The most remarkable achievement of the author has been to pioneer a modern history of Asian connections by looking at the impact of people moving across borders and frontiers, an impact that has typically been studied bilaterally. He thus tries to show how different groups of Asian peoples have been important in the shaping of modern Asia from a long historical perspective.
Second, Amrith has packed an encyclopedia into a readable book of 200 pages. With coverage of over 150 years (up to the present) and including many of the densely populated regions of Asia—the Gulf, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China—in considerable detail, this is no mean feat. Of course, this leaves out movements in other parts of Asia and his knowledge cannot be equally strong for all these areas; but he has taken on an important challenge and done a commendable job.
Amrith discusses several different groups, such as laborers and settlers, sojourners and immigrants, intellectuals and students, among others. He discusses the various causes of migration and sojourning including new means of transportation and communication, natural disasters, and warfare. He also studies the conditions of these groups' movement and the systems that seek to incorporate, control, or contain them. Moreover, he attends to the subjective and experiential aspects of migration including the aspirations of migrants, their self-transformations, and their goals and attitudes towards their host, as well as home communities, gender differences, and much more.
The book's chapters are chronologically divided with a different theme dominating each period. Thus the first period, in the late nineteenth century, represents the beginnings of mass movements, while the early twentieth century chapter sees the consolidation of diasporic communities. For the era from 1930 to 1950 Amrith discusses the shrinkage and even reversal of migration and disruption of the linkages consequent upon the global depression and war. The period from 1950 to the 1970s is characterized not so much by the absence of migration as much as the movement of people within the new decolonizing and developing nation-states, and so on. This chapter then alerts us to the notion that the migration discussed by the author is not confined to transnational migration but is much broader, including the movement within the state or nation, to frontier regions of older empires and across the seas or what came to be called transnational migration, especially in the current period. In addition, he also counts refugees among the moving people, whether settled in foreign camps or dispersed among the people.
These two innovations of the author need more clarification. First, the idea that spatially, migration is relatively continuous at the national, frontier, and transnational levels is suggestive but not fully worked out. Indeed, the author develops the point only towards the last third of the book. Based on a few works, such as that of Jonathan Parry on migrants from central India, he invokes the idea of “cultures of migration” (Andrew Hardy) where migrant communities continue to send out members at different times to different scales based on kin networks and community repertoires. Yet it is not clear if the bulk of labor migration derive from these “migrant cultures.” The author might need a more structural approach involving state and capital—in addition to cultures of migration—to see how migration at these scales can be conceptualized as continuous. On the second issue regarding different kinds of “movements” the author might provide a little more justification. Are these different communities to be understood in terms of migrant cultures or pathways and repertoires or does their commonality lie in shaping Asia?
Amrith also seeks to distinguish Asian migrations from European (or African) ones. In the first place, historically Asian migrations have been circular and sojourning; as such, these communities retain connections to their home cultures or nations even when their impact on host communities is significant (as among Chinese and Indians). Second, the migration industry is and has been highly developed in Asia where brokers and intermediaries articulate with “cultures of migration” and more recently, the state. Finally, Asian migration has historically developed plural societies where communities have had to advance in and adapt to multi-cultural environments (without necessary homogenization). This may well be useful to grasp the conditions of cultural pluralization in a globalizing world. Most of all, however, Amrith shows us a way of doing inter-connected histories.
While the histories of laboring communities show their own means of adaptation to often difficult if not cruel circumstances, the early chapters which discuss intellectuals, students, and others show how ideas brought back by these groups radically reshape the histories of these societies. Witness the importance of Sun Yat-sen who spent time not only in the West but also in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia (where some overseas Chinese call themselves the “Mother of the Republican Revolution”) and Gandhi amidst the diaspora in South Africa. Although he is very modest in his goals, it is historians like Amrith who will be able to redress the imbalance between national histories and circulatory histories that have historically underpinned the modern world and the modern nation.
One final word. I hope Amrith can produce a CD or other software of these population dynamics over space and time. The visualization of this kind of data will be sure to launch this project into new directions.
