Books
A place of greater safety. "In the whole of the 19th century, not a single person was refused entry to the United Kingdom." Robert Winder on the human urge to roam around the globe
Published 07 April 2003
The Global Community: migration and the making of the modern world
W M Spellman Sutton Publishing, 247pp, £20
ISBN 0750922435
The Passport: the history of man's most travelled document
Martin Lloyd Sutton Publishing, 288pp, £9.99
A commonplace of publishing is that titles matter. A Brief History of Time might not have lorded it over the bestseller lists if it had been called Theorems of Time in Modern Physics. So you have to feel sorry for Professor Spellman. He has written an admirable book, a smart and concise account of the way the world's population has been stirred, shaken and mixed over the past 500 years (since, roughly speaking, European sailors first went aroving). And then someone (perhaps even he himself) has gone and called it The Global Community. A work that is both detached and dynamic, and which skates elegantly and at speed through epoch-making commotions, ends up sounding like a World Bank position paper.
We need no reminding that migration, in the form of asylum-seeking, is one of the most vexed issues of the day. As a result, we tend to see it as a distinctly modern story. Spellman's first point - and it is well made, though it ought not to need making - is that international migration, far from being a new and problematic issue, is a basic instinct, a fact of life. Human beings began as nomads, upping sticks whenever they ran low on food or water. "Together with unpredictable shifts in climate, natural disasters and threats from hostile neighbours," Spellman writes, "a life of movement was the norm for most early people."
Human beings swirled - sometimes eagerly, sometimes in despair - from landscape to landscape, and once ocean-going ships made longer voyages possible, from continent to continent. The result, given a fresh boost by aviation technology, is a world (in the age of the Disunited Nations, one hesitates to call it a "community") that contains more than 100 million migrants, of whom 19 million are refugees. Most of them are not able to travel far or hopefully, and huddle in camps across the nearest border. The resourceful fraction who make it to a country with decently paid jobs (only 2 per cent of the world's displaced people come to Europe) are furiously resented as spongers and scroungers. This is the opposite of the truth. In fact, the people who undertake these heroic and risky journeys are the adventurous ones, the entrepreneurs with middle-class aspirations for a better, freer, safer and more prosperous life.
Spellman reminds us, from his lofty, century-spanning vantage point, that the story begins and ends in Europe. It was European navigators who explored and settled distant corners of the world, carrying their language, their culture, their commercial energy and their germs with them; it was Europeans who set in motion the imperial machinery that would spread Africans and Asians into faraway places. The result is a world in which 350 million people of African descent live outside Africa, 250 million people of European descent live outside Europe, 30 million people of Chinese descent live outside China, and nearly nine million people of Indian descent live outside the subcontinent. Some of these people - though only a tiny proportion of those who could - are completing the story by making the rich west their destination of choice.
So a story that begins in Europe finds an ending here, too. Migration is an old impulse: what is new is the desire to prevent it. In the era of globalisation, an age in which goods, services and capital are supposed to flow across borders without obstruction, it seems that the one thing that must be blocked at all costs is . . . people. In the whole of the 19th century, not a single person was refused entry to the United Kingdom. Things have certainly changed.
The most important weapon in the modern war against migrants is the passport, so Martin Lloyd's brief history of this tantalising document also comes at a good time. Passports are not as ancient as we might think. Though the desire for papers dates back 500 years (in letters of safe conduct), the modern British passport was born in 1915, when the First World War made it necessary to distinguish friend from foe with photographic ID. It was hoped that this would be a temporary measure: Britons considered such vulgar paperwork an affront to their dignity, and had long prided themselves on their refusal to stoop to such sneaky, Continental, police-state practices. But in 1920 the League of Nations, inspired by the postwar demographic mess (the Treaty of Versailles created 5,000 miles of new national frontiers), urged member-states to create the booklets that now seem indispensable guarantors of our identity and nationality.
Lloyd tells plenty of good stories. When William Joyce (the man who broadcast from Hitler's Germany as Lord Haw-Haw) was arrested while travelling under a British passport, he was hanged for treason, though he was in no sense British: he was an American who had taken German nationality. When an Italian assassin - Felice Orsini - attempted to blow up Louis Napoleon in 1858, he travelled under fake British papers, sparking off a tetchy cross-Channel spat. Lloyd has some fun, too, with the teasing conundrums of nationality, and with the cat-and-mouse game between passport authorities and forgers - at first a sharp chemistry lesson involving special paper and rare inks, now a tussle between electronic whizzes.
On the whole, he dwells more on the production of passports rather than their use. This is a shame. He might have made more of the everyday poetry of these mundane objects, the disparity between their physical and bureaucratic life and the suggestive romance, the whiff of faraway pages, which they carry on their blank pages. As a result, he slightly misses the individual drama of overseas travel and migration, the sense of it as a grand and daring adventure. This, given today's turmoil over asylum-seekers, is a matter of some importance. People who would not dream of forcing a pregnant woman back to the place where she has been raped can happily go along with the idea of deporting "bogus claimants".
Nothing has dramatised the human drama of migration better, in recent times, than the recent Channel 4 series The Last Peasants. Angus Macqueen's resonant three-film documentary camped in a single village in Romania - Budesti - and contrasted its own medieval rhythms with the villagers' urgent search for jobs abroad. Stranded in lovely green hills that could easily have been pumping out cherry tomatoes for the supermarkets of west- ern Europe if it weren't for protectionist agricultural policies, the young men and women of Budesti dreamed of jobs as cleaners in London, Paris and Dublin. They mired themselves in debt to pay for the trip, and then hung on to the underside of trains to cross the Austrian border. There they mopped and wiped for day after day, shivering in cramped bedsits, sending cash home to finance a new dress for their fiancee or to help with the haymaking. Is there anything bogus about their predicament? If only there were.
Robert Winder is completing a book about immigration to be published by Little, Brown
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