When migration history – after a few early publications from the 1880s – began in the 1970s, challenges abounded: data collected on international borders by the bureaucrats of the recently organized nation-states only counted men; migrants, misnamed ‘guestworkers’ and constructed as male, were being recruited by sedentary bureaucracies for industries with deep local and national roots; newcomers were studied as ‘problems’. Historians and social scientists saw them as moving from a nation to an ethnic enclave, so Italians to ‘little Italies’, Chinese to ‘Chinatowns’, ‘Turks’ to ‘little Anatolias’, Jamaican and other ‘colonials’ from independent states to Great Britain’s ‘Black’ neighbourhoods. States exerted control and demanded that ‘they’ rotate or ‘become like us’.Footnote ¹

Only two decades later, by the 1990s, migration studies had become a bourgeoning multi-disciplinary field. There was collaboration between anthropologists, economists, economic historians, scholars in the humanities, and political and social theorists, and some of this research became transdisciplinary, with borders between disciplines (and their associated methodologies) dissolving. On empirical analysis, borders between states, too, lost their apparent solidity. If not dissolving, they turned out to be porous, transformed from policed lines to interactive borderlands. ‘Transnational’ mobility became the new paradigm, quickly adopted because scholars had long desired it, even if they had not ventured – dared? – to express it.Footnote ² At the same time, the coherence and boundaries of ethnic groups seemed to vanish: both in their space (compare place) of origin and in their space of arrival, ‘the Mexicans’, ‘the Indians’, ‘the Algerians’ turned out to be internally differentiated by local, regional, rural, small-town, or urban culture. They were differentiated as well by gender and, as recognized later, by generation. Migration studies had developed a sophisticated methodology and nuanced theories.Footnote ³

At this point, it became obvious that regional syntheses were needed in order to integrate concepts such as migration systems (Jan Lucassen, Leslie Moch) and migration in the Atlantic economies (Dirk Hoerder) or Indian Ocean worlds.Footnote ⁴ It also became obvious that migration was a global phenomenon rather than one confined to the North Atlantic world. At first, the South Atlantic world of forced migrations from Africa to the Americas, together with flows from southern Europe to South America, became central to research. In addition, linguists and geneticists began to take a strong interest in migration. They added ‘deep time’ to the agenda: out-of-Africa and internal African migrations with the emergence of the human species. In the 1990s, a first global survey appeared for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, followed by a global synthesis from the ‘Middle Ages’ to the present. Shortly afterwards, Patrick Manning offered a first deep-time synthesis of East Africa’s Great Lakes region’s migrants’ exploration of worlds beyond their space of origin, and Hermann Parzinger presented ‘a history [of people] before human writing’.Footnote ⁵

Methodologically, a big advance was the new attention to material culture by archaeologists and the growing recourse by historians to migrant life-writings in the past and to oral histories and interviews in the present. Life views and life-course experiences turned out to be more variegated than scholarly analyses had suggested, and the term ‘migrants’ came to embrace all movements: self-decided (‘free’ would suggest contexts with no constraint), forced (serfdom, slavery, indenture), involuntary (refugees, exiles), marriage migration, transport of children by migrating parents, and more. By 2013, Immanuel Ness could induce scholars across the globe to produce a comprehensive five-volume Encyclopedia of global human migration (Wiley-Blackwell). Why had sedentarism and states ever appeared so central?

This review article on the scholarly literature on migration that has appeared over the past few years begins with the ancient Mediterranean world. In research on Western emigration and immigration, the seas have traditionally been presented as an empty space that migrants had to cross, exemplified by the transatlantic paradigm. Were historians to focus on fishing crews, they would discover that the Atlantic was as lively and well charted as the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁶ This article focuses on human-defined macro-regions rather than on geographically fixed continents and oceans. It then turns to the littoral societies of the Indian Ocean and East Asia seas and their mobilities, as well as to the migrations in the European Russia–Siberia region. It concludes with studies on the business of migration and approaches to diasporas.

A highly fruitful starting point for research on ancient migrations would be the tri-continental hinge region, the Afro-Eurasian transition zone. This requires collaborative projects by scholars with many languages and cultural backgrounds. In practice, however, it has been more common to take a two-pronged approach focusing either on the Mediterranean world or on the ‘silk route’.Footnote ⁷ Both perspectives require attention to be paid to inter-urban mobilities at the Chinese and Syrian ends of the caravan route, in the Nile valley, and at the oases of trans-Saharan routes. But most often research begins with ‘Greece’ as the alleged cradle of the European civilization.

In his Wandering Greeks, Robert Garland questions the ‘urbanity-and-civilized life’ image of the numerous cultural groups. He discusses the high mobility, ‘a galvanizing force in Greek history’ (p. xvii), whether self-willed, involuntary (as refugees), or forced (in the case of exiles, deportees, and slaves), and finds the silence of the sources concerning women and slaves ‘deafening’. He seeks to answer the question: ‘What did it mean … to be a migrant, a refugee, a settler, an evacuee, a deportee, an asylum-seeker?’ (p. xviii). To engage his readers, Garland begins the chapters with our present, and the Geneva definition of refugees, for instance. Using the three decades of the Peloponnesian War as one example, he notes that, not counting the dead, an estimated 100,000 men, women, children, and slaves were displaced. Cities ceased to exist, rural areas were razed. Regarding the traditional view of colonization and diffusion across the Mediterranean, he summarizes recent research that finds, instead of spreading Greekness, migrants settled among other peoples and acculturated (p. 35). Appendices list acts of deportation, exile, and enslavement of ‘Greeks’ by ‘Greeks’, who saw each other as resources to be used or as competitors to be eliminated rather than belonging to a common culture. In a thought-provoking argument, Garland sees self-willed groups of migrants carrying their ‘portable polis’ with them until their resettlement. Did they carry it? Or did it serve as an anchor point, a temporary reference for group cohesion? ‘Migration, displacement, and relocation, both forced and voluntary, were central to the survival, and … phenomenal success of Greek societies’ (p. 197). We might also ask how many slaves (often ‘Greek’ by culture) had to labour when cities destroyed by neighbours had to be rebuilt.Footnote ⁸

For the ‘medieval’ millennium from the fifth century to the fifteenth, Migrationen im Mittelalter, edited by Michael Borgolte, assembles the respective entries dispersed across the five volumes of the Encyclopedia of global human migration.Footnote ⁹ Covering societies from Japan via India and Africa to the Mediterranean, the contributors demonstrate how ‘entangled histories’ were part of life experiences. They marshal the concept of ‘transculturality’ – as opposed to interculturality between bordered entities – which permits an understanding of often gender-specific continuities and changes in movements across spaces. Alongside human bodies on the move, the Byzantinist contributors discuss the mobility of (liturgical) instruments and of words (in the translation of texts considered holy, for example). Whether concerning Japan, once considered isolated, or European nobility, once thought to be the only group with long-distance marriage migration, the research assembled shows the high degree of self-decided or forced mobility at all social strata, including soil-bound serfs.

Research from the 1960s on the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the China and Southeast Asia seas began from different perspectives and embraced different approaches. The concern was primarily with trade connections along the littorals and, once the monsoon patterns had been decoded, across the seas. Traders and mariners became migrants if and when they settled down; prima facie migrants also followed the same routes. Given the seasonality of the winds, traders and mariners had to remain abroad for months until the return voyage became possible along, for example, the Gujarat–East Africa or Fujian–Manila routes. In contrast to scholars focusing on the Atlantic world, it was economic historians who took the lead in tracing connectivities.Footnote ¹⁰ Migration historians followed, with Wang Gungwu terming the along-the-littoral and trans-sea movements as ‘semiterranean’.Footnote ¹¹ Anthony Reid and others have dealt with the shipping of passengers, interpreting Singapore as the transit node between southern Chinese villages and labour markets in the Southeast Asian islands and peninsulas. The migration of workers under credit-ticket or bondage arrangements – ‘indentured servitude’ or ‘second slavery’ – has also been a focus of research, which includes attempts to trace the voices of the bonded workers.Footnote ¹² Encyclopaedic reference works to diasporas are now available.Footnote ¹³

Lin Yu-ju and Madeleine Zelin’s edited volume, Merchant communities in Asia, 1600–1980, like Oonk’s, Settled strangers (discussed below), is part of the economic history approach, with case studies reaching from Korea (often overlooked) via Taiwan and Southeast Asia, to Gujarat and East African port cities. As in earlier research, sailors are conspicuous by their absence (the one exception being an essay by Evan Lampe).Footnote ¹⁴ The surviving archives of mercantile firms permit scholars to trace how shared cultural practices such as dialect and subdialect, education, and spiritual authority served as constituents of brokering and trading communities whose internal cohesion was rooted in mutual support rather than container-like clans. Such findings raise the prospect of comparison with Genossenschaften (guilds) in European trading cities. Unfortunately, historians of Asia and of Europe do not talk very much to one another, the former often including comparisons with Europe, the latter usually remaining in a Eurocentric mode. Relations between traders of different cultural backgrounds varied with context, with the amount of capital needed for long-distance bulk trade, and with the commodity traded, whether ginseng from Korea to China or rice from Southeast Asia to Shantou. In each instance, there needs to be a differentiated analysis of the forms of migrant and resident entrepreneurship in their sociocultural networks. A concluding essay synthesizing the many forms of cooperation – or conflict, if one group pushed another out of a market or restricted its share in a trade – would have strengthened the collection, as would have the recognition that these communities included women.Footnote ¹⁵

Gijsbert Oonk’s Settled strangers is based in part on interviews with an influential merchant family in Tanzania.Footnote ¹⁶ Oonk differentiates between Hindu and Muslim migrants but the latter mainly appear as a foil for the former. His emphasis is on entrepreneurial agency (as in Merchant communities) and his main achievement is to undercut the ‘Asians (i.e. Gujarati) in Africa’ success story by examining the failures through court records. He elucidates informal credit arrangements based on trust, which, upon mere suspicion of problems, were quickly withdrawn. Criticizing the ‘ethnic middlemen’ approach, he develops the concept of ‘settled strangers’, families who stay for generations, adapting their business practices to economic cycles and to changing supply or demand, but remain distinct in terms of religion, networks, and social life.Footnote ¹⁷ With the intrusion of the British, the ‘settled strangers’ oriented themselves to London for commercial purposes – symbolized by their adoption of the European business suit – but followed their own course rather than becoming tools of the empire. With the expulsion of ‘Asian Ugandans’ in 1972, families were forced to relocate and develop internationalized networks with multiple locations rather than a single new base, though family members often continued in East Africa. Unfortunately this study, despite paying some attention to gender, contains no analysis of relationships within mercantile families and the communities of indentured workers building the Ugandan Railway.

Business and economic history had not loomed large in the study of transatlantic migrations until the almost simultaneously appearance of Drew Keeling’s The business of transatlantic migration and Torsten Feys’s The battle for the migrants.Footnote ¹⁸ Both pursue similar goals, though along different lines. Feys, starting from the Holland–America Line and the evolution of Rotterdam, analyses the developing cartels (‘conferences’) and the ‘visible hand’ of the shipping lobby in the nationalization of American migration policies. Keeling, starting from the ‘big four’ – Cunard, White Star, HAPAG, and NDL – and restricting himself to 1900–1914, combines business history with an analysis of increasing control at states’ entry gates, as well as the concern for ‘comfort and safety’ on board. He emphasizes return and repeated migration, and constructs a new dataset by combining governmental ‘immigration’ data with business data (given its ideological imperatives, the US government did not collect out-migration data until 1907/08). Both studies are well documented and include graphs and tables.Footnote ¹⁹ Beyond the business aspects, the authors provide a nuanced picture of the Atlantic world by differentiating the regions from which migrants departed. As they make clear, markets had a major impact on migrants’ ability to pay for their passage; Feys, in particular, emphasizes the maritime origins of the migration agent networks and the structure of the sector. These studies of shipping across the Atlantic need to be complemented by similar recent studies on other parts of the world and groups, such as the shipping of millions of migrants from Shandong to Manchuria across the Gulf of Chihli from the 1880s and vast annual movements of the Hajj pilgrims before air travel.Footnote ²⁰ Another aspect in this time is the closing of entry gates from the end of the nineteenth century. States inserted themselves increasingly into migration processes with entry restrictions and ‘the invention of the passport’.Footnote ²¹

Shipping connections within imperial politics and economies provided migrants with ties to local places of origin as much as to constructed nations and power politics. Stefan Manz in his Constructing a German diaspora demonstrates how emigrant elites called for a strong German navy and, labelling themselves outposts of the Reich, asked for subsidies from Berlin.Footnote ²² This study – differing from those on the British and Dutch empires – combines nation-building with migration. The perspective from the Reich outwards and the diasporic communities inwards permits insights based on research on communities that formed tiny islands on five continents. While Keeling and Feys quote directors of the shipping companies, Manz provides vivid quotes from the writings of nationalists and analyses the varied legal and social frameworks of their host countries, as well as the diasporic communities’ complex internal class, gender, and regional dynamics. Many of these emigrants acculturated to pursue transcultural life-trajectories. Manz’s work adds to the diaspora studies that emerged in the 1990s, which are moving beyond the weak-and-stateless image of Jewish migrations or the culture-on-the-move image of Hellenistic diffusion.Footnote ²³ The examination of Chinese, Italian, and Polish mass migration and diasporic communities is being supplemented by efforts to bring the state, big business, and the powerful into the picture.

In Tsarist Russia, after serfdom was abolished in 1861 and industrialization, settlement of southern Siberia, and urbanization of Pacific Russia provided options or required labour, the already mobile society became even more so. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, a specialist on Russian history, and Leslie Page Moch, a migration specialist, trace and survey in Broad is my native land the various local, regional, and transcontinental movements in Eurasia.Footnote ²⁴ Like Garland in Wandering Greeks, Siegelbaum and Moch organize their study by type of migration – resettlers, seasonal, urban, career, military, refugees-evacuees-deportees, and itinerants – and pay attention to the impact on migration patterns and migrant decision-making of the changes which occurred during the Tsarist, Soviet, Stalinist, post-Stalin, and Commonwealth of Independent Republics periods, and during the two German military invasions. Many of the migrations – from western Saami via peasant men and women of the South Russian Plains or tundroviki to Kamchatka’s Evenki people and to in-migrants to Harbin and Vladivostok – ‘occurred outside of state strictures and irrespective of policy-makers’ intentions’. Migrant repertoires and the sovereign regime interacted with one another, while the family remained the key site of weighing options and making decisions – self-willed under constraints – about who departs and in which direction (pp. 388–91). Numerous topics stemming from the Russian experience – settlement of (emptied) land or peasant influx into cities – are comparable to developments in China, the United States, and elsewhere. Reaching the Amur river, eastbound Russian migrants (of many cultures) jostled with northbound ones from Shandong. This masterful study should become a starting point for intercontinental comparisons.

The well-integrated essays in Jan and Leo Lucassen’s edited volume Globalising migration history attempt to quantify cross-cultural movements in Europe, Siberia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia since the sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ At the core of the decisions to migrate in all of these cultures are functioning information flows about labour markets within the framework of states, whether weak or imperial, colonizer or colonized, or comparatively self-contained. The loci of decisions are family regimes influenced by the dynamics of micro-, meso- and macro-region-specific cultural preferences and prohibitions. Intra- and inter-state power relations resulted in forced mobilization of workers in, for example, the Dutch empire. In the Indian and South China Seas section of the British and subsequently the French empire, British-invented indentured servitude for impoverished men and women from the 1830s to the 1930s reduced options for self-decided migrations as well as those of whole families. Migration in turn had an impact on the three constituent factors of labour markets, families, and states. The longue durée analysis of migrations in Eurasia over five centuries refutes the widely accepted ‘mobility transition’ thesis of Wilbur Zelinsky in the nineteenth century. Mobility had a common start in the fifteenth century in Eurasia, diverged between West (higher rates) and East (lower rates), and then became similar again in the second half of the twentieth century. Specific cases are colonized regions, where both forced mobility and forced immobility were related to colonizer power and interest.

Given the anti-immigrant agitation in many countries at the turn of the twenty-first century and the mass arrival of refugees from war-crisis regions in acceptance-crisis regions, it is worth remembering that, as long as the Iron Curtain separated the capitalist West from the collectivized or state-capitalist East, refugees leaving the latter were democratically ‘voting with their feet’.Footnote ²⁶ Migration research shows that men and women through the ages have used their feet to move to wherever they can with their human capital, in search of economic security and betterment. May migrants in our present be voting against the global inequities of power and wealth inscribed in the postcolonial terms of trade?