Mobility: Migration and Global Networks
Mobility, migration, and networks are integral parts of the human experience and decisive forces of economic, social, and political change. Regarding migrants' contribution to society, Moris Farhi has even claimed that all history is migration history. The common goal of the projects in this research area is to examine worldwide networks and globalization as they are reflected in everyday life.
In the sense of a world connecting (Emily Rosenberg), the research projects leave the container of national historiography behind and investigate links to other regions. For example, trade flows and migrations tied to translocal networks (be they personal or material) can be identified in every era. Accordingly, the exchange between East-Central Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East was imperative for the early stages of European state formation in the Middle Ages. These links can also be traced from early modern personal states and modern empires to the formation of nation-states and supranational organizations such as the UN or the European Union.
Similarly, this research area examines questions of medieval Landesausbau and migration, early modern trade relations, and changing mobilities tied to transportation innovations since the end of the eighteenth century. It also necessarily takes conflict into account. As historical studies of the nineteenth century show, a connected world included both cross-border exchange (of knowledge, people, and goods) and experiences of violence and exclusion. The latter particularly affected the Jewish population over the course of centuries.
Migration continued to shape East-Central Europe in the twentieth century. In addition to the much-discussed violent forms of forced migration, flight, and expulsion during the 1930s and 1940s, economic and political pressure were also important factors. Accordingly, we also consider voluntary forms of migration: there have always been people who sought a “better life” through migration without being (directly) forced to do so by political circumstances. Emigration to Western and Central European cities and the “New World,” the freedoms within the European Union, and new forms of tourism are all examples of East-Central Europe as a transit space.
The research area encourages discussion of the following topics:
- Formation and positioning of exile communities and their influence on the regions of destination and origin
- Factors that enabled or hindered migration processes and the formation of translocal networks
- Gender-specific perspectives on migration and mobility
- Technical innovations and transportation, as well as the migration of ideas, knowledge (know-how), and people from the perspective of economic history
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, novel migration and settlement policies emerged globally. Based on utilitarian and racist principles, these policies remain influential today. In line with settler colonialist schemes worldwide, government agencies enforced genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples. They applied racist criteria in immigration policies to populate newly conquered or annexed areas with desired populations. The research project examines the transnational connections between these developments, focusing on the global migration of the so-called Volhynian Germans.
These German speakers settled in Volhynia, now in northwestern Ukraine, in the 1860s. In the 1880s and 1890s, they faced anti-German policies in the western parts of the Russian Empire and frequently resettled to improve their living conditions. Based on a complex web of personal, economic, and religious factors, prospective migrants chose very different places to resettle.
Along the way, they had to navigate racist boundaries that the sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois termed "global color lines." For instance, the Imperial Russian government perceived German speakers as a geostrategic threat in the western part of the Empire, while in Siberia and the Far East, valuing them as a civilizing force vis-à-vis the Indigenous population and immigrants from the Chinese Empire. The German Reich tried to utilize them as tools of its Germanization policy in Poznań province – with doubtful success. "Volhynian Germans" were not guided by ethnonational considerations and preferred, for example, Canada and Brazil, where they were welcomed with open arms as "white" farmers, unlike African, Asian, and Indigenous populations.
A comparative study of the Polish and Irish independence movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries off the beaten track is the focus of this research project. The focus is on structures and personal networks as well as on the resources of time and money. On the one hand, the project aims to reconstruct interpersonal relationships using the method of historical network analysis in order to identify sub-networks of second-tier actors and to examine their influence on the protagonists of the independence movements. The focus will be on the options for action and agency of these second-tier actors, as the protagonists were unable to pursue their goals without the support of these friends, allies and followers (but maybe also because of their rivals). In this project, the latter are therefore called the “backbone” of heroes.
The reconstruction of the networkks also serves to examine two resources that were important for the independence movements: time and money. The latter has already been investigated for the Irish case, but an investigation of the actors’ perception of time is still pending in both cases. Linking network analysis with the question of the (non-)availability of time and financial resources leads to the working hypothesis that different “Erwartungsräume” and “Erfahrungshorizonte” (spaces of expectation and horizons of expectation) (Koselleck) emerged in differently structured sub-networks (depending on the age of the members, their financial resources, etc.). According to the hypothesis, the lack of time and money but also the perception of urgency because of the fear of cultural assimilation could lead to radicalization in specific groups of the movements. From here derives the question whether the networks of second-tier actors could eventually influence the ‘heroes’ convincing them to turn to violence as a means of achieving national independence and vice versa. This raises the question of whether these decisions for or against violence led to disconnectivity in the networks. A striking example of this dissolution of personal networks is the attitude of the leaders of the Irish independence movement to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which led to the Irish Civil War and the resulting rift between the former companions Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.
Why was the coinage of the first Piasts less developed than the coinage of neighboring areas in East Central Europe? What does the quality and quantity of money production tell us about how the state functioned and the mechanisms through which it exercised power? Last but not least, why was mintage necessary? The last question may at first glance seem trivial. However, it is more important than previously assumed. Recent studies show that the use of silver as a standard of value in Mesopotamia does not trace back to the emergence of markets. On the contrary, precious metals mainly constituted a unit of value in the administration and were used for tax payment.
By using this overarching question as a starting point, the research project contextualizes spatial differences in development within Europe in the 11th–13th centuries and analyzes how monetary patterns from western parts of the continent were adapted in Piast Poland. It also examines how this impacted societal modernization. Competing imitation was an appropriate mechanism for facilitating transfers of knowledge. In this way, dukes and kings could accumulate competences that allowed them to increase revenue and strengthen their position in rivalry with other rulers. The aim of this project is to compare the Piast lands with the Holy Roman Empire while involving a wider geographical perspective, including areas between Prague and Alt-Lübeck (the Slavic settlement at Liubice).
The “socialist integration” of Eastern Europe is often seen in retrospect as a failure. But what did it mean to citizens of the German Democratic Republic and the Polish People’s Republic at the time? Customs agents played a central role in most cross-border interactions: they observed, regulated, and influenced exchanges between the two countries. Encounters with customs agents also profoundly shaped travelers’ impressions of the country they were entering or leaving. Furthermore, customs agents had their own forms of transnational cooperation: they often had to work on foreign territory, communicate in foreign languages, and collaborate with foreign colleagues (who they also spied on). This project aims to analyze the practices of Polish and East German customs agents in order to illuminate the experiences, unintended consequences, and contradictions of “socialist integration.”
