\u2018If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?\u2019<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s imagine that I go for a walk in Switzerland\u2014 in the easternmost part of the state, near the little-known town of Nauders. It\u2019s slightly dark, I\u2019m absent-minded, and in my extended perambulations I also happen to wander into not just Italy but also Lichtenstein. There are no borders marked, or none that I can see in the dark; it\u2019s all under Schengen, and there are no police checks or fences; I\u2019m mostly off-road anyway, and so there are no CCTV cameras to pick me up.<\/p>\n
The respective states don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve encroached upon them; I myself don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve ever left Switzerland, and wouldn\u2019t write it down even if I had; and so if one day a historian should set out to record my life, that little episode would quite probably never make it in.<\/p>\n
Even if I was a compulsive diarist, and recorded my every move, and even if I made that same absent-minded walk, following the same route, every day for sixty years, the border-crossing nature of my walking career would never be placed by the historian into a narrative. There would be no evidence of it.<\/p>\n
Now, let\u2019s turn our attention to the real topic. In the example above, there is still, I suppose, a chance that somebody\u2019s dashboard-cam, or amateur drone footage, or whatever else it might be might pick me up, leaving a trace. But that\u2019s the 21st<\/sup> century. Transpose such movements back into the early 20th<\/sup>, let alone the 19th<\/sup>, and the disturbances left by them become far fewer. The state doesn\u2019t know, or doesn\u2019t care, and neither does the individual.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say, to add another layer of difficulty for the historian to a nut already difficult to crack, that the individual or individuals making such a journey are actively seeking to avoid being observed; and that moreover, rather than moving between Switzerland and Italy, historically well-regulated borders, they\u2019re instead moving between, let us say, various decolonised nations in central Africa.<\/p>\n It\u2019s my intention to write my project on human trafficking \u2013the necessary conditions; the lived experiences of those involved; responses to it\u2014 in the early-to-mid-20th<\/sup> century. I had always expected this to be a somewhat difficult pool in which to fish, to invoke EH Carr. Patricia Clavin posits a vision of the world as a great hexagoned honey-comb, in which various actors are operating in the spaces in between the hexagons. Those who operate there, it turns out, frequently do so for a reason: they wish to remain undetected, and those who could<\/em> seek to detect them are either unable to or do not desire to (bribery; incompetence; systemic apathy). The crowd goes mild. What a surprise.<\/p>\n That presents quite a conundrum to the historian. How do you historicise something deliberately unremarked at the time that it took place?- especially when it occurred in multiple locations, each of them with little interest in making records? With innovation- that’ll have to be the answer. It\u2019s going to be a challenge, and it\u2019ll require an approach that does more than the simple perusal of secondary works: this will have to be a project that dives into primary sources wholesale, and sources of a wide and varied nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?\u2019 Let\u2019s imagine that I go for a walk in Switzerland\u2014 in the easternmost part of the state, near the little-known<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[146],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crossing-border-human-trafficking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-ee","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":883,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}