Reading the conventional history of migration

 For the past weeks I have been teaching a course at the university which is about the history of migration to and from Sweden. This is an area that it is not unresearched, but it has been neglected in conventional history writing. The consequence of this is that it is almost impossible to write a comprehensive synthesis - fancy historian word for large oversight - on the subject.

There exists one try to do this, Mattias Tydén and Ingvar Svanbergs a thousand year of immigration (Swedish "Tusen år av invandring") which aims to discuss immigration to Sweden from 1000 a.c. until the early 2000’s. This book is also the main book you can use in teaching, since it is rather one of a kind. In this regard I also have the outmost respect for Tydén and Svanbergs work, it is a introduction to the field of Swedish migration that is of uttermost use if you are a novice on the subject and for instance writing a thesis. 

This does however not mean that book is without it’s flaws and as I have re-read it I have come to think a lot but it. Perhaps its main flaw is that it focuses on some form of particulars, such as having an entire chapter dedicated to how immigrants built the town of Götenborg in the early 17th century. The book do mention that this was during a period were a number of towns was built, but it then only focus on Göteborg which all in either were an exception with being built by migrants, or not at all an exception. The question is left unanswered, and thereby you leave the reading of the book with a sense of Göteborg being the exception. Similar tendencies also exists in the case of biographies of successful migrants, where very prominent families are at the focus and all other migrants left behind.

Perhaps this focus on the peculiar and the success can be explained as a result of the years the book were written in, the early 2000s. This was a period where policy aimed at integrating immigrants to society, and also tries to downplay eventual differences even though these differences was at the heart of the policy. And this is were the book becomes problematic, since it focus on important or successful migrants, rather than the large groups of migrants that followed in the footsteps of their countrymen. Perhaps this is also the result of the difficulty to write a synthesis on a field that still, twenty years later, is neglected in research. So is a thousand years of migration worth reading or having in a course syllabus? I definitely think so, even though it comes with the mentioned limitations and sometimes denegratory language. But I also believe that one should be aware that it is also a book that, like history writing in general, is a testament to the time it was written.

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