Reading practice

Pre-reading Activity

Answer the following questions.

1. Why do people migrate from one place to another?

2. When do you think were the largest migrations of people in human history?

Task 2. Look through the following word combinations and make sure you know how to translate them.

1. Sophisticated civilizations.

2. To be bound in place and traded like chattels.

3. To designate others as outsiders.

4. To exercise the right to leave.

5. To dismiss asylum claims.

6. To bring another exodus.

7. To deny access to smb.

8. To lose much of the distinctiveness of smth.

9. To retain one’s language.

10. To face hostility.

11. The renewed proliferation of smth.

Reading Activity

(!) Read the text and answer the following.

How have governments and rulers tried to control people’s freedom of movement?

T E X T 1

The history of borders

1. Ancient migrations

Human history is the history of migrations and the most sophisticated civilizations arose where human traffic was heaviest. The ancient land near East, the Indian sub-continent, China – all had constant influxes of migrants bringing new ideas and change.

2. Bonded serfs

Large-scale restrictions were imposed with the introduction of serfdom in Europe under the Roman Empire during the third and fourth centuries AD. By mediaeval times a large part of Europe’s population was bound in place and traded like chattels.

3. Nation states

During the early Renaissance period a new social order emerged founded on wage laborers and serfdom started to die out. People were viewed as wealth, and rulers even encouraged immigration by offering newcomers citizenship, tax incentives and other benefits. The ideology of nationalism united a vast range of cultural groups and classes on the basis of loyalty to the state while designating others as “outsiders”. Countries like Spain and France ordered mass expulsions of ethnic or religious minorities.

4. Slave labor

More horrific than these expulsions, however, was the shipment of millions of West Africans to slavery in the Americas – the largest involuntary migration in history. In all, between eight and ten million Africans were taken to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

5. Right to leave

By the end of the seventeenth century “liberal” thinkers like John Locke were questioning a ruler’s right to restrict the movement of the individual. Border controls were relaxed and monied people in the West could largely choose where they went. The New World was settled in the nineteenth century by people exercising this right to leave.

6. War wounds

Waves of refugees swept across Europe in the early twentieth century. The post-World War One political realignment of territories that occurred after the four great European empires collapsed made many thousands homeless. By the 1920s immigration controls were tightened and passports – which had fallen into disuse in many places – were reintroduced. The Second World War brought another exodus as intensified aerial bombardment left massive numbers homeless.