Moving Romans: Migration to Rome in the Principate - Tapa dura

His (Laurens Tacomas) contribution is very welcome, and scholars of immigration in the Roman world will find Moving Romans to be a stimulating addition to the field. (Ryan R. Abrecht (University of San Diego), The Journal of Roman Studies Vol.107)

Moving Romans is a meticulous and highly readable account of migration and migrants in the first and second centuries AD ... The bringing together of many different types of evidence is what makes Tacoma's work uniquely valuable. What Tacoma shows throughout this thorough and well-argued book is that migration was a feature of many lives in ancient Rome, across all social classes. Any readers interested in learning more about this topical debate in Roman history will find Moving Romans illuminating and rewarding. (Katherine McDonald, Classics for All)

LE Tacoma offers the reader a penetrating reflection on migration in Rome, based on a solid historiographic foundation and a careful and careful examination of books or articles, although devoted to more recent periods and very often written in the language but which allow us to glimpse the richness of the subject. In addition, the coherent and rigorous methodology for studying this problem within the framework of Vrbs during the Principat, thanks to a thorough knowledge of the ancient sources, but also of the contributions of the isotopic analyzes, also contributes to making the work henceforth impossible to circumvent for any future publication on this subject. For all these reasons, one can recommend reading, profitable and stimulating, to all those who wish to take interest in this topic for other regions of the Roman world. (Anthony Álvarez Melero, Bryn Mawr Classical Review)

While the importance of migration in contemporary society is universally acknowledged, historical analyses of migration put contemporary issues into perspective. Migration is a phenomenon of all times, but it can take many different forms. The Roman case is of real interest as it presents a situation in which the volume of migration was high, and the migrants in question formed a mixture of voluntary migrants, slaves, and soldiers.

Moving Romans offers an analysis of Roman migration by applying general insights, models and theories from the field of migration history. It provides a coherent framework for the study of Roman migration on the basis of a detailed study of migration to the city of Rome in the first two centuries A.D.

Advocating an approach in which voluntary migration is studied together with the forced migration of slaves and the state-organised migration of soldiers, it discusses the nature of institutional responses to migration, arguing that state controls focused mainly on status preservation rather than on the movement of people.
It demonstrates that Roman family structure strongly favoured the migration of young unmarried males.

Tacoma argues that in the case of Rome, two different types of the so-called urban graveyard theory, which predicts that cities absorbed large streams of migrants, apply simultaneously. He shows that the labour market which migrants entered was relatively open to outsiders, yet also rather crowded, and that although ethnic community formation could occur, it was hardly the dominant mode by which migrants found their way into Rome because social and economic ties often overrode ethnic ones.

The book shows that migration impinges on social relations, on the Roman family, on demography, on labour relations, and on cultural interaction, and thus deserves to be placed high on the research agenda of ancient historians.
Photo © Krien Clevis
(from the series Echoes of Eternity)

Krien Clevis is an artist/researcher (PhD) who is working on an ongoing photo project, part of the multi-disciplinary Dutch research project 'Mapping the Via Appia'. Clevis' contribution to the project is devoted to this unique historical 'avenue of memories', which over the centuries has been subject to constant change. She studies the different perspectives on this street, ranging from its protection to its opening-up. See also: www.knir.it/krienclevis/ or www.krienclevis.com