Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  The intellectual response to the oversimplicity of the invasion hypothesis has thus taken the form of developing two models which in different ways minimize the importance of migration, whether by cutting back on the likely numbers involved, the degree of violence, the significance of its effects or, in one of the two, the extent to which there was any real intent to migrate-cum-invade at all. These models are obviously much more compatible than the invasion hypothesis with those visions of group identity that deny that large, compact groups of humanity could ever intentionally move as a cohesive block from one locality to another. But while these models are certainly more sophisticated, and are to that extent a step in the right direction, they do not yet, even in combination, add up to a satisfactory overall approach to migration in first-millennium Europe. Confining discussion to a framework supplied by just these two models involves three specific problems, and one much more general one.

  Mistaken Identity?

  The first problem stems from the fact that in their excitement that human beings do not always organize themselves in self-reproducing, closed population groups (and, I think too, in their determination to banish for ever the abominations of the Nazi era), historians and archaeologists of the first millennium have tended to concentrate on only one half of contemporary discussions of identity in the social-scientific literature. At the same time as Leach, Barth and others were focusing on group behaviour and observing individuals swapping allegiance according to immediate benefit, a second group of scholars turned their attentions to the close observation of individual human behaviour. These have sometimes been called ‘primordialists’, because they argue that group affiliations have always been a fundamental part of human behaviour. Some of these studies seemed to come up with different conclusions from those generated by Leach and Barth in that they showed that, in some cases, inherited senses of group identity apparently cannot be manipulated at will, but constrain individuals into patterns of behaviour that go against their immediate interests. Differences in appearance, speech (whether language or dialect), social practice, moral values and understandings of the past can – once they have come into existence – act as formidable barriers to individuals who might wish, for personal advantage, to attach themselves to a different group.22

  The two lines of research have sometimes been held to contradict each other, but in my view they do not. They actually define the opposite ends of a spectrum of possibility. Depending upon particular circumstances, not least past history, inherited group identities can exercise a more or less powerful constraint upon the individual, and provide a greater or lesser rallying cry to action. Again, this is firmly in line with observable reality. In terms of larger group identities now, the rhetoric of Britishness strikes a much stronger chord in the United Kingdom in contemporary debates about the EU, for instance, than does, say, Luxembourgeoisness in its home corner of Europe, neatly located between Germany, France and Belgium. And so too at the level of the individual: individual members of any larger group show marked differences in their levels of loyalty to it. Accepting the fact that group identity is sometimes a stronger and sometimes a weaker force in people’s lives does not, I would stress, really contradict what Barth had to say (even though he might think it did). His famous aphorism is that identity must be understood as a ‘situational construct’. Fair enough, but a crucial point is that all situations are not the same. Influenced in part by the old Marxist dogma that any identity that is not class-based (as group identities will not be, unless every member has the same status) must be ‘false consciousness’, and partly by the fact that he was primarily reacting against a world dominated by nationalist ideologies, Barth stressed, and was most interested in, the kinds of situations that produced weak group affiliations. But even the logic of his own phrasing implicitly allows that there might be other situations that produced stronger types of group affiliation, and the so-called primordialist research has explored some of them.

  Two entirely different types of constraint can act as barriers. On the one hand, there are the informal constraints of the ‘normal’, whether we’re talking food, clothing, or even moral values. Research has suggested that the individual picks up many of these group-defining characteristics in the earliest years of life, which helps explain, of course, why they might sometimes have a profound effect, making individuals feel so uncomfortable outside the norms of their own society that they cannot happily live anywhere else. On the other hand, and sometimes operating alongside such senses of discomfort, there can also be much more formal barriers to changing identities. As an individual, you can in theory claim any identity you want to, but that doesn’t mean it will be recognized. In the modern world, group membership usually means having the appropriate passport, and hence the ability to satisfy the criteria for obtaining it in the first place. In the past, of course, passports didn’t exist, but some ancient societies monitored membership carefully. Rights to Roman citizenship were jealously guarded, for instance, and a whole bureaucratic apparatus was set up to monitor individual claims. Greek city states had earlier followed similar strategies. Such bureaucratic methods relied on literacy, but there is no reason why non-literate ancient societies might not also have controlled membership closely in certain conditions. There can also be degrees of group membership. America and Germany, in the modern world, have more and less officially accepted large groups of foreign workers without necessarily giving them full citizenship rights, and herein lies the key, in my view, to a total understanding of the identity question. When full group membership brings some kind of legal or material advantage – a set of valuable rights, in other words – we should expect it to be closely controlled.23

  The underlying conclusions to emerge from the identity debate are more complex, therefore, than has sometimes been realized. For individuals born into all but the simplest of contexts, group identity comes in layers. Immediate family, wider kin, town, county, country, and these days international affiliations (such as citizenship of the EU), together with their own life choices – the desire, for instance, to live somewhere else entirely – all provide the individual with possible claims to membership of a larger group. But any claim he or she makes does have to be recognized, and, according to context, these possible affiliations might exercise a more or less powerful hold upon them. Essentially, Barth’s famous aphorism sets up a false contrast. All group identities are ‘situational constructs’ – they are created, they change, they can cease to exist entirely – but some are more ‘evanescent’ than others.

  From this follows a first potential problem in current approaches to migration in the first millennium. They are predicated on the supposition that large-group identity is always a weak phenomenon, but this is only a half-understanding of the identity debate. If a position on identity is adopted a priori – whether it is viewed as strong (in the era of nationalism) or weak (in the currently emerging consensus) – then evidence to the contrary will be ignored or argued away. To my mind, it is important to be willing to re-examine the evidence for migration in the first millennium without assuming that the population groups involved will necessarily have been bound together so weakly as some of the current half-understandings of the group identity issue would suppose.

  The second problem emerges when the virulent rejection of migration as a possible agent of past change among some English-speaking archaeologists is set against the kinds of archaeological reflection of migration that is likely to turn up in practice. It is not usual in the modern world for entire social groups to move in a block, and, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, this was also true of the period being explored in this study. There is in fact little or no evidence of first-millennium ethnic cleansing. First-millennium migration almost always consisted, therefore, of moving part of a population from point A to point B, with at least some of the latter’s indigenous population remaining in situ, the only exception being Iceland which was unoccupied when the Norse arrived there in the ninth century. This be
ing so, you can never expect to find the complete transfer of an entire material culture. Rather, only certain elements of the old material culture would be likely to be brought to point B: those invested with particular meaning, perhaps, for the subgroup of the migrant population actually involved in the migration process. At the same time, some or much of the indigenous material culture of point B would probably continue, and some entirely new items or practices might be generated by the interaction of the migratory and host populations. The archaeological reflections of many first-millennium migratory processes, in other words, will often be straightforwardly ambiguous in the sense that you could not be absolutely certain, just on the basis of the archaeology alone, that migration had occurred.24

  So far so good: if the only archaeological evidence for a possible migration is ambiguous rather than definitive, so be it. Better that than populate European history with a series of phantom invasions. Where this does become a problem, however, is when migration is viewed as ‘always simplistic’ and ‘usually groundless’. If you approach the issue in this frame of mind, then the ambiguity of the evidence will not be treated in an even-handed fashion. Where you’re looking at some archaeological transformation which might or might not represent the correlates of a migratory process, then it is important to say exactly that – no more and no less. But because archaeologists have just gone through such a nasty divorce from migration, some have a strong tendency (at least in Britain and North America) to want to write it out of their accounts of the past entirely.25 It is now enough in some quarters to show that an observable transformation might have been generated without migration for this to be taken as a proven fact. But since the archaeological reflections of many migration processes will only ever be ambiguous, the basic fact that just about every kind of archaeological transformation can, with sufficient intellectual ingenuity, be explained in terms other than of migration, doesn’t mean that it should be. The right answer is not to say that, because there is ambiguity, migration has been disproved, but to accept the ambiguity and see if anything else – especially historical evidence where appropriate – helps resolve it.

  It is not safe, then, either to build your estimate of the potential scale of first-millennium migration on the presumption that group identities were always weak, or to dismiss its existence and importance if you find only ambiguous archaeological evidence. These two observations in turn generate the third problem. The concept of a migration topos – the idea that Mediterranean writers were led by a cultural reflex to see any barbarians on the move as a ‘people’ – has sometimes been used to dismiss historical evidence for large, compact and mixed migration groups. Up to this point, however, its supposed prevalence is based on assertion rather than on any properly argued demonstration that it really existed. As a concept, it has gained a priori plausibility from the idea that group identities could never have been strong enough to generate the kind of large-group migration that the sources seem to be reporting, and from the fact that, as already noted, the archaeological reflections of migration are often ambiguous. But if archaeological ambiguity is only to be expected, and it is unsafe just to assume that all first-millennium group identities were necessarily weak, this obviously undermines the support these points have been supposed to provide for the supposed existence of a migration topos. So it will be necessary in what follows to examine on a case by case basis whether the historical accounts of large-group migration can really be dismissed so easily.

  Even by themselves, these three problems would be sufficient to warrant a re-examination of migration in the first millennium. But there is also a fourth, and much broader, reason why current treatments of the topic require a thorough overhaul.

  Migration and Development

  The comparative study of human migration has a lengthy pedigree. Like many other fields, it has proceeded from originally simple models to more complex and interesting ones, particularly in the last scholarly generation or so. Interest originally focused upon economic motives as the paramount factor in explaining population movements, with a landmark study arguing pretty successfully that immigration to the United States was positively correlated with its business cycles.26 The quest to understand first-millennium migration has seen some engagement with this rapidly developing field. When thinking about causation, for instance, the concept of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors – things that were bad about a point of departure and attractive about the destination – has long been part of the scholarly vocabulary. The importance of accurate information in shaping migration flows, and the fact that larger-scale migration is sometimes preceded by pioneering individuals (‘scouts’) whose experiences add momentum to what follows, are likewise part of the landscape. But these ideas are no more than the tip of the comparative-migration iceberg and, in general terms, the literature has been little explored by those studying migration in the first millennium.27

  This is a strange omission because the comparative literature offers a wide range of well-documented case studies against which to compare the first-millennium evidence, with an obvious potential to expand the range of possible migration models beyond the limits of wave-of-advance and elite-transfer. Amongst other examples, more recent history gives us economically driven flows of migrants, who are unorganized in the sense that all are making individual decisions. Nonetheless, they can over time, and especially when allied with population increase among those who have already reached the point of destination, fill an entire landscape: even one as big as the United States. The twentieth century has also underlined the importance of another basic cause of migration: political conflict. Individual refugees fleeing persecuting regimes are extremely common, but political disturbances can also generate much more concentrated migration flows. The most horrific example from recent years is Rwanda, where this chapter began. But there are many others: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the expulsion in just three months of eighty-eight thousand foreigners from Saudi Arabia in 1973, the movement of twenty-five million refugees in central and eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, the flight and continued plight of Palestinian refugees.

  Aside from expanding the underlying intellectual frame of reference, the comparative literature also indicates that it is necessary to ask more detailed questions of any migratory process than has customarily been done in first-millennium studies. Early modern and modern case studies have thrown up no instance where the entire population of place A has moved en masse to place B. Migration has always turned out to be an activity confined to certain subgroups, and a particularly fruitful line of questioning has stemmed from this observation. What leads some individuals to stay at home, when their fellows in more or less identical circumstances move? Work directed at understanding this phenomenon has identified some interesting patterns. Economic migrants tend – certainly in the first instance, at least – to be younger, often male and, in terms of their own societies, relatively better educated. Migration also tends to be undertaken by the already mobile. On closer inspection, half of the Dutch migrants to what became New York turn out to be people who had already migrated once before, from other parts of Europe to the Netherlands. Likewise, many of the ‘Irish’ participating in the early stages of the colonization of North America came from Scottish families, which, just a generation before, had moved to Ireland.28 Longer-distance migration flows have always to be understood, therefore, against established patterns of internal demographic dislocation. Participants in the latter will have a greater than average likelihood of providing manpower for the former.

  Even within these variegated patterns of participation, however, the decision to migrate does not turn simply upon what you might term rational economic calculation. Other factors complicate the individual’s thought process. Information about both projected destinations and the routes to them is one key variable. Large-scale migration flows to a new destination only begin once the pros and cons of the route, and of the potential new home, become generally understood. Bef
ore that stage, ‘channelled’ migration is correspondingly common. Under this pattern, population groups from relatively restricted departure areas end up clustered together again in specific areas at the point of destination. This seems to be caused both by limitations on the amount of available information, and by the kind of social support that can be provided by a host population from the migrants’ point of departure. Transport costs, not surprisingly, also intrude into a potential migrant’s calculations, and psychological costs are important too. The strangeness of life in a new place and the disruption to emotional ties binding the individual to family and friends affect decisions to move, as well as subsequent decisions about whether to remain. A substantial flow of return migration is thus a significant feature of all well-documented population displacements.29

  Over and above all these factors, potential migration flows can be interfered with by the political structures in existence at either the point of departure or that of arrival, or both. Since the 1970s, Western European countries have more or less brought to a halt the flows of legal migrant labour from particular parts of the Third World, which had been a regular feature of life since the Second World War. This decision was motivated by political rather than economic considerations, since industry still wanted the relatively cheap labour that migrants provide, but governments were concerned to pacify the hostility towards migrant communities that had grown up in some quarters of their own societies. Migration flows from the old sources have continued, in fact, but in the greatly modified form of family reunification, not new migrant workers, and there has followed a corresponding shift in gender and age patterns among the migrants. Flows of women and the relatively elderly, wives and dependent parents of the original migrants, have replaced the procession of young men. This is but one example of the general rule that political structures will always dictate the framework of available options within which potential migrants make their decisions.30