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The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born a
by pseudo0 3mo ago
The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
- Tor3 3mo agoIt only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.
- kmijyiyxfbklao 3mo agoHow is 1500 years ago a short time frame? Yeah, people moved, but how many people in what amount of time is important. And places become more boring if the have the same migrants as every other place, not less boring.
- Tor3 3mo agoI didn't say that 1500 years ago is a short timeframe. I'm saying that if you look at short timeframes like a decade or a generation or two it may look like there's not much migration going on. But stretch that a bit, and you'll see the changes. It's like a slow-moving river. Always moving, if you yourself move your viewpoint back a little.
- roryirvine 3mo agoThe average person may well have lived all their lives in one village, but the minority who didn't has always been substantial, often very substantial. Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth. Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).