This book is the result of two international conferences, held in Los Angeles in 2018 and in Paris in 2019. The aim of those conferences is presented by Moatti in the introduction: to contribute to an anthropology of mobility, beyond the particularities of each historical situation. Three dimensions are considered (p. 8): the practical aspects (‘living in mobility’), the associated representations (‘thinking the mobility’) and the experience of the world made by the migrant (‘thinking in mobility’) (the reference here is A. Schütz, L’étranger [1942/2003]). To achieve this goal, three main concepts are highlighted: precarity, the issue of trust and the ‘in-betweenness’ of spaces, statuses or identities.
I will mostly focus in this review on the articles dedicated to the ancient world. While the ambition of the book is to contribute to a general anthropology of the migrant experience, the historian facing this ambition must deal with the limitations imposed by the available sources. For the ancient period especially, we lack testimonies of the personal experiences of migrant people, as underlined by C. Müller in her chapter. Most of the contributions on antiquity therefore focus on the institutional and legal treatment of people on the move. A second introduction to the book, juxtaposed to the first one, is provided by Chevreau on Roman legal matters concerning people on the move, ‘Citoyenneté et mobilité’. She emphasises how Roman citizenship is deeply rooted in a territory and is essential for the identity of people, explaining partly the systematic precarity of migrants in ancient times. Her contribution, ‘The Sea Journey in The Roman World: a “Legal In-Between”’ goes further in this study of Roman law concerning mobility. She outlines how Roman law dealt with the expansion of maritime trade that brought together on a ship people from different cities and states. With the frequency of wreckage and piracy, maritime trade was a risky business. A ius gentium, a law of all nations, applicable aside from Roman law, was invented to provide a legal environment to what happened aboard.
People on the move often represent a challenge to legal or political institutions, who sometimes adapted to the situation by inventing new norms or habits. Other contributions deal with the same kind of issues concerning legal written documents, and with the same type of people on the move: people who deliberately choose to be on the move because of their professional occupation, such as merchants or diplomats. R. Dorin studies the privileges granted to migrant moneylenders for northern Italy in ‘Migrant Moneylenders and the Threat of Expulsion in Late Medieval Europe’ while A. Kosto, in ‘“Coming and Going” in the Middle Ages’, presents the way in which medieval powers tried to ensure the safety of people travelling in and out of their territories with the safe-conduct institution. In ‘“Un étranger très pauvre”. Cas difficile, précarité et compétences des tribunaux dans une société d'Ancien Régime’ G. Calafat studies the case of a French poor merchant from Marseille, dealing with various courts of justice in France and Italy because of his mobile professional life, which leads to a modification of the legal process for such cases.
Some contributions focus on states dealing with immigrants staying in a stable way in the same place. The sources are again official documents, for example in C. Fischer-Bovet's study ‘Organizing Military Immigrant Communities in Second Century bc Egypt. The Politeumata and the Construction of an In-Between “Space”’. To attract foreign soldiers at a time of military need for the Ptolemaic power, Ptolemy V (163–145 bce) developed a new type of ethnic community, the politeuma, for foreign soldiers and their families, in an Egyptian territory where Greek poleis were rare. Being a member of a politeuma ensured privileged access to royal officials. The politeuma is often linked with a cultic space, with a meeting place near the temple.
V. Simon presents the legal dispositions made by the state of origin towards migrant merchants, here the French king limiting the integration of French merchants staying in the Ottoman Empire, in ‘Légiférer contre l'acculturation des marchands français dans l'espace ottoman (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle): l'appréhension par le droit d'un entre-deux contraint’. The construction of in-between legal statuses is also studied for the modern period in the United States by H. Motomura in ‘The Many Meanings of “In-Between”’. States can regulate in-between spaces, especially at their margins, as showed by A. Chase-Levenson in ‘Sanitary Cordons, National Borders, and Continental Frontiers in the Early Nineteenth Century Mediterranean’.
A state can try to restrain the negative effects of their officials on the move for local populations in foreign countries. In ‘Deviating Soldiers: Officials on the Move and Local Communities at Risk in Roman Asia Minor and Greece’ C. Brélaz shows how Roman soldiers and officials often behave in an abusive way towards local populations. For some communities, being located near the Roman main roads became a factor of vulnerability and precarity, in total contrast to the ideology of the Roman empire and the network of well-curated roads supposed to ensure the safety of all inhabitants.
Precarity of people on the move is the focus point of those chapters studying forced mobilities, for example in S. Lape's ‘The Precarity of Female Immigrants in Graeco-Roman Comedy and Athenian Culture’. Based on case studies from New Comedy theatrical pieces by Plautus and Terence, Lape emphasises the precarity but also the resilience of foreign women in classical Athens, often forced into exile and surviving through prostitution, especially focusing on the character of Thais, a Samian hetaira. The forced mobility of free black men in Virginia in the nineteenth century and the measures taken by the state to separate them from black slaves are studied in A. Gross and A. de la Fuente's ‘The Precarious Status of Free People of Color on the Move in Antebellum Virginia’.
In ‘Between Slave Catchers and Slave Harborers: Trust on a Roman Road’ N. Giannella studies the fate of fleeing slaves and their encounters with two types of intermediaries, slave catchers and slave harbourers, using a broad range of sources, such as a papyrus of the third century ce describing a fugitive slave as well as literary sources, such as the story of the slave Giton in Petronius’ Satyricon (first century ce). Archaeological sources are used with a rich discussion of the interpretation of the so-called slave collar from the fourth century ce. Giannella finally emphasises the importance of scale. When mobility occurs on a local scale, people know each other, whereas the further they go, the more difficult and yet crucial it becomes to trust people who are complete strangers, especially for fugitive slaves who cannot rely on the legal system to protect them.
Müller's contribution, ‘How Did Mobility Affect Personal Statuses in Ancient Greece?’, offers five case studies based on epigraphical and historical evidence. The Cyreneans wandering around the Mediterranean before the foundation of Cyrena, as narrated by Herodotus, are studied through the loss of their identity because of their departure, with a long in-between mobility before they settle and recreate a new civic identity in Cyrene. A long in-between mobility can also create a new type of community, as shown by the example of the Greeks’ retreat from Persia in Xenophon's Anabasis. Echoing Lape's contribution, the case of the Corinthian former prostitute Neaira, as described in Demosthenes’ Against Neaira, demonstrates the resilience of a precarious migrant navigating through the norms of classical poleis. The contribution also studies ‘civic practices and measures of control in Greek poleis of the Classical and Hellenistic periods’ (p. 287), with two epigraphic documents: a decree concerning exile from Acarnania in Western Greece, in the face of Macedonian rule (338/337 bce), and the case of the Samians in the fourth century bce, who are described as ‘en tè phugè’, ‘in exile’, following an Athenian punishment, recalling the example of the Samian Thais in Lape's contribution.
Other contributions are based on testimonies from people on the move, allowing for a study of their experience of mobility. This type of discourse is the focal point of C. Rouxpetel's ‘Mobilités et altérité d'après les récits de pélerinage latins (Syrie, Palestine, Égypte, XIVe–XVe s.)’ and D. Valérian's ‘Les fondouks chrétiens en terre d'Islam, un espace de familiarité dans un monde étranger’, both also studying specific spaces. Y. Dejugnat presents an individual personal experience of medieval mobility in the study of ‘“Le voyageur des Arabes et des Persans”: une approche cognitive de la riḥla d'Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (1325–1355)’.
M. Grenet's chapter, ‘Circuler entre les langues: usages, pratiques et médiations linguistiques en Méditerranée moderne (XVIIe–XIXe siècle)’, studies the essential role of interpreters and the central role of intercultural comprehension through language, presenting a nuanced analysis of the lingua franca used in the Western Mediterranean. For more recent periods J. Bourdin analyses the diaries of emigrants going to the far West in ‘The Mechanisms of Trust: The Emigrants’ Response to the Dangers of the Overland Trails to Oregon and California in the 1840s and Early 1850s’. The experience of mobility for groups of people or a whole community in exile is presented in two contributions on the twentieth century. I. About and A. Sutre focus on the chosen mobility of the tsigan population in ‘Circulations raisonnées. Consciences et discours du voyage dans les sociétés romani-tsiganes au début du XXe siècle’ while A. Kunth presents ‘À l’épreuve de l'incertitude. Réfugiés arméniens en route et en déroute au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale’ on Armenian refugees.
Summaries of the contributions in French and in English are provided at the end. One of the editors, Moatti, played a central role in developing the study of mobility in the Roman world. This rich book shows the appeal of a transperiodic approach to this theme. One can only regret the lack of a conclusion as well as a general organisation that is sometimes difficult to follow. The volume is divided into five parts, dedicated respectively to statuses, characters, spaces of the in-between and finally on cognitive and status changes. Given the diversity of the contributions, in terms of sources, time and spaces, as well as the complexity of the case studies, it is often difficult to understand why a contribution is placed in a specific part and not elsewhere. But this is a minor point: the volume offers an important insight on a field of research only starting to develop, echoing the contemporaneity of its issues.
