ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between information and mobility in the (mainly European) past. Beginning with the observation that information itself can be defined as knowledge in motion, it focuses on two sets of people on the move. The first part of the chapter discusses the role that information has played in long-distance migration since the eighteenth century, shaping people's decision to move, their choice of destinations and notions of belonging and diaspora. In its second half, the chapter introduces Roma as exemplars of a different kind of mobility—a peripatetic group. When travelling, Roma both deployed informal systems of communication (markers in the landscape) and adapted existing technologies (post and telephones) to exchange information. At the same time, Romani practices tended to evade and subvert policing regimes, so that in the twentieth century, they became victims both of state practices of information-gathering and then of persecution facilitated by that information.
