Your research focuses on migrations in the Western Mediterranean from the mid-19th century to the early-20th century. Who were the migrants that you are studying?
They were mostly humble people from Spain, especially from the south-eastern provinces (Almería, Murcia, and Alicante). Families tended to migrate together, so we find both male and female migrants, together with children (many of whom were born in the North of Africa). Besides these “economic” migrants, we find political exiles, mostly anarchists and carlists (traditionalists). And finally, for the case of the city of Melilla, we find many male soldiers, most of them conscripts who were forced to become temporary migrants against their will. In Tangiers and Oran, likewise, we find many young men fleeing from conscription and trying to avoid being sent to die in colonial wars.
The Mediterranean is currently the background of dramatic migration processes. Do you see any connections with the period you are studying?
Even though 150 years ago the flows were mostly north-to-south, states were also concerned about the mobility of people and tried to implement (often unsuccessfully) measures to control or channel these migrations. Many of the phenomena we can observe nowadays (seasonal migration, border controls, irregular migration, deportations, sensationalist discourses about the dangers supposedly posed by migrants like diseases or criminality) were already present at the time. There are also differences, mainly the colonial projects of France and Spain (while the legacies of these colonial projects can also be linked to many of the migration flows we see nowadays).
In parallel to your PhD research, you are pursuing a public history project, Desvelando Oriente, on the history of the Middle East for a non-specialist Spanish audience. What do you think could be the main positive impact of a greater historical awareness in our societies, and especially in the Mediterranean context, at the crossroads of Europe and the Near/Middle East?
First of all, it would offer us a broader perspective to understand our present and imagine alternatives for the future. Second, I think it would help us stop “othering” people from outside Europe and see their history as inextricably linked to ours. In general, I think greater historical awareness would help us to understand how most contemporary conflicts and tensions are often the result of modern and relatively recent developments and not the result of centuries-old grudges.
My main ambition when I started my public history project was to counter many of the discourses that present Near and Middle Eastern societies as alien to us and radically different. I wanted to fight against the lazy generalisations used by many journalists and commentators, and explain complexities in an accessible way. One of my ideas was to show that the role played by religion is not so different than in European or Christian societies, and that usually it is more useful to apply similar analysis than the ones we use for our countries; for instance, highlighting socio-economic issues and sociological factors and pointing out that religious themes are often instrumentalised by political authors (hence the wordplay, “Desvelando Oriente”, as “unveiling” it, this is, both explaining its complex dynamics and secularising the narrative about it).
Alejandro Salamanca Rodriguez is a fifth-year PhD researcher in the Department of History of the European University Institute, specialising in migration history, microhistory, and public history. The title of his PhD thesis is 'Between two lands: migration in the Western Mediterranean (1875-1914)'. His first book, 'A Microhistory of Early Modern Transatlantic Migration' (Routledge), will be published in April 2025.
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