Prof. Marlou Schrover
Testimonial Prof. Marlou Schrover
“We can only truly study migration by comparing today's immigration to immigration in the past.”
“Leiden University has a long tradition of studying migration and ethnicity. This tradition can be traced all the way back to such sources as nineteenth-century Leiden Arabist and ethnographer C. Snouck Hurgronje. What I find so interesting about Leiden is that on the one hand this tradition is continuously being further expanded on, while on the other hand, migration research is being carried out within many different disciplines (history, for example, as well as broadly outside this field)... What I try to do is promote the collaboration as well as benefit from it.
Migration is the most important subject in current debates. If we consider migration and integration from a historical, long-term perspective, we see patterns emerging. The fear of newcomers was the same in the past, and what's more, the fate of Dutch immigrants abroad hardly differed from that of modern-day immigrants in the Netherlands. The world in the Netherlands can only be understood by also looking at the Netherlands in the world.
We can only really study migration and integration if we place the similarities and differences side by side: today's immigration has to be compared with immigration in the past, and immigration has to be compared with emigration. Migration and integration have to be placed in the wider frameworks of the development of trade networks, the emergence of multinationals, economic growth and stagnation, and world unification. Ethnicity needs to be studied in combination with gender and class, as parallel mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and the formation of identity. Leiden University is in my opinion the ideal place for this approach.”
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