the Irish migrants who settled in British North America or (later, Canada) were little different from the migrants who settled in the United States. The Canadian data can be ignored only through apodictic assumptions and unconscious prejudice: such as magisterially inaccurate assertions that settling under the Crown made the Canadian settlers somehow a totally different set of human beings from the settlers in the United States. The fact that the Ontarian, British North American, and later Canadian data are some of the best in the world becomes very meaningful. The Canadian data are

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crucial for the entire history of the Irish diaspora, considered as a worldwide phenomenon, because the Great Famine and the migration that followed it was so staggering that it has shaped the memory and thus the “history” of all immigration from Ireland to the United States. The Canadian data can help us to set straight some of the myths surrounding Irish migration, specifically regarding the nature of Irish migrants themselves to the nineteenth-century United States. Appropriate usage of the Canadian data requires one mental prerequisite: the halting of the segregating mentality that cuts the history of the Irish diaspora into either unrelated or incompatible tranches of human history. And that holds when approaching the historical situation in the United States. So, before turning to the Famine and the migration that followed it, an episode in the city of Philadelphia in 1844 is worth paying attention to, for it provides a snapshot of the Irish immigrant community in one of the United States’ greatest port cities on the very eve of the Great Famine. Here we use a pamphlet, concerned with condemning the sectarian and xenophobic behaviour of Philadelphians during the nativist riots in that city in May 1844, as a tiny aperture that provides a sharp picture. Philadelphia was the main port for Presbyterian migration throughout the nineteenth century and a major one for Irish immigrants of all types. The author of the piece concerning the riots remains anonymous, but identifies himself as a Protestant and third-generation Philadelphian. Significantly, he objects to “Irishness” being equated with Catholicism. He points out the irony in the activities and rhetoric of the nativist party that stirred up the riot. To their constant warnings and vituperations against “the Irish,” and “the degraded Irish Papists,” he writes, “Are there no Protestant Irish amongst us? Yet, not a word is said against them.” Obviously, plenty of Irish Protestants were known by all to be around, otherwise the author’s rhetorical question would have been meaningless and ineffective. He also points out that, “if none but Native Americans are to constitute the [nativist] party, how is it, that hordes of Irish Protestants have attended their meetings, and have been welcomed with joy by these saviours of their country!”59 According to the traditional historical view, Irish Catholic and Protestant immigrants would have been separated from each other. Protestant migrants, supposedly, would have been a rarity at this late date and if they did immigrate, they would have struck out for rural America. They also should not be in urban areas, where the Catholics were stuck in their slums, and

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there definitely should not be “hordes” of them. The author relates that in their denunciations of Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants won for themselves immunity from the persecutions of the xenophobic, nativist party, but the author finds this perplexing for the Irish Protestant immigrants, “foreigners as they are, [are] about as good and as bad as Irish Catholics” – something which also goes against the traditional view of Protestant and Catholic Irish immigrants. But indeed, Irish Catholic immigrants and Irish Protestant immigrants seem to have been very much alike in their material lives in 1844 Philadelphia, for the writer of the pamphlet tells us that the Irish – both Catholic and Protestant – lived mainly in the western section of the Kensington district of Philadelphia. This is a very interesting and somewhat surprising bit of information. Most histories of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century United States emphasize the penury of Irish Catholic immigrants and the relative wealth of Irish Protestant immigrants. But, if both groups were generally known to be living in the same section of town, it is highly probable that both groups were at least comparable economically, and that on a fundamental economic level, they also shared a similar experience of immigration: definitely not identical, but similar. Nevertheless, although they had similar socio-economic situations, Protestants and Catholics, we are told, brought with them from “the Old Country” an implacable hatred for each other. However, this hatred, the author says, is not only related to religious differences (which he grants is the main cause), but was also related to, “strikes for prices amongst the Irish handloom weavers.”60 This follows, one infers, from both Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant immigrants in Philadelphia being active in the weaving industry – a skill they almost certainly brought with them. In Ireland, both Catholics and Protestants were heavily involved in the weaving of linen in the Irish province of Ulster and also in northern Leinster – areas also long associated with sectarianism. And as a group, the weavers had a high propensity for migration, a characteristic that followed from their being one of the occupations among the working classes that combined a high degree of literacy with sufficient means to afford self-paid transatlantic fares. Thus, from this one intriguing pamphlet, we learn that on the eve of the Great Famine, at least in Philadelphia, broad swatches of Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant immigrants lived very similarly upon arrival – the Irish Protestants “about as good and as bad as the Irish Catholics,”61 even if their reception by the nativist party seems to have been

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vastly different. Yet, because of the patchy state of the data – or indeed their nonexistence in some cases – we can never know the overall character of Irish settlement in the United States during the nineteenth century using sources from the United States. Moreover, the Great Famine did hit, and it changed utterly the Irish homeland, the nature of out-migration, the folk-memory of what emigration meant, and ultimately the historiography of all these changes.

(7) The appearance in Ireland of phytopthora infestans, the “potato blight,” in the fall of 1845, was a harbinger of death. Panic hit, and the Irish moved to emigrate as if jolted by the shock of death’s grisly face staring at them through their own cottage windows – seventy-five thousand emigrated from Ireland in that year alone, more than in any prior year.62 By the end of the following year, another 100,000 or more had fled.63 In 1847, the worst year of Famine deaths, 214,000 left Ireland for North America alone, and the outgoing numbers did not finally peak until 1852, when 368,764 people emigrated. The standard way of estimating the direct effect of the Great Famine has been to consider the inferred population of 1845 and the enumerated population of 1851 to bracket the period. This slightly extends the time of the direct impact beyond the years of crop failure, but not so much as to distort the picture. (As for the indirect impact of the Famine, it continued until the mid-1960s when the Republic of Ireland showed the first annual increase in population since 1845.) During the period 1845–51, Ireland lost a total of 2.3 million human beings, this being a remarkable 27 percent of the country’s population. The most respected investigations have suggested that between one million and 1.1 million died from Famine causes – meaning in excess of the normal deaths that would have occurred in the period. And out-migration was 1.1–1.2 million persons.64 The preexisting streams of worldwide Irish migration were now raging torrents, although the pattern shifted slightly: British North America remained a major destination, but the United States became unambiguously the preferred receiving port. In the horrid year of 1847 (“Black ’47” as it has come to be known), direct routes from Liverpool to American ports, and to New York City in particular, became the dominant paths of the Famine migration.65

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The image of the “coffin ship” has become a symbol of all Irish migration, although it seems that the horror of such passages was not typical of migration between 1845 and 1851. By 1846 there was a panic to leave Ireland, and in the midst of that famine- and death-driven hysteria, many made the decision to cross the Atlantic outside of what was generally known as the “emigration season,” the period from spring to early fall. Crossing the Atlantic outside of these months made the passage especially bitter, and even lethal to many in weakened conditions before embarkation. The risk of winter storms was substantial, and because older vessels were pressed into duty to meet the increased demand for emigrant passages, going to the bottom was a real danger. Dampness, cold, tossing seas, and cramped quarters all contributed to an unhealthy atmosphere in which dysentery and typhus thrived, and many died in their humiliating, unholy clutch. It is the vividness of these gruesome maritime deaths, more than their actual numbers, which is etched upon both the folk memory and much of the later historiography. Robert Scally aptly summarizes the situation: “The miserable epic of the Atlantic crossing in these years has been told so often and well that it hardly seems necessary to recount its dreadful details … the ‘coffin ship’ stands as the central panel of the famine triptych, depicting bondage and fever in the steerage, wailing children and mothers’ pleas from the darkness below decks, heartless captains and brutal crews, shipwreck, pestilence, and burial at sea.”66 The reality is, however, that the “coffin ship” was not typical. Most migrants did make the crossing to North America alive. The worst incidence of ship-borne death was in 1847 and held along the poorly regulated route to British North America: 20 percent. After 1847, the migration went overwhelmingly to the United States, where the overall death-duringpassage rate was 2 percent.67 Even this is a tragic number, but it was not atypical of the risk associated with midcentury migration from any country in Europe to North America. The Irish death rate on ships leaving Irish ports in 1847–48 was significantly lower than on German ships bound for New York.”68 While not as grim as it has been remembered, the crossing was dreadful nonetheless, and the winter passages, especially, made for not only a difficult crossing, but a difficult time upon arrival. Thus, in Quebec City, newspapers warned that Irish immigrants arriving in the winter would have little alternative to begging because the winter cold practically closed down all avenues for employment. In New York, the president of the “emigration

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society” warned that those who arrived in the winter would “only bring misery on themselves and a heavy tax” upon the cities which had to help care for them.69 Witnesses in North America frequently described the Famine migrants as the “dregs of humanity,” and waxed long in newspaper articles about their “universally wretched appearance after long, often disease-ridden voyages.”70 Despite their physical appearance upon arrival, and in their first months in the New World, overall the migrants of the Famine era were largely no better and no worse than their immediate predecessors. Middling farmers, craftsmen, linen workers, and entrepreneurs continued to make up a sizeable portion of the migration cohort. On the other hand, the greater portion of the poorest emigrants from Ireland were forced to take the cheapest option: the cattle boat to England or Scotland wherein most were caught in an inescapable poverty trap.71 Both popularly and academically, the Great Famine has long been seen as the most significant historical event for the Irish in the United States. The memory of the horror of Famine events, when combined with the thinness of American census data and immigration records for the period, has allowed narrative to shoulder aside analysis and evocation to displace verifiable depiction. This was almost inevitable in folk memory and in historical writing of the first and second generation after the massive trauma. Actually, it would have been surprising if the post-Famine migration from Ireland was not in the early generations written with the Great Famine itself being the ur-cause, and pain and victimization being its leitmotif. Slowly, the historiography is coming to terms with the recognition that from the 1850s to the 1960s something more than Famine-trauma was involved in Irish out-migration: the integration of Ireland into the world of modern capitalism, with all that implied. The central point in the present discussion, however, is that the trauma of the Great Famine has become a large distorting lens concerning the character of the Irish diasporic movements that occurred before the Famine. The pre-Famine historiography is massive – several thousand articles, monographs, and published lectures – and I have not here pointed to specific items, because one does not wish to particularize a point that is general in nature. One is not creating a straw man in suggesting that very few studies of pre-Famine Irish migration show an authorial ability to prescind knowledge of the Famine. Given that the Famine was not inevitable – “the

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role of sheer bad luck is important” in the courageous reading of Cormac Ó Gráda72 – but if one believes, however unconsciously, that the Famine was inevitable, then historical events of the pre-Famine era become nothing but a prolegomenon to the horrific tragedy. This wipes out complexities, such as those introduced by the Irish Presbyterian migrations. Moreover, such an historiographical practice obscures the pivotal fact that even without the Famine, a massive Irish diaspora was in train by the mid-1830s and almost certainly would have continued throughout the nineteenth century. The tramlines were there well before the Famine, and the outflow would have followed them in any case. Thus, as the professional scholarly historiography of the Irish diaspora develops, it is necessary simultaneously to recognize the import of the Great Famine and to decentre it. This is to say: recognize the reality of the popular diasporic consciousness, but be skeptical of embracing it as the default position of scholarly work.

9

Narratives of Home: Diaspora Formations among the Indian Indentured Labourers Amitava Chowdhury

introduction: diaspora as “becoming” Toward the end of the last century, when some theorists and commentators were quick to declare the death of the nation,1 the concept of diaspora started gaining prominence as a metaphor of belonging among global migrant communities in an increasingly interconnected world.2 Such a metaphor and the promise of lateral and simultaneous allegiance received a rude shock in the wake of the new global politics in the last decade, partly as a response to the dastardly destruction of the New York twin towers. Consequently, over the last ten years, on the one hand, increasing attention to border control and anti-immigration sentiments have consolidated nationalist thoughts, and, on the other hand, have weakened the promise of multiple belongings embedded in the concept of diaspora.3 Thus, in recent years, although diasporic claims have continued unabated, the purchase of the concept of diaspora has been challenged on multiple registers. Part of this challenge comes from the fluidity of belonging that diasporas by definition imply, which seem to thwart the national imaginary in an age of heightened nationalism.4 It is not that diasporans do not belong. Rather they espouse at least three levels of allegiance: a sense of belonging to the adopted home; memory of and belonging to what has always been described as the “original homeland”; and a sense of correspondence with the peculiarities that a particular diaspora represents.5 These multiple registers of belongings confound, contradict, and even resist the prescriptive stronghold of singular national identities.

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Curiously, the peculiar and reinvigorated turn to nationalism in the twenty-first century has only served to proliferate diasporic claims of disparate groups, and as if to exercise a voice of resistance, claims of new diasporas keep appearing very frequently.6 In this state of affairs, just as the new global politics threaten the ambit and ambition of diasporas, the burgeoning roster of diasporas pose an altogether different challenge. As new diasporas keep appearing, and the old ones multiply in tandem, the explanatory power of the original concept risks losing any coherent meaning.7 The exponentially large and commodious interpretation of the concept has pushed diaspora studies away from its central promise of going beyond the inflexible confines of ethnicity, citizenship, and immigration. Hedged between these two challenges – one conceptual and the other socio-political and experiential – the academic concept of diaspora now more than ever requires urgent renewal and repair. Diaspora research, more often than not, accepts diasporas as accomplished facts and as actual entities.8 Consequently, the literature on diasporas, in most cases, looks at diasporas ex post facto, and unsurprisingly the field is largely dominated by the disciplines of sociology, political science, and anthropology. I contend that instead of relying on certain normative discourses borrowed from the social sciences – a consequence of looking at diasporas after the fact – the meaning and promise of diasporas can perhaps be best appreciated by turning to historical formative processes. The process of “becoming” a diaspora, in this reading, sheds more light on the meaning of “being” in a diaspora. An historical perspective in diaspora studies can only serve to enhance its conceptual stability. I plan to engage in this exercise of reassessing this once promising and increasingly capacious term by offering vignettes of the case of the Indian labour diaspora – the diaspora formed of the descendants of Indian indentured labourers – in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Instead of asking the meaning of being “Indian” in the diaspora – and thus, reifying the diasporas as a fixed entity – I want to ask: How did the indentured labourers become Indians? Meditations on this question will also help in clarifying the meaning and scope of the larger global Indian diaspora, of which the labour diaspora is at best only a part (and, at worst, a separate formation). Although empirically this chapter is based in the sugar plantations of the southwestern Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, it is my hope that the larger reflections offered here would resonate with diasporic anxieties in other global instances.

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genealogy of normative discourse: geography and essentialism In the nineteenth century, when slavery as an institution was abolished in the British Empire, and it seemed increasingly difficult to attract the freed Africans to remain in or return to the plantations, alternative labour arrangements were made. Madhavi Kale argues that a scheme of “imperial reallocation of labor” depressed African wages in the plantations and fabricated a need for labour emigration.9 Indentured Indian labourers became the predominant workers in the sugar plantations globally. This history of Indian indentured labour in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went through a number of phases,10 and it is clear that in the initial phase of indenture, from its inception to the late 1840s, the system was in a state of disarray. In this early stage, a handful of labourers from India in different colonial plantations failed to form coherent communities with any distinguishable overriding group identity.11 Over time, however, and with the increasing flow of indentured labourers, the emigrants from India in their adopted home in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean formed separate communities, and in several locations gradually took on an Indian identity.12 This, in the nineteenth-century context, is an oddity, because the emigrating labourers did not espouse any supraregional identity while still in India and traditionally identified with subnational, regional, and castebased identities.13 The emergence of an overarching Indian identity in place of locally defined identities needs to be historically explored, but what is equally intriguing is that the descendants of Indian indentured labourers in the erstwhile plantation colonies and the more recent South Asian migrants – mostly educated immigrants in the industrialized nations – came to be clustered together as part of a larger “global Indian diaspora” in the latter part of the twentieth century. This is striking because the two streams of migrants – the indentured labourers from British India and skilled Indians from the independent Indian nation-state – embodied distinct, separate, and mutually exclusive histories and trajectories. Their simultaneous and unquestioned inclusion in the global Indian diaspora, both in the academe and more plainly in the public sphere, therefore, reveals certain structural peculiarities and proclivities in the way diasporas are imagined and analyzed, and calls for a reassessment of the concept of diaspora. If the de-

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scendants of the Indian indentured labourers and the latter train of South Asians are uncritically assembled under the same canopy, simply because of ancestral ties to a geographical (later, political) entity, then the concept of diaspora is essentially reduced to a geographical moniker, and diasporas become the playground of reified and elusive cultural traits.14 To be clear, it is not my intention to argue that the Indian labour diaspora should not be considered a part of the global Indian diaspora; rather I wish to call for a critical reflection on the processes that helped to include it in the larger global diaspora. By momentarily separating the two train of migrants – as Vijay Mishra has done by naming the first the “diaspora of the old,” and the second as the “diaspora of the new” – and by interrogating the history of diasporic claims of the first, we might be able to understand better how some diasporas are formed, and in the process, reveal some of the structural and conceptual problems that still pervade the field.15 This, in turn, we can hope, will help renew the explanatory purchase of the concept of diaspora. The uncritical inclusion of former indentured communities in the global Indian diaspora stems from two related conceptual scaffoldings that characterize the field of diaspora studies. The first considers geographical origin to be the primary determinant of diaspora formation. In the case of the Indian labour diaspora, the claim is that the diasporic Indians are Indians because of their original geographical origin, which is translated as a geographical identity. In this stream of thought, therefore, as Colin Palmer once quipped, the entire humanity is part of the African diaspora, and then, of course, the concept of diaspora loses all meaning and explanatory power.16 What I imply here – contrary to the older literature and a significant portion of the new literature on diasporas – is that something apart from the mere geographical fact should be present for a diaspora to form. This is so because not every train of migration results in diaspora formation, and migrants from one group sometimes end up being a part of a different diaspora.17 Thus, dispersion is necessary but not sufficient for diasporas to emerge and persist. In this vein, Rogers Brubaker’s recent perceptive formulation on diasporas is apposite: “I want to argue that we should think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim … It does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it.”18 Similarly, I wish to argue that the indentured labour diaspora(s) can be conceptualized as a part of the global Indian diaspora if it claims to be so, and if it practices that identity, and not merely

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because their ancestors migrated from India. The larger question, then, is how did the indentured labour communities come to claim a global Indian diasporic identity? Migration is an essential part of diaspora formation, but that alone does not satisfactorily explain diasporic emergence. One must turn to history to seek insight into such processes. Closely connected with this geographically determined destiny, the second of the two conceptual pillars that I mentioned above is a discourse of essentialism that pervades diaspora-talk, in practice and academic analysis. Diasporas, in this imagination, are held together not only by an immutable geographical connection, but also by becoming the arena of a reified culture, representative of the original geography. In this thought, diasporans as Madhavi Kale notes, become reduced to “mere carriers of this reified culture.”19 Such reduction, of course, has a very long history, and can be traced back to early anthropological literature and the concomitant invention of culture and cultural continuity as the basis of identity in the twentieth century. For example, Melville Herskovits in one of the most important early classics on African-derived peoples in the Americas, The Myth of the Negro Past, made the claim that the New World African cultural formations made little sense without reference to the particular forms of cultural retentions of African past. Speaking of African funerary rites in the Americas, Herskovits writes, “not only many of the elements in its ritual but also its underlying motivations and its setting in the matrix of custom reflect an impressive retention of African cultural traits”;20 and, “retention manifested itself in a continuum from pure African carry-overs to behavior indistinguishable from that which characterizes the dominant culture of European derivation.”21 Herskovits’s views and his insistence on cultural retention came to influence a large body of literature on not only the African diaspora but also the Indian (labour) diaspora as well.22 In its early form, for example, Arthur and Juanita Niehoff, in a pioneering examination of East Indians in Trinidad, claimed that they were studying the community in a “labouratory” situation, where “the plasticity of Indian culture as indicated in its interaction with another culture” was being analyzed.23 Retentionist models of this kind – explaining cultural configurations and culture as the governing domain of diaspora formations – later on came to dominate the analytical field, and still determine the practice of diasporas. In this reading, therefore, diasporas become the “laboratory” of inherited, transported,

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and retained cultural practices. Discourses predicated on the twin pillars of geographical origins and cultural continuity uphold a notion of diaspora that is bounded, exclusive, impermeable, and fundamentally incompatible with other diasporic claims that prefer a provisional and fluid identarian position, and incorrigibly distance other ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, even in contexts where they coexist. In a different iteration, in the final decades of colonialism in Africa and African-derived colonies, major thinkers including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, and Frantz Fanon among others, espoused the claim (or, need) for the underlying, essential Africanity in Africa and all Africanderived communities in the New World.24 In the decades leading up to decolonization, anticolonial movements based on négritude and pan-African identities that searched for and claimed an essential “oneness” among the diasporic Africans, very often clashed with those that upheld an Indian identity in the erstwhile plantation colonies, thereby consolidating a permanent rift between the African-derived and the descendants of labourers from India. This, of course, obscures the long history of mutual exchanges, sharing, and cohabitation that marked plantation societies globally, but also occludes the history of biological and cultural mixing. The two communities – Africans and Indians – so starkly alienated during the anticolonial movement were now imagined to never have mixed in the past.25 Discourses of essentialism brought in a rhetoric of purity that now defined the practice of diasporas. Later, when diaspora-talk came in vogue in the 1990s, much of the analytical sphere on diasporas ignored the possibility of interaction, mixing, acculturation, assimilation, hybridity, and creolization, and implicitly endorsed essentialism, or remained oblivious of the critique of cultural purity and retention. While diaspora theorists spoke of displacement as the basis of diaspora formation, it was also the essentialized cultural core which survived displacement that formed the kernel of diasporas. Diaspora as an expression of cultural essentialism drawn from an irrevocable geographical derivation has a curious resemblance to an earlier model in cultural sociology. Writing in the 1940s, John S. Furnivall, in the context of Indonesia, Burma, and Singapore, described these societies as plural societies irreversibly altered as a consequence of colonialism.26 This model was subsequently refined and applied in the context of the British West Indies by Michael G. Smith in what has become the foundational iteration of the plural society model.27 Plural societies, in this scheme of

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thought, created as a consequence of colonial migrations, are predicated upon geographically derived unchanging cultural memes that keep different ethnic and cultural groups eternally distant and separated from each other. The plural society model was a product of its time, but nevertheless it did dominate historical and sociological understandings of colonial societies, especially plantation societies, for a generation. Early invocations of diaspora-talk, both in popular politics and the academy, were rooted in the same intellectual horizon that foregrounded cultural and geographical essentialism. In the early 1970s, cultural theory diverged from overt reductionism, in part with the arrival of Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica.28 Brathwaite recognizes four core sociocultural elements in Jamaica (and, by extension in the British Caribbean) that interacted to create a fundamentally new society, different from any of the constituent elements. These constituent elements are African, European, Amerindian, and East Indian. The dynamic creole society model stymied earlier articulations of essentialism embedded in the plural society model, but such antiessentialism did not necessarily percolate down to academic and real world understandings of diasporas.29 Indeed, diaspora and creolization have been seen as antonyms – an oppositional rendition that has reaffirmed essentialist tropes in diaspora theory. One notable outlier in this genealogy of purity and essence is, of course, Stuart Hall. In a highly influential treatise published in 1991, Hall reconciles the polar opposites of diaspora and mixedness. He writes: “The diaspora experience … is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a concept of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”30 It would appear that Hall’s appeal fell on deaf ears insofar as the larger arc of diasporic discourses is concerned, and diasporas continue to be imagined in the pluralist sense with a kernel of purity and essence embedded in their core. But even if that were not true, that is, even if we were to define, understand, and imagine diasporas as a concept and as a consciousness born of hybridity, how would we historically assess the emergence of such a phenomenon in specific and particular cases?

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While creolization and other articulations of hybridity capture the historical complexities of diasporas better than models based on purity and cultural essentialism, it still leaves out the question, “how is the diasporic hybridity historically produced?” How does creolization unfold differently in different colonial contexts, and how is the reality of mixing swept under the carpet, and in its place tropes of purity and cultural essence constructed? Such questions can perhaps be best answered by turning to historically specific processes and by diverting the focus away from culturally determined readings of diaspora.

reciprocal comparisons: between diaspora and liminality I have so far argued that the very notion of diaspora has, more often than not, been imagined as an entity born out of cultural continuity where geographical origin is the overriding determinant. In reality, people interact, converse, and cohabit with others who at least ostensibly belong to alien cultures and who have emanated from other geographies. The reality of mixedness, syncretization, and hybridity in language, religion, sartorial traditions, and miscegenation subvert the fundamental trope of purity and thus stand in opposition to the concept of diaspora. The question I want to ask is why do people claim purity even when they practice hybridity?31 How do diasporas emerge in a horizon of hybridity? In other words, how can we envision diasporas at the limit of hybridity? This question is particularly important in the case of Indian indentured plantation labourers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, where frequent mixing belied cultural persistence; or, perhaps it is particularly relevant in island communities where creolization and claims of purity transmogrify in unique articulations of diaspora.32 Diasporic consciousness was absent at the inception of indentured labour, since a heterogeneous group of emigrants devoid of any supraregional identity could hardly organize themselves under a unifying canopy. Uprooted from the original emigration zones, the condition of the Indian indentured labourers was decidedly unstable. A large section of the emigrating population was Hindu, and a small proportion was Muslim, but at least in the initial phase of indenture, substantial sections of the immigrants

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did not belong to any of the major religions of nineteenth- century India and were drawn from outside the folds of caste society. Furthermore, the absence of any religious infrastructure in the sugar colonies, at least in the first few decades of indentured immigration, made even those who previously practiced Hinduism or Islam marginally religious. Patrick Beaton noticed in 1850 in Mauritius that, “the Coolies can scarcely be said to have any religion.”33 Beaton claimed that the indentured labourers had morally deteriorated, and he blamed such a state of affairs on the absence of any religion among the labouring populations in Mauritius. The godless state of the immigrants described by Beaton is perhaps exaggerated to some extent, but that the unsettling forces of dislocation altered the immigrants’ spiritual universe is hardly in dispute.34 The labourers existed in a liminal state until fresh batches of immigrants gradually and eventually led to the formation of consolidated communities with opportunities to pursue their chosen religions. Over the nineteenth century, some of the colonies, especially Mauritius, Trinidad, and British Guiana received a continuous stream of immigrants from British India. I have argued elsewhere that a steady stream of immigrants from the late 1850s altered the demographic proportions in the receiving colonies leading to a critical mass of immigrant labourers who later on in the twentieth century claimed or subscribed to a unitary or singular nation-based identity drawn from India.35 On the one hand, the increasing number of immigrant labourers led to the recognition of their separate needs and rights by the colonial government, thus consolidating their emerging and evolving Indian identity; on the other hand, the existence of a large section of overseas communities inaugurated a new phase of constant exchanges between India and the overseas locations from the 1870s onwards. Thus was established a network of frequent exchanges between India and the colonies sustained by the continuous stream of indentured migration and occasional repatriation. While the two-way train of indentured migration provided the basic structure of such reciprocal exchanges, important additional impetus came from religious, cultural, and eventually nationalist missions. At the very basic level, fresh trains of migrants started emigrating with a consciousness of anticolonialism, particularly in the decades after the Great Indian Revolt of 1857.36 From the decade of 1880 onwards, the news of the early Indian nationalist thought started reaching the colonies in the

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wake of the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Indian nationalist consciousness became much more pronounced in the colonies in the early twentieth century with the establishment of a few ethnic presses. These newspapers, especially in Mauritius and Trinidad, started publishing articles on the nascent Indian nationalism unfurling in British India. On one hand, the news of the Indian national movement reached the colonies through the vehicle of the ethnic press; on the other hand, the Indian national political theater, in the shape of the Indian National Congress, made improvement of the condition of the Indian indentured labourers, and indeed the abolition of the system of indenture, as central items in the nationalist agenda. The two-way traffic of Indian nationalism led to the abolition of the system towards the close of the second decade of the twentieth century. In the same vein, the exchanges between India and the colonies through the medium of Indian nationalism brought the overseas migrants closer together. It can be said that a sense of global diasporic consciousness – or bilocation between the immediacy of the colonies and the distant homeland – emerged out of this sustained process of circulation and formations of exchange. People in the distant colonies in Mauritius, Trinidad, British Guiana, and Fiji recognized a common link, and their concerns became mutually intelligible. At the same time, the nationalist dimension affected other domains of life as the colonies attracted religious missionaries, schoolteachers, and other itinerants who would, eventually, bring India closer to the world of sugar plantations. In Mauritius, a colony that received more than 400,000 labourers, frequent exchanges of homeland orientation were most vibrant. In 1901, Mohandas Gandhi visited the island and observed both the plight and the promise of the indentured labourers.37 Shortly thereafter, Gandhi visited India to attend a meeting of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta, where he was able to enlist support for sending an Indian emissary to Mauritius. Six years later, Gandhi’s wish came to fruition in the shape of Manilal Doctor, a barrister trained in England.38 Manilal arrived in Mauritius in October 1907 with the purpose of improving the general conditions of the indentured labourers in the colony and to inculcate a sense of pride among the population. It is easy to discern that during the first year of his stay, Manilal was active in using legal means to bring social justice to the labouring class. Questions of the sanctity of religious practices (particularly, Hindu) reigned foremost in his agenda.39 But, in 1909, Manilal’s activities

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took a distinctly political turn when he started using the language of Indian nationalism in the realm of political activism. On 15 March 1909, the first issue of Manilal’s fortnightly paper, The Hindusthani, was published. The front page of the paper displayed the motto, “Liberty of Individuals, Fraternity of Man, Equality of Races.”40 An explicit political appeal for liberty and equality coopted the revolutionary language in the service of nationalism. In the first issue of the paper, Manilal wrote, “our paper does not favour any particular race, sect or people … We therefore call upon Hindus, Mussulmans, Parses, and Christians to join hands, and strive with unanimous effort for liberty, equality, and progress.”41 Circumventing sectarian differences was a necessary step for inaugurating a secular nationalist phase. The Hindusthani was trilingual and published articles in English, French, and Hindi, much of it written by Manilal himself. The articles attempted to develop a sense of pride in being Indian among the indentured population. To this end, articles on Indian mythology, folklore, religions, and music appeared frequently. Additionally, developments on the Indian political front, which was left tumultuous after the controversial Partition of Bengal Act of 1905, were regularly reported. Beyond the overt goal of bringing India closer to the colony, Manilal may have been moved by an unspoken goal that we can identify only in retrospect. For instance, the line immediately below the French revolutionary decree said, “Mauritius may be looked upon as a little India beyond the seas.”42 Thus, it is clear, that Manilal was trying to stake a claim or imagine Mauritius as an Indian territory, while at the same time working tirelessly to abolish the system of indenture and to spread the message of Indian nationalism. In July 1909, while making a deposition in front of the Royal Commission visiting Mauritius, Manilal suggested transferring Mauritius under the purview of the Viceroy of India. Such an arrangement, Manilal claimed, would in the long run save Mauritians from sugar tariffs and would eventually work out better for the planter class.43 Manilal’s actions in Mauritius, his work for social improvement, his attempts at enhancing awareness of Indian history, culture, and politics, and his political actions, ultimately served two purposes. On one hand, they enabled him to rally the indentured labourers under the common cause of nationalism, and on the other they allowed him to mobilize the

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early Indian nationalists towards framing a coherent movement against the system and infrastructure of indenture. It is largely through his actions, and in particular through the workings of his newspaper, that indentured labourers in Mauritius started subscribing to an overarching Indian identity. The multilocal reach of the Indian National Congress working through Manilal’s speeches, writings, and actions created a sense of nationalism and anticolonial resistance that ultimately contributed to the recasting of indentured Indians into a global diaspora. The frequent and sustained processes of homeland orientation played an important role in precipitating such an outcome. In a different horizon of a different hemisphere, the agents of exchange in the shape of religious, cultural, and nationalist missions never arrived. In contrast to Mauritius (and, Trinidad, British Guiana, and Fiji, for that matter), in Jamaica, the proportion of Indian population was far smaller. The critical mass necessary to make a colony attractive to the missionaries was never achieved. By the midtwentieth century, people of Indian heritage had been baptized, lost their language, intermarried with African-derived communities, and in short, had become integrated with the Africans. Therefore, the geographical fact of origin, genealogy, and ancestry did not play supreme. Rather, what turned the Indians in Jamaica into Africans were the situational peculiarities, historical context, colonial government policy, and the absence of the umbilical cord that the processes of constant exchanges with the homeland provide. The narratives of home, so vividly rekindled by Manilal Doctor in Mauritius, became increasingly distant before they all but disappeared, as they did in other smaller locales such as St Lucia, Nevis, and Antigua. The Indians in Jamaica lingered in a liminal state before being subsumed by the dominant identity of the host society. To return to the question I posed above, and developed even earlier in chapter 3, it seems that the logic of derivativeness, or a model of diaspora as dispersion would still include the Indo-Jamaicans within the fold of the global Indian diaspora, solely on the basis of a genetically determined head count. But the curious history of Jamaica, the realities of miscegenation, and the absence of reinforcing links render such head count to be meaningless. The prescriptive stronghold of the logic of diaspora by dispersion is turned on its head in the liminal zones of hybridity, forgetting, and in a world made possible through different choices and imagination. Unlike

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Mauritius, the census records in Jamaica did not have a separate category of “Indian.” Unlike Mauritius, Jamaica did not receive religious missionaries, such as the Sanatan Dharma organization, or the Arya Samaj. Unlike Mauritius, Jamaica did not receive immigrant schoolteachers who taught courses in Indian history, music, and mythology. Unlike Mauritius, Jamaica did not have a Manilal Doctor. In the absence of the historical, processual, contingent, and contextual details, the Indian immigrants in Jamaica did not practice Indian diaspora as a project. But, then, diaspora is a curious concept, and the invention of a project is a matter of choice, willingness, and enterprise. In the 1940s, fresh Indian migrants, who arrived in Jamaica outside the bounds of indentured labour, in what Mishra has called, “the diaspora of the new,” started clamoring for exclusive rights for the Indians. In this, they were able to rally together some who remembered their original arrival from India. While being an Indian did not mean anything to them in terms of their immediate past, now united under a political cause, they wanted to be just that. In order to become Indians under the rallying call of the newly arrived Indians in the middle of the twentieth century, the East Indian Progressive Society, founded in April 1940, requested the colonial government to reestablish the position of a Protector of Immigrants – an early official position that ensured sustenance of the system and the well-being of the indentured labourers. Without the artificial scaffolding of a Protector of Immigrants, put in place to protect the rights of the Indians, the latter had no hope of rising up as a separate people to join hands with a global diasporic call. The colonial government did not take too kindly to such an unusual request in such an inappropriate hour. The absurdity of reinventing an extinct scheme was reason enough to thwart any diasporic claims. In the absence of a critical mass of Indians on the island, the “diaspora of the new” failed to connect the ex-indentured population with a global diasporic imagination. The colonial authorities interpreted such late requests as awkward and inconvenient. In January 1942, the petition was put to rest in these words: “It is the Government’s policy to absorb them into the general community as rapidly as possible … the most effective means of doing this is I suppose to refuse to recognize that there are any special problems regarding the East Indians as a class and to insist that the various questions which

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do arise should be dealt with through the ordinary administrative and judicial channels … even a half-hearted revival of the distinctive post may keep alive any tendency towards East Indian nationalism.”44 Denied the chance of instituting a project to respond to the global call of diasporic consciousness, the Indo-Jamaicans remained in a liminal horizon, perhaps waiting for a future call of a different imagination.

conclusion In the past century, identarian meditations within and across diasporas have mainly followed either the language of cultural continuity, or of hybridity. Drawing from anthropological studies of African-derived societies in the New World, the perspective on cultural continuity, retention, and survival dominated explanations of diasporic diversity and homogeneity in the first half of the twentieth century. Such views increasingly fell out of vogue after the 1980s, when creolization as an explanatory paradigm started to take root in the humanities and social sciences. This chapter argues that while creolization seemingly subverts and transcends essentialism, it is nevertheless guilty of Afrocentrism and particularism and is characterized by what Theodor Adorno has elsewhere described as the, “iron grip of rigidity despite the ostentatious appearance of dynamism.”45 Instead of dwelling on culturalism and the many incarnations of cultural reification, the chapter finds it more profitable to turn to historical processes as a primary explanatory framework for diaspora formation. Building on an asymmetrical comparative study of Indian diasporas in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, we illustrate the importance of transnational and transoceanic history in revealing hemispheric dissonance in imperial policies and long-term sustained reciprocal relations between the homeland and the diaspora that contributed to disparate outcomes in diaspora formation. While empirically rooted in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, the standpoint on processual history, and the theoretical and methodological discernments of this study, transcend the immediate oceanic context and perhaps resonate with a broader relevance among global diasporic histories. It is to such questions that we turn now in the conclusion of the book.

CONCLUSION

Diaspora as Global History Amitava Chowdhury

a common cause The contributions to this volume have covered vast grounds both in time and space. We have explored the use of the term “diaspora” from the Babylonian Exile to its manifestation in cancer research published only very recently. Geographically, we have encompassed vast stretches of land in almost all continents across oceans and islands situated in the middle of the large oceanic systems. Does this mean that the term diaspora is exceedingly resilient, one that has survived the ravages of time; or is it not the case that the modern meaning of the term is often different compared to its original antiquarian connotation? What is it that makes the concept so capable and ingenious that it can be asked to perform such a mixture of tasks? How does one term capture such a diversity of human experience? Therefore, at the end of what has been a rather long excursion, let us try to search for epistemological commonalities among what has been said thus far. Drawn from such commonalities, let us explore the idea of diaspora history one more time. Diaspora, particularly as an historical concept, has important lessons to offer insofar as the units of analyses are concerned. Contrary to most historical studies produced globally over the last 150 years, diaspora is conspicuously rebellious in its engagement with the geographical limits of the nation-state. This, of course, has been a common denominator running across the chapters in this book. To state the obvious, diasporas exist in multiple locales in multiple host societies outside of the scope of a claimed

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homeland. Much has been said in the literature, especially beginning in 1991, that exile and diasporas are never to be confused. Earlier in this book, Donald Akenson traced the prehistory of such divergent formulations. Diasporas, by their very nature, real or imagined, as dispersion or as a conscious claim, transcend the boundaries of nation-states. It is fair to say that diasporas not only transcend the nation-state as a unit of analysis but, in reality, are not tied to any arbitrary geographical unit at all. We will see very soon why such a seemingly mundane observation does matter in historical scholarship. If one of the primary organizing principles of modern historiography, emanating from nineteenth-century romantic historical formulations, is the idea of progress, then diaspora as project formulated earlier in the book represents a critique of such linear, teleological formulations. In fact, the very idea of circulating networks of people and ideas – even without any notion of coercion, exploitation, dispossession, loss, and erasure that has been a staple of diaspora-talk – questions (and renders invalid) the very concept of an eventual rise of the nation-state as the normative and primary mode of belonging, and turns the idea of progress on its head. While the chapters of this book do not articulate a united protest against imperialism or coercion, they nevertheless offer a potent critique of the idea of progress by following the logic of circulation, transgression, and alternative modes of belonging. The idea that history does not have to follow the idea of progress becomes vivid in diasporic imaginaries. If the idea of the nation-state and the logic of progress put European powers at the center of historical agency, diasporic imaginations confront such readings of agency. This is, of course, true of diasporas formed of people from the erstwhile-colonized world, but is equally true of European migrants as well. Here, one must not confuse the European state apparatuses embodying the structure of the modern nation-state, grounded upon the logic of eternal progress, with the European migrants. They too lay outside of the logic of agency as progress and stymied the restrictive and normative formulations of the nation-state. This is not to say that diasporas reside outside of the realm of agency. However, the point is that diasporic agency or “diaspora as agency” practiced by the subjects of this book are contradictory constructions that complicate and render vacuous the dominant markers of historical agency embodied in the colonial/ imperial state and the formulas of empire.

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What are we to make of such realizations? Studying diasporas forces us to imagine alternative units of analyses; they ask us to imagine organizing schemes not centered on nineteenth-century post-Enlightenment ideals of progress; and, they help us to imagine the very meaning of historical agency in a new way. Cumulatively, they point towards the project of what we have to understand as global history. In the remainder of this chapter, let us explore the concept of diaspora as global history and the latter as a critique of post-Enlightenment historiography and the institutions of modernity, a critique the diasporans find to be so liberating.

diaspora as global history In the past two decades, there has been a sudden explosion of works on global history. An increasing number of academics in North America (and some parts of Europe and Asia) now identify themselves as global (or, world) historians. New courses and programs of study are routinely drawn up. Academic associations and new journals in the field keep appearing, and conferences on various aspects of global history are becoming increasingly popular. The American Historical Review regularly organizes forums on the meaning of global, world, or transnational history, and the American Historical Association has now elected practitioners of the field as presidents.1 In some sense, this is to be expected, because historians have always written and responded from within their own problem space, and it is hardly surprising that in the global electronic age we should imagine the past in a global frame. Nevertheless, in spite of the tremendous proliferation of global history practice, there is little consensus on the meaning and scope of the field, and it still lacks an intellectually coherent set of methodologies and an overarching theory that would set it apart from other genres and subfields of historical practice.2 First, we need to take stock, and a good place to begin, perhaps, would be to talk about terms. Does the term global history subsume other related terms, such as world history, transnational history, and even international history?3 Some scholars identify themselves as world historians more readily and resist other labels, while others feel that what they practice could be best conceptualized as global history. Still others favor transnational history.4 Much has been said about this, but I would still like to meditate on the distinction between global and world history before proceeding further.

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In 2005, during a brief meeting with a prominent historian in the field, I asked whether “world” history and “global” history could be used interchangeably, or whether they were fundamentally different. The said historian’s view at that time was that they were essentially the same – a matter of semantics without any real genealogical or epistemological distinction. Over the next several years, as I became more familiar with the field, it became increasingly apparent that the distinction was stark, and if it had not yet been clearly articulated, one needed to precisely do that. It seems that the term “world” can mean the whole world, but at the same time it also can connote a “world in its own.”5 In this reading, we can talk about the “Atlantic World,” or, the “Indian Ocean World,” or even, the “world of Mediterranean pirates.” Conceptually and experientially, the world implies a sufficiently integrated unit of analysis that is not divided or disrupted by the artifices of geopolitical entities. From an historical perspective, events and processes unfold in multiple scales. Sometimes they do so on a local scale, sometimes on a regional or national scale, and often in supraregional, hemispheric, or even global scales. The term “global,” on the other hand, immediately implies an encompassing whole, the entire planet – the blue planet seen from afar. It is no coincidence, therefore, that much of the globe-talk in academia and the public sphere catapulted only when the first pictures of our planet were taken from the moon by Apollo 11 in 1969 – showing a fragile blue globe complete and replete with life, purpose, and meaning.6 Incidentally, it was also around this time, or soon after, that diaspora became a popular analytical category and a potent metaphor. Just as global history frees us from arbitrary geopolitical units, such as the nation-state, diaspora too is grounded in a similar logic. Global history, I would argue, examines the past tout ensemble. In contrast, world history usually engages with smaller worlds, and only rarely with the larger World, that is, the globe.7 It is in this sense that diasporas are conceptualized as global histories in a schemata of colliding worlds. Similarly, to employ the concept of global history in relation to diasporas, one has to read the global as a synecdoche, as we have argued above. Here, I would like to offer an alternative to the different ways in which world and global histories are practiced, and argue that one of the central goals of such endeavours should be to not only trace historical processes beyond and across nation-states, but more fundamentally unravel the mutual production of structures of knowledge and the nation in the nineteenth

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century in the same horizon that saw the emergence of history as a professional discipline, especially in its Rankean incarnation.8 Interrogation of this horizon reveals the intricate manner in which the nation became intermeshed and interweaved with structures of knowledge at the very same time when national identity dislocated and dismantled plural heterogeneous identities and forged new ones.9 It is the same epoch that saw global dissemination of people in all corners of the world. What we now retrospectively consider to be a globe full of diasporas originating from nineteenth-century migrations (barring the Jewish Diaspora, of course), is a world that came into being precisely at the time that modern historiography came into practice, and the nation-state raised its head as if to come to terms with the unhappy anomalies in the shape of diasporas existing alongside other nonstate entities. The purpose of global history, in this reading, is to unravel such associations and expose how the nation and its accomplice have fundamentally influenced our sense of the past in the nineteenth century. Hence diasporas, in their formational stage, can only shed welcome light on such endeavours. A quick survey of the literature that constitutes the field indicates that beyond the semantic distinctions between world, global, transnational, and other cognate terms, there are significant differences in the way people have conceptualized the field’s genealogy and its epistemology. In some versions, and arguably the most popular and prevalent version in public pedagogy, world history is employed in the sense of a compendium. This, we may term, as the “world history as compendium” approach. Here, world history is a collection of its constituent parts, and in the fashion of a textbook sequentially covers all areas of the world. Drawing its inspiration from the ap World History program in American high schools, “the world history as compendium” approach includes everything under the sun, arranged chronologically often in the guise of thematic distributions. Such an approach has an interesting genealogy, and was once rather scandalously invoked in the call for membership of the World History Association that implied that world history teachers are faced with the difficulty of teaching “the whole history of the whole world.”10 Such compendium approaches are routinely met with equally astonishing naïveté in various claims and curiosities about the history of “something in world history.” One comes across enquiries on how to teach (and, write) “music in world history,” or, “warfare in world history,” or “salt in world history,” and, “cities in world history.” They often belong in the world of compendium

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approach because one is expected to sift through the corpus, collate isolated references to their search item, and then weave together a narrative that somehow connects and globally compares the practice of music, warfare, and cities, among numerous other possibilities. An older approach – one that is seen as the true genealogical origin of world history by many – has been in the area of cyclical metahistories. Starting with Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and reaching its full potential in William McNeill’s Rise of the West, cyclical metahistories have torn apart the rigidity of nation-centered approaches, and have posed a strong critique of Whiggish histories organized around the idea of perennial human progress. Until the 1990s, such metahistorical approaches were bludgeoned to extinction by the larger academe, but it is easy to see that they have left behind interesting insights into the meaning of world and global history.11 Some recent works have carried on this tradition.12 A more productive, and intellectually stable alternative is to look at “world history of a process.” The idea here is to rescue a historical process from imposed geographical confinements, and follow it as it travels far and wide. For example, one could choose to write about “world history of reggae music” and follow the formation, continuation, connection, and eventual comparison of its practice globally.13 Instead of remaining confined within the traditional unit of analysis – that is, the nation – “world history of a process” traces a process wherever it goes and subverts traditional analytical boundaries of the discipline. One could attempt a world history of sugar and quickly find out that the appropriate treatment of the subject would require eschewing traditional nation-state centric approaches.14 The key here is, of course, the question one asks of the data; and, the same subject, therefore, can also be framed in a regional or a larger frame. The history of sugar in the last 500 years, for example, does not have to encompass the entire globe, as we know it did not reach many areas of the world. Rather, the “world of sugar” is what constitutes the world here. In this respect, diaspora as a project, or process, or claim, follows the same logic and falls in cognate comradeship in its mutual geospatial transgressions.15 Still others have tried to tread a noble, but decisively challenging avenue, an alternative that I would label “world history as a process.” Here one tries to understand the history of the world as a process, which is entirely different from the compendium approach I described above. “World history as a process” diachronically traces the evolution of those processes that are only

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intelligible on a global scale.16 Such endeavours interrogate global patterns of planetary relevance that often find varied articulations in different local settings. Alternatively, others have worked on the idea of globalization, both as a long-term process and as a peculiarly late twentieth-century reality.17 Histories of globalization together with what I prefer to call “world history as a process” constitute the true domain of global history. It is only in this horizon that the world and the globe become synonymous. If we ignore the first of these approaches for the time being and concentrate on world history “of a process” and “as a process” and miscellaneous cyclical metahistories, then we immediately recognize that the plethora of works on global and world history that apparently have disparate approaches, nonetheless have certain interesting commonalities, mostly implicit but often explicit. Global history exposes the inadequacy of the nation-state as a unit of analysis for certain historical processes, and by the same token, allows for meaningful investigation of these processes on a wider scale. Fundamental to the entire enterprise of global history, therefore, is a critique of the nation as the frame of history. Furthermore, global history reveals non-European agents as critical actors in the past and moves away from those approaches that have been termed Eurocentric. By critically exposing the rationalizing agency of the nation-state as the sole claimant of sovereignty – a process that has historically undermined the sovereign claims of those who do not contribute to national myths and meanings – global history, similar to postcolonial approaches, recognizes the agency of non-Western actors. Contrary, to postcolonial approaches, however, global historians do not necessarily have to engage in postcolonial readings of colonial suppression, colonized defeat, and subaltern consciousness. This, of course, does not mean that one should abandon the study of the West in global (and, world) historical scholarship, which, unfortunately is the tendency of many self-acclaimed world historians. It simply means that global historians should critique Eurocentric approaches, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Moreover, global history unravels the way in which environmental forces and biological processes act as agents of change, and in this way opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary and indeed multidisciplinary research. And finally, global history reveals that progress in its Whiggish sense is an untenable organizing scheme for historians, and historical processes follow much more complicated and intricate pathways. Together, if we were to distill these pivotal characteristics of global history

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as a subfield into a terse manifesto, it can well be said that global history is a critique of post-Enlightenment historiography insofar as it relates to the idea of agency, progress, and national politics. This, as we have argued above, coincides with the domain of diasporic formulations. Bound up in the very process that they seek to explain, historians have been important accomplices in the project of the nation and nationalism. It is no wonder that Ernest Renan saw the danger in examining historical progress divorced from the nation when he argued, “that is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger for nationality.”18 Fortunately, for Renan, the progress of historical studies in his time and henceforth did not jeopardize the nation, and on the contrary served to strengthen it. It is the task of the global historian now to steer the course in a different way, and rescue the study of the past from the grips of the nation-state. Diaspora provides us with an attractive alternative.

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foreword See, in particular, Safran, “Diasporas,” 83–99, and Clifford, “Diasporas,” 302–38. See Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1–19. Akenson, “Introduction,” 27, this volume. Safran, this volume, 63. Akenson, this volume, 81. The readers will note that in this volume we have stayed away from direct engagement with questions of gender as well as religion and religions in the diaspora, or indeed religious diasporas. We feel that the potential insight to be gained from exploring such terrains would justify separate volumes. That remains as a task for the future.

introduction 1 Encyclopaedia Juadica, 1st and 2nd eds.; Menahem Stern, “Diaspora,” with editor’s prologue. The extremely contested relationship between Israelis and members of the Jewish Diaspora is shrewdly surveyed in Sheffer, “Jewish Diaspora,” 1–35. 2 Three textual points are here revealing. (1) The fiat that prefaces the “Diaspora” article in the 1972 edition is marked as being written by the editors. The much longer scholarly article is by Menahem Stern, Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and one can only speculate why he would permit the editorial dicta to sit over his name. (2) The fact that the introductory halachah was

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Notes to Pages 4–8 not actually by Professor Stern is erased from the second edition of 2007. The entire article, including the introduction, is ascribed to him. (3) Everything else in the two editions is the same: which is to say that the necessity of having a semiofficial rebuke to the Jewish Diaspora still was operative. Incidentally, the blurred character of the timeline when diaspora is an approved descriptor – essentially it was here used as a residual category to refer to eras in which galut was not operative – is underlined when one encounters the definition of “galut” in the same encyclopedia. The article by Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, Israeli supreme court justice, bows before the semistate definition that “the residence of a great number of members of a nation, even the majority, outside their homeland is not definable as galut so long as the homeland remains in that nation’s possession.” He defines the galut as lasting from the Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce to the founding of the modern Jewish state. Kelleher, “Irish Genealogies,” 142. The Oxford English Dictionary of the Christian Church (1968) credits Smith’s The Old Testament with making “higher criticism” a current term among the educated class. Smith’s volume, however, merely ratified an admiration for the German biblical critics that ecclesiastical adepts had harboured since the late eighteenth century. This, according to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED ), 2nd ed. s.v. “Diaspora.” The Wellhausen article was translated from German as he did not write fluent English. His high prestige in English scholarly circles at the time was largely the product of the publication of the second volume of Die Geschichte Israels in 1878, republished as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1882). Per OED , 2nd ed. The famous eleventh edition (1911) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reprinted this article from the 1885 edition. It nicely confirms the cultural migration path of “diaspora” into educated English: the article is the joint product of Professor Emir Schurer, one of Germany’s leading scholars of the Early Common Era, and the Reverend Professor Charles Bigg, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oxford University. Anon, “Apocrypha.” For a full discussion of textual matters that here must be com-

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pressed, see Akenson, Surpassing Wonder, 19–90. It should be noted that the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Tanakh translated by Hellenized Jews in Egypt in the third through first century bce, has Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah immediately after Kings. The dominant Jewish scholars found this arrangement unacceptable, as far as the Hebrew version was concerned, and it is that Hebrew canon that prevailed in Jewish tradition. Lemche, Ancient Israel, 179. For general background, see Wiseman, Nebuchadrezzar. Ezekiel 3:15 speaks of one group of captives “at Tel-abib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar …” The juxtaposition of water – as in Waters of Babylon – and the place of exile are significant. The only way to harmonize the early reports that roughly ten thousand were exiled and the reports in Ezra that approximately fifty thousand returned half a century later is to assume an amazing degree of fecundity among the exiles in Babylon. This is not only a virtual demographic impossibility, but would also imply a degree of domestic felicity in Babylon that could scarcely be called an oppressive exile. That quick definition of the Septuagint is a bit too facile. For one thing, there is nothing approaching an original version of the Greek text. Second, it arranges the canonized books in a different order than does the Hebrew version. Further, scholars disagree on whether the Septuagint should rightly contain only a Greek version of the Tanakh or whether it should include contested additions to some of the books of the Hebrew scriptures, and whether it should include some extrabiblical texts. A critical edition of the Septuagint was only completed in 1935 and was the result of a half century of German scholarship. See Melvin K.H. Peters, “Septuagint,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1st ed., 5:1093–1104. For the various forms of the core term, “diaspora,” see the entries in Taylor, Septuagint. See the galut entry in dos Santos and Hatch, Hebrew Index. I realize that the assertion that the characteristics of the Covenant are still a live issue can be challenged. My view of the Covenant and of its being a causal reagent in some crucial modern situations is found in Akenson, God’s Peoples.

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16 Derived from entries in Hatch and Redpath, Septuagint. Two points: (1) There are additional uses of diaspora in the Apocrypha, but none disprove the observed rule; (2) The Hatch-Redpath concordance works only from the Greek word to the Hebrew original. That is why the dos Santos-Hatch item mentioned in note 14 is a valuable check, for it starts with the Hebrew original and provides the Septuagint’s Greek translation, if there is one. 17 If this really were the Unregulated Words Committee, I already would have dealt with a question that I am incapable of addressing with any degree of competence: namely, where did the Greek word “diaspora” and its offspring come from? Yes, it is a compound of an agriculturally based term, speir, “to sow or scatter,” and dia, “from end to end,” but that gets us nowhere. It would suit my argument admirably if Martin Baumann is correct in asserting, (1) that there were plenty of ancient Greek words for the nasty business of being pushed all over the earth; and (2) that diaspora-based words were used by pre fifth-century Greek writers to refer to disaggregation; so that (3) when diaspora was used in the Septuagint it was being employed in a creative way tailored to the Septuagint – in that the concept was radically altered from implying both disaggregation and permanent dispersal, to implying a continuing connectedness among the dispersed. As yet, one finds the possibility intriguing but far from proved. See Baumann, “‘Diaspora,’” on the irishdiaspora.net of the University of Leeds. Baumann’s main referenced source is an inaccessible doctoral thesis by Arowele, “Diaspora Concept.” Baumann’s internet article is an expansion of some of his views as found in “Shangri-La in Exile,” 377–404. 18 Bloom, “Introduction,” in Genesis, 5. 19 Niehoff, Philo, passim. 20 This is one of the few places where one can fault the structure of the Loeb Classical Library. The index to the existing thirteen volumes of Philo was compiled after the completion of volume 10 and, in any case, it is a very coarse instrument. However, a large cooperative project among Norwegian universities produced an excellent index to the Greek words Philo employs. Without this work it is difficult to gain control of what this most compellingly discursive of ancient

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writers actually thinks on any specific topic. Borgen et al., Philo Index. “Posterity and Exile of Cain,” 89. All references are to the standard method of citing Philo and are applicable to almost any edition compiled in the last 100 years. “Noah’s Work as a Planter,” 59–60. “The Preliminary Studies,” 55–8. On the Confusion of Tongues, passim. On Moses and Joseph, see Niehoff, Philo, 62–74. “The Embassy to Gaius,” 281–3. The question of terminology is highly vexed because we do not have any idea what most followers of Yeshua of Nazareth, in the period roughly 30–70 ce, called themselves. Whatever Yeshua of Nazareth was, he certainly was not a Christian. In Acts 11:26, written after the Destruction, it is reported that the Yeshua-followers “were first called Christians” at Antioch in midcentury. This is a form of the passive and leaves open whether or not it was a slur word – meaning, roughly, “Christers.” The reference gives no indication of when it became a term of self-description, either in Antioch or in the wider community of Yeshua-followers. The author-editors of Acts also put the word into Saint Paul’s mouth (Acts 26:28), but this is a case of the imaginative form of speech writing that is ubiquitous in classical reports. Paul himself does not use the word in his epistles. Nor is the term “Christian” found in any of the Gospels. The only additional usage is a passing employment in 1 Peter 4:16, this being a pseudepigraphic item written in the latter one-third of the first century. The first usage of “Christian” by an identifiable outsider was in a report at about 112 ce by Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan. (Pliny, Epistles, 10:96–7 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1969)). A little later, c. 115 ce, Tacitus refers to Christians (Tacitus, Annales, 15:55 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1980)). Thus, in the second decade of the second century the term was well enough known by Roman officialdom to be taken as an acceptable signifier. That leaves aside the issue of when adherents of the Yeshua-faith accepted the term to describe themselves. A reasonable guess is that

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Notes to Pages 19–22 between 70 ce and the early second century many (perhaps most, but certainly not all) of the followers of Yeshua increasingly called themselves by some variant of the term we now use. For the documentation, bibliography, and argumentation concerning the writings of Saint Paul and their position in the evolution of the Christian canon, see Akenson, Saint Saul. A brief note on method is probably necessary at this point. A few readers may wonder why I am looking at Paul rather than the four Gospels, since the Gospels deal with an earlier period than do most of Paul’s letters. The simple reason is that Paul wrote earlier (before the Destruction) and the Gospel writers wrote later (after the Destruction). If we are interested in the evolution of a concept, we go to the earliest text first and then proceed forward, accepting the basic dictum that something (here, an earlier word usage) cannot be caused by an event that comes after (a later word usage). The only argument against this way of proceeding is the Fundamentalist position concerning the divine dictation of the scriptures and that, while a legitimate matter of private faith, has no place in a public evaluation of historical evidence. Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 697. The rhetorical brilliance and ideational fertility of this article is immense. The whole argument (693–725) should be read. Besides the expository fluidity, the essay deserves credit for courage on two fronts. The first is the attempt to bring Jewish scholars to read Paul’s letters with an open mind. The second is the attempt to reorientate the Jewish use of “diaspora” in a positive and inclusive manner, as an antidote to ethnocentricity and to the prepotency of national self-determination as the only thing that really counts. In other words, they propound a non-Zionist concept of Jewish identity. Ibid., 697. Niehoff, Philo, 1832. The matter of the rise of the somewhat misnamed “matrilineal principle” in Rabbinic Judaism is a very difficult matter. I have been unable to find a discussion of the issue framed in historians’ terms (as distinct from confessional arguments). My own attempt to place the evidence in order is found in Akenson, Some Family, 156–75. Early English Books has six separate sixteenth- and seventeenth-

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century editions of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History available and this is in addition to ancient language versions. Philo was well enough known to be a stage figure in a 1645 fable, Sad Condition of a Distracted Kingdom. Johnson, History of Jews, 300. For an excellent longue-durée essay, see McCoskey, “Diaspora,” 387–418. Akenson, Irish Emigration. Government of Ireland, Commission on Emigration. In the interests of full disclosure, my early commitment to “diaspora” – more intuitive than reflective, I freely admit – is found in the following studies. The first round of books, which aimed at establishing that the Irish were a multipolar migrant group – not just migrants to the United States – was as follows (in order of publication): Irish in Ontario; Irish in North America; Irish in New Zealand; Irish in South Africa; If the Irish Ran the World. The material in these volumes was summarized in Irish Diaspora. This was the first study to deal with the Irish diaspora as an integrated phenomenon. It was very well received but, like all pioneering efforts, has some deficiencies. The largest of these is that my discussion extends only to the Irish diaspora as it spread in North America and other portions of the British Empire. As an example of what can be done using a specific diaspora to test theories that evolve in the social sciences, see the large data-base evaluation of the Weber thesis in Small Differences. As an example – Talmudic in character and semifictive in form – of how any given diaspora can be used to unlock the cultural dna that all humanity shares, see Irish History. Armstrong, “Mobilized Disasporas.” Sheffer Modern Diasporas, passim. Kilson and Rotberg, African Diaspora, 2. Ibid. Shepperson, “African Diaspora,” 153. Irwin, Africans Abroad. Terborg-Penn et al., Women in Africa. Bonnett and Watson, “Introduction,” in Black Diaspora, 3. Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, quoted in ibid., xiii.

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49 Shirinian, Republic of Armenia. 50 In order to focus the International Committee’s deliberations on the central topics, the Canadian Historical Review commissioned a special issue that included one plenary piece on each of the three main topics. Some of the matters I discussed at that time inform the present examination of diaspora. See my article, “Concept of Diaspora,” 377–409. chapter one 1 There were two exceptions: Armstrong, “Diasporas,” 393–408, and Sheffer, Field of Study. 2 The French discomfort regarding ethnic minorities is reflected in Dominique Schnapper’s complaints about “the current lyricism of partisans of particularity.” Schnapper and Davis, “Diaspora as Concept,” 249. 3 Safran, “Diasporas,” 83–4. 4 See Cohen, Global Diasporas, 21–5, and Clifford, “Diasporas,” 216–20. 5 Reis, “Theorizing Diaspora,” 42. 6 Echchaibi, Voicing Diasporas, 28. 7 Mishra,“Diasporic Imaginary,” 336. 8 Gilroy, “Diasporic Identification,” 3–16. 9 Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora,’” 568. 10 Ibid., 560. 11 Clifford, “Diasporas,” and Butler, “Defining Diaspora,” 189–218. 12 Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora,’” 557. 13 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1. 14 Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 8. 15 Ibid., “Diaspora Studies,” 110. 16 Akenson, “Diaspora,” 169–217, quoted in Cohen, Global Diasporas, 15. 17 Ang, “Migrations of Chineseness,” 5. 18 See Bhabha, Location of Culture, and Aciman, Alibis. 19 Axel, Nation’s Tortured Body. 20 Mishra, Indian Diaspora, 16. 21 Buruma, “Romance of Exile,” 33–7; see also Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 166, and Bhabha, Location of Culture.

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Hoffman, “New Nomads,” 43–58. Smart, Modern Conditions, 182. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 202. Akenson, “Diaspora,” 180–1. See Aciman, Alibis. Schnapper, “Introduction” in Les Diasporas, 21–3. Walker, “Queer Nation,” 537–43. Levitt and Glick-Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity,” 1008 and passim. Schiller et al., “Immigrant to Transmigrant,” 48. Tsagarousianou, “Concept of Diaspora,” 52–66. The Satmar Hasidim in New York do not engage in “transnational” activities; they never travel to Israel and do not even acknowledge its legitimacy. Yet they are almost a hyper-diaspora, for even after they have returned to their homelands in a physical sense, they, like the Neturei Karta their ideological brethren in Jerusalem, continue to be in “exile” until the coming of the Messiah. Esman, Ethnic Politics, 14f. Monica Davey, “For Children of Norway, a Rift With the Mother Country,” New York Times, 20 November 2007. On the notion of a “usable past,” see Smith, “‘Golden Age,’” 36–59. Axel, Nation’s Tortured Body, 199. Acton, “Nationality,” 181. Safran, “Comparing Visions,” 36. Bentz, “Tibetan Refugees.” James Sterngold, “Shah’s Son Enlists Exiles in US in Push to Change Iran,” New York Times, 2 December 2001. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Exiles Torn Between Countries, Want to Help Rebuild Afghanistan,” New York Times, 10 February 2002. Christophe Châtelet, “La Diaspora Albanaise de Suisse Mobilise en Faveur du Kosovo,” Le Monde, 2–3 August 1998. Shain and Wittes, “Diasporas in Conflict Resolution,” 12. Safran, “Diasporization of Israel,” 385–400. When Israel emerged victorious, many American Jews who had been estranged from the Jewish community suddenly identified as Jewish and proclaimed, “We are winning!” Conversely, the settlement of the Northern Ireland conflict and

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Notes to Pages 45–59 growing anti-Americanism in the Irish Republic have had the effect of attenuating the connection of Irish Americans to their ancestral homeland. See Cochrane, “End of the Affair,” 356–60. Baser, Kurdish Diaspora. Cohen, Global Diasporas, 57, 67–72. Chaliand, “Introduction,” in Les Minorités, 17. Marienstras, “La Notion de Diaspora,” 215–18. In the nineteenth century, many assimilated German Jews regarded themselves as “Germans of the Jewish confession” and, as such, as a Germanic tribe analogous to the Saxons and Bavarians. For them, stories of the Middle Eastern descent of their ancestors had no relevance. See Elon, German-Jewish Epoch, 288. Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Cohen, Global Diasporas, 26. McCafferty, Irish Diaspora in America, 105. Nanton, “Caribbean Diaspora,” 115. Caratini, Force des Faibles, 198–9. Bruneau, “Peuples-Monde,” 193–212. Cohen, “Rethinking ‘Babylon,’” 5–18. Safran, “Hostlands and Homeland,” 193–210. Weinberg, Tradition and Modernity, 83–4. See Memmi, Portrait, and Marienstras, “Juifs,” 455–91. Eronn, “Sami,” 1–8. Laitin, Identity Formation, 29. Pilkington, “Forced Migration,” 85–106. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 68–9. The term “nuclear homeland” is used to indicate that the relatively small Armenian republic is all that is left of a domain that was much larger several centuries ago. Clifford Krauss, “Just Think of It as a Little Wales With Cactuses,” New York Times, 15 May 1999. Mireille Duteil, “Francophonie: La Revanche des Acadiens,” Le Point, 27 August 1999: 42–5. Halevi, Selected Poems, 2. Tom Zeller, “Terror Diaspora,” New York Times (Weekly Review), 3 March 2002: 5. Ignaci Klich, “Le Scandale de la Dispersion Nazi Dans le Tiers Monde,” Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1983.

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72 It should be noted, however, that the garb of members of certain Hassidic groups was a diasporic imitation of that of members of the Polish landed gentry. 73 An example of a “de-Judaized” and very rationalist Jew is Raymond Aron, who rediscovered his kinship roots after the Six-Day War, and who spoke of “un mouvement irrésistible de solidarité” and of “cette bouffée de judéité qui fit irruption dans ma conscience de Français.” Aron, Mémoires, 498–502. 74 Renan, “Une Nation?” 903–4. 75 Safran, “State, Nation, National Identity,” 232. 76 Fishman, “Promised Land,” 44. 77 Wayland, “Sri Lankan Tamils,” paper presented at Immigration Seminar, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma thesis, 2 September 1998. 78 Jayaram, “Indian Diaspora,” 30. 79 For an extended list of diasporic attitudes and actions, see Safran, “Diaspora and Homeland,” 78. 80 Alan Cowell, “The Tug of Faith Unsettles Many British Muslims,” New York Times, 24 October 2001. 81 Halter, Book of Abraham. 82 Haley, Roots. 83 Kim Bendheim, “For an Emigré Writer, We are All Exiles: André Aciman Talks about Nostalgia, Memory, and Loss,” Forward, 4 August 2000. 84 Buruma, “Exile,” 33. 85 Pan, Yellow Emperor, 379, quoted in Ang, “Migrations of Chineseness.” 86 This conception applied in the nineteenth century to extreme Reform Judaism in Germany, according to which the Jewish religion in modern times had no relation to any anterior homeland. This position has been widely rejected, in part because it came to be regarded as a passageway to conversion to Christianity. The one exception today is the American Council for Judaism, which was reduced to minuscule membership after World War II. 87 Gitelman, “Decline of Diaspora,” 4. 88 The Association of Indians in America includes Hindus and Muslims and speakers of Hindi and Bengali. The objectives of the association are to provide “a forum of common action to all whose Indian

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heritage and American commitment offer a bond of unity”; “to concern itself with the social welfare of Asian Indians who have decided to live in the United States”; “to facilitate participation in the development and progress of India”; and “involvement … in American community life.” On pan-Indian identity in the diaspora, see Bhattacharya, “Indian Diaspora.” 89 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 55–69. 90 For example, in the nineteenth century, many expatriates left Italy before becoming “Italian.” In fact, Italians did not exist when the Italian diaspora began to develop in the United States. See Luconi, “Italian-American Ethnic Identity,” 466–7. The Indian diaspora in the Americas developed before Indian independence; Irishness in North America is claimed by people who are of Scots Protestant origin and who cannot fully identify with an arch-Catholic Irish Republic; and most members of the Jewish Diaspora do not accept Israel as the center of Jewish peoplehood. 91 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” chapter two 1 Griffith, Population Problems. 2 Ravenstein, “Laws of Migration” (1885), 167–235, and “Laws of Migration” [second paper, 1889], 241–305. 3 I am grateful to Professor Brian Osborne for helping me to understand the position of Ravenstein in the development of migration studies as conducted by historical geographers. Any misreadings are entirely my own. Two articles in the scholarly literature are also especially useful: Lee, “Theory of Migration,” 47–57, and Tobler, “Migration,” 327–43. 4 This usage of “definite law” appears in Ravenstein, “Laws of Migration” (1885), 167, and then disappears. 5 Ibid., 235. 6 Ravenstein, ”Laws of Migration” (1889), 305. 7 Ibid., 286. 8 Ibid., 305. 9 Ibid., 286. Ravenstein mentions “productive land still in the state of nature.” This was a common conceit concerning lands in the

Notes to Pages 75–83

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several New Worlds that were actually held and used by their aboriginal inhabitants. Ravenstein, “Laws of Migration” (1885), 191. Ibid., “Laws of Migration” (1889), 288. Ibid., “Laws of Migration” (1885), 191. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 175. Ravenstein here mentions only inflow, but his point holds for out-migration as well. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 199. Lee, “Theory of Migration,” 47–57. Thomas, Research Memorandum. Thornthwaite and Slentz, quoted in Tobler, “Migration,” 330. Dorigo and Tobler, “Migration Laws,” 1–17. One should not forget Lee’s work, “Theory of Migration,” which included a set of testable quantitative hypotheses concerning migrational behaviour. Tobler, “Migration,” 328. Ibid. Fairchild, Immigration. Petersen, “Migration,” 256–66. This typology is placed in a larger context in Petersen’s classic synthesis, Population. A sharp, sometimes caustic, review of work in migration studies in the two decades following the publication of his typology is Petersen’s “International Migration,” 533–75. Stouffer, “Mobility and Distance,” 845–67. See Burford, “Internal Migration,” 77–81. For an excellent overview, see Jensen-Butler, “Gravity Models,” 68–78. Adapted from Lee, “Theory of Migration,” 50. Dorigo and Tobler, “Migration Laws,” 3. One surmises that the authors were able to make their crucial observation because they did not use the conventional approach of multiple regression analysis. As employed in migration studies, the most common form of multivariate analysis takes as a given the phenomenon of migration from Point A to Point B and then assesses the relative power of the factors which produced this given result.

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29 Jerome, Migration. His conclusion about the relative strength of push and pull is found on p. 208. 30 Thomas, Swedish Population Movements, 88. Thomas’s book was jointly sponsored by the Institute for Social Sciences of Stockholm University and by the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University. 31 Ibid., 92, 166–9. 32 Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth. 33 Ibid., x. 34 Quigley, “Swedish Emigration,” 114. 35 Although the instance mentioned is heuristic, this fictive case is presented because it suggests a set of side-observations about Irish migration patterns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As is well documented, Irish “single” women migrated in proportionately higher numbers than for any other major nation. Not all these “single” women were unmarried. And rural Ireland could be a cruelly abusive situation for a married woman. For an extreme case, see Bourke, Bridget Cleary. 36 Speare, “Rural to Urban Migration,” 130, quoted in Lowell, Scandinavian Exodus, 11. 37 Geary, “Pre-Famine Ireland.” 38 Ibid., 127. 39 Williamson, “Migration.” 40 Ibid., 378. 41 Ibid., 379. 42 Mokyr and Ó Gráda, “Emigration and Poverty,” 380. 43 Hatton and Williamson, Mass Migration, 5. 44 Ibid., 22. See also Hatton and Williamson, “International Migration,” 13. chapter three 1 In James Clifford’s words, “live inside, with a difference.” Clifford, “Diasporas,” 308. This is not to imply that identities are no longer foisted on us externally, but to claim that the freedom in making identarian claims is more of an artifact of our time than ever before. 2 For some of the foundational works in the field that portray diaspora as dispersion, see Clifford, “Diasporas”; Cohen, Global Dias-

Notes to Pages 96–7

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poras; Safran, “Diasporas,” 83–99; Sheffer, Diaspora Politics; Shepperson, “African Diaspora,” 76–93; Tölölyan, “Nation-State,” 3–7; and Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora (s),” 3–36. So far, I have spoken of diaspora as a concept and an abstract entity. But, whenever we use an article, definite or indefinite, in front of the term, the concept becomes an entity. The italicized a attempts to capture this trepidation. See Brubaker, “‘Diaspora,’ Diaspora,” 13. See Marshall, “Greek Community,” 100–7, for an early academic discussion on the “Greek diaspora.” The Armenian diaspora is not mentioned in the academic literature until the 1930s (except very sporadically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and while the concept of the African diaspora has been in vogue from the nineteenth century, it is not explicitly spoken about until 1966 (Shepperson, “African Abroad”). Stéphane Dufoix notes some exceptions (see note 8, below). See, Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 3. Curiously, the Italian diaspora is spoken about very early in Rouse, “Sojourners,” 519–29, but does not explicitly emerge in the literature again until 1968 in Dore, “Italian Emigration,” 95–122. In many ways, the 1978 Russell King report made a diaspora out of a largely assimilated people. See King, “Italian Diaspora,” 386. Chowdhury, “Diaspora,” 510–13. See Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, for a critique of a singular Italian diaspora. For the early twentieth-century history of the term, see Dufoix, Diasporas, 11–13. Dufoix corrects the generally accepted idea to show that the religious Jewish (and, Catholic and Moravian) concept was extended to global Africans not in the 1960s, but in earlier albeit infrequent invocations in the early twentieth century. Among specific works on the African diaspora that inform the meaning of the field, see Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans,” 1–29. Also, see, Lovejoy, “African Diaspora.” Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 242–3. Ibid., 245. See, Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 11, for a strong critique of the idea of dormant membership in diasporas. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 2; also see, Sen, Identity and Violence, passim, for a strong critique of singular miniature identities.

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13 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 3. 14 See Cohen, “Diasporas and State,” 507–20. Also see, Cohen, Global Diasporas. 15 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 12. Emphases in the original. Also see, Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, for an early view on diaspora as project. 16 See Chowdhury, “East Indian Ethnicity,” 209–20. 17 A desire to belong is often a critique of the current mode of belonging. Thus, diaspora is symptomatic of unbelonging, as well. 18 Galván, “Metaphors of Diaspora,” 114. 19 Levine, “Diaspora as Metaphor,” 105–18, quoted in Boyarin and Boyarin, Jews, 308–9. 20 Such a characterization is not too different from V.S. Naipaul’s “familiar temporariness” as it occurs in the case of the Indian indentured labourers. See, Naipaul, House, 185, and, Mishra, Indian Diaspora, 98. 21 See Megill, Prophets, 119, and Mishra, ibid. 22 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 6. 23 Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 235; also see, this volume, 246. 24 Lasry, “Juifs Sépharades,” 113–38. 25 Oktapoda-Lu, “Diaspora,” 69–102. 26 Collyer, “Diasporas,” 101–7. 27 See, Haraway, “Women’s Experience,” 240–55; Mendelsohn, “Anglophone Jewish Diaspora,” 177–209; Frantzi, “Greek in Anglophone Diaspora,” among numerous others. More recently, see Pulis, Religion. 28 For example, the workshop, “Diaspora, Empire and the Making of a Lusophone World,” University of Oxford, 25–26 September 2008. 29 See, for example, works on the Hindi diaspora: Mesthrie, “Bhojpuri– Hindi Diaspora,” 25–44, and Shukla, “Ramcharitmanas in Hindi Diaspora.” 30 See Patton and Sánchez-Eppler, Queer Diasporas; Eng, “Queer Diasporas,” 1–37. 31 Fountain-Stokes, Queer Ricans; Gopinath, Queer Diasporas; Wahab and Plaza, “Queerness,” 1–34; and Pecic, Queer Narratives. 32 See, Ayres, Deaf Diaspora; Rose, “Politics of Difference,” 256–66; and Leigh, Deaf Identities.

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33 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora,’ Diaspora,” 3. 34 The most influential article on this rather extraordinary metaphor is Pienta et al., “Cancer Diaspora,” 5849–55, but see Reddi et al., “Stem Cell Diaspora,” 345–6, for a more recent iteration. 35 Galut – refers to the deportation of Jews to Babylon. See Akenson, “Introduction” to this volume, and Dufoix, Diasporas, 6. 36 Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 235. 37 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 3. 38 See Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, 11; also see, this volume, xi–xii. 39 Senghor, “Problématique,” 274, quoted in Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 13. Translation from Edwards, not quoted verbatim. 40 Appadurai, Modernity, 48, argues that ethnoscape as a concept and neologism captures the “changing social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity.” 41 Radhakrishnan, “Diasporic Mediations,” xiv. 42 Dufoix makes a similar point in Diasporas, 108. 43 It must be granted that such access to choice is not universal.

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chapter four Burke, “Indigenous Diaspora,” 304–7; Clifford, “Diasporas,” 309; Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” 470–2, 478–9; Delugan, “Indigeneity Across Borders,” 41–2; Harvey, “Performing Identity,” 133; Johnson, “Migrating Bodies,” 41–2; McCall, “Diasporas,” 121; Mello, “‘Diaspora,’” 85; Miller, Invisible Indigenes, 7–8; Teawi, “Sea of Phosphate,” 173. Fabian, Time and Other, 1. Wade, Before Dawn, 9, 12–17, 23, 100, and Boyd and Silk, Humans 341–3. Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, 82, 108, 150; Fortey, Life, 305, 310; Hamish Clarke, “dna Confirms Aboriginal Australian Origins,” Cosmos Magazine, 8 May 2007. http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/dna-confirms-aboriginal-australian-origins/, accessed 1 September 2013. Wade, Before Dawn, 8, 27, 52, 64, 70–7, 90–3, and Boyd and Silk, Humans, 341–3, 349. Recent genetic testing has challenged the argument that modern humans left Africa in a great wave and suggested instead that today’s Australian aborigines

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Notes to Pages 113–17 are descended from an earlier migration that happened twenty-four thousand years before the great exodus. See de Lange, “Aboriginal Genome,” http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/aboriginalgenome-rewrites-human-dispersal-story/, accessed 13 September 2013. Palmer, “Modern African Diaspora,” 27–8, and Wade, Before Dawn, 5, 8, 27, 30–3, 60, 71–4. For the so-called criterial approach, see Safran, “Diasporas,” 83– 99; Safran, “Comparing Diasporas,” 255–91, quote, 262; Reis, “Theorizing Diaspora,” 41–60; Cohen, Global Diasporas; Brubaker, “ ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1–19; Clifford, “Diasporas,” 302–38; and Palmer, “Modern African Diasporas,” 27–32. For the so-called experiential approach see Berns-McGown, “Redefining ‘Diaspora,’” 3–20; Butler, “Black History,” 125–39; Cho, “Turn to Diaspora,” 11–29; Delugen, “Indigeneity,” 93–7; Vertovec, “Meanings of ‘Diaspora,’” 277–99; Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” 467–90. Trigger and Dalley, “Negotiating Indigeneity,” 46-47, and Miller, Invisible Indigenes, 24. Aikau, “Indigeneity,” 477–500; Cox, Primitive to Indigenous; Corntassel, “Who Is Indigenous?,” 75–100; Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 18; Sissons, First Peoples, 13–18; Delugan, “Indigeneity,” 84; Johnson, “Migrating Bodies,” 38. de la Cardena and Starn, “Introduction,” in Indigenous Experience, 1–32; Kuper, “Return of Native,” 389–95; Merlan, “Indigeneity,” 303–33; Gegeo, “Cultural Rupture,” 491–507; Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” 472, 481-82; Johnson, “Migrating Bodies,” 37–52; Miller, Invisible Indigenes, 37–8; Sissons, First Peoples, 8, 12, 14, 18, 23–5. Teawia, “Native Thoughts,” 24, 36–43. Reis, “Theorizing Diaspora,” 42–5, and Safran, “Diasporas,” 83. Crosby, Columbian Exchange, 9; Quesada, “Spain,” 98–100; Mason, Deconstructing America, 17; McClintock, Imperial Leather, 24; Zamora, Reading Columbus, 176; Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 3; Ellington, Noble Savage, 12; and Christopher Columbus, Diario, 111, 157, quoted, 111, 235–337. Merlan, “Indigeneity,” quoted, 304, and Fabian, Time, 2–3, 10–12, 17, 30–2, 52, 75.

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14 Trouillot, “Anthropology,” 23; Chakrabarty, “Post Coloniality,” 19; Abu-Lughod, “Writing,” 139-43; Fabian, Time, 17; and Silverblatt, “Becoming Indian,” 279. 15 Cho, “Diaspora,” 12. 16 Teawia, “Native Thoughts,” 18; Cox, Indigenous Religions, 66; and Kuper, “Return of Native,” 389–90, 395. 17 Fabian, Time, 2–3, 10–12; Markelin and Husband, “Sámi Media,” quoted, 116; Johnson, “Migrating Bodies,” quoted, 38; Whitehead, “Introduction,” in Histories, xii. 18 Carson, “‘Tuscarora War,’” 189–92, and Richter, Ordeal, ch. 1. 19 Teaiwa, “Our Sea,” 173, and “Harvey, “Performing Identity,” 125. 20 Meyer and Sherman, Mexican History, 53–63. 21 Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, 116, 142, 177; Clifford, “Diasporas,” 309; Cox, Indigenous Religions, 2; Kuper, “Return of Native,” 390, 392; Diaz, “Creolization,” 576; and Trigger and Dalley, “Negotiating Indigeneity,” 54. 22 McCall, “Diasporas,” 121–2. 23 Schiller, “Transmigrants,” 96; Cho, “Diaspora,” 13; Cohen, Global Diasporas, 57–9, 67, 78; Reis, “Theorizing Diaspora,” 48; and Safran, “Comparing Visions,” quoted, 279. 24 Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 2; Goody, Writing, chs. 2, 5; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 50, 101; McCoy, Elusive Republic, 19–40; Man, Attila, 32, 40; Banner, Law and Power, 18–20; SmithRosenberg, Violent Empire, 227–30; Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 27; Akenson, “Great European Migration,” quoted, 36. 25 Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, as quoted, 225.

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chapter five Curtin, Cross Cultural Trade. Ibid., 1–3. Polanyi, “Ports of Trade,” 30–45. Aslanian, Indian Ocean, 1–22. See: Goitein, Medieval Jewish Traders; Goitein, “Portrait,” 449–64; Goitein and Friedman, India Traders; and Margariti, Aden. Aslanian, Indian Ocean. Wasserman and Faust, Social Network Analysis, 4. Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1–19. See also the contributions of Akenson (introduction), Safran (ch. 1), and Chowdhury (ch. 3).

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9 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 5–6. 10 See: Brubaker, “Ethnicity,” 21–42; Safran, “Language,” 171–90; and Yans, “‘Groupness,’” 119–29. 11 Seland, “Networks,” 373–90. 12 Barth, Ethnic Groups. 13 See Seland, Ports and Power, 67–9, and Seland, “Networks,” 373–90. 14 Others arguably being the Mediterranean, Central Asia, and the Eastern Indian Ocean. See Abu-Lughod, European Hegemony. 15 Bang, Roman Bazaar, 131–201, and Morley, Trade. 16 Eisenhardt, “ Agency Theory,” 57–74, and Kiser and Cai, “War and Bureaucratization,” 511–39. 17 Curtin, Cross Cultural Trade. 18 Schiettecatte, “L’Arabie du Sud,” 237–73, and Seland, Ports and Power, 17–31, 42–6. 19 See: Casson, Periplus; Sidebotham, “Red Sea,” 1041–59; Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade; and Seland, “Archaeology,” 367–402. 20 Casson, Periplus. 21 Ibid., sec. 21, 63. 22 Ibid., 148. 23 Ibid., 141–2. 24 Ibid., sec. 16, 61. 25 Ibid., sec. 17, 61. 26 Horton and Middleton, Swahili. 27 Qviller, Bottles and Battles, and Wells, Culture Contact, 65–6, 95–7. 28 Ray, Archaeology. 29 See: Pavan and Schenk, “Indian Ocean,” 191–202; Schenk, “Routletted Ware,” 44–50. 30 Pavan and Schenk, “Indian Ocean.” 31 Tomber, “Roman Red Sea,” 205–6. 32 Haaland, “Foodways,” 165–82. 33 Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, 75–6. 34 Casson, sec. 31. 35 Ibid., secs. 6, 21. 36 Ibid., secs. 21, 27, 32. 37 Ibid., sec. 36.

Notes to Pages 130–4 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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Thomas, “Port Communities,” 170–99. Strauch, Foreign Sailors. Ibid., 346–8. Ibid., 355–60. Ibid., 344–5. Ibid., 179–81, 202–3, 405. Ibid., 182–3. On the development and meanings of the term Yavana see: Meile, “Yavanas,” 85–123; Ray, “Yavana Presence,” 311–25; Torrey, “‘Yawan,’” 302–11; and Zvelebil, “Yavanas,” 401–9. Begley and Tomber, “Indian Pottery Sherds,” 161–82, and Tomber, “Pots,” 5–10. Pavan and Schenk, “Indian Ocean,” 200. Ray, “Inscribed Pots,” 121. Casson, Periplus, secs. 21, 31. See: Gawlikowski, “Palmyra,” 27–33; Millar, “Caravan Cities,” 119–37; and Seland, “Palmyrene Caravan Trade,” 197–211. See list of inscriptions and dates in Gawlikowski, “Palmyra,” 27–33, and Yon, Notables. Bingen, “Dédicace,” 355–8. Dijkstra and Verhoogt, “Greek-Palmyrene Inscription,” 207–18. Bron, “Palmyreniens,” 95–8, and Robin, “South Arabia,” 488–92. Gorea, “Palmyra,” 447–87, and Robin and Gorea, “Vestiges Antiques,” 409–45. See: Will, “Marchands,” 262–77; Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade, 123–68; and Seland, “Palmyrene Caravan Trade.” Adams, Restaurant, and Hitchhiker’s Guide. See: Parker, Roman India; Romm, Edges of Earth, 82–120; and Whittaker, “Roman View,” 1–20. Talbert, Rome’s World. Selvakumar et al.,“Archaeological Investigations,” 29–41. Cherian, “Kerala Council,” and Cherian et al., “Chronology,” 236–40. Seland, “Persian Gulf,” 398–409. Casson, Periplus, 56, 85. Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade, 26–7. pat 1062, “Palmyrene Inscriptions,” 89.

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Notes to Pages 134–42 Warmington, Commerce, 35–8, 95, 99, 103, 138. Katz and Goldberg, Last Jews, 8–20. Hall, Hellenicity, and Seland, “Networks,” 379. Klauck, Early Christianity, 313–25. Ibid., 315–16. Ferguson, Civilization. Gabrielsen, “Brotherhoods,” 183–210. Ebel, Attraktivität, 14–31. Gabrielsen, “Brotherhoods,” 189. Ibid. Gabrielsen, “Rhodian Associations,” 215–44. Evers, “New Institutional Economics.” Morley, Trade, 75–6. Bingen, “Dédicace,” 356. chapter six Emigrationsutredningen, 1907–13, 21 vols. Runblom and Norman, eds., From Sweden to America. Although the source for this number is often not cited, this widely used estimate is extrapolated from the work of Willcox and Ferenczi, International Migrations. For a compelling cartographic presentation of this phenomenon, see De Geer, “Migration,” 347–66. I am avoiding the bitter debate about whether or not the Great European Migration should be considered to be genocide. Nor are the details of the various accounting approaches to indigenous populations and slave populations engaged here. This latter, highly vexed matter is discussed in my Great European Migration, 22–48. O’Rourke and Williamson, “European Periphery,” also published under the same main title in European Review of Economic History, 153–90. Again, one leaves out Scotland which seemingly had a very high out-migration rate. Because of the permeability of the border with England, the data set is too sparse to permit strong conclusions. Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved, 42, Table 3.6. Akenson, Great European Migration, 39–55.

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10 Kälvemark, “Population,” 211–30. The same article was also published in Kälvemark et al., Time, Space and Man, 221–38. 11 Tedebrand, “Swedish Emigration,” 77. 12 See, for example, the way that Swedish material is used to shed light on the issue of early nineteenth- century European immiseration in Soltow, “Sweden,” 43–63. The big question of the relationship of literacy to economic innovation is illuminated in Pettersson, “Agrarian Revolution,” 207–20. And, on the wider issues of economic integration, see O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalisation and History. 13 Margareta Larsson argues that the thinking behind the Swedish reporting categories of the Tabellverk era were based on Lutheran ecclesiological models. Larsson, “ Social Förändringar,” 516–49. 14 The standard history is Arosenius, “Swedish Official Statistics,” 537–69. 15 League of Nations, Official Vital Statistics, 19 and 21. Although he is not credited on the title page, Professor Harald Westergaard was the author. As for the error rate introduced by the cannot-befounds, Westergaard suggested that 0.5% was about right. This was based on the 1910–20 period in which physical mobility was considerably reduced, and one suspects that the rate was markedly higher in the 1870 to 1900 era. 16 For an admirably efficient description (including photographic examples) of the rolling catechetical record and of the other special registers kept by the parish clergy, see Jeub, Parish Records. 17 In English, this is usually called a “nominative list.” That word is not used in standard English and is a bit misleading – smacking as it does of the verb “nominate” and of the philosophical notion of nominalism, both of which connotations confuse the issue. A list of names was required, simple as that. 18 Bergland, “Husförhörslängdernas Befolkningsstatistika,” 52–82. 19 Edvard Arosenius, First Actuary of the Central Statistical Bureau, had pointed out this systemic weakness in the Swedish system as early as 1918. Arosenius, “Swedish Official Statistics,” 564. 20 Akenson, Great European Migration, 79–81. 21 The 1920 forms, in translation, are found in League of Nations, Official Vital Statistics, 26–8.

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22 In relation to emigration from Sweden, the government and the state church had a particular fear of Mormonism. Thus, an entire volume in the work of the Emigration Commission of 1907–13 was given over to the Latter-day Saints. See Emigrationsutredningen, Bilaga 3, Mormonvärningen. 23 Arosenius, ”Swedish Official Statistics,” 565. 24 Edin and Hutchinson, Fertility in Sweden, 21; Hofsten and Lundström, Swedish Population History, 157. 25 These numbers are not unrealistic. For a discussion of the Emigration Commission’s methods, see Akenson, Great European Migration, 19–20. 26 Sundbärg, Emigrationsutredningen, Bilaga 4, Utvandringsstatistik, 94–8, Tables 17–21. The revised data are found on 94–8, Tables 17–21. 27 Sundbärg, Emigrationsutredningen. Betänkande, 591. 28 Tedebrand, “Swedish Emigration,” 86–8. 29 Hofsten and Lundström, Swedish Population, 67. 30 Derived from Carlsson, “Swedish Emigration,” 117–19, Table 5.1. 31 For reasons of evidentiary availability, I am here dealing only with persons from Sweden. This is not to deny that in Finland a sizable community existed of persons who were Swedish in primary language and culture. The classic, compressed, discussion of those Swedo-Finns who emigrated to the United States is found in Nelson, Swedes, 73–5. 32 These figures (as is the case with all numbers in the present discussion) are for the area that comprises present-day Sweden. Although Norway and Sweden were a regnal union from 1814 to 1905, the statistics collected for the two nations were segregated. 33 Statistical History of the United States, 118, Table C.228-95. 34 Hofsten and Lundström, Swedish Population, 67, citing Sundbärg on the brief period of Norway-bound migration. 35 This is implied even by the official registered migration figures – which heavily underestimate intra-European migration. See Government of Sweden, Historisk Statistik, 62, Table B, 16. 36 Ibid., 62–3, Table B. 37 Compare ibid., 62, Table B with Sundbärg, in Emigrationsutredningen, Bilaga 5, 62, “Tabeller II,” Table 45.

Notes to Pages 150–3 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50

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Johansson, ”Registrering av Flyttare,” 167–92. Hofsten and Lundström, Swedish Population, 66. Ahlgvist, “Utvandring till Danmark,” 193–206. Tedebrand, “Swedish Emigration,” 84. Historisk Statistik Befolkning, 3, Table A.3, and 4–5, Table A.4. The pioneering studies were Martinius, Befolkningsrörlighet under Industrialismens, and Nilsson, Emigrationen. Since then, there have been literally scores of tight empirical studies of local and regional mobility published as doctoral theses from Swedish universities. See Ravenstein, “Laws of Migration,” (1885), 167–235, and “The Laws of Migration,” [second paper, 1889], 241–305. For a case study that makes a similar point, see Larsson, “Utvandring från södra Småland,” 153–60. An excellent general survey is Magnusson, Sweden. See Akenson, Great European Migration, 50–5. The term “rural social differentiation” is more accurate than the older concept of “rural proletarianization” because many of the small operators and labourers did quite well out of the whole process. The magnitude and direction of this process as it affected later nineteenth-century social structure is found in ibid., 189–96, and 220–1. De Geer, Migration och Influensfält. Willerslev, Den Glemte Invantring. A précis is found in Framtid, 333 Års´boken om Skånelandsregionen, 237–40. See also Willerslev, “Nettoutvandringen frå Sverige till Danmark, 1850–1910,” 84– 106, and Willerslev, “Den Svenske indvandring til Bornholdm,” 53–96. Riegler, Emigration. A sympathetic, but critical review by Richard Willerslev is admiring of the qualitative work of Riegler, but points out that he used only the limited Swedish official records as far as determining flow patterns. See Scandinavian Journal of History, 3 (1986): 291–5. That noted, Riegler was himself aware of the difficulty of separating official from unofficial movement of workers and, further, of separating temporary labourers from those who became permanent residents in Germany. See esp. Riegler, Emigration, 26–45, 271–5. The exhibition had no printed catalogue, but was available http://

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54 55 56 57

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Notes to Pages 153–6 www.utvandrarnashus.se/startsida.asp and on http://www.emiweb. eu/EmiWeb/showdtenr.x That latter address is more apt to be durable. The concept of “The Forgotten Migration” in Swedish historiography seems to owe its origin to Larsson, in an article “Utvandring från södra Småland fram till 1870,” 153–60. In the discussion which follows, I am ignoring the case of the island of Guadeloupe which England took from France in 1813, then ceded to the Swedish monarchy in exchange for Swedish troops being sent against France to the Continent. The Swedish authorities were so slow off the mark that they had not planted a presence on the island by 1814, and the Swedish king therefore had no choice but to acquiesce to the return of Guadeloupe to France under the Treaty of Paris. The following are valuable scholarly articles: Barton, “Sweden,” 408–30; Luthin, “St. Bartholomew,” 307–24; Sjöström, “Swedish Colonialism,” 69–85. For popular accounts, nicely illustrated, see Swahn and Jennersten, Saint-Barthélemy, and Olin, Våra första Västindienfarare, 29–88. Kent, History of Sweden, 138. Swahn and Jennersten, Saint Barthélmy, 41; Sjöström, “Swedish Colonialism,” 70, 73. Drescher, Abolition, 280. Compare ibid., 280 and Swahn and Jennersten, Saint-Barthélmy, 45 with Kent, History of Sweden, 191. I am inclined to the larger estimate, as this follows the demographic curve of the other Leeward Islands. One suspects that there was a marked difference between the number of slaves that were compensationable under the Swedish procedures and the actual number still owned (or still clandestinely traded with South America and Cuba) by islanders. The common pattern in the West Indies after slave emancipation was that the white population dropped more swiftly than did the black, although members of both groups cleared out as the islands slipped into irrelevance as trading ports. For a representative case study, see Akenson, Montserrat, 160–70. Sjöström, “Swedish Colonialism,” 72 and 74; Kent, History of Sweden, 192. Swahn and Jennersten, Saint Barthélmy, 37.

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60 Kent, “History of Sweden,” 192; Luthin, “St. Bartholomew,” 317–24; Swahn and Jennersten, Saint Bartholmew, 43. 61 Vassberg, Stockholm on the Rio Grande. 62 Norman, “Swedes in North America,” in Runblom and Norman, eds., 242–3, Table 9.3. 63 One catches a glimpse of a very different type of Swedish migrant – the on-the-make representatives of Swedish manufacturing firms in the pre-World War I era in Latin America, especially Mexico, in Runblom, Svenska Företag i Latinamerika. There is not much detail about these representatives, but they seem to have been either: [a] Swedish citizens who were educated labour migrants and who eventually returned home; and [b] individuals permanently resident in Latin America who had some ethnic, personal, or marital tie to Sweden and knew the Swedish language as well as local rules. It is not arch to suggest that one gets a fair, if hilarious, sense of this sort of indigenous representative of European mother firms by reading Graham Greene’s Latin American works, especially, Our Man in Havana. 64 The following discussion depends largely upon Friborg, Brasilien svenskarna. Friborg’s work is especially admirable in its ingenious merging of Swedish data with material from the German ports from whence the German firms that organized much of the migration operated. Earlier useful summaries are found in Runblom, “Swedish Emigration to Latin America,” 301–10, and Runblom, “Nordic Immigrants in Latin America,” 175–82. In turn, this depends chiefly upon unpublished work by Stenbeck, “Utvandringen från Sverige tillBrisilien, 1868–1891,” and by Eriksson and Falk, “Emigrationen.” A competing (but published) study by Flodell is judged to be largely unconvincing by Runblom. See Flodell, Tierra Nueva. 65 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 55–6, 98. 66 Derived from Eltis, African Slavery, 9, Table 1-1. 67 Friborg, Brasiliensvenskarna, 23, has a useful specification of the migrants, according to county origin. 68 Runblom, “Nordic Immigrants,” 180. 69 Here we will be using modern vocabulary. The evolution in nomenclature as scattered colonies coalesced into full-blown states in these jurisdictions is interesting, but not here relevant.

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70 Koivukangas, Scandinavian Immigration, 256. This is an unchanged photoprint of his 1972 PhD thesis, for the Australian National University. For details, see Beijbom, Australian Fararna, 137–9. Also see, Lyng, Scandinavians in Australasia. Lyng, who was the longtime editor of The Norden, was a Dane who attempted to position himself as the pan-Scandinavian spokesman in Australia. He corrected some of his earlier errors about Nobelius in his Non-Britishers in Australia. The material on “the Scandinavians,” 67–92, has some interesting tidbits, but the whole book is wrapped in a racist epistemology – cranial structure, brain size, cultural essentialism, that sort of thing – and is best treated skeptically. 71 Beijbom, “Swedish Ethnicity,” 139. 72 One should avoid trying too hard to find Swedish communities or associations. See, for example, Christie, Swedes, where nine early twentieth-century Swedes, along with “other Scandinavians,” are memorialized for their contribution to the building of Vestey’s Meatworks. 73 Beijbom and Martin, Swedes, 52–4; Koivukangas and Martin, Scandinavians, 69–70; Lawson, “Immigration,” passim. 74 Martin, “Swedes,” 696. 75 Vamplew, Australians, 12, Table ieo-90-98. Norwegians were lumped with Swedes, but collateral evidence suggests that there was no significant difference between the groups. 76 The quotation is from an article by Hokanson, “Johan Norberg.” The Sanderson collection has person-specific data – date of immigration, occupation, etc. – on more than 2,500 individual Swedish migrants. 77 Derived from ibid., 18, Table ieo, 119–28. 78 Price, Migrants, 5. For an extended background discussion, see Price, Great White Walls. 79 Runblom, “Nordic Immigrants,” 175–6. The reason for relying on Australian data rather than on Swedish government tallies of emigration is that they show only 3,652 migrants to Australia for the entire period 1850 to 1930, a number belied by the Australian censuses and port information. See “Foreword,” in Beijbom and Martin, Swedes, 6. 80 Price, Australian Immigration, A90, Table 4.3.Two comments about

Notes to Pages 163–4

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Price’s work: (1) In the data above, he filtered out the Norwegian material, thus giving a straight read on Sweden. This is useful because until the 1911 Commonwealth census, Norway and Sweden were merged. (2) Price’s methods are often misunderstood and underappreciated by scholars dealing with present-day ethnicity. Most recent studies deal with self-defined identity and in large-scale enumerations (the census of the United States being the prime example). Individuals can choose their own ethnicity or ethnicities regardless of their actual nativity or historical antecedents. This makes sense in terms of public policy, because people act in terms of what they choose as their self-identity. Price, however, was working as an historian and trying to infer from very limited data (there was no ethnicity question on any of the relevant Australian censuses) how the ethnic composition of Australia had evolved over time. When he termed his method “objective,” he did not mean that it was the only truth but, rather, that it was the best inference in the absence of contemporary self-identification information on second, third, and fourth generation migrants to Australia. The best description of Price’s accounting methods is found in the item mentioned immediately above, A68-A87. See also Khoo and Price, Australia’s Ethnic Composition, 8–14. 81 Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Australian Immigration, 12, Table 5. 82 Khoo and Price, Australia’s Ethnic Composition, 11, Table 4. Here it is worth noting that if one compares Price’s data to that which the American census authorities began to compile in 1980, one should be aware that Price’s “objective” technique involved no doublecounting. In contrast, the American handling of the self-definition ethnicity question on their censuses produced a large degree of double-counting, since everyone was allowed to declare multiple ethnicities if they so wished. In practice, this means that the roughly fifty thousand persons calculated to be in the “ethnic strength” of Swedish-Australians in the 1980s is equal to a much larger figure of persons if one used the tally methods employed by American enumerators, since the latter allowed double-counting. 83 A rare exception was the Swedish congregation in Melbourne. See Martin, “Swedish Church,” 147–62. As a sidebar, it is worth noting

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87 88 89 90 91 92

Notes to Pages 164–7 that one of the modern Christian denominations whose origins were in Sweden, the New Church of Jerusalem, found its way to Australia. In the English-speaking world, it was usually known to outsiders as Swedenborgianism, and it had a fair run. The papers of the Brisbane branch of the denomination covering 1865 to 1998 are in the Freyer Research Library, the University of Queensland. The minute books show that the denomination was dominated by men whose names were unambiguously Anglo-Celtic. Only a few persons who could conceivably be inferred to be Swedish, or at least Scandinavian – Human, Linden, Berg, by surname – were involved. For its twentieth-anniversary celebration, the Chamber’s journal, The Swedish-Australian Trade Journal, put out a glossy 249-page book as the issue for June 1931. The organization was clearly not short of funds. Besides the predictable wealth of trade data, the volume was very proud of the Chamber’s Swedish heritage and was unexpectedly assertive of the “Mayflower Effect,” which put Swedes right at the founding of Australia. For the full table of place-of-birth of the New Zealand population, as derived from successive censuses, see Akenson, Irish in New Zealand, 40, Table 9. Aminoff, Svenska i Nya Zeeland, 62–3. The sources are not cited, but they are the same as those specified in Akenson, Irish in New Zealand, 41, Table 9. Derived from Result of a Census, 12, 25, 27, 31, 35. See Aminoff, Svenska i Nya Zeeland, 103–446 for the details on these individuals. Ibid., 53, Table. Ibid., 50–1, Table and Map. Derived from Official Handbook, 112–13. One must pay respect to Davidson’s “Scandinavians.” If in its day this piece of research only earned an honours bachelor’s degree, today it would be considered as being half-way to a successful doctorate. A number of local histories have been written about the bush settlements and their related regions. These include: Anderson, Norsewood; Carle, Forty-Mile Bush; Dunlop and Mooney, Hawke’s Bay; McDonald, Dannevirke; Reed, Hawke’s Bay; Beijbom, in Iantipodiska utvandrarspår, 97–102, went so lyrical as to describe the Seventy-Mile Bush as the Minnesota of the Antipodes.

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93 Aminoff, Svenska i Nya Zeeland, 28. 94 A mistitled, romantic, but not grossly inaccurate, biography of Friberg is Brew, Scandinavian Footprints. The entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, (Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1990 ff.) is rather more severe. See also Aminoff, Svenska i Nya Zeeland, 28–32. The statement, found in several texts, that Friberg was a Norwegian, stems from his first job shepherding a group of Norwegians. 95 King, Lutheran Story, 30–4. 96 Lyng, Scandinavians, 176–7. To take an intermediate date between Lyng’s figures, in April 1911 there were eleven Lutheran churches (both German and Scandinavian) in New Zealand, with attendance on census Sunday of 728 persons. However, 4,477 persons told the census-taker that they were Lutheran. Census of New Zealand, 1911, 27 and 136. On the German population, most of which was drawn from the north-European plain and were Lutheran, see Burnley, “German Immigration,” 45–63. 97 The census sources are those specified in Akenson, Irish in New Zealand, 40, Table 9. 98 Lochore, Europe to New Zealand, 17–18. 99 The reader may be aware that Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, considered for a time the possibility of Uganda’s becoming the ultimate Jewish homeland. This, and Swedenborg’s plan, open the pleasant counterfactual possibility of two New Jerusalems in central Africa and a quite serviceable old one still in the Middle East. 100 Indeed, the terms “apostles” and “disciples” concerning Linné’s followers continued without irony well into the twentieth century. See the graceful essays of Selander, Linné läjunga I Främmande Lånder. 101 A pleasant popular version of events is found in Berg, När Sverige upptäcke Africa, 128–45. 102 Pagels et al., Svenska Kongofarare. 103 Freys, Frya år i Asante. The genre of missionary tale deserves analysis as a literary form all its own: a mixture of adventure narrative, spiritual heroism, disingenuous modesty, reportage of historical occurrences, and money-raising propaganda. 104 Axelson, Culture and Confrontation, 217–21, 274–89. 105 Lagergren, Mission and State, esp. 178–214. For impressionistic material see Lagergren, I Kongo.

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106 The mixture of an Exodus-out-of Bondage, together with the epochal breaking of various inland indigenous groups, became the founding story of the Afrikaner portion of the white community that controlled southern Africa. For the veneration in Afrikaner culture of this set of events, especially the tie of a biblicized covenant to the victory over the natives, see Akenson, God’s Peoples, 45–96. 107 Winquist, Scandinavians, 16–20. The memorialization was facilitated by Trichardt’s having kept an emotionally moving diary; and, then by his son having been a participant in the first Anglo-Boer War and a leader in the second Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902. This all tied back into propaganda aimed at bringing Swedes onto the Afrikaner side in that war. For an edited translation of gobbets of the 1837–38 diary, with large historical interpolations by the editor, see Fuller (subsequent editions by Leo Fouche), Louis Trigardt’s Trek. 108 Berg, När Sverige upptäcke, 169–72. 109 Kuparinen. African Alternative, 102–4. This volume deserves special attention. It is the only monograph dealing with Swedish mobility during the era of the Great European Migration, other than several pertaining to the United States, which operates at the top level of historical evidentiary assessment and exposition. On “Scandinavia” see also Berg, När Sverige upptäcke, 177. 110 Ibid., 146–7. A Swedish traveller could save a bit by shipping from Hamburg then to England and thence to Cape Town, a service that by the 1890s was provided by British shipping lines. The cheapest fare was for the open berths for men which cost ten guineas, somewhat more than twice the fare to the United States from Sweden. Emigrants’ Guide, viii. 111 Emigrants Guide, 59, citing the Census of the Cape Colony 1875, 152. Most Swedish persons were probably in the Cape, rather than in the Afrikaner republics to the inland north. The Swedish missionary presence in Natal, though culturally important, did not involve more than a score of individuals. 112 Ibid., 28 and 59. Kuparinen, African Alternative, precisely identified 1,540 Swedish migrants, while the official Swedish statistics total only 839. Given that no matter how thorough Kuparinen was, a portion was lost even from his work: that portion is ultimately

Notes to Pages 173–6

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114 115 116

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unknowable, but probably not negligible, given the porosity of southern Africa to ship-jumping mariners. It seems likely that the actual number of Swedes who appeared in southern Africa, between the gold boom and World War I, was well north of two thousand. That this is the case is clear if one interrupts the total flow and looks at a point-in-time (that will give a number necessarily well below the total flow). Thus, note the 1904 census of the four constituent jurisdictions of South Africa, which showed a Swedish-Norwegian total of 3,988 persons resident at that date (Kuparinen, African Alternative, 63, Table 3). The pattern at the time was that slightly more Norwegians than Swedes migrated to southern Africa, but even if one guesstimates that 1,800 Swedes were in that 1904 composite figure, the entire migrant flow from 1886 to 1904 must have been markedly higher than this figure. One calls it a sample because Kuparinen could not catch nearly everybody in his assiduous search. One suspects he had data on between one-half to two-thirds of the migrants, and that is a very strong sample, even if it cannot be shown to be perfectly representative. Kuparinen, African Alternative, 431, Appendix 22. I have described a similar filtration process for the Irish migrants. See Akenson, Irish in South Africa and Irish Diaspora, 141–53. Translated quotation in Winquist, Scandinavians, 184. His entire discussion, 162–88, is valuable. For a political-scientific usage of pro-Afrikaner attitudes to illuminate the various sorts of end-ofnineteenth-century Swedish nationalism, see Rosenblad, Nation, nationalism och identitet. Berg, När Sverige upptäcke, 167. Lau, Andersson. Andersson, the son of a Swedish mother and an English father, wrote most of his business correspondence in English, although he was fluent in Afrikaans as well. Andersson’s travel writing, also in English, was translated into Swedish and was hugely successful. His massive three volumes were published by Bonnier, 1856–61, under the titles Sjön Ngami (the first two volumes) and Floden Okavango. Recent admirers of Wahlberg adjudge that “had it not been for his untimely death, he could have become a notable ornithologist.” Craig and Hummel, Wahlberg, xxix.

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120 Berg, När Sverige upptäcke, 177–8; Winquist, Scandinavians, 41–72. 121 Darroch and Ornstein, “Vertical Mosaic,” 305–33. 122 Darroch and Ornstein were most interested in the mid-century period, 1861–1871, when Canada was becoming a capitalist economy. Darroch and Ornstein. “Ethnicity and Class,” 111–37. See also Darroch “Class,” 49–72. The proof-patterns developed here are very useful in gaining a perspective on the somewhat indeterminate debate in Swedish historiography over the alleged “proletarianization” of the rural labouring class in the same time period. See also, Darroch and Soltow, Property and Inequality. 123 Thus, for example, Sager and Baskerville, Household Counts. For an example of broad-scope, deep-data longitudinal study, see Baskerville, Silent Revolution? 124 Ljungmark, Svenskarna i Winnipeg. See also his “Swedes in Canada,” 67–77. 125 Barr, Swedes in Canada. This incorporates and expands upon her excellent earlier bibliography, Swedish Experience. 126 Sundbärg, Emigrationsutredningen, Bilaga XX, 112, n. 1 to Table 13. Actually, “United States” also included Mexico. 127 Derived primarily from Ljungmark, Svenskarna i Winnipeg, 12; Helge Nelson, Swedes, 1: 41; and from Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, 2: 238, Table 34, and Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, 1: 234–35, Table I. It should be noted that Nelson’s classic study made a systemic error in his table that includes Swedish migrants to Canada, by forgetting a zero, up to the year 1920. That is, his numbers are right, except that they are one-tenth of what the official reports said. 128 In the fullness of time, Canadian in-and out-migration will be sorted out, but it is more complicated than one might think. The best discussion of relevant matters with which I am acquainted are those of McInnis. Among his writings, see especially: “Economy of Canada,” 57–107; “Population of Canada,” 371–432; “Immigration and Emigration,” 139–55. 129 Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, 1: 234–5, Table I. 130 Derived from ibid., Table I. See also, ibid., 235–6, Table III. 131 On the smaller sources, see Roinila, “Finland-Swedes,” 190–202, and Hedblom, “Gammalsvensky People,” 32–48.

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132 Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, 1: 215, Table II. 133 Ibid., 220, Table VII. 134 The major study of recruitment by governments and private firms for the United States is: Ljungmark, Scandinavian Immigration, with material on Canada, 192ff. The Canadian material is expanded in Ljungmark’s “Scandinavian Immigration,” 21–42 and in “Canada,” 253–6. 135 Derived from Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, II: 294, Table 50. 136 Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, I: 290–1, Table XIII. 137 Runblom, “Swedes,” 4–20. A less considered essay is Rudling, “Scandinavians,” 151–94. 138 Derived from Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, II: 438–9, Table 69. 139 Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, I: 266, Table VIII. Strictly speaking, the figures applied to either English or French, but given Swedish settlement patterns, they mean English. 140 Ibid., 235–6, Table III, and ibid., 245, Table VIII. The second most common faith was United Church, then Anglican, then Baptist. Because the Swedish homeland censuses did not systematically record religion, one cannot make a direct comparison to the homeland. Only the Baptists may be seen as a possible direct importation from Sweden. On the nature of the Swedish state church and the imposition of religious identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the counter pressure of the Dissenters, see Akenson, Great European Migration, 79–85, 236–8, 250n32. For the Swedish Lutherans in Canada, see Rönnqvist, “Församlade svenskar – ethnicitet och religion i Alberta, 1893–1955,” 293–317. 141 Runblom, “Swedes,” 11–17. 142 Derived from Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, II: 440–1, Table XVII. 143 Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, I: 235–6, Table III. 144 Ibid. 145 Here I should like to warn the reader against following the usage of what Canadianists call “The by-and-by Commission” as a source on the linguistic issue. This was the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism which stated that in the second generation the Scandinavians in general had the lowest retention of their ethnic language of all Canadian groups (171ff). Granting that this was true of the Swedes as well as the other Scandinavians, it has no

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relevance to the period of the Great Migration or, indeed, up to 1931 at least: the 1931 census showed that Austrians, Germans, Romanians, Serbo-Croats, Slovaks, and Russians all had a lower retention rate of their specific ethnic language as assessed in their respective multigenerational ethnic group. Further, it would in any case be totally irrelevant if, in the late 1960s, second-generation Swedes were less retentive of their ethnic language than, say, were Italians. Given that most second-generation (and third- and fourthgeneration) persons of Swedish ancestry had their roots in families that had arrived before World War II, in contrast to what Canadian social scientists often called the “post-WWII multiculturals,” or, officially, “allophones,” of course they were English or French speakers. The only relevant comparison would be with the children of Swedish migrants who settled in the United States in the 1930s, and there is no trustworthy American data on that. 146 Runblom, “Swedes,” 8. 147 Derived from Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, II: 442–43, Table XVII. 148 A reasonable speculation is that Swedish remained the primary home language of the entire Swedish ethnic group in Canada up until World War II, but that it faded very quickly thereafter for reasons that any historian of geopolitics will understand.

1 2

3 4

chapter seven For an excellent discussion of such networks in their widest context, see Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation. Though I would not go as far in stating these societies “completely neglected Saint George as a saint and a man […] only referring to him as a representation of the nation.” Bianchi, “St George’s Day,” 192. Indeed, essays on Saint George adorn the souvenir publications, histories, and sketches. Saint George also was regularly the substance of lectures on 23 April. See, for example, Waller, Sketch of the Origins, vii–x, 55–7. Kumar, English National Identity. Bueltmann and MacRaild, “Globalising St George,” 79–105. The story unfolds in detail in the Sons’ journal: Sons of England Record, I, 15, no. 12 (15 May 1897): 1–2; II, no. 1 (15 June 1897): 1–2; II,

Notes to Pages 190–5

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18 19 20 21 22

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no. 2 (15 July 1897): 1–21. Journal held at the Archives of Ontario, Ottawa, f1155 – mu 2864. Also see a souvenir publication detailing the event: Sketch of How ‘the Diamond Anthem’ was sung. Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 8. Brubaker, “‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1–19. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland. See Cohen, Global Diaspora. See also Kenny, “Diaspora,” 134–62. Bueltmann et al., “Invisible Diaspora?” 5–30. Campbell, “Romans,” 3–108. See also McCrone, “National Identities,” 301–20. Colls, Identity of England, ch. 6. Paxman, English, ch.3. MacRaild et al., “Interdependence Day,” 140–62. Seeley, England. In this paragraph, I draw heavily on Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 4–5. The massive United States Immigration Commission, Reports of the Commission, sought restrictions on southern and eastern European immigrations. The historiography turned to furthering the case of immigrants and their contributions to American society. The classic commencement of this approach is Thomas and Znaniecki, Polish Peasant. Other examples include the classic work by Blegen, Norwegian Migration. Harper and Constantine, OHBE Companion Series, Migration and Empire, 14. Bickers, ed., OHBE Companion Series. Settlers and Expatriates. McCormack, “English Immigrants,” 38–55; Lloyd, “English Immigrants,” 135–49. Elliott, “English,” 463. The Scots accounted for 488,789 (17.7 percent) and the Welsh for 59,540 (2.2 percent). A further 793,801 did not specify origins. Congress, 3d Session, Doc, 756, Reports of the Emigration, Tables 8, 13. Erickson, “English,” 320. Whereas other groups such as the Italians and Irish are examined in economic and cultural terms. Kraut, Huddled Masses; Bodnar, Immigrants in Urban America, 60–1, 66–7, 111, 151–2, 154–5, 186–9. The term “invisible immigrants” is Charlotte Erickson’s: Invisible

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29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39

Notes to Pages 195–8 Immigrants. Erickson includes the Scots in this study. For AngloAmerican culture, see Van Vugt, British Immigration. Conzen et al., “Ethnicity,” 3–41. Thompson, May Day. Most recently, see Bueltmann et al., “Invisible Diaspora?” for a discussion of the limits of the historiography and counter-arguments in favour of English ethnicity. Also Gleeson, “English Immigrants,” 98–115. Shepperson, Emigration. Fender, Sea Changes, stressed something similar through a major study of literature. Boston, British Chartists, 14. Charlotte Erickson, American Industry, 49, 60–1, shows how, in addition to disgruntled workers abandoning the United States, American trade unions also supported striking workers to return to England. Also Shepperson, Emigration and Disenchantment. Cole, Immigrant City; Blewett, Constant Turmoil; Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism. Kenny, Molly Maguires. Blewett, Constant Turmoil, 279–80. Miller, “Immigrant Group Identity,” 96–129. In diverse places, Scottish elite organizers were prevalent, without any denial of ethnicity. On New Zealand, see Bueltmann, Scottish Ethnicity. On Ulster, see Hughes, Scots. Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 88n102. Bianchi, “St George’s Day,” 174–83; Knauff, Sons of Saint George; Bowring et al., St George’s Society. The very first such ethnic charity was founded by the Scots in Boston, either in 1657 (Berthoff, British Immigrants, 165) or 1684 (Massachusetts Register, 40); M’Culloch, Concise History, 195). Rosen, Short History, 40. The Charleston Mercury, 24 April 1858 announced the 125th anniversary of the society in that city, thus corresponding to an establishment year of 1733. For the Philadelphia Society of the Sons of St George, see Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hsp), Sons of St George Collection, Minute Book, vol. 1. This includes the minutes of the founding meeting, held on Saint George’s Day, 1772.

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40 Clark, Clubs and Societies. 41 Rules and Regulations, 3. For the wider context, see: Mills, Ideal of Loyalty. 42 Royal Gazette, 12 June 1838. 43 Ibid., 13 November 1839. 44 Ibid., 10 November 1840; also reports of the death of one of the society’s chaplains, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, ibid., 20 April 1875. 45 hsp, 1733, “Sons of St George Collection,” Stewards’ Books, I, 3 May; 10 June 1861. The Albion Society was formed in December 1855. Albion Society. 46 Oberholtzer, History of Philadelphia, vol. 3, 38. 47 North America St George’s Union, Report of Fifth Annual Convention, 5. 48 City Archives of Ottawa (cao), mg28-v, 3, St George’s Society of Ottawa, vols. 1–13, I, 30 April 1859, 1; Diocese of Ontario Archives (doa, xm-72A, St George’s Society, Kingston Minutes, 1858–73, Bye-laws and Minutes, 1858–1886, Minutes, 6 April 1858, Introduction to Constitution, 1; Maryland Historical Society [mdhs], 1881, St George’s Society of Baltimore, Minutes, 10 vols, Minutes. iii. 49 Royal Gazette, 28 August 1860. 50 cao, mg28-v, 3, St George’s Society of Ottawa, Special Meeting, 16 July 1860, 35. 51 Wisconsin Patriot, 23 August 1856; Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 12 March, 3 April 1858. 52 Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 26 April 1858. 53 Chicago Tribune, 2 May 1861; 26 April 1864. The fourth agm was reported in the same newspaper on 5 and 12 April 1864. 54 King, Sons of England, 11 55 Elliott, “English,” 462–88 (quote, 483). 56 Manitoba Free Press, 18 July 1882. 57 Elliott, “English,” 483. 58 New York Times, 24 April 1882. 59 Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 August 1880; New York Times, 29, 30, 31 August 1883; Chicago Daily Times, 21 August 1884; Washington Critic, 29 August 1888; Washington Post, 30 August 1888.

302

Notes to Pages 202–6

60 Daily Cleveland Herald, 8 January1864; Milwaukee Daily Journal, 21 April 1890; Little Rock Daily Arkansas Gazetter, 27 December 1874. 61 Salt Lake City Intermountain and Colorado Catholic, 24 March 1900; Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1885, 6 April 1887, 1 January 1891, 25 April 1895, 25 April 1904. 62 The zone brilliantly described for period of primary industrialization by Bukowczyk, “Migration,” 29–77, 194–212. 63 For Freemasonry, see Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire. On the Atlantic reach of Orangeism, see Harland-Jacobs, “Orangeism,” 27–49, and MacRaild, “Orangeism,” 307–26; Kenny, American Irish, 195–6. 64 MacRaild, Orange Order, and “Networks,” 311–37. 65 Manitoba Free Press, 24 April 1882: 1. 66 The royal charter was granted in the early 1900s. 67 Bianchi, “St George’s Day,” 185–7, offers a brief outline of the nastgu. 68 The Royal Society of St George, Annual Report and Year Book 1904 (London: 1904), 64, cited by Bianchi, “St George’s Day,” 186. 69 North America St George’s Union, Report of Fifth Annual Convention, 12–16. 70 Toronto Daily Mail, 21 August 1889. 71 Chicago Daily Times, 9 March 1873. 72 See hsp, Sons of St George Collection, Letters from the North America St George’s Union to the Society of the Sons of St George, Philadelphia, Minute Book, vol. 6, 1888. 73 doa, xm-72, b, St George’s Society, “St George’s Convention, 1878 to St George’s Society, Kingston.” A handbill report by delegates to members, Kingston, 3 September 1878. 74 Washington Post, 20 May 1882; Evening Critic, 20 May 1882. 75 Ottawa Daily Citizen, 26 August 1880. 76 North America St George’s Union, Report of Fifth Annual Convention, 7. 77 Philadelphia Enquirer, 12 September 1877; New York Times, 13 September 1877. 78 New York Evening Express, 11 September 1879; history of the conventions, Evening Critic, 20 May 1882.

Notes to Pages 206–9

303

79 New York Times, 11 September 1879. 80 Petersburg Index and Appeal, 16 December 1876. 81 Ibid., 8 September 1877; New York Herald, 14 September 1877: 9; New York Evening Times, 14 September 1877: 5. 82 New York Times, 27 August 1886. 83 doa, xm-72b, St George’s Society, Kingston, Minutes, Handbill, “St. George’s Convention, 1878 to St George’s Society, Kingston.” A report by delegates to members. The description of the extent of the St George’s society movement is the fullest we have before the setting up of the London-based society in the mid-1890s 84 Ibid., “St. George’s Convention, 1878 to St George’s Society, Kingston.” A handbill report by delegates to members, dated 3 September 1878. 85 Ottawa Daily Citizen, 25 August 1880. 86 doa, xm-72b, St George’s Society, Kingston, Minutes, Handbill, “St George’s Convention, 1878 to St George’s Society, Kingston.” A report by delegates to members. The description of the extent of the St George’s society movement is the fullest we have before the setting up of the London-based society in the mid-1890s. 87 Ibid. 88 New York Times, 11 September 1879: 11. 89 North American (Philadelphia), 21 August 1880; New York Times, 25 August 1880: 3. 90 hsp, 1733, Letters from the North America St George’s Union to the Society of the Sons of St George, Philadelphia, Minute Book, vol. 6, 1888; North American, 21 August 1880; Chicago Daily Times, 20 August 1884; Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), 18 April 1877; North American, 21 August 1880. 91 doa, xm-72b, St George’s Society, Kingston, Minutes, Annual Meeting, 5 April 1881. 92 mdhs, 1881, Minutes ii, 19 July 1879, 26. 93 Ibid., 23 April 1883. 94 Ibid., 29 August 1883. 95 Washington Post, 24 April 1881: 1. 96 Philadelphia Enquirer, 25 July 1881: 3. 97 Evening Critic (Washington), 20 May 1882. 98 Toronto Daily Mail, 17 May 1882: 8.

304

Notes to Pages 209–20

99 100 101 102

Critic-Record (Washington), 24 May 1882. Evening Critic (Washington), 20 May 1882. Ibid. mdhs, 1881, St George’s Society of Baltimore, Minutes, vol. I, 20 January 1869. Baltimore Sun, 24 April 1878 McCormack, “English Immigrants,” 43. Ottawa Daily Citizen, 25 August 1880. Ibid. Washington Post, 20 May 1882; Evening Critic, 20 May 1882. Ibid. North America St George’s Union, Report of Fifth Annual Convention, 12–16. Philadelphia Enquirer, 11 September 1902. Terms identified by Kapur, Diaspora, 34. On the role of Ireland in Anglo-American foreign relations, see Sim, Union Forever. Kumar, English National Identity, 30–8.

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

chapter eight Coogan, Irish Diaspora, 415. Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 111; Sherling, Invisible Irish, ch. 4. Hannah, Scotch-Irish, 1:162–3. Quoted in Akenson, Irish Diaspora, 255. Dunaway, Scotch-Irish, 5. Quoted in ibid., 255–6. Adams, Ireland, 64–5. Ibid., 65. Emphasis is mine. Blaney, Presbyterians. Ibid. and Leyburn Scotch-Irish, 133–9. Blaney, Presbyterians. Níall Naoi Ghíallach, “Niall of the Nine Hostages,” is the mythohistorical founder of both the O’Neill clan in Ireland and the MacNeil clan of the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides. For information on Irish, Scottish, and Ulster dna research, see the m-222 Haplo-Group Project, http://www.familytreedna.com/pub lic/R1b1c7/, the Ulster Heritage dna Project, http://ulsterheritage.

Notes to Pages 220–6

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31

305

com/, http://www.familytreedna.com/public/ulster/. For more on the tracing of a single Gaelic clan whose history spanned the Irish Sea in Ulster and Argyll and whose migration to America largely matched that of the classic “Scotch-Irish” migration, see McCain, Finding the McCains. See also Nash, Irish Descent. Akenson, Irish Diaspora, 28, 30. Clark, Hibernia, 96. Schmidt, Holy Fairs; Leyburn, Scotch-Irish. Sherling, “Irish Protestants,” 2: 427–35. See Kirkham, “Ulster Emigration,” 77–117; and Griffin, People with No Name, 89. Kirkham, “Ulster Emigration,” 77–8. Sherling, Invisible Irish. Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 20–4. Most historians have suggested that the term “Scotch Irish” was not generally used until much later. Randolph’s use of the compound to describe these Irish Presbyterians is interesting because it may presage earlier widespread use of the term. See Bolton, Scotch Irish, 25. Ibid. Sherling, Invisible Irish, ch. 4. Torrence, Old Somerset, 169–73, 211–49; Schlenther, Francis Makemie, 69: 1–20; Polk, “Scotch-Irish.” Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, t/3672/1; Quoted in Polk, “Scotch-Irish,” and Parkhill, “Assisted Emigration,” 58. Spellings as in the original. See Schlenther, Francis Makemie, 24n57. We do not know at this point where these immigrants came from, but it seems likely that they were Presbyterian, knowing Makemie’s penchant for encouraging Presbyterianism in America, specifically on the Delmarva Peninsula. Kirkham, “Ulster Emigration”; Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, and “Searching for Land.” Miller et al., Irish Immigrants, 435–51. Ford, Scotch-Irish, 111. Bolton, Scotch Irish, 220–9. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 137–68.

306

Notes to Pages 226–32

32 Jones, “Ulster Emigration,” 47–68. 33 Cullen, “Irish Diaspora,” 113–49, and Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 167–219. 34 Miller and Kennedy, Irish Immigrants, 656–8, app. 2; and Akenson, Great European Migration, 115–16, 120, 134n. 35 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 123. 36 Sherling, “Scotch-Irish.” 37 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 129; Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 167–219. 38 Leyburn, Scotch-Irish, 273–95. 39 Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 114. 40 Akenson, Between Two Revolutions, 14–15. See also, Green, “Ulster Emigrants’ Letters,” 87–103. 41 Bagenal, American Irish, 12–13. 42 Leyburn, Scotch-Irish, 305. 43 Jones, “Ulster Emigration,” 47–68. 44 The sharpest, and most misleading demarcation is that drawn by Leyburn, who states that, “there was almost no further influx from northern Ireland [i.e. Ulster] after the Revolutionary war.” Leyburn, “Scotch-Irish,” 99. 45 Ibid., 99; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 144, 159. 46 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 163. 47 Wilson, United Irishmen, 30. 48 For interesting and nontraditional insights on the 1798 Rebellion, see Dunne, Rebellions; Stewart, “1798”; and Stewart, Irish History. 49 Wilson, United Irishmen, 30; Foster, Modern Ireland, 280. 50 Wilson, United Irishmen, 99. 51 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 147. 52 Dictionary of Irish Biography, 2016, s.v. “Glendy, John.” 53 This is my estimate based on the data in Table 11 in Akenson, Irish Diaspora, 56. 54 The great lacuna in the history of the Irish diaspora is caused by the scarcity of academically rigorous, cohesive discussions of the global pattern. Pioneering outlines are found in Akenson, Irish Diaspora, and in his Small Differences. A strong collective effort is Bielenberg, Irish Diaspora. 55 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 162; Kenny, American Irish, 45–6.

Notes to Pages 233–40

307

56 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 178. 57 Miller, Emigrants, 477. 58 A generation ago, Donald Akenson pointed out the fragility of the American data on nativity, religion, and ethnicity and suggested some ways that the Canadian data could be used to strengthen the analytics of Irish diaspora studies. See Being Had. 59 Protestant and Native Philadelphian, “Truth Unveiled,” 22. Emphasis is mine. 60 Ibid., 23. 61 Ibid. 62 Miller, Emigrants, 291. 63 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 173, 181. 64 See, Akenson, Great European Migration, 154–60. The standard studies, which have held up well, are Boyle and Ó Gráda, “Fertility Trends,” 543–62, and Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved. 65 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 174–5. 66 Scally, Hidden Ireland, 218, quoted in Ó Gráda, Black ’47, 106–7. 67 Ó Gráda, Black ’47, 107. 68 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 175. 69 Ibid., 178. 70 Miller, Emigrants, 293. 71 Ibid; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 173. 72 Ó Gráda, Ireland, 122. chapter nine 1 See, in particular, Bhabha, Location of Culture; Appadurai, Modernity; Tambini, “Post-national Citizenship,” 195–217. 2 Sheffer, Diaspora Politics. 3 Kalra et al., Diaspora, 1–2. 4 It must be noted that this challenge is not new, and any group identity that did not conform to the dictations of the nation-state or earlier imperial authorities have historically been readily stifled. 5 Such a “triadic relationship” has been proposed, among other theorists, by Safran, “Diasporas,” 83–99, although, rediasporization or double-migration complicates such a triadic schema. The notion of homeland is problematized in several studies, most notably by Gilroy, Black Atlantic.

308

Notes to Pages 241–5

6 Brubaker, “Accidental Diasporas,” cited in, Brubaker, “‘Diaspora,’ Diaspora.” 7 See, Akenson, “Concept of Diaspora,” 377–409; Brubaker, “‘Diaspora,’ Diaspora,” 1–19; Chowdhury, “Diaspora,” 510–13. 8 See, for example, Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 244–5. 9 Kale, Fragments of Empire, 5. 10 See Mohapatra, “Indian Immigrant Labour,” 173, for a recent exposition of the different phases of indenture and community building. 11 See, Baumann, “Diachronic View of Diaspora,” 170–88. 12 Also in Fiji, but that remains outside the scope of this paper. This paper is mainly concerned with the indentured labour diaspora, and excludes other trains of migrants from the subcontinent who went to Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. 13 I have elsewhere dealt with these formation processes in some detail. See Chowdhury, “East Indian Ethnicity,” 209–20. 14 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora,’ Diaspora,” 11 essentially makes this point in critiquing Sheffer’s Diaspora Politics’s stance on diasporas derived on the basis of ancestry. 15 Mishra, “Diasporic Imaginary,” 421–47, for the important distinction between “diaspora of the old” that is, the diaspora of the indentured communities, and the new diaspora of late twentieth-century South Asian migrations. 16 See Butler, “Defining Diaspora,” 189-219. Palmer, “Modern African Diaspora,” 1, 22–5; Alpers, “African Diaspora.” Also see Carson, “Indigeneity,” ch. 4 in this volume, 113. 17 The Indians in smaller Caribbean islands, for example, in Antigua, or St Kitts are more easily identifiable as a part of the African community. 18 Brubaker, “‘Diaspora,’ Diaspora,” 12. Emphases in the original. 19 Kale, “Projecting Identities,” 73. 20 Herskovits, Negro Past, 204–5. 21 Ibid., xxxix. 22 Although none of these communities were consistently labelled as diasporas before the 1990s. 23 Niehoff and Niehoff, East Indians, 12. 24 Some of the foundational texts on négritude include: Cesairé, “Culture,” 190–205; Damas, Poètes; Senghor, Liberté I.

Notes to Pages 245–53

309

25 See Munasinghe, East Indians; Khan, South Asians; and Chowdhury, “East Indian Ethnicity.” 26 Furnivall, Netherlands India, in particular, ch. XIII, sec 1, 446. 27 Smith, Plural Society. 28 Brathwaite, Creole Society. 29 See Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, for early articulations of such insistence. Sheffer’s Diaspora Politics reiterates such formulations. 30 Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 222–37. 31 See, Munasinghe, East Indians, 83 and Khan, South Asians, 222. 32 See Cohen and Sheringham, “Creolization and Diaspora,” 6–17. 33 Beaton, Creoles and Coolies, 181. 34 Some claim that the earliest indentured immigrants in Mauritius attempted to construct temples of worship in the forests of Bois Pignolet long before Beaton’s visit to the island. 35 Chowdhury, “East Indian Ethnicity.” 36 See, in particular, Carter and Bates. “Empire and Locality,” 51–73. 37 For some information regarding Gandhi’s visit, see Ramsurrun and Nakoo-Ramsurrun, Manilal Doctor, 2. 38 Chatterjee, Modern Review, 154. 39 See, Ramsurrun and Nakoo-Ramsurrun, Manilal Doctor. 40 Some issues are preserved at The National Archives, UK (tna), Colonial Office (co, 167, documents. See, for instance, co 167/ 800, “Petition against Indentured labour, sent through Government, enclosures,” August 1911. 41 The Hindusthani, 15 March 1909, quoted in Ramsurrun and Nakoo-Ramsurrun, Manilal Doctor, 95. 42 Very few issues of the newspaper have survived. This sentence does not occur in the 17 October 1910 issue (co 167/794), but appears in the 18 May 1911 issue (co 167/1911). In the latter issue, and in all issues afterwards, the source is credited as The Statesman (2 February 1911). 43 “Report of the Mauritius Royal Commission,” 1909. Part II. Appendix B. Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence,” 1910 (Cd. 5186). London: hmso. Also, see Tinker, “Odd Man Out.” 44 tna, co, 137/840/19, Johnston to Hibbert, 29 January 1942. 45 See Hutnyk, “Adorno,” 401, and Adorno, Culture Industry, 72. Also see, Shalini Puri, Caribbean Postcolonial, 65.

310

Notes to Pages 256–61

conclusion 1 For example, Kenneth Pomeranz and Patrick Manning. 2 See Manning, Navigating World History, and Hughes-Warrington, World Histories, for incisive overviews of the field. Also see, Briggs et al., “Transnationalism,” 625–48; Iriye and Saunier, Palgrave Dictionary. For works at the interface of labour, migration, and global histories, see: Manning, Migration; McKeown, “Global Migration,” 155–89; Gabaccia, and Hoerder, Connecting Seas; Harzig, Hoerder and Gabaccia, What Is Migration History?; Hoerder, Migrations; and Lucassen et al., Migration History. 3 Bayly et al., “ahr Conversation,” 1441–64; Mazlish, “Terms.” 4 See Iriye, Global and Transnational History, for a useful treatment of the different approaches. 5 See Hughes-Warrington, World Histories, 5. 6 Lazier, “Earthrise,” 602–30. 7 See Mazlish, “Comparing Global History,” 389. 8 Although, I invoke Ranke as the foremost nationalizing historian in the nineteenth century, similar projects were being undertaken in France, England, and the United States. See, Baker, “National History.” 9 Duara, Rescuing History; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Guha, History. 10 Mazlish, “Comparing Global History,” 385. 11 McDougall, “Thoughts,” 19–42. 12 For example, McNeill and McNeill, Human Web. 13 Taylor, Global Pop. 14 As has been done by Mintz. See Sweetness and Power. 15 Some recent exemplary works have interpreted this direction as the stuff of global history. See, for example, Beckert, Empire of Cotton. 16 See, Conrad, Global History for the most recent and clearest articulation of this approach. 17 Hunt, Writing History, brilliantly condenses this approach. 18 Renan, Oeuvres Complétes, 361.

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Contributors

donald harman akenson is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University. He has been awarded several honorary degrees for his work in the history of religion and in the history of Ireland and its diaspora. His most recent books are Ireland, Sweden, and the Great European Migration, 1815–1915 (2011) and Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell (2016). james taylor carson is professor of history at Queen’s University. Inquiries into the nature of cultural change and persistence in indigenous North America occupied his early work, while his book, Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South (2007), explored cultural formations born of contact between indigenous, African, and European peoples. His most recent book, The Columbian Covenant: Race and the Writing of American History (2015), explores the degree to which race and racial language have defined the writing of American history from the fifteenth century to today. amitava chowdhury is associate professor of history at Queen’s University, and the managing editor of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He is a collaborating member of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University and a former fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History at Harvard University. He is primarily interested in the history and archaeology of plantation labour systems, and works on aspects of indentured labour and fugitive slaves in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean.

356

Contributors

don macraild is professor of British and Irish history at Ulster University. He has written or edited a dozen books in the fields of modern social and labour history; Irish and British diasporas; and historical method and theory. He has received major grant funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. He has undertaken peer review for funders in Ireland, the UK, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the UK Higher Education Academy. He regularly reviews for the Times Higher Education. william safran is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published widely on French and comparative politics, diaspora, and the politics of ethnicity, language, and religion. His books include, inter alia, Politics in Europe (2014), The French Polity (2009), Transnational Migrations (2009), Language, Ethnic Identity and the State (2005), The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion, and Politics (2003), and Identity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies (1999). He is the founding editor of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics and the general editor of Routledge Studies in Nationalism and Ethnicity. eivind heldaas seland works as a researcher in ancient history and global history at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies, and Religion at the University of Bergen. His scholarship addresses the Indian Ocean, the Near East, and the Eastern Mediterranean in the pre-Islamic/ancient period, with particular interest in the interrelation between long distance trade, ideology/religion, and political power. rankin sherling is assistant professor of history at Marion Military Institute, the Military College of Alabama. He is a specialist in the migration of people, ideas, religion, and culture from Ireland to America and is the author of The Invisible Irish: Finding Protestants in the Nineteenth Century Migrations to America (2016).

Index

Aboriginal inhabitants. See indigenous peoples “Abraham’s seed.” See Chosen People Aciman, André, 35, 64 Acton, (Lord). See Dahlberg-Acton, John Adams, William Forbes, 218–19 Adorno, Theodor, 253 African diaspora, xiv, 25–8, 96, 115; and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, 100–2 African origins, 112–13 Aftonbladet, 175 agency. See “diaspora as agency” Ahlgvist, Göran, 150 Akenson, D.H., xiii–xiv, xv, 33, 108, 123, 255 Albert, (Prince), 200 Albion Society, 189, 197–201 passim, 203, 206, 208, 301n45; in Philadelphia, 199. See also Order of the Sons of St George Alien and Sedition Acts (usa), 230

American Historical Association, 28 American Historical Review, 256 Amerindians, 158, 178; and Catholic Church condemnation of slavery, 158. See also indigenous peoples Aminoff, Sten, 165–6 An Gorta Mór. See Great Famine Anderson, Benedict, 36 Andersson, Charles John, 176 Andrews, J.A.H., 209 Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), 175–6 Anthias, Floya, 33 anti-Semitism, 20–1, 41, 43, 47, 59, 66 Apocrypha, 6 Armenian Assembly of America, 42 Armenian diaspora, 27–8, 32, 42–3, 46, 47, 96, 98, 277n4; economics of, 57; trade networks, 125–6 Armenian Genocide (1915), 27 Armstrong, John A., 25 Arya Samaj, 252

358 Aslanian, S.D., 125 associations: Canadian, 198–214; as diasporic agencies, 197–213; English, 190–214 passim; German, 200; Irish, 197, 198; Scottish, 198 Australia, 161–5 Authorized version. See King James Bible autocracies, 43–4, 63 Axel, Brian, 36, 41 Aziz, 132 Aztec, 120 Babel, Tower of, 17 Babylonian Exile, 7–11, 254 Baghdad, 10 Bahrain, 132 Ballarat, 161 Baltimore. See Calvert, George (Lord Baltimore) Baptists, 172, 220, 228, 297n140 Barbaroi, 118, 129 Barber, Edward C., 211–12 Barker, R.W., 207–8 Barr, Elinor, 180 Basutoland, 170 Baumann, Martin, 266n17 Beaton, Patrick, 248 Bechuanaland, 170 Belgian Congo, 171 “belonging.” See identity Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel, 264n2 Berenike, 130, 131, 132 Bharukacca, 131 Bible, 3–27 passim; Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, 6, 7, 8, 10–14, 19–20, 21

Index Black Box problem, 87–93 Bloom, Harold, 15 Bonnett, Aubrey, 27 Boyarin, Daniel, 20, 268n30 Boyarin, Jonathan, 20, 268n30 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 246 Brazil, 158–60, 168 British Guiana, 248, 249, 251 British North America. See Canada British-American Society, 199 Brooke, Peter, 228 Brooks, G.B., 201 Brubaker, Rogers, 33, 39, 69, 97–8, 100, 102, 104, 126, 137, 191, 243 Bruneau, Michael, 50 Bryce-Laporte, Roy, 27 Buruma, Ian, 65 Butler, Kim, 33 Cabo Corso (Ghana), 154–5 Caligula, Gaius, 16 Calvert, George (Lord Baltimore), 221 Canada, 177–88, 194; censuses of, 178; demography of, 178–87, 232–4; and ethnicity, 182–3; and gender imbalance, 184–5; and longitudinal data, 178–9 Canadian Families Project, 179 Cape Colony, 170–7 passim Caribbean diaspora, 50–1 Carson, James T., xv, 107 Catholic Defenders, 230 Césaire, Aimé, 245 Chaliand, Gérard, 46 Chicago, 186 Chichimecs, xv, 120

Index Chirac, Jacques, 35 “Chosen People,” 12, 17, 20–1 Chowdhury, Amitava, xiii, xvi, 5, 108, 110 Christianity, 267–8n27 Church of Ireland, 218 “circulation society,” 125, 127. See also trade diasporas Civilization, 135 Clifford, James, xi, 32, 33 Cobbet, William, 231 “coffin ship,” 237 Cohen, Robin, 32, 46, 50, 98 Cohens, clan, 21 collegia, 136 Colls, Robert, 192–3 Colonia Finlandesa, 160 Columbus, Christopher, 116–17 Constantine, Stephen, 194 Conzen, Kathleen Neils, 195 Coogan, Tim Pat, 217 Cook, James, 118 Coolidge, Ruth Dame, 218 Cortes, Hernando, 118 Craighead, Thomas, 226 Cronqvist, Corfitz, 162 Cuban Revolution, 44 Cullen, L.M., 226 Curtin, Philip, 108, 125, 126, 129 Cyrus of Persia, 10–11 Dahlberg-Acton, John (Lord), 41–2 Damas, Léon, 245 Dannevirke, 167 Darroch, A. Gordon, 179 David, (King), 10 Dawson, George Francis, 205–6, 209

359 de Gaulle, Charles, 41; 1967 diatribe, 59 de Geer, Eric, 152 de Valera, Eamon, 56 Delaney, Enda, 24 Delaware River, 223, 226 Delmarva migrations, as concept. See Delmarva Peninsula Delmarva Peninsula, 109, 216, 217, 221, 222–4, 226 democracies, 62–3; pluralist, 62 Denmark, 167; and in-migration, 149–54 passim Derry, County 218 Destruction (of Jerusalem, 70 ce), 21 Deutero-Canon, 6 deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, 47 diaspora; 19th century usage, 5–7; as agency, 255–61; “cancer diaspora,” 102; as concept, xi–xvi passim, 23, 31, 66, 70–1, 83, 95–106, 114; as diachronic, xi–xii, xv, 105, 241–2, 253, 254–61; and “diasporic personality,” 63–6; and early Christian usage, 19–21; economic aspect of, 56–9; and ethnicity, 39– 40; formations as concept, 107– 10; and Greek definition for dispersion, 3, 16, 26, 96, 97–9, 105, 266n17; as language groups, 101; as metaphor, 100–3, 240; as multipolar, xi–xii, 83–94, 139–40, 188, 254–5, 269n39; as narrative, 104– 6; and “otherness,” 36–7; philosophical usage of, 15–18; and

360 post-modernism, 34–40; as project, 98–100; as religious concept, 3–15, 96–7, 245–8, 251–2; and spatiality, 104–6; as “stranded” (Russia), 52; as symptom of anomie, xv; as synchronic, xi–xii, 104; victim, 98. See also “push– pull”; typologies Diaspora (journal), 25, 28 Dickson, R.J., 226–7 Dillingham Commission, 139–40, 194, 299n17 Dissenter Act: of 1860, 146; of 1873, 146 Dissenters, Swedish, 146–52 distance-decay, 76 Dobbs, Arthur, 227 Doctor, Manilal, 249–51, 252 Donegal, County, 218, 222 Donegall, Earl of, 228–9 Dorigo, Guido, 78, 83 Dunaway, Wayland F., 218 East Indian Progressive Society, 252. See also Indian diaspora economic historians, 84–95 Edomites, 17 Egyptian Captivity, 17–18 Elliott, Bruce, 201 Emigration Commission, Swedish (1907–13), 139, 144–50, 187 emigration: Irish, as concept, 24–6 Emigrationsutredningen. See Emigration Commission, Swedish (1907–13) Encyclopaedia Britannica, 5 Encyclopaedia Judaica, 3–5, 14, 19, 263–4n2

Index English American Club, 197 English diaspora, 109, 190–214. See also associations; as diasporic agencies Erickson, Charlotte, 195 Eriksson, Axel Wilhelm, 176–7 Esau, 17 Esman, Milton, 39 ethnicity, 41, 48, 51–9, 126 Euphrates River, 9–10, 132 European invasions, 120–2 Eusebius, 22 Evers, Kasper G., 136 exile, xiii, 3, 7–9. See also galut Exodus, Israelite, 17–18 Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 80 Fanon, Frantz, 245 Ferguson, Niall, 135–6 “First Nations,” 118. See also indigenous peoples Fischer, David Hackett, 195 Fitzgerald, Edward, 224–5 Fitzgerald, Patrick, 227, 229 Fitzpatrick, David, 24 Foresters, 197 “The Forgotten Emigration,” 153, 154, 288n51 Forssman, Oscar W.A., 172 France: and Jacobin republican culture, 62–3; Jewish population in, 47; Muslim assimilation in, 60–1; pieds noir in, 48–9, 53–4 Free Church (Sweden), 146–7 Freemasons, 203 Friberg, Bror Erik, 167–8 Friborg, Göran, 160 Fristedt, F.L., 172

Index Furnivall, John S., 56, 245. See also “plural societies” Gabrielsen, Vincent, 136 galut, xiii, 3, 4, 7–9, 13, 33, 47; as concept, 12, 23, 66, 102. See also Babylonian Exile; exile Gandhi, Mohandas, 249–50 Garvey, Marcus, 64 Geary, Lawrence M., 89–90, 91 Germany, 45; Jewish population in, 47, 48; and in-migration, 149–54 passim Gilroy, Paul, 32–3 Glendy, John, 231 Glick-Schiller, Nina, 37 global history as field, xiii, xv, xvi, 256–61 “global Indian diaspora.” See Indian diaspora globalization, 61, 260 golah, 8 “gravitational-pull model,” 82 “gravitational settlement,” 161–4 “gravity model,” 81–2 Great Deprivation, Sweden (1867– 69), 151, 153, 154, 158–9, 188 Great European Migration (1815– 1914), 85–94, 108, 140–3, 148, 153, 163, 178, 180, 183. See also Poor European Periphery Great Famine (Ireland), xvi, 109, 215, 231–2, 234, 236–9; historiography of, 238–9 “The Great Hunger.” See Great Famine Great Lakes as transnational zone, 202–3

361 “Great Strike (1909),” 160 Great Trek (1834–40), 170–7 passim Griffith, G.T., 71 Gurr, T.R., 56 Gustav III, (King), 155, 170 Hadramawt, 131, 132 Haley, Alex, 64 Hall, Stuart, 100, 246 Hallbeck, Hans Peter, 172 Halter, Mark, 64 Hanna, Charles A., 218 Hansen’s Law, 60 Harper, Marjory, 194 Harris, Joseph E., 26 Hastakavapra, 131 Hatton, Timothy, 92–3 Heidegger, Martin, 100 Heimkehrillusion, 45 Herskovits, Melville, 244 Herzl, Theodor, 56 Hindusthani, (The), 250 homeland; as concept, 41–52, 247, 253 Homo erectus, 112, 113 Homo floresiensis, 113 Homo heidelbergiensis, 113 Homo neanderthalensis, 113 Homo sapiens, 112–13 hostland; as concept, 60 Humanistic revolution, 22 Hybridity, as concept, 99–100, 111, 246–7 identity; as belonging, xi–xvi, 35, 95, 97, 100–10, 111, 240, 255, 278n17; and creolization, 246–7,

362 253; and liminality, 247–53; as unbelonging, 100–4 indentured labour; Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, xvi, 46, 98–9, 105, 110, 223, 227, 241–53, 308n12, 309n34. See also Indian Ocean indentured servant. See indentured labour Indian diaspora, 99–100, 110, 241– 53 passim; in Fiji, 249; and IndoJamaicans, 250–3; in Jamaica, 246, 251–2; in Mauritius, 248, 249, 251; and Tamils, 42, 53, 98; in Trinidad, 248, 249. See also indentured labour Indian National Congress (1885), 249 Indian Ocean, xvi, 126–37, 240–53 passim Indian Revolt (1857), 248–9 Indians. See indigenous peoples indigeneity; as concept, 107, 111, 112, 114–16; ilo definition of, 115; “New World,” 115; “Third World,” 115; transnational, 115, 253; un definition of, 115 indigenous peoples, 62–3, 111–24, 141, 172, 174, 176, 294n106 indios, 116–17 “infiltration” migration, 164–6 International Committee of Historical Sciences, 28 “invisible diaspora” as concept, xv, 191–7 “invisible immigrants” as concept, 195

Index Ireland, 90–1, 141–2, 193, 202, 215–39, 271–2n46, 276n35 Irish Catholic migration, 109, 229 Irish diaspora, xv–xvi, 46, 49–50, 109, 214, 215–39; 19th century, 232–9; and American Revolution, 229–30; and the Anglo-Irish, 220; Catholic stream, 216–17, 220, 229–31; historiography of, 220–1, 232–6, 238, 239; and Ulster-Scot stream, 217–29, 236; and US demography, 232–4. See also Great Famine; Scotch-Irish; Ulster Scots Irish immigration; as concept, 224– 5. See also Irish diaspora Irish Presbyterians. See Irish diaspora; Ulster Scots Isanti County (Minnesota), 154 Jefferson, Thomas, 231 Jehoiachin, (King), 10, 13 Jeremiah, the prophet, 3 Jerome, Harry, 84 Jerusalem, 11, 293n99 Jesus of Nazareth, 20 Jewish Diaspora, xiv, 3, 6, 23, 31– 69 passim, 46, 96, 103, 258; and myth of return, 49–50, 51 “Jewish Enlightenment,” 22–3 Johansson, Rolf, 150 Jones, Maldwyn, 226–7 Jönköping, 145 Judaism, 20–1, 47, 51, 60, 116, 146, 192, 273n85; “liberal” form of, 23; and matrilineal principle, 268n33 Judith, Book of, 6

Index Kale, Madhavi, 242, 244 Kälvemark, Ann-Sofie, 142 Kelleher, John, 4–5 Kennedy, Liam, 24, 226–7 Keynes, John Maynard, 91–2 Khor Rori, 130, 131 Kiberd, Declan, 191 Kilson, Martin, 26 King James Bible, 14–15 Kirkham, Graeme, 223, 226 Kirkus, Dr., 210 koina, 136 Koivukangas, Olavi, 161 Koptos, 136 Kuparinen, Eero, 173, 174 Kuznetian cycles, 85–6 labour migration; Swedish, 149–54 lagaskiftet (1827), 152 Laggan Presbytery, 221–3 Lambkin, Brian, 227, 229 languages, 33, 40, 46, 51, 54–6, 62, 67–8, 129, 131, 152, 160, 185, 187, 216–17, 250, 251, 253, 297– 8n145; Yiddish, 44 “Laws of Migration.” See Ravenstein, Ernst Georg Lee, Everett S., 77, 82–3 Levine, Amy-Jill, 100 Levites, clan, 11–12, 21 Levitt, Peggy, 37 Leyburn, James G., 226 Linnaeas. See Linné, Carl von Linné, Carl von, 170–1, 176–7 Liverpool, University of, 24–5 Ljungmark, Lars, 180–1 Lloyd, Amy, 194

363 Londonderry (New Hampshire), 224 Longstaff, G.W., 207 “Low Ethnic Consciousness,” 183–6 Lower Congo, 171 Lutherans, 145, 146, 156, 169, 184, 285n13, 293n96 MacRaild, Donald, xv, 24, 108, 109 “magic lantern” effect, 143 Maimonides (Moses Ben Maimon), 56 Makaretu, 167 Makemie, Francis, 223 Manawatu, 167 Maori, 120, 169 Marienstras, Richard, 51 marriage patterns; in Australia, 162–4; in Canada, 185; intermarriage, 128, 129, 162, 169, 218–19, 251 Martin, John Stanley, 164 Maryland, 221–2 Mather, Cotton, 225 matrilineal principle, 21, 268n33 McCormack, Ross, 194 McGregor, James, 224 McKinstry, John, 224 McMurphy, John, 224 McNeill, William, 259 Memmi, Albert, 51 Mendelssohn, Moses, 22–3 Mesene kingdom, 132 Mexico, 157–8 Middle Eastern diaspora, 50–1 Miller, Kerby, 197, 226–7 mining, 154, 160, 172–7, 196 Minnesota, 154, 184, 186, 292n92 minorities, 58–65

364

Index

Mishra, Vijay, 36, 243, 252 Misiones colony, 160 Mission Covenant, 171 missionaries, 251; Swedish, 171–3 Mochore, R.A., 169 Mokyr, Joel, 91, 141–2 Molly Maguires, 196–7 Monrad, Ditlev, 167–8 Morgan, Parker, 208 Morley, Neville, 136 Mormons (lds), 146, 286n22 Moses, 17 Moyor, William, 26 Muza, 129 Muziris, 133–5 Myos Hormos, 130, 131 “myth of the return.” See Heimkehrillusion

New Zealand, 164–9 Newfoundland, 109, 201, 216; and Irish migrant stream, 216–17 Newton, Isaac, 74, 81 “Niall of the Nine Hostages,” 220, 304n11 Niehoff, Arthur, 244–5 Niehoff, Juanita, 244–5 Niehoff, Maren, 16 Nobelius, Carl Axel, 161 Norman, Hans, 140 Norsewood, 167 North America St George’s Union (nastgu), 191, 202–12; purpose of, 204 North Dakota, 186 Norway, 141–2 “nuclear homeland,” 272n65

Namibia, 170, 176–7 Natal, 170–7 passim National Bureau of Economic Research, 84, 86 nationalism. See nation-state nation-state, concept of, xiv, xiii, 31, 32–7, 38, 61–3, 123, 126, 214, 240–1, 248–55, 260 Native North Americans. See indigenous peoples Nazis, 35, 41, 47; and expatriation, 58 Nebuchadnezzar, 10 New England, 224–5 New Jerusalem, 170 New South Wales, 162 “New Sweden,” 154–5 New Testament. See Bible. See also King James Bible

obefintliga, 144 Öcalan, Abdullah, 45 Oddfellows, 197, 203 Ó Gráda, Cormac, 91, 239 Ohlsson, Anders, 177 Ohm’s law, 78 Old Sinhalese, 131 Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures). See Bible. See also King James Bible Ontario, 177, 201 Orange Order, 201, 202, 203; Triennial Council (Ireland), 202 Orange River, 170–7 passim Order of the Sons of St George, 197; in New York, 198; in Philadelphia, 198 “original homeland.” See homeland Ornstein, Michael D., 179

Index Pale of Settlement, 23 Palmer, Colin, 113, 243 Palmyra, 131–3 Palmyrenon naukleron Erythraikon, 136 Paul (the Apostle), 15, 19–21, 267– 8n27, 268n29 Paxman, Jeremy, 193 Pense, E.J.B., 207–8 Periplus, 128–31, 134 Petersen, William, 80 Philadelphia, 234–5 Philo Judaeus. See Philo of Alexandria Philo of Alexandria, 5–6, 15–26 “physical dispersion.” See tfutsot “plural societies,” 245–6 Polanyi, Karl, 125 Poor European Periphery, 140–2 “potato blight.” See Great Famine, Ireland Prakrit, 131 Presbyterians: Irish, Ulster. See Ulster Scots Price, Charles A., 163, 290–1n80 Protector of Immigrants, 252 push-pull model of migration, xiv, 79, 82–3, 93 Quebec, 101, 177, 237 Queen Victoria; and diamond jubilee, 190–1 Queensland (Australia), 161–2, 168 Queer diaspora, 37, 100–1 Quigley, John Michael, 86–7 Rabbinic Judaism, 21 Randolph, Edward, 222, 223

365 Ravenstein, Ernst Georg, 71–9, 83, 93, 151; and hydraulic model of migration, xiv Ray, Himanshu P., 131 Registration-Taxation Bureau (Sweden), 147 Renan, Ernest, 59, 261 Rhodes, 136 Riegler, Claudius, 153 Robin, Christian J., 132 Roman Catholics, 35, 40, 45, 47, 49, 109, 146, 158, 162, 216–21 passim, 229–36 Roman Empire, 16, 18, 134–5 Rotberg, Robert, 26 Royal Society of St George (rsstg), 198, 204 Runblom, Harald, 140, 163, 183–4, 186 “rural proletarianization,” 287n47 Russia, 41, 160, 198; and “stranded diaspora,” 52–3 Saam, 51–2 Saba-Himyar Kingdom, 128–9, 131 “Sabbath of desolation,” 12 Safran, William, xi, xiv, 116; diasporic hypothesis of, 67–9 Said, Edward, 65 Saint George, 190, 191 Saint Paul. See Paul (the Apostle) Saint-Barthélemy, 155–6 Sanatan Dharma, 252 Sanskrit, 131 Scally, Robert, 237 Schnapper, Dominique, 270n2 Scotch-Irish. See Ulster Scots Scotch-Irish Presbyterian rebellion, 229

366 Second Temple Judaism, 4, 19, 21, 263–4n2 Seeley, J.R., 193 Seland, Eivind, xv, 108 Senghor, Léopold, 105, 245 Septuagint, 13–15, 20, 21, 265n8, 265n12 Seventy-Mile Bush, 167, 169 Sheffer, Gabriel, 25, 96–7 Shepperson, George, 26 Shepperson, Wilbur, 195–6 Sherling, Rankin, xv–xvi, 109 Sierra Leone Company, 170–1 Sirach, Jesus Ben, 6 Sjöblom, E.V., 171 Skidelsky, Robert, 91–2 slave trade, 27, 28, 74, 80, 119, 122, 242, 154–9; and Brazil, 158 Smith, Anthony D., 53 Smith, Michael G., 56, 245–6 Soados, Son of Boliades, 134 Socotra, 131 Sons of England Benevolent Society, 190, 194, 201; in Canada, 201–2; in South Africa, 201 South Africa: Indian settlers in, 46; and in-migration, 169–77 South Arabian kingdoms. See Indian Ocean South Carolina, 225 Spanish diaspora, 103, 120 Spasinou Charax, 132 Speare, Alden, 89 Spengler, Oswald, 259 språkgemensak, 152–3 St George’s Society, 189–214 passim, 298n2, 303n83, 303n86

Index Statistika Centralbyrån (Central Statistical Bureau), 144–50 passim Stern, Menahem, 263n2 Stevens, Colonel, 221 Stouffer, Samuel, 81 sugar, 98, 155, 259; plantations; tariffs, 250. See also indentured labour Sundbärg, Gustav, 147–8, 149 Sundsvall strike, 159 Swaziland, 170 Sweden, 141; and demographics, 139, 142–9; and intra-European migration, 149–54; and migration records, 144–50; and poverty, 142–3. See also Emigration Commission, Swedish (1907–13); Great Deprivation, Sweden (1867–69) Swedenborg, Emanuel, 170 Swedish diaspora, xv, 108–9, 138– 88; and migrant low ethnic consciousness, 184. See also Sweden Swedish West India Company, 155–6 Swedo-Finns, 182 Swedish migrants, low ethnic consciousness, 184 Tabellverk, 143–5 Tabula Peutingeriana (TP), 133–4 Tadmor, 132 Tamil, 131, 133 Tanakh (Old Testament). See Bible Tasmania, 162 Teaiwa, Teresia K., 118 Tedebrand, Lars-Göran, 142–3, 150–1 Templ(um) Augusti, 133

Index Tel Aviv, 10 tfutsot, 47 Thomas, Brinley, 85–6 Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 77–8, 84–5 Thompson, Lewis, 209 Thornthwaite, C. Warren, 78 Tibetan diaspora, 42, 48 Tobit, Book of, 6 Tobler, Waldo, 78, 83 Tölölyan, Khachig, 25, 33 Toltec, 120 Tomlin, William, 209 Tone, Wolfe, 230 Toynbee, Arnold, 259 trade diasporas, xv, 24, 108, 125–37, 289n63. See also Indian Ocean. See also mining trade migration: ship-crew, 166; South African, 172–7; transPacific, 164 Trail, William, 222–3 transnationalism, 37–8, 58, 61, 67, 73, 78, 84, 111, 115, 123, 153, 191–2, 199, 202–14 passim, 253, 256, 258, 271n32 Transvaal, 170–7 passim Treaty of Trianon (1920), 53 Trichardt, Louis, 171–2 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 193–4 Tuscaroras, xv, 119, 120 Tyndale, William, 14–15 typology, 79–84 Ulster Scots, xvi, 109, 216–29 passim, 305–6n12. See also Irish diaspora

367 Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The, 133 United Empire Loyalists, 199 United Irishmen, 230 usa, 140–2; demographic information, 291n82; exceptionalism, 193; and frontier thesis, 193; and “germ theory,” 193; Irish migration to, 25, 216–39; Jewish population in, 47; migration to Canada, 185–7; Swedish migration to, 147, 149, 157. See also nation-state Vairo Geniza, 125 victimhood, 192 Victoria (Australia), 162 Vogel Era. See Vogel, Julius Vogel, Julius, 166–8 Wagner, Richard, 20 Walvis Bay Mining Company, 176 Washington, 186 Watson, G. Llewellyn, 27 Wellhausen, Julius, 5 Welsh diaspora, 54–5 Westergaard, Harald, 285n15 Western Australia, 162 Wideman, Pehr, 161 Wiggan, Alfred R., 212 Willerslev, Richard, 152 Williamson, Jeffrey G., 90–3 Wilson, David, 24 Winnipeg, 180, 186, 201 Witwatersrand, 169–70, 173 Wokeck, Marianne, 223, 226 Woodside, James, 225 Worcester (Massachusetts), 224

368 “world history.” See global history Yemen, 128 Yeshua. See Jesus of Nazareth Yeshua-faith. See “diaspora,” Christianity Young, J.R.C., 191

Index Zangwill, Israel, 60 Zhitlowsky, Hayyim, 51 Zionism, 35, 56, 59, 268n30, 293n99; and post-Zionist revisionism, 65. See also Jewish Diaspora