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 main 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 “backbenchers”, i.e. 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 the “backbenchers” referred to here. In this way, attention is drawn to previously neglected aspects beyond the “big names” in the history of politics and ideas. The reconstruction of the networks 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 the 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 that the actors sometimes felt could lead to radicalization and a turn to violence as a means of achieving national independence. 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 does the coinage system of the first Piasts appear undercomplex in comparison with the neighboring regions of East Central Europe? What do the quality and quantity of money production tell us about the functioning of the state and the mechanisms of exercising power? And why were coins minted at all? The last question may seem trivial at first glance, but it is far more important than has long been assumed in the humanities. Recent studies show that the origins of the use of silver in Mesopotamia cannot necessarily be traced back to the emergence of markets. On the contrary: precious metals were used as a measure of value within the administration of large households and served to fulfill obligations.
Based on this overarching question, the research project contextualizes the spatial differences in development in Europe in the 11th-13th centuries and analyses the adoption of monetary patterns from the west of the continent and their influence on the social modernization processes in Piast Poland. Competitive imitation was a suitable mechanism for promoting the transfer of knowledge. This enabled dukes and kings to accumulate skills in order to increase revenues and make the exercise of power more efficient in rivalry with other sovereigns. The project not only compares the territory of the Piasts with the Roman-German Empire, but also includes other areas between Prague and Old Lübeck.
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