Abstract
When I was a child, my parents could not afford to take us on family holidays. But my ever-enterprising mother would organise day trips on the Green buses that departed from Croydon bus station taking us out into the lovely Surrey countryside. One of those regular outings was to Hampton Court, which I favoured, not for the Palace but for the gardens and, particularly, the maze. Dizzy with delight as I lost myself in this giant man-made puzzle, little did I know then the centrality the maze metaphor had played in a vicious eighteenth-century dispute about the origin and distribution of species. The ideas of the prudish Swedish natural historian Carl Linnaeus were pitched against those of the French Enlightenment naturalist George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, curator of the King’s medicinal gardens in Paris where he created the most famous and complex of mazes and labyrinths.
Linnaeus, for his part, followed biblical teachings about a sedentary planet, a natural order where God put each living creature in its place with a specific function to fulfil. Nature existed in discrete units, defined by biological borders, and migration, whether of plants, animals or people, was a destructive and invasive force. The European explorers and travel writers busy ‘discovering’ exotic places could rely on Linnaeus, as well as other ambitious naturalists, to back up their far-fetched stories. Linnaeus had already described the reindeer-herding nomads of northern Sweden (i.e., the Sami) as a nonhuman group that included dwarfs and Patagonian giants. And to prove that Africans were anatomically different, he seized on European travel writers’ claims that African women had different reproductive organs, possessing a ‘genital flap’ (the ‘Hottentot apron’), further categorising Africans as a subspecies descended from a cross between humans and troglodytes. Buffon’s take was somewhat different from Linnaeus’, but only up to a point. While he asserted that all humans originated from the same family, Buffon did not believe that humans developed equally. On the contrary, as our European ancestors embarked on a great migration (the circuitous routes comparable to the mazes at the Jardin de Roi), the variable processes of change and adaptation caused distinctions. As Europe was the continent closest to the original site of the Garden of Eden from which all humanity emanated, those who migrated furthest from Europe were destined to degenerate, both morally and biologically, due to different diets and too hot or too cold climates, according to Buffon. From this dispute emerged two strands of human biology linked to the rise of ‘racial science’: the colour coded by continent theory of subspecies of Linnaeus, versus the environmentally determined degenerative theory of racial origins of Buffon. Voltaire displayed the racial limits of Enlightenment thinking when he declared ‘the Negro race is a species of men different to ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds’.
This is just one of the many fascinating mini-histories US science journalist Sonia Shah recounts in The Next Great Migration: the story of movement on a changing planet. A romping read, it describes in great detail the central place migration (whether of plants, animals or people) has played, and continues to play, in the biodiversity of our planet. Fittingly, Shah does not organise her material in linear fashion, preferring to go back and forth in time to establish various pathways for her readers to explore. While this maze-like structure well suits Shah’s storytelling approach, her narrative is looped around an earnest intent, namely: to unearth anti-migrant science in today’s politics; to provide evidence of the centrality of migration in our biology and our history; and to expose the myth that migration is an anomaly.
If The Next Great Migration reads on occasion like an accumulation of horrors that is because it is also the story of racism in science from the sixteenth century onwards. While scholars may have told that story more authoritatively, Shah’s account is valuable for the way it captures the dialectical relationship between rigid, Christian orthodoxies about the natural order and the origins of race science, and how the racialised view of the natural order was ultimately understood through its dissemination in popular culture.
By adopting a story-telling approach, she invites the discerning reader to make analogies with the present. Did race science ever really go away or does the notion of biological borders live on, a nasty (if unspoken) underbelly to the inflammatory rhetoric of anti-immigrant politicians today? What primeval prejudice and phoney science does, for instance, Nigel Farage, the former leader of the Brexit party, invoke when he posts videos on social media of his travels around south English coastal regions, giving back-seat monologues about an impending ‘invasion’? So much of the xenophobic hysteria about the young male refugees desperately trying to cross the English Channel on inflatable dinghies to scrounge benefits and rape ‘our women’ seems to mirror the ‘invasion biology’ described in The Next Great Migration.
It is good that this book is aimed at the popular market, as it needs to be read outside academic institutions and particularly by the medical profession. The pandemic as well as the Black Lives Matter movement have brought to our attention the racism in medical textbooks, discourses, practices and outcomes, as recently demonstrated by Neil Shah in his discussion of dermatological training at medical school. In a Guardian ‘Long Read’, Neil Shah locates the systematic failure of the medical profession to correctly identify black skin conditions in its over-reliance on early twentieth-century skin colour categorisations ‘that are skewed towards white people, with three of the six types covering what we would commonly call white skin, two for brown skin, and only one type to encompass the many kinds of blackness’. 1
Sonia Shah provides much evidence of the ‘phantasmal’ ‘science’ that developed out of the long history of skin colour categorisation, such as the seventeenth-century theory that Black people had a third layer of skin. One may think this ignorant theory is confined to the long distant past, but, terrifyingly, Shah cites a 2016 US study which shows that half of white medical students believe that black people’s skin was thicker than that of white people. She convincingly relates this to the medical profession’s continuing inability to accurately assess black people’s pain, citing the fact that in the US the deaths of pregnant black women occur at a rate three to four times higher than for white women. (The fact that Black women are five times more likely to die in childbirth in the UK suggests that we face the same medical racism and institutional negligence here.)
But if the medical profession would benefit from reading this book, so too would environmental activists, who will learn much about the reactionary roots of modern conservation and environmentalism, not surprising given that ‘the classification of species as either native or alien’ has been ‘one of the organising principles of conservation’. Shah points out that even today the work of ‘scientists who show the folly of splitting wild creatures into natives and aliens does not enter the popular consciousness through TV and media reports’. Building on the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, like Linnaeus, who saw migration as a violation of the natural order, conservationists have claimed that the migration of wild animals constitutes dangerous behaviour, depicted human migration as biological calamity, demanded restrictive immigration laws as a means of population control and asserted that sexual reproduction between natives and migrants leads to degenerate, mutant hybrids. Maybe Boris Johnson (who describes the desperate journeys of asylum seekers across the English channel as ‘very bad’, ‘stupid’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘criminal’) came across the work of British scientist Charles Sutherland Elton at university (they are both Oxford alumni). Or perhaps Elton’s 1958 award-winning book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, which went on to inform the management of national parks and programmes protecting wildlife around the world, was popular reading in the Johnson home. After all, his dad, Stanley, who recently addressed an Extinction Rebellion rally, is author of several texts on environmentalism and population control and has won awards from the likes of Greenpeace, the RSPCA and the World Wide Fund for Nature for his contributions to nature conservation and animal welfare.
Elton gave a scientific veneer to the ‘cock and bull’ myth from Norwegian seafarers that lemmings (Arctic dwelling rodents) leap from cliffs to an icy death in the sea in a mass suicide aimed at population regulation. It was a macabre story that captured the public imagination, particularly after Walt Disney’s 1958 ‘documentary’, White Wilderness. As scientists once again began to study lemmings, it emerged that the film, which won an Academy Award, was nothing more than an elaborate hoax. Lemmings don’t leap to their death but bury themselves under icebergs, digging holes and hiding under the snow, in order to feed on moss and breed their young. The scene of the lemming suicide march in White Wilderness was actually staged on a specially created set after young kids were paid twenty-five cents each to capture lemmings which were then shipped to a special set in Calgary, replete with an Arctic sky. Yet Elton’s theories had become the cornerstone of modern ecology legitimising the ugly myth of the suicidal Zombie refugee with a death instinct. Elton himself referred to the lemming procession as a ‘rather tragic procession of refugees, with all the obsessed behaviour of an unwanted stranger in a populous land’.
Shah writes about the natural world, whether it be butterflies, birds, beasts, flowers or coral reefs, beautifully – and she has a gift for making science simple. She has given all of us involved in challenging racist border regimes invaluable insights into the role racial science has played in creating a commonsense popular racism that establishes borders as biologically necessary. But wise as her book is, it falls short, when it comes to discussing human migration. The comparison of human beings with migrating animals and plants can only go so far, and her faith in UN processes is misplaced. We need to take into account the man-made design of migration – imperialist wars and the plunder of land and resources – and also recognise that people have the right not to be forcibly displaced. Her scientific arguments that migration serves an ecological function linked to the survival of the species is, indeed, empowering, but plenty of those forcibly displaced by authoritarian or racist regimes, resource-driven wars and globalization-linked colonisation, might see their loss in less positive terms. Her consciousness about human migration is shaped by the challenges of climate change. And while her arguments here are rich and insightful, the modern factors shaping migrant and refugee movement are not just environmental. Imperialist wars are undoubtedly a threat to the biodiversity of the planet, though, as Shah predicts, those so violently displaced also have the code to the planet’s survival.
Institute of Race Relations