Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot in these islands. Grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus was said to have been born in Rome; but, exiled from his birthplace, he travelled western Europe before finally settling here.
That the legend of Brutus was a ninth century fantasy concocted by a Welsh monk named Nennius – with the aim of affirming a British place in the club of civilisations – need not concern us. For Sam Miller, the point isn’t just that Brutus was the first Briton: it is that he was a migrant. And his story “is another reminder of how normal it once was to eulogise rather than deny one’s migrant past”. Nennius, meanwhile, was hardly unique in his invention: principalities across early medieval Europe, among them Brabant, Burgundy and Corsica, all claimed Trojan migrants as their founders.
Humans have always sought origin stories for ourselves, or sought to explain the present through mythic retellings of the deep past. In the 19th century, the belief that the British were one of the lost tribes of Israel was widespread. The very word ‘British’ was derived from Hebrew, meaning ‘People [ish] of the Covenant [brit]’; ‘Saxon’ was a corruption of ‘Isaac’s sons’. By 1900, the British Israelite movement had some two million members. Conversely, Miller cites 20th-century Indian nationalist PN Oak, who argued that India was the birthplace of Indo-European culture, that “ancient England was a Hindu country” and “the Pope was a Hindu priest”.
Some peoples have imagined themselves to be wholly indigenous. “We Athenians… [are] the only Greeks who never migrated,” Herodotus has an Athenian envoy say. The Taino people, whom Columbus encountered on Hispaniola in 1492, believed they emerged from two caves on the island. But settlement and deep-rooted continuities are only one part of the human story. In Migrants: The Story of Us All, Miller’s enjoyable, provocative and timely new book, he emphasises the other side of the coin: how our history looks “through a prism in which migration is a normal activity”. It challenges what Miller calls “the myth of sedentarism”, the idea that human beings are by nature settlers, inclined to live and die in the same place among the safe, familiar and known. Most of the historic episodes covered are Euro- or Americo-centric: it is pejorative western narratives about migration that he is most keen to confront.
Sedentarism began around 12,000 years ago in the Middle East. Those who settled quickly regarded themselves as superior to those who did not. “Pure are the cities – and you are the ones to whom they are allotted,” a story about the Mesopotamian water god, Enki, begins. Before that, we were all nomads. It is part of our nature, Miller argues. No other land mammal has spread so far across the planet, with the possible exception of the rat. As recently as 400 years ago, a third of the world’s population was still nomadic. Miller is attracted to the idea that there is a ‘wander lust’ gene; but even absent that, most of us, outside of sub-Saharan Africa, carry with us a little Neanderthal DNA. We are all mongrels of a sort, with an eye for the horizon.
But even once humans settled, they wanted to roam. We think of ancient Greece as a world of more-or-less autonomous city states; it defined how the Greeks thought of their humanity. “By nature,” Aristotle wrote, “man is a being who lives in a city-state.” But during the archaic and classical periods Greek cities established at least 270 new settlements around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Miletus alone founded 36. In France, Marseilles is still sometimes known as La Cité Phocéene after its founders from Phocaea, now the Turkish coastal town of Foça. The arrival of the Greeks was a mixed blessing for existing populations; in Syracuse, for example, they were enslaved. Had Alexander the Great not died so young evidence suggests he planned to forcibly transplant populations from Asia to Europe, and vice versa, to help unify his vast empire.
Miller’s account of migration includes every kind of human mobility within its definition. Outside of the Americas, he tends not to dwell on the impact of population movement on resident peoples, and to downplay conflict. The Vikings were more peaceable than we were once taught; the Vandals may have looted Rome in 455 CE, but they didn’t vandalise anything. He returns several times to the idea of migration as an ‘adventure’. Sometimes, often perhaps, that may be true: he cites former migrants across the Mexican-US border – so-called wetbacks and braveros – who use just that word when reflecting on their youthful transgressions.
But Alexander’s plan highlights a recurrent problem. Miller wants to argue that migration is not only an essential human activity, but a human good. The inclusion of forced migrations complicates that argument. The most obviously troubling instance that Miller discusses is the transatlantic slave trade. Miller records a friend’s objection to including the 12 million Africans transported against their will in the most cruel of circumstances. How can it be migration if there is no element of choice? Miller’s defence is that “slave suicide can sometimes be seen as an act of rebellion”, and that therefore enslaved people still retained some degree of autonomy or free will. But he himself notes Olaudah Equiano’s account of the crossing, in which the slave ship’s side were lined with nets to prevent precisely that. Elsewhere, other forced migrations pass with little comment: Five Native American nations were compelled to leave their ancestral homelands in the American south-west and migrate thousands of miles in the 1830s, in what has become known as the ‘Trail of Tears’. Millions were displaced by the ethnic and cultural sorting of Europe that followed the First World War and the formation of new nation states. After the Second World War, as many as 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their historic homes in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.
Perhaps the most serious omission, however, is nomadism. The topic receives a few paragraphs, largely used as a means to pivot to a brief foray into philosophical arguments about the history and meaning of land ownership. “Why does anyone… have more of a right to be at a particular place on this earth than anyone else?” Miller asks. But in a book which wishes to argue that human mobility is a virtue and a purpose in itself, the absence of the Roma, Sinti and other itinerant peoples is surprising. This is particularly so since Miller is keen to refute the negative, often racialised, stereotypes with which non-sedentary peoples are often viewed. Few populations are more stigmatised than ‘Travellers’. They would seem an ideal example of the mobile life which Miller extols – and a good example, too, of how persecuted mobile populations often are.
Miller himself is a much-travelled former BBC journalist, as he explains in the brief interstitial essays – he calls them Intermissions – that separate each chapter. He lived in Delhi for a decade and has subsequently lived and worked for long periods in numerous countries across Asia and Africa. The book’s thesis is certainly coloured by his own experiences. He never felt quite at home in Britain, he writes, and likens the feeling of being born in the wrong country to gender dysphoria. At times, Miller’s own tastes and prejudices cloud his judgement. For a book which argues for understanding of the breadth of human experience, Miller himself has surprisingly little empathy for the experience of exile. “Surely there is no-one… who was ever more sorry for himself,” he writes of Ovid, exiled from his beloved Rome on the shores of the Black Sea. “He was the first to turn self-pity and homesickness into an art form.” But overall, the more personal sections are among the most successful and powerfully argued in the book.
Miller makes an eloquent case for the importance of migration and mobility to human history. He is right, too, that a deeper understanding of the role migration has played in shaping – and continuing to shape – the world as we know it will help us recognise the certainties of our moment, our sedentary presumptions of stability and order, of neatly organised nation states and peoples, as contingent and transitory. Is it a human good, though? No doubt for many it is; but not for nothing was our exile from Eden a punishment.
This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in The Spectator in February 2023.
Mathew Lyons 