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Recent years have seen much attention, media and political, given to the movement of people. This is especially the case in terms of the extraordinary movements precipitated by war, famine and the ravages of global warming that have produced refugees in seemingly greater numbers. They have also produced hostile responses with the building of walls and fences, the denial of aid and solidarity and changes to citizenship laws which have often turned citizens into migrants to be policed even more harshly. Global crises related to the movement of populations recur with relative regularity, and yet each is presented as unprecedented, reproducing the idea of crisis in the process. This occurs not just in media representations and political debate but also in academic accounts of migration, which often use similar framings in their analyses. In this superb new book, Migration Studies and Colonialism, Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner contest the idea of the unprecedentedness of the movement of peoples and seek to locate both contemporary migrations and our understandings of migration in the historical contexts that produce them.

Our modern world has been significantly shaped by historical processes and structures that have been in place from the late fifteenth century onwards. These have shaped our institutions and our understandings. We can use the figure of Columbus and his voyages to stand for the beginning of these processes and structures and how they have been understood within Europe. As Locke wrote in the late seventeenth century, ‘in the beginning all the World was America’. That is, in their discovery of the Americas, Europeans believed that they were encountering earlier versions of themselves. This laid the groundwork for particular understandings of hierarchies among and between populations across the world. If those peoples encountered by early European travellers were effectively understood as being their ancestors, then Europeans could both show them the (predetermined) future and be unconcerned about their elimination. The first justifies the belief in ‘development’; the second suggests that the disappearance of other cultures, peoples, is not a consequence of European actions but a quasi-natural phenomenon.

Columbus, and the Europeans who followed him across the subsequent centuries, are often presented as heroic figures – as travellers and pioneers. They are seen to move in what has been called the age of free migration when, apparently, there were no obstacles to movement. Traders, merchants, travellers, mendicants and explorers had long criss-crossed the globe, encountering new cultures, trading with them and learning the ways of others. The population movements from Europe to the New World and beyond coalesced, over four centuries, into a phenomenon that was markedly different from these other quotidian movements and encounters. This is because European movement was linked to colonial settlement which was central to the displacement, dispossession and elimination of populations across the globe. It was also central to the creation of the global inequalities and injustices that mark the worlds we share in common and that are the basis of contemporary movements of peoples. Without understanding the histories that produced these inequalities, we are unlikely to understand contemporary movements.

Taking Columbus, and the Americas, as the beginning is not the same as taking him, or them, as the origin. As Said (1995 [1978]) argues, whereas the idea of ‘origin’ presupposes that which develops from it, that of a ‘beginning’ is developed as a complex of connections which allows for construction and reconstruction. Columbus is not the origin of what followed but can be seen as one of the beginnings of the processes and structures that have shaped the modern world. Acknowledging beginnings permits shifts in perspective and understandings of knowledge by taking different points of departure. Events, in this view, are best understood as located in, and constitutive of, particular historical interconnections. Columbus, then, is an event in a world of events which together brought into being our modern world.

Christopher Columbus, born in the Italian city-state of Genoa, patronized by the Spanish Crown of Castile, landed in the islands of what we now know as the Caribbean, searching for a direct route to the treasures of the Indies. His exploratory voyages in the late fifteenth century opened up an entire continent to European populations who travelled in increasing numbers to the New World. Some were in search of adventure, others fleeing poverty, famine, religious persecution and economic disadvantage. Whatever their motives, the decades and centuries subsequent to Columbus’s ‘discovery’ were marked by the subjugation and elimination of indigenous populations and the extraction and appropriation of their resources and land (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

In the journal Nature, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin note that the arrival of Europeans in the lands that would come to be known as the Americas – lands which had been known by their pre-existing (and continuing) inhabitants as Turtle Island and Abya Yala – ‘led to the largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years’ (2015: 174). They suggest that the continent had had a population of around 61 million prior to European contact and that this ‘rapidly declined to a minimum of about 6 million people by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine’ (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 175). In this way, Abya Yala was gradually, although not without resistance, transformed into the Americas.

If subsequent waves of Europeans – and across the nineteenth century this involved around sixty million Europeans (Miege 1993) – found these lands to be available to them, then this ought not to be regarded as a natural fact but a social and political fact that requires further analysis. It is a fact that should be central to all subsequent discussion of the movement of peoples, to all discussions constituting migration studies. As I have argued elsewhere, migration is a movement of people across political boundaries, and migrants are people who live in societies other than their own, but according to the rules and norms of the societies of which they come to be a part (Bhambra 2019). Within this understanding of migration, those who do not, en masse, live according to the rules and norms of the societies of the lands they come to are not migrants. They are better understood as colonial settlers and colonial settlers are not migrants, even if much of the scholarship on migration describes them as such. Failing to acknowledge the ways in which colonial histories are the context for the consolidation of particular patterns of European movement and the ways in which these come to be the reasons for subsequent movements is problematic to the extent that we are interested in effective solutions to the problems of global inequality.

Where we start from, and which histories and epistemologies we acknowledge, will profoundly shape our understandings. This is the central premise of this vitally important book. Mayblin and Turner start from an understanding that the field of migration studies is poorer – in terms of both intellectual coherence and policy applications – if it does not take colonial histories seriously. While they do not suggest that colonialism explains everything about migration, they do argue that migration can rarely be adequately understood without taking it into account. While there is plenty of literature at this nexus, in a global context, it does not often form the basis of migration studies as it is generally conceived in Europe or the United States. Mayblin and Turner ask those of us located in migration studies who have not addressed the histories of colonialism to consider what difference would be made to our understandings if we were to do so. It is urgent that this call be answered.

Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Sussex