Historical Mobilities

Humans move. Movement is the primary indicator of human vitality, from beating heart to subsistence. Scholars of the human experience striving to represent its condition accurately account not only for Thomas Hobbes’ 17th-century observation that “life is but a motion of limbs,” in Hobbes 1968 (cited under General Overview on Historical Mobilities); they also document our general practice of mediating this “motion” with technologies, while analyzing the social and cultural consequences of both. Mobilities and historical mobilities apprehend that heterogeneous movement and its mediation occupy a central place in earthly life, whether cell mitosis or container ships. This means mobilities studies also adopt, if implicitly, a post-humanist worldview: nonhuman life as intrinsic to, and a determinant of, the human. In this, mobilities studies likely insinuate that sentience itself demands movement (sentience also including the botanical ability to perceive stimuli and forms of consciousness in the zoological realms). Subsistence and security, and competitive and mutual survival among all life forms—micro-scale to macro-scale—require persistent mobility: a blizzard of movement from the slow motion of photosynthesizing plants to the GPS-guided motion of combine harvesters. Thus, mobilities theoretically assume that all life—but primarily humans, human societies, social networks, technologies, and even the profusion, interrelatedness, and processual nature of human spaces and places—possesses essential motives for, and forms of, mobilizing. This entails accounting for how mobilities change and stay the same, for there is a curious stability and constancy to mobilities, as Pooley 2017 (cited under General Overview on Historical Mobilities) maintains and Hobbes’ dictum implies. Importantly, mobilities and historical mobilities studies epitomize Foucault’s democratic championing of the insurrection of disqualified and subordinated knowledges—causing a methodological revolution of diverse and radically inclusive theoretical postures. Subsequent historical mobilities research, then, balances on a plurality of methods investigating, explaining—and complicating—a traditionally elementary issue: historical human movement, ultimately the basic definition of the term. However, historical mobilities researchers complicate even this foundational idea, apprehending that, like the variegated historical “publics” mobilities have depicted, served, and been associated with, mobilities exist as multiplicities and demand differentiated methodological and empirical positions—to investigate a miscellany of possible historical mobilities, London omnibuses or Middle Passage slave ships among them. Accordingly, the literature of historical mobilities not only reveals a panoply of historical experiences and explanations; it also exceeds describing and prescribing the fact of mobilities and their technologies, respecting the usually unsubtle presence of gender, “race,” class, ability, power, and political economy in the deployment and use of mobilities and mobilities technologies.