Is human migration really a normal activity?

Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot on this island. The grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus was said to have been born in Rome; but, exiled from his birthplace, he travelled western Europe before finally settling here.

That the legend of Brutus was a ninth-century fantasy concocted by a Welsh monk named Nennius need not concern us. For Sam Miller, the point isn’t that Brutus was the first Briton, it is that he was a migrant, and his story ‘is another reminder of how normal it once was to eulogise rather than deny one’s migrant past’.

Humans have always sought origin stories. Some peoples have imagined themselves to be wholly indigenous. ‘We Athenians are the only Greeks who never migrated,’ Herodotus has an envoy say. The Taino people, whom Columbus encountered on Hispaniola in 1492, believed they emerged from two caves on the island. But settlement and deep-rooted continuities are only one part of the human story. Migrants, Miller’s enjoyable, provocative and timely new book, aims to show us our history ‘through a prism in which migration is a normal activity’. It challenges what Miller calls ‘the myth of sedentarism’, the idea that human beings are by nature settlers, inclined to live and die in the same place among the safe, familiar and known.

Sedentarism began around 12,000 years ago in the Middle East. Those who settled quickly regarded themselves as superior to those who did not. ‘Pure are the cities – and you are the ones to whom they are allotted,’ a story about the Mesopotamian water god Enki begins.