TRAVELLERS AND MIGRANTS AND THEIR TRIBULATIONS THROUGHOUT HISTORY: A DIDACTIC APPROACH - Trabajo Fin de Máster - TAUJA
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Centro de Estudios de Postgrado
Centro de Estudios de Postgrado
Trabajo Fin de Máster
TRAVELLERS AND MIGRANTS
AND THEIR TRIBULATIONS
THROUGHOUT HISTORY: A
DIDACTIC APPROACH
Alumno/a: Extremera Budiño, María
Tutor/a: Prof. D. José Ruiz Mas
Dpto: Filología Inglesa
Table of Contents
Table of Tables .................................................................................................................. 4
Tables of Figures ............................................................................................................... 5
Resumen / Abstract .......................................................................................................... 6
1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 7
2. Theoretical background ................................................................................................ 8
2.1. An introduction to the ambivalent role of migration in the history of humankind
8
2.1.1. The human evolution from nomadic to sedentary and then to nomadic
again: the birth of property and the beginnings of wars .......................................... 8
2.1.2. Types of human migration ........................................................................ 10
2.2. A selection of highlights in an Anglo-centred history of migration ..................... 12
2.2.1. Prehistoric and ancient immigration to the British Isles ............................... 12
2.2.2. Medieval migration in Britain: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Danes,
Norwegians and Normans ....................................................................................... 14
2.2.3. Overseas migration in colonial England/Britain from the 16th century
onwards ................................................................................................................... 17
2.2.4. Overseas migration to Britain in the 20th century and beyond..................... 22
2. 3. Imperial Britain: a factory of migrants (settlers, colonisers, civil servants,
merchants, missionaries and military men) ................................................................ 23
2.3.1. British reluctant migration to North America (17th-19th centuries) ......... 23
2.3.2. A single ticket to hell: British convicts in Australia ................................... 27
2.3.3. British settlements in the South Seas: the cases of Tahiti and Pitcairn
Island 30
3. Didactic unit: “Travellers” ........................................................................................... 32
3.1. Justification ...................................................................................................... 32
3.2. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 32
3.3. Legal contextualization .................................................................................... 34
3.4. Objectives ......................................................................................................... 35
3.4.1. Objectives of Stage (Bachillerato) ............................................................. 35
3.4.2. Objectives of Area (English as a foreign language)................................... 36
3.4.3. Aims for this Didactic Unit ........................................................................ 38
3.5. Methodology .................................................................................................... 38
Page 2 of 92
3.6. Timing ............................................................................................................... 40
3.7. Competences.................................................................................................... 41
3.8. Cross-curricular issues...................................................................................... 42
3.9. Evaluation and evaluation tools ....................................................................... 44
3.10. Rubrics for evaluation ...................................................................................... 46
3.11. Evaluation criteria ............................................................................................ 51
3.12. Teacher’s and students’ self-evaluation sheets ............................................... 51
Teacher’s self-evaluation sheet ............................................................................... 51
Student’s self-evaluation sheet ............................................................................... 52
3.13. Activities ........................................................................................................... 53
SESSION 1 ................................................................................................................ 53
SESSION 2 ................................................................................................................ 56
SESSION 3 ................................................................................................................ 61
SESSION 4 ................................................................................................................ 66
SESSION 5 ................................................................................................................ 70
SESSION 6 ................................................................................................................ 75
SESSION 7 ................................................................................................................ 79
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................... 87
References ...................................................................................................................... 88
Page 3 of 92
Table of Tables
Table 1: Timing ................................................................................................................ 40
Table2: Speaking rubrics ................................................................................................. 46
Table3: Writing rubrics ................................................................................................... 47
Table4: Listening rubrics ................................................................................................. 48
Table5: Reading rubrics .................................................................................................. 49
Table 6: Assessment grid of student’s handed-in work (portfolio/individual notebook)
........................................................................................................................................ 50
Page 4 of 92
Tables of Figures
Figure 1: Youtube video" Run for your Life" 53
Figure2: Screen shot from”Run for your Life" ................................................................ 53
Figure 3: YouTube video “I am a Refugee - Poem by Ifrah Mansour” ............................ 56
Figure 4: Refugee camp .................................................................................................. 65
Figure 5: Youtube Video: “Kids Meet A Refugee | Kids Meet | HiHo Kids” ................... 67
Figure 6: YouTube video "Prehistoric Human Migration " ............................................. 70
Figure 7: "The back of beyond" ...................................................................................... 75
Figure 8: Sunsetview ....................................................................................................... 76
Figure 9:Example of how Mentimeter works ................................................................. 79
Figure 10: Natalie Portman ............................................................................................. 81
Figure 11: Hahatay .......................................................................................................... 81
Figure 12: Storyboard Example....................................................................................... 84
Page 5 of 92
Resumen / Abstract
Este trabajo de fin de máster ofrece una visión generalizada de la migración humana a lo largo
de la historia y los distintos tipos de migrantes. Concretamente, se abordará el fenómeno de las
migraciones, ya sean de manera forzada o voluntaria, desde y hacia Gran Bretaña, así como las
razones que han llevado a ellas. Finalmente, se presenta una unidad didáctica diseñada para la
asignatura de inglés del primer curso de bachillerato que ha sido creada con la intención de
enseñar el idioma y su cultura a la vez que se da a conocer la situación del migrante en nuestros
días.
Palabras clave: migración, Gran Bretaña, unidad didáctica, enseñanza del inglés como
lengua extranjera, 1º de Bachillerato.
This Master’s degree final Project takes a generalised look at human migration throughout
history as well as focusing on different types of migrants. Both forced and voluntary migration
to and from Britain are covered as well as their causes. It also includes the design of a didactic
unit for students of the first year of Post-Obligatory Education for the subject of English as a
foreign language in the Spanish baccalaureate. This didactic unit aims to teach the English
language and culture to students while making them more aware of the issue of migration in
our times.
Key words: migration, Britain, didactic unit, TEFL, 1st Year of Post-Obligatory Education
Page 6 of 92
1. Introduction
This Master’s thesis deals with the issue of migrations. Its primary aim is to teach English through
an original and relevant topic but I also wish to promote solidarity and empathy of the students
in the context of an EFL classroom and make better citizens of them.
I have opted for this topic because, following my personal experience, I have come to realize
that 1) English can be taught through any kind of text provided it fits in the teenager’s interest
and welfare; 2) teenagers find themselves in a difficult stage in which they experiment lots of
changes and they do not usually wear somebody else’s shoes; 3) I believe the EFL classroom may
give the teacher the perfect scene to promote solidarity, equality and critical thinking among
the students.
Finally, a didactic unit is proposed in order to put into practice the theoretical background
revised before. I myself have elaborated all the activities of the didactic unit. They are all original
with the exception of those addressed at the fast and slow learners.
Page 7 of 92
2. Theoretical background
2.1. An introduction to the ambivalent role of migration in the history of
humankind
2.1.1. The human evolution from nomadic to sedentary and then to nomadic again:
the birth of property and the beginnings of wars
The development of humankind runs parallel to the history of migratory movements.
Throughout the long and cold night of prehistory and more recently throughout the
latest several thousand years of history, human beings have not stopped moving from
one place to another in search of their survival or their improvement in the living
conditions both for themselves and for their families, tribes, clans or nations. Humans
(whether belonging to the sapiens or neanderthalensis species or to any other presumed
genetic humanoid variation) had lots of experience as migrants or nomads following the
dictates imposed by the whim of nature and the regular passage of the seasons. Their
“food” did so too. In prehistoric times, human beings, nomadic animals par excellence,
moved from one place to another on the lookout for the regular paths and routes of
emigration of mammals and birds. Hungry-striven cavemen and women were after
herbivorous animals, their main sources of energy to their protein-based diets, the
bigger they were, the better. They were also after their skins and plumages and also
after their fats in their quest of body heat and protection against the unmercifulness of
glaciations, climate changes, the extreme cold and the heavy rains and the discomfort
of provisional and imperfect impromptu shelters. Some other times humans were
obliged to leave their place of settlement after unexplained and uncomprehended (but
no doubt superior) forces beyond their limited control to look for new pastures, for
comfort and more often than not for mere and sheer survival. This adventure towards
the unknown would take place as a consequence of the deep influence and impact of
natural disasters and destructions of ecosystems or by the inexplicable forces of nature
and their multiple and lethal manifestations.
Page 8 of 92
Once sedentary, in the Neolithic period, when humans learnt to master agriculture
and the art of taming and domestication of the animals closest to them such as dogs (for
safety and companionship), pigs, chicken, sheep, goats, cows and oxen (for food and
clothes), horses, donkeys and other pack animals (for transport), etc., the concept of
“property” showed its ugly head for the first time in the history of humankind. By means
of the accumulation of lands and livestock in the hands of a lucky few or in the hands of
the strongest, some members of the community/tribe/clan/nation wished to
monopolize the exploitation of the best lands to their sole benefit, or kept the usufruct
of rivers and the seas and their fishes and their waters for private consumption or
irrigation and did everything in their power to keep away intruders (i.e., other individuals
or other communities/nations/tribes/clans) from their “possessions”. The most
powerful members of the group accumulated and retained personal possessions in the
forms of houses, jewelry, utensils, food surpluses and the exclusive access to fertile
women who could guarantee large numbers of offspring for the survival of their tribes
or their families. The maintenance of the acquired property became an obsession of the
new elites. Their properties could only be passed onto their offspring and selected heirs.
Tensions between members of the same community or the violent clash of neighbouring
communities (and subsequently wars) soon ensued. This was the price for humans to
pay for “civilization”.
Indeed, when society became more sophisticated and complex (with the
development of the division of classes, the increase of prestige of some social layers
over others, the accumulation of wealth, power and the authority of some elites over
the common folk, etc.), that is, when some individuals or cliques imposed themselves
on others following the golden rule of “the strongest dominates the weakest”, the
weakest human beings were forced to migrate to some other territories. Winners
stayed, losers left. When tension born from selfishness and greediness filled the air in
the new societies, men and women had no choice but to move towards the unknown.
It was a desperate attempt on the part of the new social victims of human viciousness
to look for new lands where to settle down in more favourable contexts, as far away as
possible from bullies and despots. Such an imperfect animal as the homo/femina sapiens
had by now become a homo/femina propietarius/-ia; soon afterwards a homo/femina
avarus-a, and almost immediately afterwards a homo/femina ambitiosus-a,
Page 9 of 92
characterized by an endless thirst for power and wealth and endowed with vanity and
ambition.
2.1.2. Types of human migration
The development of humankind as we know it today and the ever-growing complexity
of the social, political, cultural, religious and economic context of the homo/femina
sapiens and the adaptation (or lack of adaptation) to the lands initially obtained by good
luck, accident, fate, more powerful authorities or God’s will have produced a varied
range of reasons for human migration:
a) People migrate for economic reasons in search of greater economic
opportunities, usually from a less economically developed
territory/region/country to a more economically developed
territory/region/country, or, as the 19th and 20th centuries so amply
demonstrated, from former colonies to the central (imperial) metropolis. These
migrants, in most cases, are in search of employment or they simply wish to
escape hunger.
b) Political migrants (exiles) are those who are forced to change their permanent
residence because of a conflict, or a civil war, or as the result of discriminating
policies passed by the governing bodies against a particular unwanted sector of
the population or against those individuals or groups who displayed some kind
of real or imaginary opposition to their authorities/governments. These migrants
are often unable to return to their countries of origin because they are afraid of
being persecuted and imprisoned (as is the case of victims of political repression
and religious intolerance) or even eliminated, as has often been the case of
exiled or banished individuals and ethnic groups throughout history.
c) Environmental migrants are those who leave their original lands of abode or their
regions/countries of origin due to a sudden or a long-term natural catastrophe
(floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, draughts, volcanic eruptions, etc.) or serious
Page 10 of 92short-term or long-term changes of climate (global warmings, abrupt freezing or
de-freezing of lands, risings of coastlines, etc., that may affect the environment
seriously and put the well-being or livelihood of humans in jeopardy.
d) Slavery and deportation are the most dramatic cases of human migration. Slaved
migrants and deported groups have been violently and physically transported to
a land against their will, usually for their exploitation. The phenomena of slavery
and deportation in the history of mankind are the evil consequence of stronger
men and women’s infinite capacity for selfishness, greed, brutality and cruelty
(alas, too often) exercised towards the members of a less strong community or
sector of the population. Wars and mass kidnappings are frequently the origin of
slavery: Jews (confined in concentration camps for hard labour and/or
extermination and in ghettos), Indians/Native Americans (in reservations),
gypsies (rejected everywhere), black African slaves (used in British, French,
Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and American cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations
and in domestic service), Asians (in rail works in American and European
territories), war prisoners/POWs (especially during WWI and WWII by both sides
of the conflicts), British convicts in Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania (in the
18th and 19th centuries), etc., are the best known examples of victims of man to
man’s cruelty and abuse.
e) In more recent times, due to the worldwide flow of travellers and the
development of tourism and the culture of leisure (19th, 20th and 21st centuries),
the globalization of markets and the work force as well as the faster and safer
travel technologies (20th and 21st century) in most countries and continents, new
family and personal bonds have been created and therefore stronger needs to
join relatives and partners. This is the so called family reunion migration.
Page 11 of 922.2. A selection of highlights in an Anglo-centred history of migration
2.2.1. Prehistoric and ancient immigration to the British Isles
It is commonly assumed that the British Isles, being in the geographical periphery in
the Euro-Asian continent, must have been uninhabited by any type of hominids during
the Ice Age. The oldest human settlements in the lands that we nowadays call Britain
are believed to have taken place around twenty-five thousand years ago, at the end of
a glacial period (i.e., when ice started to recede) and there was still a land bridge
connecting the British Isles with mainland Europe; but then, again, this is based on
speculation rather than on absolute certainty. Ancient Britons, i.e., Paleolithic hunters
and gatherers, occupied the England (as we know it today) land through migration from
continental Europe and a witness of their presence and settlement is the skeleton found
in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset named “Cheddar Man”, assumed to be of dark-brown
skin, blue, green, or hazel eyes and dark hair. During the Neolithic period, six thousand
years ago, once the English land bridge was submerged, a new wave of farming brown-
skinned, brown-eyed and dark-haired migrants from the Iberian Peninsula brought new
technologies and farming lifestyles: wheat pollen in the earth stratum sediments of the
prehistoric period gives them away as inhabitants of the land that is England today.
During the Early Bronze Age (about 4,400 years ago), another wave of migrants from
continental Europe, this time light-skinned and light-haired people, the so called Beaker
People due to their use of pottery in their burials and clay pots for their everyday life,
substituted the earlier Iberian wave. The employment of iron tools of yet another new
wave of migrants characterizes the beginning of the Iron Age (600 BC–50 AD) in Britain.
Iron Age inhabitants of the British Isles lived in farming and warring tribes and increased
animal husbandry, especially in the south of England, as well as the employment of the
iron plough and other metal weapons and utensils. They spoke the Insular Celtic
language known as Common Brittonic and their religion and their oral knowledge was
in the hands of the Druids. Apparently Celtic Britain was already known to overseas
traders for its richness in resources and minerals as far south as the end of the
Mediterranean (Robb, 2014).
Page 12 of 92In the following centuries, Greco-Roman civilization displaced the Celtic culture of
Iron Age Europe. Indeed, the Romans arrived in Britain in the first century BC. These
culturally superior invaders viewed the Celts (“Keltoi” or “Galatians” in the words of
Greek historian Herodotus, “Brittōnēs” and “Galli” for the Romans) as barbaric and
warlike, but after Queen Boudicca’s defeat in her revolt against the Romans in the year
60-61 AD, Celtic Britons did not take long to adopt the newly-arrived Roman civilized
ways. However, Rome only ever conquered half the whole island. Effective
Romanization did not go further than the Hadrian Wall in the north of England (Ireland,
Wales and Scotland were naturally excluded) and whatever land was north of it was the
territory of fierce and feared Celtic peoples such as the Picts and the Scots.
The Roman occupation of the British Isles was not as “Roman” as it has been
traditionally believed: Roman (Italic) Latin-speaking officials were few in Britannia. The
population of Roman Britain was overwhelmingly indigenous, that is, it was mainly made
up of Romanized Britons but also of Roman (non-Italic and therefore multiethnic)
soldiers who had been brought to English lands from different territories of the Roman
Empire, mostly from the north of Africa, Hispania, Gallia and Germania. There is
evidence of an auxiliary unit of five hundred Moors (i.e., North Africans) created by
emperor Aurelius in the 3rd century AD, garrisoned by Hadrian’s Wall for its protection.
There is also an allusion to a black soldier from Ethiopia in the Roman army in a last
attempt of the emperor Severus (himself born in Libya) to conquer Scotland in the year
208 AD, as narrated in Historia Augusta (4th c. AD):
After inspecting the wall near the rampart in Britain… just as he [Severus] was
wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian from a military unit, who
was famous among buffoons and always a notable joker, met him with a garland of
cypress. And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight,
troubled as he was by the man’s ominous colour and the ominous nature of the
garland, [the Ethiopian] by way of jest cried, it is said, “You have been all things, you
have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god.”
Page 13 of 92From an initial invasion force consisting of forty to fifty thousand Romans, by the 4 th
century AD there were only about ten to twenty thousand in England in an overall
population of four million inhabitants, not at all what we may call a case of mass
migration. By the 4th century, Britannia was legally and culturally Roman, but of
indigenous descent and still mostly speaking Celtic languages.
2.2.2. Medieval migration in Britain: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Danes,
Norwegians and Normans
The abandonment of Britannia by the Roman forces in the 4th century AD markedly
reduced the population of the Celtic-Roman territory. Soon afterwards Britannia
received new waves of overseas migrants in the form of invasions and/or settlements
of a number of Germanic tribes from continental Europe such as the Jutes, Angles,
Saxons and Frisians in the 5th-6th centuries who settled in different regions of the island
forming different independent kingdoms (the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy) which rivalled
with each other but turned the land into a Germanic-run country. Celts remained in the
peripheries of the British Isles: Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, Isle of Man; this is the
reason why Celtic languages are (or were) spoken there. Intermittent and dreaded
inflows from warlike Danes/Norwegians (=Vikings) in the search of easy bounties in
northern English monasteries (Lindisfarne, Jarrow, etc.) and rich English towns as well
as lands to settle in for good –Scandinavian lands were not as warm or as fertile–
provoked inevitable clashes with the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the island. From the 9th
to the 11th centuries, despite King Alfred’s strenuous efforts to keep the
Danes/Norwegians at bay, the Old Norse-speakers managed to retain a large chunk of
territory in the north of England where their law ruled: Danelaw. Old English in the north
of England would be deeply influenced by the language of the Scandinavian neighbours:
hundreds of Old Norse loans and grammatical and phonetic changes would follow suit
in the language of the Anglo-Saxons.
The Viking raiders often enslaved the people of the towns they encountered and
raided. Their slaves were mostly Franks, Frisians, Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Brittonic Celts
and Slavs. Slavery traffic was one of the pillars of Norse commerce. There is evidence
Page 14 of 92that there were Germanic and Celtic slaves in Roman markets. They were most probably
victims of Norse kidnappings and war bounties. In Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum
(c.731 AD), a cultivated Angle monk, the Venerable Bede (c.672-735 AD), tells us about
how the future Pope Gregory I (c.540-604), known in history as Gregory the Great, had
the idea of sending missionaries to convert pagan England to Christianity. In the year
597 (6th-7th c.), before being elected Pope, Gregory saw fair-haired children slaves in the
Rome market and asked about their identity. When told they were Angles, the soon-to-
be Pope wittily answered: “Non Angli, sed Angeli” [i.e., Not Angles, but Angels]. A few
years later Gregory I decided to send the missionary St Augustine to England with the
difficult mission of Christianizing the land. No easy task, he thought.
The Christianization of the island was a revolutionary step in the preservation of
medieval culture in England. King Æthelberht of Kent was the first Anglo-Saxon monarch
to convert to Christianity (around the year 601). St Augustine and his forty monks were
lucky that Æthelberht was already married to a Christian princess of Frankish origin,
Bertha, who was allowed to use her own private Christian chapel at their palace in Kent-
wara-byriġ (hence Canterbury, “the town of the men of Kent”) and thus eased the
kingdom’s road to Christendom. Soon the king and his subjects became Christians Old
English society was gradually Christianised, albeit rather superficially. Germanic
paganism and Christianity coexisted in Anglo-Saxon England in the ensuing centuries
(Ruiz Mas, 2019: 14).
The Duke William of Normandy’s conquest of England from 1066 onwards brought a
relatively small number of Normans to the British Isles, probably no more than ten
thousand soldiers and noblemen in comparison with the size of the indigenous
population of England in the 11th century, estimated as approximately two million
people. Despite the small size of the Norman migration, the new administration made a
huge impact in England, as Normans took for themselves the main posts of the Church,
justice, nobility, and kept the best lands. All English high ranks of the state and the
Church were soon changed for Norman noblemen and prelates. Although Anglo-Saxon
nobles were respected until they died, they were openly segregated and suspected of
treason. All the nobility titles of those English knights that had died in battle were given
to Normans. As far as the peasantry was concerned, the Norman newcomers had
virtually no influence on them and the Anglo-Saxon masses in England (that is, eighty
Page 15 of 92per cent of a population of about two million people) went on using Old English in their
everyday life. Only the English urban artisans and tradesmen made an effort to speak
Norman French in their attempts to have fluent commercial intercourse with the
powerful nobility. We may conclude that Norman French was a minority language in
England in terms of number of speakers in spite of its status of official language. The
new language, Norman French, was spoken almost solely at court and written in Anglo-
Norman literature, but it became the “official” one in the organization of the newly-
conquered land (Ruiz Mas, 2019: 18).
In the Middle Ages England was hardly a receptive country for overseas migration,
pilgrimages and commerce excepted. It is estimated that only a very small minority of
Jews lived in England, but were expelled in 1290. The south of England gave residence
to a number of Flemings as the result of the fluent commerce existing between England
and the Low Countries. Chaucer’s father was a well-off wine merchant residing in
London (one of the most affluent commercial ports in the Europe of the late Middle
Ages), with connections with France and Portugal and Spain. Geoffrey Chaucer’s
“General Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales (1385-1400) introduces several characters
(the shipman, the merchant and the wife of Bath) which evidence the constant trade
existing between England, France and the Low Countries (textiles, wine, etc.). The
Merchant used to work in the prosperous wool and cloth trade (exports) between
England and Flanders. The Shipman was a skillful mariner with lots of sailing experience
and knew the coasts and tides and the ports of Western Europe, from Hull in England to
Cartagena in Spain, from Gotland to the cape of Finisterre.
On the other hand, the Wife of Bath of The Canterbury Tales represented another
type of traveller in the Middle Ages: the professional pilgrim. By the time she set out to
visit Thomas à Becket’s shrine as a member of the jolly train of pilgrims to Canterbury,
she had already travelled several times to Jerusalem, Rome, Bologna, Cologne and
Santiago de Compostela, no small feat at the time when travelling was both dangerous
and expensive. In Piers Plowman (c.1370-90), William Langland (c.1330-c.1400)
criticised the type of professionalized pilgrim who travelled the world for fun and
entertainment, not for piety. According to Langland, these pilgrims lied and pretended
that they travelled to London, Santiago de Compostela or Walsingham (England) for love
Page 16 of 92of God and his saints but in reality they did not take religion seriously enough during
their pilgrimages.
The Knight, the Squire and the Yeoman, the military representatives of 14 th century
English society in The Canterbury Tales, give evidence of the existence of other travel
routes in the known world as part of their mercenary professions. The Knight has a long
history of campaigning in crusading wars. He has widely travelled and fought for
Christianity (in the south of Spain, in northern Europe, in the southern and eastern
Mediterranean against the enemies of Christendom. He has fought the Barbarians in the
north of Europe (Lithuania, Russia), Moors in the south of Spain and north of Africa
(Granada and Algeciras, Morocco and Algeria) and Ottomans in Eastern Europe
(Armenia and the Mediterranean). The Squire and the Yeoman have also crossed the
English Channel to participate in military raids on French lands as part of the Hundred
Years’ War.
2.2.3. Overseas migration in colonial England/Britain from the 16th century onwards
England’s growing status of trading power in Europe attracted a number of foreigners
who did not nevertheless diversify the human landscape of the country, not even
London. Henry VII and Henry VIII had a number of moriscos (i.e., dark-haired and dark-
skinned) musicians and black servants in court brought to England by Catherine of
Aragon (GarcíaGarcía, 2013: 297). It is also speculated that Shakespeare’s “dark lady” of
his “sugared” sonnets (especially in sonnet no. 127) could have been a black girl of “black
wires”, i.e. with Afro-Caribbean hair (sonnet no. 130). GarcíaGarcía (2003: 16-18)
reflects on the possible identity of this mysterious “dark lady” who Shakespeare could
have had a liaison with and on the possible candidates to the identity of this mysterious
woman, he opts for the dark-haired musician and poet Emilia Lanier (1570-1640s, née
Bassano), of Italian origin, probably of Jewish ancestry too. If this were the case, whether
black or “dark haired”, the presence of overseas migrants in the English court would be
confirmed.
Gypsies, a much-maligned minority in most places, persecuted more often than not,
often also romanticized by literature, came to the western world originally from India.
Page 17 of 92They entered Europe through two different routes: a) through Turkey and Eastern
Europe (12th century); and b) through Egypt, the north of Africa and Spain (14 th-15th
centuries) (Watkins, 2019). There is evidence of the presence of gypsies in early Tutor
England, in Scotland and in Wales in the 15th-16th centuries. Their troubles began as soon
as they arrived in the British Isles. In England, the so called “Egyptian Act” (1530) was
decreed by Henry VIII to expel them from his kingdom as they were popularly considered
to be vagabonds, thieves and tricksters. In 1562 Queen Elizabeth I signed an order to
force gypsies to settle down or else they would be sentenced to death. Some gypsies
were hanged in 1577, 1596 and in the 1650s. Under King James I, England began to
deport gypsies to the American colonies, Jamaica and Antiga (Cressy, 2018; Healey,
2018). In the 19th century gypsies went on living as nomads in England, as is ascertained
by the English travel writer and linguist George Borrow (1803-81), who certainly
romanticized and idealized their nomadism and fierce sense of independence. Borrow,
the son of a military man, led a wandering childhood due to his father’s profession and
mingled with lots of nomad gypsies in England, from whom he learnt their language. He
explains this in his autobiographical Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857). In
Spain Borrow was fascinated by the local gypsies, to whom he used to speak in “caló”,
as is ascertained in his travel book The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies in Spain (1841)
and The Bible in Spain (1843) (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Gypsies are also found
in Scotland in 1505 –the surnames Faa and Baille are thought to have gypsy origins–
making a living as tinkers, dancers, story-tellers, fortune-tellers and obliged by law (the
Vagabonds Act, 1609 and 1624) to settle down or face death by hanging, simply because
they were “Egyptians” (Watkins, 2019). Ireland’s gypsies, termed “Irish travellers”,
“pavees” or “minceirs” (or derogatively “pikeys”), are not genetically related to Romani
gypsies, but they have certainly been victims of similar discriminatory laws due to their
vagrant nature. There is much speculation over their origins: some believe that their
existence dates back to pre-Celtic times, some believe they are the consequence of
Irishmen and women becoming homeless and therefore forcedly itinerant after
Cromwell’s conquest and brutal repression of the island in the 17 th century or after the
Great Famine in the 1840s, most of whom worked as tinkers. The Irish playwright J. M.
Synge (1871-1909) described their lifestyle at the end of the 19th century and first years
of the 20th in his play The Tinker’s Wedding (1909) (Burke, 2009: 142).
Page 18 of 92French Protestants (Huguenots) arrived in England by the thousands after St
Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572. Throughout the 17 th century and
especially during and after the French Revolution at the end of the 18 th century many
French aristocrats fled the country and settled in England to save their lives from the
guillotine. Indeed, in 1797 one of Jane Austen’s brothers, Henry Thomas, married one
of her cousins, Eliza Capot Comptesse de Feuillide (1761-1813), the English widow of a
French aristocrat, Jean Capot, executed in France in 1794, thus becoming Jane Auten’s
sister in law (Austen-Leigh, 1998: 111).
The ominous slave trade has produced the largest mass migration of forced labour in
the history of humankind that we know of. The main trade routes starting from Africa
towards the West Indies (often passing by the port of Liverpool and the slave market of
Bristol) saw the transportation of around ten million black slaves for intensive field work
in the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations, many of whom died during the journey
across the Atlantic and many others as victims of exhaustion and the trafficker’s whip.
Slave trade from the 16th century onwards –1502 saw the arrival of the first African
slaves in America– brought to England a small number of Africans as domestic servants.
Elizabeth I issued an order of expulsion of blacks in 1596 (but it grossly failed to be put
into force) and the reissue of the Queen’s order of deportation took place in 1601 (Fyer,
1984: 92),to no avail. They grew to become an established African community, especially
in the 17th and 18th centuries, of approximately from ten to thirty thousand men and
women, although the exact figure is difficult to ascertain. In fact, black household
servants (laundry maids and pages) were used as status symbols in the mansions of English
noblemen and gentry in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the last decades of the 18th century
England’s black men were promised freedom if they fought on the British side in the
American War of Independence (1775-83). The promise was kept, but the harsh reality was
that hundreds of black “loyalist” soldiers exchanged their relatively comfortable lives of
slaves in English mansions for begging in the streets (Fyer, 1984: 94-95).
It was during the 1640-80 period when large-scale African slave labour began to be
introduced in the British Caribbean for sugar production (Beckles, 2002: 5-10). The stuffy
atmosphere and unsanitary conditions in the slave ships during the shameful
transatlantic transportations of the wretched coloured human cargo were both morally
Page 19 of 92inhumane and physically unbreathable. However, the issue of slave abolition was
already in the air in England. The pro-abolitionist pre-Romantic poet William Blake
offered an amiable but imperfect (and therefore distorted) image of the Christian
brotherhood of black and white boys in his poem “The Little Black Boy”, from Songs of
Innocence (1789). Both children were loved equally by God, provided that the black boy
made himself liked by the white boy by fulfilling his duty of obedience to the white
master:
Thus did my mother say and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our father’s knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me. (l. 21-28)
The Irish clergyman and physician Rev. Robert Walsh (1772-1852), who served aboard
one of the ships assigned to intercept the slavers off the African coast, gave a horrid
description of the most unhealthy conditions and inhumane treatment of the black
cargo in the chapter “Aboard a Slave Ship” of his Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (1830
and 1831). Walsh chronicled the wretched conditions that the slaves went through in
the transportation ships. Naked men, women and children were denied adequate room,
food or breathing space and the stench was appalling:
The space between decks was divided into two compartments three feet three
inches high; the size of one was sixteen feet by eighteen and of the other forty by
twenty-one; into the first were crammed the women and girls, into the second the
men and boys: 226 fellow creatures were thus thrust into one space 288 feet
square and 336 into another space 800 feet square, giving to the whole an average
of twenty-three inches and to each of the women not more than thirteen inches,
Page 20 of 92though many of them were pregnant. We also found manacles and fetters of
different kinds, but it appears that they had all been taken off before we boarded.
The heat of these horrid places was so great and the odor so offensive that it was
quite impossible to enter them, even had there been room. (1831, II: 479)
Jane Austen made it clear in Mansfield Park (1814) that many British fortunes relied on
the employment of black slaves in Antiga (currently Antigua and Barbados, in the
Caribbean Antilles), including that of the character of Sir Thomas Bertram, the uncle of
the protagonist of the novel, Fanny Price. Britain was the world’s leading slave trading
power at the time. The anti-slavery movement and national campaigns (led mainly by
the Anti-Slavery Society now rampant) finally successfully to force the passing in the
British Parliament of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which banned international slave
trade, though not slavery itself. The new law enforced the creation of the so called West
Africa Squadron in the Royal Navy in 1808 to enforce the ban. Victory for abolitionists
could only be chanted later, when the Slavery Abolition Act, banning slavery in most
territories of the British Empire, excepting “the Territories in the Possession of the East
India Company”, the islands of Ceylon and Saint Helena, was passed in 1833.
It is believed that a large part of the upper classes in Victorian Britain had had enough
time to grow their fortunes from the slave trade (Fyer, 1984: 99). Around forty-six
thousand British slave owners were compensated with twenty million pounds (in 1833)
“for their loss of their human property”, a monetary “recompense” that the British
taxpayer was still paying for until 2015 (Malik, 2018). From 1834 onwards the situation
did not improve much, for slaves in the British colonies were substituted by indentured
labourers from China and India who had to pay for their forced bondage in abusive work
contracts with minimal wages for a fixed number of years before they could acquire their
freedom. From 1834 to 1917 Britain transported around two million Indian indentured
workers to her furthest and most remote colonies (South Africa, Fiji islands, Mauritius,
etc.) and imported another few hundreds of them from the Indian sub-continent from
the 18th century onwards as domestic workers. They became especially popular in the
19th century. Queen Victoria herself had a loyal servant from India in her service,
Mohammed Abdul Karim (1863-1909), who raised many eyebrows in the British court
as to the appropriateness of the close relationship that developed between them.
Page 21 of 92Despite the official banning of slavery in most of the British Empire, it was still in force
in British territories such as Sierra Leone, Gambia, Burma, Hong Kong and northern
Nigeria in the 20th century, as the British authorities were forced to admit to the League
of Nations in 1924.
Despite having been expelled in the 13th century, Jews went on coming to Britain in
fairly sizable numbers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries due to the permanent state
of unrest in Russia and Eastern Europe. Charles Dickens immortalized a Jewish character,
Fagin (depicted as a crooked Jew in close contact with criminal London), in his novel
Oliver Twist (1837-39). However, one generation later, in 1868 first, and then in 1874-
80, in the thick of the reign of Victoria, a direct descendant of Jews became a Prime
Minister in Britain for the first time in history, the conservative politician Benjamin
Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield, 1804-81), a novelist also in his own right. He made Victoria
empress of India in 1876.
In 1845-47 and in the ensuing years Britain reluctantly received massive shiploads of
Irishmen and women and children fleeing from Ireland for survival due to the Potato
Famine, a large-scale starvation followed by a real Irish diaspora, caused by the failure
of the potato crop (main food in the Ireland of the time) and the failure of the British
government to respond to the Irish crisis appropriately. Indeed, a quarter of Ireland’s
citizens either died of hunger or emigrated to England or to the US. Most of the
estimated one million of Irish migrants who settled in the east of England did it in
Liverpool (Coogan, 2013; History.com Editors, 2017).
2.2.4. Overseas migration to Britain in the 20th century and beyond
Eastern Europe has provided Britain with thousands of migrants, especially Protestant
Poles, having moved to England after the numerous failed uprisings against the Russian
empire during the 19th century. One of the most famous Poles of the period who arrived
in England at the end of the century was the Anglo-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad. But it
was after WWII when the majority of Polish soldiers stationed in the British Isles were
offered citizenship after the Polish resettlement Act of 1947. They did not wish to go
back to Russian-dominated Poland and remained in Britain as British citizens. Thousands
of Jews from Germany, Austria and other Slavic countries moved to Britain during the
Page 22 of 92Nazi regime in the 1930s and during WWII to avoid being sent to concentration camps
and be exterminated as part of “the final solution”.
The creation of new nations after WWII due to the decolonization policies promoted
by the UN and by the new mapping of the world as insensibly organised by the Allies in
the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam provided Britain with a large number of
colonial British subjects of the colonies who now opted to reside in the old metropolis.
Britain’s Nationality Act of 1948 granted them the right to live and work in the UK
without being subject to immigration control. The flow was continuous until 1962, when
tighter immigration controls were placed on immigration from the Commonwealth
countries, and more and more reduced during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. However, during
the late 20th century and the first decades of the 21st there has been a massive increase
of migration of unprecedented levels due, among other reasons, for the UK’s
membership in the EEC which allowed the free entrance of citizens of twenty-seven
countries in Europe. However, the UK’s recent “divorce” from the EEC has brought new
regulations as to the entrance of migrants of European origin in the British Isles.
2. 3. Imperial Britain: a factory of migrants (settlers, colonisers, civil
servants, merchants, missionaries and military men)
2.3.1. British reluctant migration to North America (17th-19th centuries)
History teaches American schoolchildren that the adventurer John Smith (1580-1631)
was responsible for the safe establishment of the English colony of Jamestown (Virginia)
in 1607 under the patronage of the London Virginia Company, despite the harsh
conditions endured by the English residents and the Native Americans’ attacks. They are
also taught that Captain Smith explored and mapped the coast of New England, the first
one to do so. In his second book, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the
Summer Isles (1624), Smith related an overtly sentimental (but apocryphal) love story
between the Indian princess Pocahontas and himself. His intention was to encourage
the coming of other migrants from England to the north-eastern coast of America. He
meant to prove that the two races could get on well and benefit from each other and
Page 23 of 92that English settlers could safely take advantage of the paradisiacal nature of the New
England territories. Indeed, London’s Virginia Company wished to convert the Native
Americans to Christianity and to encourage investment in the new colony. As a
propagandistic maneuver, the Virginia Company decided to bring Pocahontas to England
and use her as a symbol of the civilized and Christianized “good savage” of the New
World and evidence of the success and opulence of new colony. Pocahontas and her
English husband, John Rolfe, arrived in England accompanied by a dozen other “civilized”
Native Americans. She was entertained at various social gatherings, met King James I
and attended a court performance of Ben Jonson’s masque The Vision of Delight
(performed in 1617). This is a perfect example of the English capacity to civilize both
pagans and new continents with their message of prosperity.
A few years later the Pilgrim Fathers, a group of Separatist Calvinist Englishmen and
women, left Plymouth in 1620 on board the “Mayflower” after living in the Low
Countries for some years, away from England’s religious intolerance. They had the
financial aid of the London Virginia Company to be returned eventually in the form of
large portions of the migrants’ crops. After crossing the Atlantic the Pilgrim Fathers
settled in Plymouth Bay Colony (Massachusetts), but the adaptation to the New World
was a traumatic experience for the greatest part of them and many perished in the
process. The English colonizers only barely survived after one year of residence in
American lands. The yearly dinner tradition of Thanksgiving Day, a feast created by the
second governor of the colony, William Bradford, author of Of Plymouth Plantation
(1651), a diary he kept to show off the consolidation of the colony from 1620 to 1646,
was the way to commemorate the “success” of the God-chosen English pilgrims. In 1630,
seventeen ships left England for America, the most famous of which was the ship
“Arabella” with the Puritan leader John Winthrop on board. This new batch of English
migrants had the intention of creating a “New Jerusalem” of religious freedom (from
England’s Anglicanism anyway) and new settlers were welcome, provided that they
adjusted to the strict religious rules of the colony. The so called Great Migration had
begun: an estimated two hundred ships carrying twenty thousand people set foot in
Massachusetts; the new land was to be called New England.
Page 24 of 92John Rolfe (1585-1622), Pocahontas’s husband, had brought tobacco seeds from the
West Indies on his way to New England. He found, to his own surprise, that his plants
grew exuberantly in the new English territory. Much labour force would be needed in
Virginia after finding out the great commercial potential of tobacco. The economic
prosperity brought about by the new plantations saved the colony from its collapse.
Hundreds of indentured servants (British and Irish criminals, political rebels and beggars)
for fixed time-contracts were soon brought to Virginia and to other nearby colonies. In
1619 the first slaves were brought into Virginia and slavery became the dominant labour
force in the colony as tobacco had been turned to be Virginia and Maryland’s main
agricultural export. The business protocol was perfect for England’s economy: under
their usual mercantilist policies, England obtained the raw materials (tobacco, cotton,
sugar cane) from the new American colonies, finished them into manufactured products
and sold them to other European countries and to her own colonies with giant economic
profits.
Fischer (1989: 91) best explains the circumstances that favoured the massive flow of
aspiring colonists that the British-American colonies kept receiving from the British Isles
from the 17th century onwards. The migration phenomenon was successful partly due
to the proclamation of religious tolerance in the colonies, but also partly due to the
better prospects of prosperity for the downtrodden English population. The Quakers,
persecuted by England’s political and ecclesiastical authorities for their rejection of
social hierarchy and slavery, started to arrive in Delaware and Salem (New Jersey) in
1675. They reached their highest peak of influence in the American colonies with the
leadership of William Penn (1644-1718), an English philosopher and businessman who
managed to create a predominantly Quaker region in the new continent called
Pennsylvania. Throughout the late 17th and 18th century Catholic English exiles (due to
the dethroning of the Catholic English king James II), Scottish exiles (after the failure of
the Jacobite Rebellions to place the Stuarts back in the English throne) and Irish men
and women (exhausted from the repressive measures of the English monarchy and
Republican tyrants on the island) began to migrate to North America in greater numbers.
It can be easily concluded that there was a strong religious element in the North of
America’s colonization. At the end of the 18th century the New World was still
synonymous with freedom of cult. In 1794 Romantic poets Robert Southey and S. T.
Page 25 of 92Coleridge considered creating a utopian society devoid of the strong power of religion
and based on the rejection of private property and the implementation of class and sex
equality in Pennsylvania called “Pantisocracy”, with frustrating results in the end due to
monetary reasons and to the would-be settlers’ awareness of the hard work that it
would require to set the egalitarian colony up successfully (Newly, 2002: 129).
In the 19th century English-speaking migrants almost monopolized the migration
movements towards the west and their frontier regions of North America. Other major
European flows of immigrants in North America consisted of mostly Germans, Dutch and
Swedes. In the southern areas of North America, due to their proximity to Mexico,
Spaniards had founded numerous missions and towns throughout the 17 th and 18th
centuries. The French opted and fought the British and the Native Americans for lands
in today’s Canada. As for the arrival of blacks, the slave importation went on growing
dramatically in the coastal southern states during the seventeenth century and the first
half of the eighteenth century due to the economic dependence on the growth of
tobacco and rice of these territories, especially in South Carolina.
The constant clashes of the newly-arrived Europeans and the Native Americans (in
the so called Indian wars) would slowly decimate the original inhabitants of the northern
part of the American continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was achieved through
well-planned policies of extermination that included surprise attacks of their villages,
the encouragement of wars and disputes among the different native tribes, the lethal
effect of the new diseases that the Europeans brought from their original countries, the
systematic annihilation of their fauna (buffalos especially, which was the main source of
protein of the Native Americans), the occupation of their lands by the new settlers, the
overexploitation of woods and rivers, their mass imprisonment in reservations and the
promotion among the Natives Americans of White Man’s “inventions” such as the
uncontrolled consumption of alcohol (Fulford, 2006: 188-89). American-Hollywood
propagandistic film productions of the 20th century have consistently portrayed Native
Americans (systematically labelled as Indians) as the cruel and wild antagonists of their
“westerns” in a clear attempt to disguise (or at least justify) the brutal genocide applied
on them. “Westerns” have also constructed the new nation’s proud American identity
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