> we're all moving in the opposite direction
I flew to Britain in 2020 of all times, and got in with a swipe of my passport. That’s easier than it has been for most across history to travel a fraction of that distance.
I flew to Britain in 2020 of all times, and got in with a swipe of my passport. That’s easier than it has been for most across history to travel a fraction of that distance.
The border controls, I think you are simply incorrect. For most of human history in most places, if someone had the material means to go somewhere, nobody would keep them out, there were no documents, fingerprints, or fees. For most humans across most of human history there weren't even such things as borders.
At any rate, the OP is saying that it will soon require more than a swipe of the passport for Americans to get into the UK; and the comment I was responding to that it already does for British to get into USA.
Good luck just wandering into other countries in order to sign up as a student today.
Well of course. It was touch and feel. Safe passage was negotiated piecemeal. That’s why we created standardise documents, so one village chieftain on your 900-Village journey couldn’t veto your transit.
For the most part, rigid passport control can really only exist at airports, controlled ports, possibly some 'choke-points' in roads, and some exceptionally closely guarded borders. If you're in bumfuck nowhere in the third world absolutely no one has time to mess with deporting you unless you did some dumb shit to make it worth their while. Watch some documentaries on people trying to immigrate (illegally) to EU or America. You always see the stories about people working from country to country all though Central/South America and Africa and when they get stuck at the border absolutely no one has the money to deport them all the way back to their home country. There are tons of people like this that get stuck somewhere like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile with no papers and somehow their life just.... continues on. Eventually their children are born wherever they get stuck and there's a good chance after 1-2 generations their family are <new country> nationality.
What are you basing this on? Where do you think the threat of being an outlaw comes from? When justice is customary, one has none away from one’s peers.
There is an early modern period of free movement, when Hamilton emigrated and helped found a nation. But to deny the specialness of that era undermines it.
People have tried building great empires for millennia, and those empires have always relied on long-distance trade. In order for trade to flourish, long-distance travel has to be safe and predictable, at least relatively speaking. Traders and other travelers typically had to worry more about outlaws than about being outlaws.
One recent read was Graeber and Wengrow's _Dawn of Everything_, which suggested there was evidence of a culture of travel networks throughout much of North America during a significant (pre-Columbian) period, based on a sort of "clan" system calling for hospitality across geographic/culture/language-groups. And similar systems in other places.
I just found an ebook copy public online, so could search to find this quote:
> In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.
> It’s difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.
Hm, there's no page numbers on this PDF, but it's PDF page 132. (it has it's own footnote citations) https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/The-Dawn-of-Ever...
Here's another passage:
> Perhaps the most insightful contribution came from Marcel Mauss, who tackled the notion of ‘culture areas’ in a series of essays on nationalism and civilization written between 1910 and 1930.10 Mauss thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonsense; not for the reasons most anthropologists do now (that it’s pointless and uninteresting),11 but because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual.
> The exact opposite was true, Mauss argued. People in past times, he wrote, appear to have travelled a great deal – more than they do today – and it’s simply impossible to imagine that anyone back then would have been unaware of the existence of basketry, feather pillows, or the wheel if such objects were regularly employed a month or two’s journey away; the same could presumably be said of ancestor cults or syncopated drum rhythms. Mauss went further. He was convinced the entire Pacific Rim had once been a single realm of cultural exchange, with voyagers criss-crossing it at regular intervals. He too was interested in the distribution of games across the entire region…
This just being a book I read recently so is in my mind, which touches on relevant things. Since you asked, I thought to look for passages from it, it's not alone supposed to answer all questions, and is not the only source on which i've based my view.
What do you base your conclusions about most people throughout most of human history on?
In the end I was dumped at the border, along with an ex-post-facto warrant of complete fabrications used to get a judge to sign off AFTER THE FACT AND AFTER EXECUTION of the 'medical' searches they initiated. No evidence of a crime was ever found, no truthful probable cause or even articulable suspicion ever existed. I found out later this was part of a systematic pattern of abuse by CBP [0].
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...