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The study of migration reveals
both the deepest continuities and the latest twists in human history. Research
continues to emphasize the importance of human movement and connection, so that
migration remains important in both conceptualization and narrative of world
history.1 The
five articles in this forum combine to emphasize three themes in the history of
migration: the "materiality" of migration, focusing on the material traces of
human mobility; long-term continuities in migration; and the social conditions
and institutions of recent migrations, showing how migrations become steadily more
complex.
The articles are presented in
chronological order. Patrick Manning's contribution emphasizes
long-distance migrations of early times. It describes agricultural
migrations of between six thousand and one thousand years ago, comparing them
briefly with more recent migrations. It develops the concept of
"mid-Holocene migrations," an argument that world history of this era was more
than the rise of river-valley civilizations, and that migrants could also be
farmers, not just nomads. In the second essay, Jack Bouchard describes a
substantial Atlantic migration from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth
century that rose and declined without involvement of the state. Fishermen
from northwest Europe sailed to the coast of Labrador each summer to catch and
process whales and fish, exchanging goods with Algonkian visitors to the same
coast. His analysis pairs the concept of seasonal migration with
attention to portable tools as the key possessions of migratory workers.
Two articles address the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century era of oceanic migration. Tiffany
Trimmer focuses on British colonial rule in Malaya, exploring the official
ideology that all wage labor should be performed by immigrant workers,
especially from India and China. As she shows, a sudden "labor famine" in
1903-1904 revealed that the migrants themselves and the self-appointed
recruiters were as influential as the government in determining labor flows. Torsten
Feys shows that in this same world of mass migration—apparently led by
steam technology and great states—shipping companies too were influential
intermediaries. Focusing on migration to the United States across both
Atlantic and Pacific, he argues that the size and direction of migrant flows
depended very much on the influence of European-based shipping companies and
not only on the migrants and the U.S. government.
In the final essay, Bennett Sherry
considers twenty-first-century migration of refugees. Refugees, escaping
political oppression, found that their lives were still conditioned by states
and international organizations. Nevertheless, as the article emphasizes,
the migrants still exercised agency in their movements and in their cultural
identity: Sherry deploys the concept of "layering" to portray the complex
shifts in identity among Bhutanese refugees, and encourages historians to join
in developing archives to preserve the experience of such migrant groups.
These
and other such studies are combining to make migration history into a
significant subfield within world history. Beginning with stories of
migration that had previously been treated in isolation, world historians are
knitting them together to reveal the global fabric of human movement. The
results show the continuity of human migration, the ways that migration has
nurtured contacts among societies, and the ways that new migratory patterns
develop even as the old ones persist. |
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Notes
1 For
an important new statement, see Globalising
Migration History: The Eurasian Experience (16th-21st Centuries), Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2014). |
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