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The message here is that you should conduct your life as if operating
behind enemy lines, taking inspiration and guidance from the military
experiences of the SAS. This is the most pernicious feature of the
Handbook: that, despite its occasional disclaimers, its overwhelming
effect is to foster a paranoid fear of crime and to encourage people to
regard everyday life as a war and society as a battlefield. This sort of
response to the problem of crime inevitably strengthens the conser-
vative right, whose social and economic policies are actually
responsible for the problem in the first place.
Bath College of Higher Education JOHN NEWSINGER

Books reviewed
John Wiseman, The SAS Personal Trainer (London, Headline
Publishing 1996) 192pp. £10.99.
Barry Davies, The SAS Escape, Evasion and Survival Manual
(London, Bloomsbury 1996) 274pp. £19.99.
Andrew Kain and Neil Hanson, SAS Security Handbook (London,
Heinemann 1996) 360pp. £20.

The Cambridge Survey of World Migration

Edited by ROBIN COHEN (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1995) 570pp. £75.00
How could it be possible to review a volume of 570 pages, consisting of
’95 contributions by 99 authors from 27 countries’, broken into fifteen
sections, laid out in magisterial Cambridge Survey style, encyclopaedic
despite the disavowal of the preface, epic in its globe-circling, worlds-
encompassing, sixteenth century-till-now breadth?
Size and scope are the central problems of this work. The project is
too grand to be useful, and yet it is too useful to be turned away. How
do I describe this? Big and fat, but not quite an encyclopaedia, as it is ,

too intelligent to fall under that rubric; descriptive and dull, its huge
scope requires a certain convention of tone and style that becomes
wearisome if read all at once; informative but introductory, epic and
educational, serious and survey, the book is very, very fine in many,
many ways. But there is what troubles me - it is only very fine. It is
more than adequate, it is not pedestrian. But it is not great.
The problem perhaps lies with this book’s descriptive constraints,
which, however necessary, are worn in a realist mode that is not very
forthcoming about any theoretical or, more importantly, political
orientation or criteria for deciding subject matter. There is a politics in
the book, but it has to be excavated. There are positions and propo-
sitions and emphases - and I have no problem with the fact that

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sometimes the contributors might be on contradictory or opposing

sides of a certain debate or interpretation, but could this not have been
spelled out more? Nor do I have a problem with having to do a little
work to evaluate the emphases, but I also want to see the cut and thrust
of struggle over ideas and opinions, interpretations and angles,
orientations and refutations, and I want this declared somewhere. I
wanted this book to argue a line, or several lines, but clearly. Perhaps I
am demanding too much?
This is an ambitious project and, no doubt, one many thought
impossible. It has every chance of becoming the benchmark reference,
even though, or possibly because, it covers such a vast area (in time and

geography, as well as perspective and slant). It could become required

reading for all - ’an indispensable tool for scholars and students in the
field’ as the jacket blurb says. As a desk-side companion for teaching
migration courses, it could find a place; as a reference book in libraries,
it stands out on the shelf. As a ’tool’, it deserves to be utilised, it can
build. Given this utility, content matters. What is selected and how it is
arranged raises important questions. In reviewing such a difficult
object, I welcome the provocation to rethink (and so make no apology
for speculations out of turn, allegations out of reason, grumbles out of
anger - the book should upset many).
First, heresy: why start with the Greek? Conventional accounts
begin with the wandering Odysseus, as does this, although there is
unspecified acknowledgement that other ancient civilisations ’also
generated their own migratory myths and their own population flows,
often occasioned by the construction of immense monuments’. Now,
perhaps I’m fussing too much here, but what was it that this Greek
built? Wasn’t he responsible for bringing down the city of Troy - and
along the way blinding Cyclops, maiming princes, stealing from the
dead and losing his crew, before coming back to wipe out the men of his
home town for daring to seek to sleep with his long suffering, house-
bound, wife? Sounds like a monumental bastard to me. And the book
ends by noting, in a footnote no less, that the term Europe is the name
appropriated to refer to Greece after Zeus had ’possessed, brutalised
and conquered’ a Phoenician princess. Yet the citation to the Greek is
only a taster; the limitation of this book is to migration in the ’modern’
period, ’marked by the flourishing of long-distance trade and the
opening up of global lines of communication’. The next citation is to
Wallerstein and the appearance of the European world economy,
though, if ’flourishing’ is not meant to be an evaluative term, it seems to
carry a taint of growth and exuberance that disguises a certain imperial
violence. At the same time, the emphasis on this moment, ’marked’ by
long-distance trade and communication, would suggest that such had
never happened before - the exceptionality of Europe is affirmed here
once again.

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The ’terrible event’ of forced migration and the shipping of ten

million slaves from West Africa to the New World is left aside because
it has ’already been extensively chronicled by a prodigious and easily
accessible literature to which a volume of this kind could add little’. A
footnote directs readers to some eight representative works, four from
the 1970s and four more recent. Does it not behove a prestigious
publishing house to do more than this in its survey, especially since this
slave trade was a founding ’moment’ of the very modernity that is its
subject? This was not only the first mass migration of this period, but
also the catalyst for other colonial exploits, as it was with silver coins
gained from the West Indies slave sales that merchants of the East
India Company were able to buy their way into India in 1612 as well. I
think possibly the avoidance here signals a recognition that to call
slavery ’migration’ of any sort somehow minimises the extent of the
atrocity. Several of the contributions to the volume, too, note the
importance of slavery, but turn away, as if it cannot be faced. Cohen
does mention it in several section introductions (for example, by way of
telling the story of Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked after undertaking a
slave capturing voyage), but perhaps he protests too much: if slavery is
to be elliptically mentioned, why is it not more upfront? It is interesting
that, at the point in Cohen’s general introduction where he sidesteps
slavery, he turns directly to section three, which deals with indentured
labour from Asia, and this is mentioned, promoted, before section two
on voluntary settlement. Why this periodisation in the text, and why
the need to reorder it in the introduction, if not as some sort of
compensation for eliding slavery? This is not just a petty point of order,
but is, I suspect, a marker of the struggle over inclusion. Nevertheless,
the recognition that not only was it that commodities such as gold, fur,
spices and ivory moved along the trade routes, but also ’seamen,
settlers, merchants and slaves’, is welcome, if somewhat banal.
Convicts too, and indentured labourers, were the front line of
European colonial aggression overseas. (Aggression? The book offers
’expansion’ which seems so much more placid.)
Section two does recognise the violence of colonisation and we need
more of this, in Australia against Aboriginal peoples, in New Zealand

against the Maoris, in Canada against the Inuit, Germany against the
Herero, Belgium against the Congo ... etc. But this is placed in the
context of discussion of settler societies and still puts Europe, and
European concerns, in the centre of the analysis. We hear that the
French settlers considered Algeria a part of France before we hear from
the Algerians; we hear more about the rivalry between the French and
the English than we do of what they did in the colonial spaces. There is
good reason, perhaps, for this, given the conventional histories that
need to be surveyed in this book. But what of the resistance movements
that countered colonisation? How might such counter-movements be

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brought into focus in a book dealing with ’expansion’? The first words
of the first contributed article quote Sir John Seely (1883) who wrote
about how Britain had seemed to ’have conquered half the world in a
fit of absence of mind’. Indeed.
Much of this survey deals with migration in the twentieth century
rather than earlier. This is reflected in the importance of the world
wars, post-war European refugee movements, and labour requirements
in the mid-1970s labour migration boom. (An interesting observation is
that it was only with the outbreak of hostilities in the first world war
that passport checks were introduced.) Some detailed attention is given
to the American migration experience of the previous century, based
upon US manufacturing output - ’Give us your poor...’ etc., for work
-

and to the periods of strong European growth as a pole of attraction

(labour power, legal and illegal, brought in from many countries is
discussed in sections eight and nine). These sections do culminate in a
focus upon the contemporary Asian-Pacific economies and the alleged
shift of the geopolitical reality, and concomitant drives of ’flight
capital’, to new regions. But perhaps a more sustained look at the ways
Europe is now closing its borders - Fortress Europe, immigration
restrictions, anti-asylum legislations - and the relation of all this to a
trend for capital to find cheap workers at home, concomitant with its
search for deregulated labour markets anywhere, might have been
warranted. Capital migrates too.
As for the importance of labour to migration and its impact on the
world system, it cannot be stressed enough. The violence of indentured
labour migration is recognised as horrific. Indeed, another gross irony
in the relations of African and Indian colonial experience was that
plantation workers ’recruited’ from India were moved into the slave
barracks of the former African slaves. Again, slavery is the ever-present
undressed, running sore. Although it is perhaps too convenient to
criticise Cohen for taking a European example to illustrate his points -
serfdom in Russia and Poland - rather than the example of slavery, the
persistence of unfree labour until today is a reality that must be pointed
out. (Almost in passing, this is mentioned again in relation to mine-
workers as forced migrant labour in Southern Africa in the very useful
and informative section six). Whether or not recognising the persistence
of forced labour today by means of a footnote citation of the UN
estimates of child labour in India is the best way is debatable, but this is
how it is done.
Europe’s special place, its ’historical centrality’ - in the general
introduction Cohen compares 65 million European international
migrants, in the 1500-1914 period, with only 15 million African or
Asian intercontinental migrants - needs to be rethought. I am not sure
that there is the data to compare like entities, though it is definitely true
that a great number of Europeans did leave Europe in those 400 years.

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International, intercontinental (nothing about internal), these terms

require, whatever the actual numbers might be, reflection as to what, in
these contexts, nation and continent specify. Is Europe a continent, or
just the eastern tip of one? Is America? It is significant that the editor,
who introduces each of the fifteen sections, notes that a bias in favour
of attention to Atlantic migration comes from the distortions of
looking through a European lens and that Asian migration across the
Pacific has now superseded Atlantic crossings. Similarly, Mexican
migration into the US, under the stern gaze, and boot, of the border
patrols, might change the picture somewhat. Europe’s exceptionality
rests upon a notion of a ’timeless, stable, undisturbed continent’, and
this can also be seen to operate in nationalist North American rhetoric.
As with the KKK, Cohen has shown that timeless, fictive nationalism
is the ideology of contemporary European racists who feel threatened
by hordes of foreign immigrants of colour pounding at the Fortress
walls.
I’m still worried about selections. The editor admits that ’an
editorial decision had to be made as to the broad bias of the volume’
and this was decided in favour of international rather than internal
migrations. Perhaps this explains why internal migrations in countries
like China and India are only mentioned in passing, in discussions of
urbanisation, but it does not explain the omission of the Chinese
diasporic movements into the rest of South East Asia, Oceania,
Australia etc. (though, since much of the Chinese diasporic reach into
South East Asia can be traced back many centuries, perhaps this was a
criterion for exclusion). The excuses offered for looking only to inter-
national migrations are, admirably, ’not losing’ the ’important issues
... of analysis of xenophobia and racism’ and ’the determining
influence of international migration on ethnic relations in the receiving
country’. Although it would seem likely that internal migrations have
their own racisms (and where does the internal/international movement
of peoples during partition in India, or after unification in Germany, fit
in this schema?), the emphasis is not to be dismissed. Nonetheless, the
transmigration programmes of the Indonesian government moving
peoples from the Island of Java onto Kalimantan, Timor and Irian
Jaya certainly deserve mention.
In the listing of disciplinary affiliations, as in the ’area studies’
geographism which guides the volume across its globe-encircling
terrain, it is curious that theory doesn’t get a mention. Not Marx, nor
Derrida, not Berger, nor Papastergiadis, there are many possibilities
that flow beyond the breadth of its empiricist/positivist criterion.
Similarly, the arts of migration, the exiles, the writers, painters, poets,
the crafts; the circulation of souvenirs and folk-styles, of musicians, all
this is migration too. What, also, about the migration of ideas? For
example - to choose a provocative one - the circulation of struggles,

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the Comintern? The Communist Party of India, for example, was

formed in conditions of migration, with M.N. Roy (who had already
had a major role in the birth of the first Mexican Communist Party
organisation) among those who founded the Party in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan, in 1920, a member of the Comintern delegation to China,
a regular visitor to Moscow and one who fought alongside or in close
contact with Trotsky and Lenin. But perhaps the circulation of ideas is
not strictly migration?
Part seven does deal, somewhat elliptically, with the revolutionary
situation in South and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, not in
terms of the import (migration) of marxist ideas, but rather the flight of
populations from violence (from Nicaragua and El Salvador, Chile and
Cuba) and the responses of the US immigration authorities, etc. The
introduction to this section did seem to promise more on political exile
and critiques of the ’ill-advised intervention of the USA on the side of
the political right’. Here, a passing reference to Trotsky and ’US
victims of the McCarthyite period’ is not followed up, but the earlier
parts of the section are useful in examining nineteenth and twentieth
century migration to the region and reminding us of often forgotten
groups - the Italians to Argentina and the Japanese to Brazil, the
Chinese (indentured labourers and free immigrants) to Peru, Cuba and
Mexico, and other Asian settlement. Japanese migration to Peru is not
separately covered; however the chapter on Chinese migration begins
with the election of Fujimori to the Peruvian presidency.
Part eight tells of post-war migration to North America, from
Mexico, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and part nine repeats a similar
post-war history of migration to the West for Europe. Much of this
seems to me more readily available elsewhere, although part ten on

repatriation makes some good and often overlooked points regarding

the arrival in the UK of British citizen Indians from Uganda, and of the
colonial Dutch from Indonesia back to the Netherlands. Sometimes a
tone which suggests that decolonisation was ’unfortunately too quick’
is not avoided (the example is Timor), when perhaps other factors
could have been taken into account, but it is interesting to reread the
decolonisation process from the perspective of its effect on the
colonising nation. Part eleven offers pieces on migration in Asia and
Oceania, and part twelve on the Middle East distinguishes rightly
between different views of the migrations of Jews to Palestine (Zionism
or colonialism) but in doing so, perhaps the importance of other

population shifts - or displacements effected by the arrival of ’Israel’ -

are lessened. This would always have been a difficult section, but the

provocations are needed reminders to think by way of comparisons.

Likening the ’displacement’ of Palestinians to the genocidal annihila-
tion by colonial power of the Inuit, Native Americans and Australian
Aboriginals does underline the significance of, and the violence and

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brutality of responses at stake, in land claims, land grabs and

nationalisms of all sorts. At the other end of a spectrum from slavery -
but not unproblematically - it might be useful to distinguish settlement
from migration, especially when it comes to naming phenomena. These
are not all alike, and use of the term ’settlers’ in Britain or Australia has
a different resonance from the term ’migrants’ in these countries;
moreover, there are important differences even between uses of the
same terms in both places. Settlement in Australia or Israel is a very
different political matter from the settlers of Asian origin who have
come to Britain in the last few generations.
Part thirteen begins with 20 million refugees (1995 United Nations
estimate, of which Cohen is justifiably cautious). His points about the
West’s calculation of the use-value, possible foreign policy gain, labour
market circumstances and lobbying in determining whether to ’accept’
refugees are important (but were already made in his 1994 book
Frontiers of Identity: the British and the Others). In general, the sections
on refugees and asylum-seekers (part fourteen) are timely and topical,

yet again I want more, since unfortunately these issues are destined to
remain crucial in Fortress Europe, increasingly the goal of European
unification. This, for me, is one of the strengths of the book, that a
progression from the colonial project of the initial sections can be seen
to continue through to the present day. I would, though, want the links
laid out more clearly, stressing the connections between colonialism
and the present, and also the connections of this complex with current
problems and processes in other parts of the world (recent attacks _

against Bangladeshi labourers in places like Malaysia, for example).

Such connections must demand the attention of contemporary anti-
imperialist struggle in Europe.
What is more disturbing is the section on omissions at the end,
which seems to work as a catalogue of afterthoughts and, as such, does
the volume no justice at all. Honest perhaps, but the tacking on of
gender at the end really looks tacky - a telling sentence suggests that ’to
date, most books and articles purporting to deal with the migration of
people in fact focus on the migration of men’. And only at the end is
there an explicit attempt to ’assess the significance of global migration
flows from ethical and political standpoints’. For me, this could have
been the point of the book (although I am less convinced of ethics as a
standpoint in this context) as a political view of migration seems to be
implied throughout the text, albeit unevenly. This again raises the
question of the uses of the book. But even as a resource it has some
glaring omissions. The index, for example, is, in this case, wholly
inadequate. It is ’confined to the migrating groups listed by ethnicity
and religion’ and gives no opportunity for students to cross reference
political or analytical categories. For example, it would have surely
been helpful if students could follow index references to, say, women,

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environment, media, the state, political groups, revolutionary theory,

or even the UN UNHRC and so on. It is an index of something that
or
these terms, and many others, are not there.
I have tried to make an assessment that is explicit about my
preferences for reading this document, and for reading migration along-
side political struggles of the transformatory and redistributive type,
against slavery, colonialism, racism, etc. I have also tried to signal the
points at which my reading takes issue with the choices of the editor and
his many contributors. But Cohen does provide the material for the kind
of readings that a transformatory project of redistributive justice might
require. (In one sense, just getting CUP to perpetrate such a volume is an
achievement.) For this reason, I do find it a useful book. It’s a good tool
to have around - and not only as a doorstop. Unfortunately, such
volumes aren’t the mass production, home-use encyclopaedia style
products that everybody can have at home (imagine this coming out in
week-by-week supplements at the newsagents), but there are, still, public
libraries that make it accessible to a degree. I can recommend that you
recommend this book to your library. Cambridge should be proud
(though they should try to be cheaper).
University of Manchester JOHN HUTNYK

Haiti, History and the Gods

By JOAN DAYAN (Berkeley, California University Press, 1995). 340pp.
Haiti has always lent itself to a multiplicity of representations, both
extreme and contradictory. Born out of the only successful slave
revolution in history and the first independent black republic, the
country became a symbol for black self-determination and an
American variant of radical Jacobinism. Little matter that its
revolution soon degenerated into a long succession of dictatorships;
liberals and radicals across Europe and North America welcomed the
new state as a beacon of freedom. Its heroic aura, meanwhile, was

swiftly counterbalanced by another set of images and associations, in

which the anti-colonial utopia was transmuted by reactionary
ideologues into a dystopia of savagery and backwardness. The
traumatic impact of the loss of colonial Saint Domingue to an army of
former slaves can be felt in the innumerable tracts and novels which
circulated in nineteenth-century France, depicting the country as a
tropical hellhole, plagued by disease and cannibalism.
All such ’extremes of idealisation and debasement’, as Joan Dayan
points out in this provocative and demanding book, were the product
of white, mostly male writers, who projected their world view on to
Haiti and Haitians. What they failed to understand or represent, of

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