BACK STORY - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 17

BACK STORY
Migration, assimilation and invasion
in the nineteenth century 1
Harriet Ritvo
People were on the move in the nineteenth century. Millions of men and women
took part in the massive transfers of human population that occurred during that
period, spurred by war, famine, persecution, the search for a better life, or (most
rarely) the spirit of adventure. The largest of these transfers—although by no means
the only one—was from the so-called Old World to the so-called New. This is a
story that has often been told, though its conclusion has been subject to repeated
revision. That is to say, the consequences of these past population movements
continue to unfold throughout the world, even as new movements are super-
imposed on them. Of course, people are not unique in their mobility, as they are
not unique in most of their attributes. Other animals share our basic desires with
regard to prosperity and survival, and when they move independently, they are
therefore likely to have similar motives. But, like people, they don't always move
independently. And, as in the human case, when the migrations of animals are
controlled by others, their journeys also reveal a great deal about those who are
pulling the strings. A couple of animal stories can serve as examples. They both
concern creatures transported far from their native habitats by the Anglophone
expansions of the nineteenth century. The motives for their original introductions
a century and a half ago were rather different, as have been their subsequent fates,
but they were introduced to the same widely separated shores under circumstances
that resembled each other in suggestive ways.
One story concerns the English or house sparrow ( Passer domesticus ), which was
apparently first introduced into the United States by a nostalgic Englishman named
Nicolas Pike in 1850, and subsequently reintroduced in various locations in eastern
North America. In Darwinian terms, this was the beginning of a great success
story. So conspicuously did the English sparrow flourish that in 1889, the Division
of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (part of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture—an ancestor of the current Fish and Wildlife Service) devoted its first