Britain is the name of a place which has become synonymous with colonialism, yet it is also an island which has been invaded and colonised more than most geographical spaces on planet Earth.
Throughout most of the Middle Ages it would be hard to say if England was a French colony or vice versa, and it took a war which famously lasted a hundred years to finally resolve this. (Kind of.)
The Conquest of Mexico could not have taken place if it had not been simultaneously an act of de-colonisation, for the Mexica civilisation had migrated down from the north and imposed itself on the peoples and cultures which had previously established themselves in the central highlands, and their desire to be free of a very brutal imperial system was very much part of the dynamic unleashed by the arrival of Europeans.
Those are three tiny snapshots of the nuances of History, of the kind which tend to get lost every time History is ransacked for the purposes of contemporary political invective.
The first thing I would have taught about the past in British schools is that every single citizen is descended from people and things which migrated. For after the Ice Age the island was a blank slate. Empty. And then the boats started coming.
I mention 'people and things' because the second lesson which needs to be conveyed in those classes is that migration always takes the form of a trinity: peoples, languages and cultures and these typically become detached and independent in their historical actions as the migrations occur.
Our contemporary habit of focusing on only one element of this trinity, usually either ethnicity or culture is a modern misconception largely driven by our prevailing political grudges*. Indeed, we cannot hope to resolve many of our own world's migratory challenges unless we properly (and dispassionately) understand how the trinity operates.
The notion that all we need to do with migration is welcome it has an obvious appeal to anyone experiencing an urgent desire to be recognised as 'good' by their peers, but it is clearly not very sophisticated.**
Each of us has our biological heredity, often not as clear-cut as we would like to imagine, but we are also made up of the way our minds work and express themselves, and this has its own history of geographical movement from the dawn of homo sapiens in Africa.
The Mexico story mentioned above leads one to add one more element to the story of human migration, a kind of fourth horseman if you like: the non-human biological component that piggy-backs on the other movements. Stuff like germs, plus both wild and domesticated plants and animals.
* One of the ways that we collectively ensure that our arguments relating to these matters are intractable, is by pointedly referencing one element, ethnicity, say, when it suits us, which often means when the other side is talking about culture, and contrariwise.
** Just consider the so-called 'ex-pat' phenomenon here in Antigua, where some could be said to add the whole and others detract from it. See also the current spate of resistance movements in major cities like Barcelona to tourism, perceived as a more short-term and temporary form of migration. All hard to legislate for or even regulate, but surely worth a try.
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