Not so Exceptional, After All

Immigration, which used to be almost exclusively the concern of the so-called receiving countries of the New World and the Antipodes, is now topic or nearly so almost everywhere. When the obtuse Helmut Kohl claimed a few years ago that Germany was not a country of immigration and never would be, he was indulging in the kind of wishful thinking typical of politicians. (He was also encouraging German nativism, but that is another story.) Kohl, and others like him, only follow where historians have led, or rather misled. Neither intra-European migration nor that of Europeans overseas has received much attention from historians of that continent. Since 1600 some 60 million Europeans have left Europe. One looks largely in vain for these 60 million European emigrants in most histories of Europe or of individual European countries. If even a tiny fraction of that number had died in battles, epidemics, or earthquakes, the history books would surely take note of it. But emigration is simply not a topic that most historians of Europe discuss at any length. Two examples will have to suffice. Eugen Weber in a 723-page text, Europe since 1715, treats emigration from Europe on six pages but discusses the emigres of the French Revolution on seven, while Hajo Holborn can find room in his three-volume History of Modern Germany (1982) for only a few brief paragraphs about the millions of Germans who migrated overseas. His index entry for one politician-Friedrich Ebert-is larger than that for emigration. And both of these eminent scholars were, themselves, emigrants! This history of misperception and miseducation makes Walter Nugent's study of the Atlantic migration in the period of its highest density doubly welcome. He, of course, is not its first student, but he is, in many ways, its most sophisticated. As was the case with the state-of-the-art conference proceedings edited by Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, A Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930 (1991), Nugent pays tribute to the pathbreaking 1960 essay by the English historian, Frank Thistlewaite, Migration

Political science · European history and politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics