Historicizing Migration and Displacement: Learning from the Early Roman Empire in the Time of the Nation-State. Response to Lachenicht, Susanne. Learning from Past Displacements? The History of Migrations between Historical Specificity, Presentism and Fractured Continuities. Humanities 2018, 7, 36

Abstract

My response to Susanne Lachenicht’s thought-provoking article is a brief attempt to take up her call to write histories that lead not to absolute certainties but to more understanding of the complexities of the past. I focus on documentation, border control, and citizenship in the Early Roman Empire to illustrate some of the radically different ways these were conceptualized and practiced in a premodern multiethnic empire like Rome than in a contemporary nation-state today. Passports, for example, and border control as we know it, did not exist, and migration was not tied to citizenship status. But the account I offer is deliberately tentative and full of qualifications to emphasize the real methodological challenges the study of this subject poses on account of fragmentary literary and material records and the numerous difficulties of interpreting these. I conclude by pointing out both the benefits and the limitations of framing history as a discipline from which one can learn. On the one hand, understanding how seemingly universal categories such as ‘citizen’ and ‘migrant’ are dynamic and constructed rather than static and natural can nuance public debates in nation-states which receive high numbers of migrants (like Germany, Lachenicht’s starting point) by countering ahistorical narratives of a monolithic and sedentary identity. On the other hand, knowledge of the past does not necessarily lead to moral edification.

In her contribution to this volume, Susanne Lachenicht takes as her starting point discussions across German society about migration following the migrant ‘wave’ of 2015, and asks what we can learn from past migrations.1 She draws from her own area of expertise, Early Modern Europe, to illustrate the complexities of looking to past migrations as a means of understanding contemporary phenomena. As a demonstrative exercise, she highlights some of the reasons for human movement in the past: political, social, economic, religious, and environmental, which she points out are all also causes for movement today. In so doing, she rightly cautions against easy equivalencies despite apparent parallels, and she warns against presentist historiography. One of her forceful conclusions is a call for critical, nuanced, and self-reflexive historical inquiries that do not necessarily lead to absolute certainties, but that lead to more understanding about the complexities of migration and to what is specific and what is universal (Lachenicht 2018, p. 9).

My response to Lachenicht will focus on my own area of knowledge, the early Roman empire, and will concentrate on three differences between the Roman and modern worlds:—to documentation, to border control, and to citizenship—to illustrate the fact that these very concepts (and the attitudes towards them) are not universal but rather historically specific, and are thus subject to change.2 This knowledge, I argue, empowers us to play an active role in their transformation. At the same time, I will emphasize the challenges the study of ancient mobility poses and conclude by underscoring the difficulties (and indeed dangers) of framing history as a didactic discipline that is morally edifying or from which we can learn anything at all.

There is now a general consensus that mobility in Ancient Rome was a historical fact.3 Still, defining migration, establishing precisely who moved and in what numbers, and determining the distances people tended to migrate in the early empire are all difficult tasks and the subject of heated scholarly debate.4 The primary literary evidence spans multiple genres from satiric poetry to legal texts, while the material evidence ranges from epigraphy to bio-archaeology, and every form of evidence presents unique challenges to the scholar, who ideally must have mastery over all. Moreover, as Lachenicht herself points out, the very language, concepts, and categories that we use are anachronistic: ‘migration’, ‘mobility’, and ‘displacement’, although all Latinate, have a different semantic range today to their Latin analogues. Thus, any treatment of the subject should be sensitive to the actual vocabulary of human movement used during the period of study—in my case that of the early Roman empire—especially because this will more accurately reflect conceptions, attitudes, and experiences than our own presentist language.5

What emerges from a survey of primary and secondary scholarship on mobility and displacement in Rome is that, unlike modern nation-states, there were no systematic, uniform, universally-enforced laws governing human circulation, and any laws or norms that did exist were not static.6 There were a variety of rules and regulations and documents, but these were inconsistently enforced, often on an ad hoc basis when the need arose. Moreover, unlike today, it was not only the state who controlled or regulated mobility; social networks and social institutions (‘private’ or ‘civilian’ people and groups) played an important role.7

Thus, for example, consider passports. In the Roman empire, there was no lexical or institutional equivalent for a single state-issued document that established a citizen’s identity, proved their citizenship, and permitted them to travel, as passports do today. This does not mean that no documentation to prove identity (or citizenship) existed, only that there were multiple different ways to do so, both ‘official’ (or ‘state-issued’) and ‘unofficial’ (designated by one’s social-network), and the documents themselves did not necessarily constitute proof.8 Sherwin-White, for example, mentions the requirement for Roman citizens to register their children at birth, upon which they received a wooden diptych as a certificate of citizenship. But this law was introduced by Augustus as late as 4 CE, and both Sherwin-White and Gardner’s work underscore the unreliability of such documents.9 Similarly with movement: there was no one specific document that ‘permitted’ a free person from within the empire to move in the empire, although there were a variety of documents that might be used depending on the identity of the person and the nature of their travel.10

This does not mean there was an absence of regulation or control; only that its reasons and modes differed from those today. Thus, although free people were able to move reasonably freely within the empire without ever having to produce ‘documentation’ such as passports or ‘migration papers’, nevertheless there were restrictions, and the exceptions tell us something important about the Roman world. The four most controlled categories of people in terms of movement were the elite, whose movement was regarded by the imperial government with suspicion, if not trepidation;11 the military, who went where it was ordered; merchants, whose movement the government had a special interest in regulating to guarantee receiving taxes and customs,12 and enslaved peoples, whose status meant that they were considered goods to be circulated at the will of their owners rather than humans with volition and agency. The elite and soldiers were by definition citizens; slaves, of course, were not. Merchants could be either.13

This list highlights the fact that in the Roman political system, control of movement was not divided along a binary axis of citizen and alien (as is the case in (and between) nation-states today): rather, control was contingent on status. In this light it is from our perspective ironic that non-elites, provided they originated from within the confines of the empire and were not soldiers, slaves, or merchants, could in principle move throughout the empire without molestation, controls, obstacles, or surveillance. Freedom of movement was thus not restricted by nationality, ethnicity, religious belief, or linguistic group, but by social status and financial limitations or logistical factors.14 Conversely, this also meant that the elite, military, and slaves can be meaningfully grouped together as categories subject to displacement—although the quality and degree of this differs significantly.15

This brings us to the next and related point: borders. Traditionally, Roman historians believed borders served a security function—keeping ‘barbarians’ and other enemies out; recently, however, some have come to view their purpose as chiefly one of economic control.16 Whichever view one adopts, it is clear that there was no uniform ‘border policy’ across the empire, and there was no administrative equivalent to border control or border police. For the most part, entry and exit into and out of cities—including Rome—was unrestricted;17 within the empire itself there were no borders between provinces to supervise, police, or restrict movement18 (Egypt, and port-cities, being an exception);19 while the nature of the imperial frontiers depended on the particular relationship with the border-people. But even these were often soft and porous, sporadic military installations notwithstanding.20 A fair characterization of the reality on the ground is that the government of the early Roman empire had controls, but these were primarily concerned with collecting taxes and preventing acts of banditry and open warfare than policing migration.

The last difference I wish to highlight pertains to citizenship.21 I have mentioned above that free non-citizens could move within the empire. This is another reminder that the meaning and scope of citizenship and its privileges differ over time, and just because citizenship, migration, and displacement are linked today does not mean that this was the case in the past (or indeed that it is inevitable for this to be the case in the present). It is undeniably true that Roman citizenship was highly valuable: even when the political meaningfulness and the prestige of citizenship began to wane, citizenship nevertheless offered vital rights, including the right to due process, the right not to be tortured, and access to the grain dole.22 Still, it is also important to remember that mobility was not contingent on citizenship—only on one’s status along the lines I outlined above. This meant that even people who were not full Roman citizens, for example those with Latin Rights, could generally move freely within the empire.23 Moreover, although there were sometimes expulsions—i.e. displacements—of groups of people from Rome, and although these could be underpinned by ethnic prejudice, they were rare and not usually linked with citizenship or ‘immigration status’.24 Quite the contrary: during the Republic and afterwards in the empire, Rome was known for having inclusive citizenship laws (certainly when compared to other ancient polities), with several instances of mass enfranchisement, culminating in the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 CE, which gave full Roman citizenship to all free men in the empire, and gave free women equal rights to Roman women.25

The differences I have highlighted between early imperial Rome and the modern world should serve as a reminder of some of the ways that the very terms of the debate—the categories, structures, processes, and definitions such as citizenship, foreigner, migrant, border, displacement, traveler, tourist—that seem natural, self-evident, or inevitable today are not: they are historical, and these evolve and transform over time.

They are also cultural. Given that even the very language we use betrays the systems in which we are embedded, and that even proximate, European, Latinate languages and traditions vary wildly in the semantic range of equivalent lexical items such as ‘migrant’, it is imperative that we recognize the profound and fundamental Eurocentricity of our entire vocabulary and the framework that it reflects, and so begin to interrogate even our most basic assumptions about mobility and displacement (itself a strange euphemism). This observation in turn opens up the possibility of exciting comparative work; of exploring how non-European traditions and languages have formulated related ideas and to ask whether they even had them at all. What does membership look like in Muslim communities—especially in transnational, Muslim cosmopolitanism?26 How do (or did) pastoral-nomadic societies in Central Asia or the indigenous peoples of the Americas conceptualize borders?27 And how about citizenship and community for those whom contemporary systems forget, ignore, marginalize, or erase: the stateless, the interned, and those who live in the limbo of ‘camps’, within the nation-state but excluded from it?28

In dispossessing ourselves of the illusion that the contemporary configuration is the only possibility, and in realizing that the categories we think in are features of a very specific world—our world, the world of the nation-state—we are forced to recognize that because all of these are historical, all are subject to transformation. We thus become free to study, analyze, and dream up other possibilities, and to take active, conscious part in determining how these concepts and frameworks can evolve. History thus can inspire us to imagine, and empower us to work toward, an alternative world, one that is informed by our understanding of the past.

This is especially crucial at a moment when the future of the nation-state is unclear: what looked like a clear trajectory towards globalization and transnationalism in the 90s has now been replaced with anxieties at the resurgence of ethno-nationalism and alarm at its implications for ethnic minorities and migrants the world over. In the context of Lachenicht’s circumscribed framing (debates about migration in German society, which stemmed chiefly from anxieties about Muslim and African migrants), the study of Roman history can inform attitudes and indeed policies towards the EU, Schengen, and migration by challenging narratives that wish to draw cultural or migratory boundaries around Europe, since movement and exchange between Europe, North Africa, and West Asia—in all directions—have been ancient, continuous, and integral.29

Tacitus’ Germania, for example, provides us with a perspective that challenges contemporary assumptions about any innate qualities that make Germany a desirable target for migrants by scoffing at the idea that anyone from Italy, North Africa or the Middle East would ever move there: “Furthermore, apart from the danger of the terrifying and unknown sea, who would have left behind Asia or Africa or Italy to seek Germany, hideous in its lands, harsh in its climate, depressing to cultivate and to look at—unless it is one’s homeland?”30

Roman history also teaches us that everybody is a migrant, and that nobody is exempt from anti-migrant rhetoric: once upon a time, Germanic tribes, too, were considered barbarians, roving migrants at the gates of civilized Rome—and long held by scholars to have been the cause of its fall. Later, in the medieval period, came the Ostsiedlung: the settling of Eastern and Central Europe, from Estonia to Romania, by Germanic-speaking peoples from the Holy Roman Empire. Ideally, this kind of historical knowledge—indeed, historical consciousness—should favorably inflect attitudes to migrants today and temper vitriolic rhetoric against us.31

But although it is tempting to look to the past for help navigating contemporary problems, and although history can help us understand the differences between the specific and the general, the conceptualization of history as a didactic enterprise is highly problematic. I have already indicated above just how difficult it is to speak with any certainty about so many aspects of ancient mobility, and have tried by means of my hedging, cautious language, my qualifications, and my long footnotes to drive home this point. In so doing, I have tried to issue a warning against cavalier statements about historical facts and thus to draw attention to how complicated it can be even for professional historians to derive any lessons from them.

But even when historical facts are not in dispute, serious questions about their utility remain. Whether to climate change or to migrancy, contemporary attitudes have shown us that people will accept whatever ‘facts’ suit their prejudices, regardless what professional historians or climate scientists assert—a salutary reminder that neither facts nor the experts who labor to share these necessarily have the power to persuade. Nor is knowledge of the past necessarily synonymous with moral edification: ‘lessons’ from history can easily be deployed by anyone also toward malignant ends. Thus, an understanding of the history of displacement does not then mean avoiding the actions that lead to it nor is it a guarantor of commitment to humane, liberal values or to social justice.32 In fact, the opposite is equally possible: history, after all, has been instrumentalized to commit heinous crimes in the past, and is increasingly deployed by supremacists to justify their racist, nativist views today.