Page - 138 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

138 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings I Justin Winkler: The experience of the last months of the year 2015 often provoked the use of the word “mass migration”. Do we have historical bases for comparing the scales and assessing the importance of the respective migrations? Peter Burke: How big a migration does it have to be to be a ‘mass migration’? It was only hundred-and fifty thousand French Protestants who left at the end of the seventeenth century, and they were spread between three countries, England, Prussia, and the Dutch Republic. Each of those places had a population of several million, and so they were getting about fifty thou- sand migrants in a relatively short time, five to ten years. If that is a mass migration, then that would be a parallel to explore. Currently an “old” vocabulary reappeared in all political shades that insinuated large scale ons- laught, by using the term “Völkerwanderung”. “Völkerwanderung” is baldly “Barbarian Invasion” in English... We have to look way back, to the end of the Roman Empire, or the early Middle Ages or to c1000, when the Magyars arrived in Hungary, in order to find entire peoples migrating in Europe. Don’t forget that the coining and use of “Völkerwanderung” is a 19th century concept that opposed uncontrolled conflict- laden migrations of a dark age to the enlightened nation-state. The historical phenomenon led to a politico-cultural redefinition of the territories formerly commanded by the Roman Empire. Take the Anglo-Saxon advance in the second half of the first millennium. Historians will check to what extent the Anglo-Saxon class has displaced the Celtic “autochthonous” Britannic population, and if they have been acting from a cultural tabula rasa or eventually have adopted certain traits from the remaining “Anglians”. A famous study by the archaeologist Cyril Fox1 of 1932 noted that the Angles and Saxons drove the Celtic inhabitants into the hills in the North (Scotland) and West (Wales) where they remain to this day. Similarly the Varangians in the Rus who have been assuming mores and language of the Slave population. The vocabulary of the “mass” always has a declamatory side; it is kind of a battle cry. What terms would fit better than “mass migration”? If one wants to study how people in the host country react, then one must remember the fact that the migration is not evenly spread over a whole country but is concentrated in certain cities and sometimes in certain parts of certain cities. And it is there where problems arise, where the locals feel they are being drowned by the newcomers – which is true on the micro scale even though on the macro scale these are not large numbers, London used to have a Little Italy, used to have a Little Germany. Today, there is Leicester, which is half Asian; Bradford is forty percent Asian. The problem in Bradford is that newcomers almost all come from the same area, a small town in Kashmir that provides a disproportionate number of the Pakistani migrants. 1 Cyril Fox. The Personality of Britain. Its influence on inhabitant and invader in prehistoric and early historic times (Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 1932)