Moving Towards Europe

Lorenzo Kamel

Foreword

This volume addresses dynamics connected to migratory movements towards Europe from the African, Asian and American hemispheres. As the volume focuses on the factors that have driven and shaped such migration in the past decade, it looks at what it terms non-linear or fragmented journeys. This foreword provides a historical context to this volume, as the history of migration towards Europe as such has also been non-linear and fragmented. In particular, in the modern era, migration between Europe and these major world regions has been deeply influenced by slavery and colonialism. Although the former (slavery) would seem to be linked and rooted in a far-away past, it is actually a key component for a deeper understanding of present-day dynamics in and beyond the field of ‘migration studies’.

Here it is enough to mention that under the system that was practiced in Africa and other parts of the world in previous centuries, children of enslaved persons did not ipso facto acquire the same status. The people who were enslaved in the historical phases preceding the Atlantic trade were thus socially and politically ‘mobile’ (in 1279, the former slave Qalāwūn, like all other ‘Burjī’ and ‘Bahrī’ sultans, became the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt), that is, generally not subject to any hereditary bonds of slavery. Moreover, and contrary to the case of the Atlantic trade, in Africa people found themselves enslaved because they had been captured in wars or raids or as punishment for crimes.

Two significant aspects distinguished the original British slave system from the system that later ‘took root’ in America. Unlike Virginia and other North American states, Great Britain never codified slavery in its legislative system. In contrast to what occurred in America, moreover, the British slave system was not based exclusively on belonging to a given ‘race’. In fact, Britain enslaved people of all colours, even ‘buying’ human beings from Barbary pirates: the latter enslaved thousands of individuals from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and even Asia.

The transatlantic slave trade – organised and carried out by ‘sable destroyers of human rights’,¹ to use the expression adopted by abolitionist and former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745–97) in his autobiography – has assumed unprecedented importance for several other reasons. It laid the foundations for modern capitalism, decisively influencing the industrialisation processes of a large part of Europe and contributing to generating the idea of an ‘Atlantic space’. Conversely, the transatlantic slave trade impacted negatively on a large part of Africa and its well-established market economies, depriving extensive areas of the continent of their best resources (human and non-human) with inevitable repercussions on the social fabric of ethnic groups and local communities as well.

More locally, the deportation of millions of enslaved Africans represented a fundamental element in the birth and development of European colonies in Central and South America and, later, North America as well: about 65 per cent of enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic were brought either to Brazil (the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery) or to the Caribbean colonies, compared to less than 6 per cent brought to the present-day United States. And yet, by 1860, about two thirds of all ‘New World slaves’ lived in the American South (Southern United States).

More than half of all those falling victim to the Atlantic trade were enslaved during the eighteenth century, with Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal (the first and the last European colonial power) competing for the lucrative trade in human lives from West Africa. Still in the first half of the nineteenth century, over 3.5 million human beings were forced to cross the Atlantic to serve in the colonies of the ‘New World’. A meaningful percentage of the inheritors of these people are today known as ‘African Americans’, while ‘white Americans’ are rarely if ever addressed as ‘European Americans’. James Baldwin once said that ‘to be African American is to be African without any memory and American without any privilege’.² While ‘African American’ is a misnomer, Baldwin was right in reminding us how the denial of inclusion is a scar that human beings can and do carry with themselves for many generations.

Turning the lens back to Europe and colonialism, for many centuries Europe contributed to intercontinental migration more than any other continent: between 1820 and 1930 more than 60 million Europeans emigrated toward Australia, New Zealand, North America and a number of other areas defined by the ‘father of Environmental History’ Alfred W. Crosby as ‘Neo-Europes’.³ On the other hand, migrants from other continents rarely chose Europe as a destination.

Much has changed during the twentieth century due to a few practical historical junctures and reasons. Pieter C. Emmer and Leo Lucassen, in particular, have focused on five of these.⁴ The first is linked to the period of the two World Wars, when hundreds of thousands of non-Europeans (mainly from China, North Africa, Indochina and Madagascar) served as temporary labourers in Europe and/or as soldiers with the allied forces in France, Germany and a number of other countries (including soldiers from India in the case of Britain, and from the Maghreb in the case of France).

The second juncture coincided with the decolonisation processes and the related collapsing of a number of colonial states, when millions of Europeans and their local allies from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Indochina (in the case of France), Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (in the case of Portugal), the British colonies in southern Africa and South Asia, as well as the Dutch East Indies, moved to Europe.

Other three reasons for the increase in the volume of migration to Europe during the twentieth century are directly linked to the rising demand for labour following the end of the Second World War (particularly the British Commonwealth), the growing quest for political asylum (from the often-violent process of state-building), and cultural and educational purposes. All this is part of what Pamila Gupta defined as ‘the sheer physicality of colonial demise and the amount of stuff that got moved’.⁵

Thus, contemporary migration towards Europe – the focus of this book – has a longer historical trail. And yet, still in 1990, migrants from West Africa, where many of the current migratory waves directed to Europe stem from, represented only 0.005 per cent in the annual population growth in Europe, which at the time was 0.184 per cent. The upsurge of net migration from the late 1990s has much to do with the combination of climate change and demographic growth (according to the United Nations, more than half of global population growth between 2015 and 2050 is expected to occur in Africa). At the same time, local economies remain locked into (semi)peripheral positions not least also due to the (never so) well organised exploitation of Africa, mainly at the hands of single European countries and companies (as also confirmed by the Panama Papers), with the connivance of corrupted local leaderships.⁶

It should also be mentioned here that several Western countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from Africa (as well as from a number of areas in Asia and South America), including 10.1 billion tons of raw materials and 379 billion hours of human labour.⁷ Such countries take significantly more resources and labour from Africa than they give. This net appropriation is not accompanied by a net payment of funds. On the contrary, high-income states maintain a monetary surplus in trade, by commanding high prices for their own resource exports, while appropriating resources from the rest of the world for well below global average prices.⁸ Thus, these are macro-economic structures which are directly influenced by Western European states and in which local individual migration decisions are then taken.

1 Equiano, Olaudah (1816), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Norwich, The Author, 1794, p. 39, https://www.loc.gov/item/44015764.

2 Cit. in Marsh, Akeem Nassor et al. (2022), ‘Let’s Talk about Race’, in Akeem Nassor Marsh and Lara Jo Cox, eds, Not Just Bad Kids. The Adversity and Disruptive Behavior Link, London, Academic Press, p. 575, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818954-2.00014-6.

3 Crosby, Alfred W. (2004), Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 304.

4 Emmer, Pieter C. and Leo Lucassen (2012), ‘Migration from the Colonies to Western Europe since 1800’, in European History Online, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/emmerp-lucassenl-2012-en

5 Gupta, Pamila (2019), Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World. History and Ethnography, London/New York, Bloomsbury, p. 17.

6 Kamel, Lorenzo (2018), ‘To Stop Migration, Stop the Abuse of Africa’s Resources’, in Al Jazeera, 15 February, https://aje.io/3rq7g.