SELECTED PRAISE FOR IAN GOLDIN

‘Goldin is one of the great authorities on globalisation’

Gordon Brown

‘Impressively succinct yet wide-ranging… convincingly shows that migration has always been an integral part of humanity’

Hein de Haas, author of How Migration Really Works

‘To move is human. Migration, therefore, is the story of humanity – as intimate to our history as evolution itself… An indispensable guide to our common origins – and our shared destiny.’

Parag Khanna, author of Connectography

‘A bold and compelling account of the story of migration… generally shifts the global picture away from the usual suspects – the USA and Western Europe.’

Robin Cohen, author of Migration: the Movement of Humankind from Prehistory to the Present

‘A fresh, clear-eyed and timely analysis of the challenges and opportunities that comes from one of the most important themes of the 21st century’

Peter Frankopan on The Age of the City

‘Fascinating… outstanding insights for all those interested in the stresses of the modern world and how other ages have confronted them in their own time’

Niall Fergusson on Age of Discovery

To my grandparents,

who gave up everything to flee

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

A Selective Migration Timeline

Introduction: Why Migration?

PART ONE: The Shortest History of Migration

1. The First Migrants

2. Peopled Planet

3. Empire and Trade

4. Voyages of Discovery and Destruction

5. Slavery

6. Coercion and Control

7. Age of Mass Migration

8. Passports and Problems

9. Wars, Mass Mobilisation and Expulsions

10. Migrants in the Postwar World

PART TWO: Migration Today and Tomorrow

11. Who Is a Migrant?

12. Migration and the Economy

13. Migration and Development

14. The Future of Migration

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Endnotes

Also by Ian Goldin

Copyright

Foreword

My family, Vienna, 1936. My grandmother is on the left in a traditional Austrian dirndl dress; on the far right is my grandfather, also in national dress. My mother is in the front with plaits, next to her sister. My grandparents escaped with their children in 1938 but all my relatives who stayed in Austria were killed in concentration camps, despite their strong allegiance to the country.

This is a deeply personal book. Both my mother’s and father’s parents fled almost certain death. Had they not done so, I would not be alive today. My paternal grandfather’s siblings and other family members who were unable to leave Lithuania perished in the pogroms. All the relatives of my mother’s parents who remained in Austria and Czechoslovakia were killed in the Holocaust. My father’s fleeing family were not welcome anywhere in Europe, with those who escaped finding refuge in the United States, Canada, Argentina and South Africa, where I was born.

Years later, I too felt compelled to leave my homeland. My opposition to the brutally racist apartheid regime in South Africa led me into exile, to establish a new life first in England, then in France and later in the US. Then the seemingly impossible occurred, and I was able to return to the country of my birth to support President Mandela in establishing a democratic country. When he retired, and my job as chief executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa was done, my family and I moved back to the US and then to England, where I had first gone into exile and where we have lived since 2006.

My experience is one example of the myriad ways in which refugees have been saved by migration. But historically we all have. Migration prevented humanity going extinct when faced by famines and droughts in the distant past. Migration enabled Homo sapiens to populate the world. Without migration, humanity as we know it would not exist. We owe our progress as a species to our migratory nature. We have learned new ways of doing things and been able to pollinate ideas through migrant encounters. It is this pollination that is essential to all historical leaps in progress and which we require more than ever to meet current global challenges such as climate change.

Migration lies at the heart of human development. My primary interest as an economist is in how this development occurs. Why do some countries become rich and others remain poor? Why are some people wealthy while others live in desperate poverty? Above all, what can be done about it? Understanding why inequality persists and how it can be addressed requires that we understand migration.

In writing this short history I have necessarily selected only a small sample from the treasure trove of accounts of past migration that are available. Choosing what to include is a highly subjective process. There are inevitably huge gaps, not least due xito the dearth of information regarding migration in the continent of my birth, Africa, and to accounts written in languages I cannot read. The endnotes and suggested further reading at the end of the book will hopefully provide stepping stones for readers to pursue their interests.

This book is divided into two main sections. After an introduction in which I discuss the complicated question of what we mean by migration, the first ten chapters provide a broadly chronological history from the first humans to migrants in the modern era. Part two then explores contemporary issues of migration with a thematic focus. In particular, it considers the impact of migration both on sending and receiving countries and on the migrants themselves. Finally, I offer my perspective on the future of migration and the lessons that can be drawn from our past.

The history of migration is the story of humanity and its progress. The building of increasingly impervious borders threatens this. Across the world, the focus over the past century has been on keeping migrants out. This book shows that it is not only migrants whose lives are poorer as a result. By excluding this source of vitality and new ideas we are impoverishing all our societies. My hope is that The Shortest History of Migration will provide fresh insights into our common history and that it will encourage readers to see migration and migrants in new and more helpful ways.

A Selective Migration Timeline

c. 315–200 kya Long-range migrations within Africa

c. 130–95 kya Early migrations out of Africa

c. 80–35 kya Humans reach Europe, Asia and Australasia

c. 27,000–13,000 ya Early migrations into the Americas

c. 13,000–9,000 ya Agriculture develops in Fertile Crescent

c. 6,000–4,000 ya Early wheel technologies emerge

c. 5,000 ya Writing systems spread by migrants

9–12 CE The short-lived Xin Dynasty of China briefly abolishes slavery

117 CE Roman Empire reaches its greatest extent under Trajan

c. 500 Silk Roads link Mediterranean and China

700s–1000s Viking longships cross Atlantic

1206–1368 Mongols form largest contiguous empire in history

1400s First sugarcane plantations in the eastern Atlantic

1405–1431 Zheng He leads 62-ship fleet across Indian Ocean

late 1400s Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama sail around Africa

1492 Columbus lands in the Bahamas, thinking it’s India

early 1500s First African slaves depart Europe for the Americas

1519 Hernan Cortes conquers Aztec capital, present-day Mexico City

1662 Settlement Act hinders movement of England’s poor

1718 Britain’s Transportation Act formalises forced migration as punishment

1780s Transatlantic slave trade peaks with more than 78,000 slaves a year arriving in the Americas

1833/4 Slavery Abolition Act bans slavery in the British Empire

1850s End of Japan’s two-century sakoku period of isolation

1850s–early 1900s Annual European migration to North America doubles to 1 million

1880s Chinese railroad workers make up 10% of California’s population

1886 Statue of Liberty erected

late 1800s–early 1900s Jewish refugees flee persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe

1900–1930 Millions of Japanese move to Taiwan and Korea as Japan extends imperial reach

1914–1918 First World War. Britain enlists 3 million people from its dominions.

1917 US introduces literary test for migrants

1917 Bolshevik Revolution leads to over 1 million refugees fleeing to Europe alone

1923 Population exchanges between newly independent Greece and Turkey

1924 US Border Patrol created

1938–1939 Kindertransport brings 10,000 children to Britain

1945 Second World War ends, leaving 11 million outside their country of origin and 30 million displaced

1947 Partition divides Indian subcontinent

1947–8 Establishment of Israel creates 726,000 Palestinian refugees

1945–1973 8.5 million colonials return to Europe

1950s Chinese flee to Hong Kong and Taiwan after Civil War

1961 Berlin Wall goes up

1971 10 million Bengalis and Hindus move to India after creation of Bangladesh

1972 Idi Amin expels 800,000 Asians from Uganda

1975 Vietnam victory over US causes 2 million Vietnamese to flee, more than 800,000 by boat

1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan displaces 2 million Afghans and creates 5 million refugees

1989 Berlin Wall comes down

1991 Collapse of Soviet Union

1995 The Schengen Agreement takes effect. The border-free Schengen area will eventually guarantee free movement to more than 400 million Europeans

2001 US invasion of Afghanistan in response to 9/11 terrorist attacks begins 20-year war

2011+ Syrian civil war leads to over 14 million fleeing their homes over next 13 years

2020 COVID-19 pandemic restricts movement around the planet

2022 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forces 7.8 million abroad, pushing global numbers of displaced above 100 million for first time

2023 Sudan civil war drives 1.4 million into neighbouring countries and displaces 6 million internally by end of year

2024 In Gaza, by the end of April up to 1.7 million people (over 75 per cent of the population) have been displaced, the majority several times

Introduction: Why Migration?

Migration is not the problem; it is the solution. Migration will save us, because it is migration that made us who we are.

Gaia Vince, Nomad Century

We Are All Migrants

Even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated you would not be alive. It is through migration in the distant past that humans evolved into who we are and what we are capable of today. Yet migration has become a source of growing anxiety and polarisation. While some see migrants as a solution to our problems, others consider them a threat that will overwhelm society.

This book is about something both commonplace and extraordinary. Most people tend to spend their lives close to home. At any point in the modern era, however, about 3 per cent of our species has been on the move. As you read this, more than 280 million migrants are living and working in countries other than where they were born.

The brief history that follows asks why. It traces the story of migration from the earliest wanderings of Homo sapiens to the rise of the digital nomad. It explores how migration has become tangled up over the centuries with ideas about identity, belonging, ambition and prosperity. And it shows how migrants have become associated with disruption and division, but also creativity and new connections.

What is a Migrant?

Simply put, a migrant is someone who travels beyond their home range or territory to settle in another. Their journey may be temporary or it may be permanent. People migrate for many reasons: some to survive or escape persecution, others to earn income to support themselves and their dependants. Wanderlust or a sudden urge to travel and see new places can make migrants of us. So too can the desire to study or be reunited with family.

migration, n.

1.a. The movement of a person or people from one country, locality, place of residence, etc., to settle in another; an instance of this.

1.b. The seasonal movement or temporary removal of a person, people, social group, etc., from one place to another; an instance of this. Also (occasionally): a journey.

Oxford English Dictionary

Historically, humans have migrated as nomads and explorers, settlers and conquerors, merchants and students. They have travelled alone and with their relatives. They have arrived in foreign places as refugees or as voluntary workers. Not all migrants travel freely, however. Slavery, coerced labour and human trafficking have been called different things at different times but they persist in familiar forms, through the exploitation and forced movement of people.

While migration occurs within countries, this book focuses on movements of people between them. As modern nation states and borders did not exist for much of history, we must begin by considering our earliest long-distance journeys across large territorial expanses.

The Story of Migration

Migration links all of us through a common lineage to our origins as Homo sapiens. Driven by curiosity and by need, the restless movement of the first humans from place to place remains a defining feature of progress in our modern, globalised world.

As people migrated further from their homes, they encountered other wanderers and settlers with different habits, technologies and economic activities. They all carried with them relics of their past: of the lands they inhabited, the plants they cultivated, animals they reared and people with whom they shared their lives. They traded words and stories. Over time these brief exchanges led to a wider pollination of knowledge, culture, ideas and practices.

The story of human mobility is one of cooperation and peaceful exchange, but it is also one of violence. Terrible things have been done to compel people to migrate against their will. Rulers have expanded their frontiers into new territories, uprooting people in the process. Colonial settlers have destroyed whole communities and cultures, subjugating indigenous peoples in the name of civilisation.

Despite the unfathomable suffering, migration is what makes us uniquely human and remains the key to the success of our species. Migrants have always brought enormous benefits to societies despite the disruption they represent, and often because of it. Well managed, migration can be a force for good. Too often, however, it is seen as a problem to be prevented and can take a terrible toll on migrants themselves.

A Desire for Control

The story of human movement is also a story about immobility.¹ For much of our past, national borders as we know them did not exist. Passports and travel documents only became commonplace after World War I, since when more than a hundred new countries have been created. The rise of national identity and a proliferation of hard borders have led to a growing sense of belonging – of insiders and outsiders – and a desire to control the movement of people considered foreign. Ironically, many people classed as migrants would like to move but cannot.

Stricter controls make the lives of migrants more difficult but tend not to reduce their numbers. On the contrary, the construction of walls and impermeable borders can leave societies with more migrants and make the management of migration harder. Workers may find it difficult to return home after seasonal contracts or when they retire, for example. By diverting migrants to more dangerous crossings, harsher laws also lead to an increase in undocumented and unregulated migration and expose people to hardship and grave dangers.

MIGRATION IN NUMBERS

2.4 million

Refugees in need of resettlement

130 million

Forcibly displaced or stateless people worldwide

(UN Refugee Agency estimates for 2024)

Movements within countries are largely beyond the scope of this book. But the evidence suggests internal migration often precedes international migration, since it draws people into cities where they pick up the know-how and resources needed for a move abroad. As we shall see, however, fears of a ‘brain drain’ are often exaggerated, as are worries about immigrants placing a burden on taxpayers. Incoming migrants tend to have a net positive impact on government revenues.

There is a widening disconnect between our growing recognition of the benefits of migration and ever-stricter controls on free movement. Everyone has an interest in migration, including governments that seek to control it and businesses that try, legally or otherwise, to employ migrants. But migration is too important to be left to politicians and bosses alone.

This book draws on the lessons of history to suggest a more humane and effective set of policies and practices to ensure that countries, communities and migrants themselves can reap the extraordinary benefits of migration. Migrants have been at the heart of all major advances in civilisation. Putting a stop to human movement harms our capacity to grapple with the global challenges we face now, from hunger and disease to the existential threat of climate change.

I hope this shortest history of migration will help readers understand our common bonds and provide clues as to how we might navigate our increasingly entangled future. By identifying what made people move in the past, and how that is changing, my aim is to provide a fresh perspective on current debates about migration. These generate a great deal of heat but very little light. By understanding migration better we can help to shape its – and our – future.

PART ONE

The Shortest History of Migration

1. The First Migrants

It is safe to assume that when our ancestors first became fully human they were already migratory.

William McNeill, ‘Human Migration in Historical Perspective’

Early Footsteps

The study of ancient migration is fraught with stubborn unknowns and shaky timelines. A single tooth, flake of stone or fragment of DNA can rewrite the story of early Homo sapiens as we understand it.

New discoveries are occurring all the time. During the months I have been writing this book, fresh evidence has emerged that modern humans may have been roaming the African continent from Morocco to South Africa more than 300,000 years ago, that they settled in the Middle East at least 95,000 years ago and that they did not subsequently retreat into Africa as previously thought.²

The toolbelt of the modern archaeologist now includes genomic testing. In early 2024, genetic analysis of recently found bone fragments from a site in Ranis in Germany provided evidence that modern humans reached northern Europe 45,000 years ago and that they continued to live alongside and interbreed with Neanderthals.³

To the work of archaeologists and geneticists can be added the contributions of anthropologists, primatologists and experts from a growing range of disciplines. Artificial intelligence, genomics and other powerful tools are helping them unravel the puzzle of our origins. Within the lifespan even of younger readers, this research has overturned our understanding of how different branches of our family tree connect, shaking up beliefs about the past and resolving a number of mysteries.

The biggest of these questions is where we come from. ‘Out of Africa’ remains the dominant story of prehistoric migration, with most studies tracing our origins to Ethiopia and the Great Rift Valley. But that tale is growing more complex. The recent discovery of skeletal remains in Morocco and southern Africa suggests the cradle of humanity may have spanned the continent.

The geographic spread of this new evidence makes it all the harder to be certain about our precise origins. But it does suggest our ancestors travelled much further than was once thought. For tens of thousands of years, it seems, modern humans migrated over long distances within Africa before venturing into the Middle East and later the entire habitable world, traversing barren lands and eventually vast oceans.

What We Do Know

Scrutiny of the oldest DNA fragments recovered from early hominins suggests we and our close cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, share a common ancestor who lived more than half a million years ago. A popular candidate is Homo heidelbergensis, a species which ranged across several continents from 700,000 to 200,000 years ago. If so, its European family tree probably led to the Neanderthals and Denisovans while its African branch led to us.

Homo sapiens was about and on the move at least 300,000 years ago. The oldest physical remains of anatomically modern humans – people who looked much like us – have been found at the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco (315,000 years ago), at Florisbad in South Africa (260,000 years ago) and at the Omo site in Ethiopia (195,000 years ago).

Reconstruction of earliest known ‘modern’ human from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. (Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig)

At some point in their wanderings, the first modern humans stepped out of Africa. The story of their dispersal remains heavily contested, with estimates of when and where they went varying by many thousands of years and kilometres. Evidence based on tools found in volcanic ash suggests there were migrations out of the continent 130,000 years ago or even earlier. By at least 95,000 years ago, our kind were living in the Near East alongside Neanderthals, who were similarly technologically and intellectually advanced.

Some of these early migrants travelled much further. Bones and teeth found in limestone cave systems in Laos and southern China suggest several human groups were living very far from Africa more than 80,000 years ago. For reasons still unknown – adverse climatic conditions, perhaps, or competition with other hominins – these early groups of Homo sapiens probably moved on or died out. They do not appear to represent our modern ancestry.⁴

Migration has never been a simple, linear progress from A to B. As today, groups of varying sizes travelled in different directions at different times, some returning to where they started and others staying in hitherto unexplored places. It is likely that most of these earliest movements have been lost to history.

Early Encounters

By moving within Africa, our direct ancestors developed the skills needed to migrate and survive over ever-longer distances. Around 65–70,000 years ago they began venturing in greater numbers than before into the Middle East and then further into Asia and Europe.

By this time modern humans had developed more sophisticated tools, technologies and lifestyles. They also benefited from a benign, humid climate that was spreading over parts of southern and tropical Africa, creating a more hospitable environment for human development than had existed at any time in the previous 200,000 years.

Ancient Etchings

Etched ochre blocks discovered at Blombos Cave near the southern tip of Africa have been dated to around 70,000 years ago. They are thought to be among the earliest forms of representational art with symbolic intent. Similar patterns have been discovered across southern Africa on blocks, shell beads and ostrich eggshells. Did the etchings carry information of some kind or were they simply recreational scribbles? Researchers are unsure, but they point to a high degree of cognitive development among these early humans.⁵

Once they left the African continent, our ancestors interbred with other hominins such as the Neanderthals and the more elusive Denisovans, who have left little in the fossil record but substantial traces in our DNA. These genetic relatives themselves moved over considerable distances. Evidence of a Neanderthal presence is scattered from Spain to the Caucasus, while finds linked to Denisovans have been made in Siberia, Tibet and Laos.

Interbreeding, competition and the development by modern Homo sapiens of more sophisticated tools and customs may have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals between about 41,000 and 35,000 years ago. By that time a degree of hybridisation had occurred between the two groups: they likely shared caves and shelters and exchanged knowledge and practices as well as genes.

Sapiens–Neanderthal relations in the Near East might have been violent at times, but it is thought there was also a significant degree of collaboration. This likely derived from necessity – for activities such as hunting – or a broader sense of shared interests and community.

These early encounters between peoples created a ‘melting pot of ideas, technology, and DNA’.⁶ It was the crucible for ideas and innovations that would allow later humans to explore the diverse landscapes and climates of Eurasia and survive there. As Homo sapiens mingled with Denisovans further east, modern humans picked up the genes they needed to adapt to new environments as they spread across the world.

Other changes were acquired much later. The gene mutation that allows humans to digest lactose likely originated in the Near East and was transported by farmers to Europe and South Asia. As more people began consuming dairy products thanks to the domestication of cows, goats and sheep, the gene spread through positive selection.

Breathing Thin Air

Interbreeding between diverse early human populations had significant biological consequences, equipping our direct ancestors with the genes they needed to adapt to different places and climates. The ancestors of many Tibetans, for example, acquired from Denisovans a gene active in red blood cells that is particularly helpful for living in low-oxygen environments. Initially, modern humans only occupied the Tibetan high plateau on a seasonal basis, but as gene mutations spread through the population they were able to settle at higher altitudes where they developed new agricultural techniques.

The story with Neanderthals is similar. Modern humans in parts of Europe and East Asia hold keratin protein genes that have helped them grow skin and hair suitable for the colder ranges originally occupied by Neanderthals.

By contrast, genetic analysis suggests that in Africa there was far less interbreeding with Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthal DNA is found in some African populations, but it is thought to derive largely from Eurasian groups coming back into Africa around 20,000 years ago, long after they had mixed with their cousins in Europe and elsewhere. Genetic analysis also suggests intermingling with much older ‘ghost populations’ of early humans who have left no trace in the fossil record.

Left for Europe, Right for Asia

Our ancestors left Africa in many waves, probably by following the coastline and natural features such as rivers. They probed ever more distant lands, helped by a more favourable climate that offered more abundant animal and plant life to hunt and forage as well as fresh water. Warmer conditions enabled access to higher latitudes, while sea levels were still lower due to the last ice age, aiding movement along the coasts.

There were two possible routes out of Africa. The northern route, the Levantine corridor, passed through Egypt and the Sinai. A far more challenging alternative was the southern route traversing Ethiopia and into the Arabian Peninsula. This would have involved crossing the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea.

Not long after moving out of Africa, humans began to skirt the coast towards the Indian subcontinent – one of the first regions where modern humans settled to become less like nomads. These migrations were made possible by newly acquired fishing and boating skills. Communities arose whose lifestyles depended on the products of the sea.

Migration along the coastline of the Persian Gulf and then the Indian Ocean would have been an easier route than through the mountains and arduous terrain of the Arabian interior. Due to the quantity of water still frozen on land during this final phase of the glacial period, the coastal plain could be as wide as 50 kilometres, with few obstructions and easy access to seafood.

The Indian subcontinent was a point of departure for many groups who later populated Europe and eastern parts of Asia, as well as an incubator for new practices and lifestyles. Over many thousands of years the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was left behind in favour of more structured settlement and the refinement of farming techniques developed in the Near East. This would entail profound shifts in how humans moved, related to one another and went about their daily lives.

Humans Take to Water

Hunter-gatherers had already reached the Pacific by the time modern humans were populating Europe for the first time – around 45,000 years ago. They are thought to have migrated east in three distinct ancestral groups: one moving around the Amur river basin between northeast China and Russia; another through the high altitudes of the Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas; and a third through southeastern Asia.

As so often, climatic conditions were a spur to adaptation and movement. Our predecessors such as Homo erectus were probably unable to cross large bodies of water, though lower sea levels helped them reach as far as Java.

When the first Homo sapiens arrived in the region, they too were able to benefit from these lower ocean levels, which exposed land that is now underwater – part of a palaeocontinent called Sahul. The gradual peopling of Australia probably happened through successive trips on logs, rafts, vegetation or canoes, possibly involving contact with people who were on the continent from an earlier date but shared ancestry with the newer arrivals from sub-Saharan Africa.

Much later – about 5,000 years ago – seafaring technologies across southeast Asia would develop even further. The peopling of Austronesia, described as ‘the largest geographic dispersal ever undertaken by humans’, entailed numerous journeys over vast distances to Madagascar and Easter Island, the Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand.

Taiwan is believed to have been a starting point for many of these relatively recent migrations. Given the distances and dangers involved, these early seaborne migrants must have been particularly adventurous, risk-taking and enterprising. Today, linguists can trace these ancient migrations by analysing the Austronesian language family, which includes Malay and Javanese and is spoken by more than 386 million people. Their immense journeys also spread cultures, genes and farming practices.

An early vessel with outriggers and ‘crab-claw’ sail. Austronesian ocean-going craft rapidly evolved into a range of distinctive forms. (Louis Le Breton, 1846)

A Trail of Mulberries

The canoes, rafts and other boats used by migrants to cross Austronesia carried domesticated animals and plants, including chickens, pigs, dogs, bananas, breadfruit and taro yam. These early seafarers also brought the agricultural knowhow needed to survive on the resource-poor islands where they settled. It has been said that early humans ‘transported landscapes’.⁷ We can learn about the movement of people by looking at the genetic variation in the plants they carried. The paper mulberry, tapa or barkcloth tree was one of the earliest and most widely transported fibre crops. A native of southern Asia, the mulberry was carried from there to Oceania, the Hawaiian Islands and beyond.

The Old New World

The humans who first populated the Americas can be traced back to the much earlier migrations out of Africa. Rather than move along the coastline into the Indian subcontinent, these migrants took a more northerly route, reaching Siberia around 35,000 years ago. From there they moved into Beringia, a flat land bridge between present-day Russia and Alaska that became submerged by what is now the Bering Sea towards the end of the last glacial period.

Probably due to the extreme weather they encountered, these migrants appear to have remained in the far eastern corner of Eurasia for around 15,000 years. While some humans may have ventured into the Americas along a coastal route, others settled in Beringia. Evidence from skeletal remains found in the region suggests they may have adapted to the freezing conditions over this time.

Genetic data show two different groups moving into the Americas at slightly different times, mingling along the way. Based on the relationship between the forms of the Yupik language spoken in Siberia and Alaska, we also know that some groups moved back into Asia – migration is rarely just one-way. There are also similarities between Shamanist mythologies on either side of the Bering Sea. Both the Altaic populations on one side and Native Americans on the other have drug-induced spiritual practices in which a shaman parts ways with the material world to communicate with spirits.

Settling Down, Moving On

We often imagine civilisation as the triumph of the sedentary over the mobile.

Robin Cohen, Migration

Adapted from David Reich, Who We Are And How We Got Here

Settling and farming on the European and Indian subcontinents followed similar patterns. Around 9,000–10,000 years ago, farmers from the Near East arrived in both regions, mixing with disparate groups of hunter-gatherers and bringing transformational technology. In India, crops brought from the west such as wheat and barley were bred to cope with monsoon weather patterns and gradually adopted throughout the subcontinent. Several thousand years later, Chinese crops such as rice and millet, independently developed in the Yangtze and Yellow river basins, also reached India, whose agricultural system was thus born out of a great collision between Near Eastern and Chinese techniques. Farming later spread through eastern Asia along a land route to Vietnam and Thailand, as well as by sea to Taiwan.

Adapted from David Reich, Who We Are And How We Got Here

Around 5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya pastoralist culture emerged across the grass steppes that range from Hungary to the foothills of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia. The Yamnaya people also occupied parts of Europe and the Indian subcontinent, mixing with farming communities and forming the genetic diversity present in both continents today. As well as their herds, their horses and their genes, the Yamnaya are likely to have brought the first Indo-European languages to Europe and India.

Languages Evolve

*wódr = water

*kērd = heart

*tréyes = three

From the first utterances of our earliest ancestors, languages have constantly evolved through encounters between migrants. The spread of words, dialects and intonations leaves a trace which, alongside genetic and archaeological evidence, provides clues as to the journeys migrants have taken. Languages spoken across much of continental Europe, central and south Asia today seem to have their common origins in a proto-Indo-European language. The words above are reconstructed from their later cognates.⁸ Many of the early languages of the Pacific Rim also appear to have migrated from a common source.

Lifestyle Choices

For those who settled, a sedentary way of life brought many benefits, such as agriculture, animal domestication and the accumulation of goods. Food surpluses allowed more and more people to learn skills and develop ideas unrelated to their immediate day-to-day survival. Urbanisation was a major step in the evolution of human cultures and technology, requiring the cooperation of large numbers of people. It also enabled specialisation. In these more food-secure environments, there was time for thinking, imagining and creating.

Social stratification and dense living brought certain advantages, but also new power and employment relations. Compared with early town-dwellers, hunter-gatherers had enjoyed a ‘relatively free, unscheduled existence’ with little routine and a degree of spontaneous mobility.⁹

Settled living may also have had profound consequences for our health. Several historians including Yuval Noah Harari suggest that foragers enjoyed better, more comfortable lives than peasants, shepherds or even today’s office workers.¹⁰ It may well be that hunter-gatherers spent less time labouring to produce or earn their food than farmers or other workers in settled communities. We should remember, however, that they were at greater risk from seasonal shortages of food as well as exposure and attacks by predators.

As agricultural techniques improved, allowing greater numbers of people to live in villages and towns and engage in a widening range of activities, the pace of human development accelerated. Yet humans never became truly sedentary.¹¹ As we will see, it was intense and continued mobility combined with the advantages of greater specialisation and cooperation that spurred human progress in the millennia to come.

A Patchy Record

Over the past decade our understanding of early human migrations has improved dramatically, thanks largely to advances in genomic technology. At times these have been so rapid that new data and discoveries have discredited conclusions even before they reached the publication stage.

Yet there remains a Eurocentric focus to the research. Around 90 per cent of published genome samples of ancient DNA have come from western Eurasia. Similarly, archaeological samples tend to come from sites to which researchers have easy access.

These biases are compounded by past ethical breaches, which have eroded trust between local communities and scientists. In some places, antagonism towards genetic research is reflected in tribal law. In 2002, the Navajo Nation passed a Moratorium barring its members from taking part in DNA studies.

The last five hundred years have witnessed repeated cases in which people of European ancestry have exploited the indigenous people of the Americas using the toolkit of Western science.

David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here

Research into human genetics and history can also touch on sensitive political or cultural areas. The findings of genomic analysis may clash with prior, competing ideas of history. Some governments, as in China, have imposed restrictions on the export of gene samples so that research is undertaken locally.

Uneven access to data risks distorting our view of human migration. The yawning discrepancies in the availability of genetic and archaeological data between Eurasia and Africa, for example, can create the misleading impression that ‘once Africa gave birth to the ancestral population of non-Africans, the African story ended’ and that people who remained on the continent became a subplot to history elsewhere.¹² There is a need for more research on ancient migration in Africa in particular. Until this is met, our understanding of the origins and movement of our ancestors will be incomplete.

What we can say is that those early humans who survived were the versatile and innovative ones. Our migrating ancestors adapted to different climates, adopted new food systems and learned to deal with new predators and diseases. They met other populations of humans and exchanged skills, tools, customs and genes, diversifying their languages, know-how and physical characteristics along the way. Migration is an evolutionary strategy adopted by a myriad of life forms, including ourselves. The ability and desire of Homo sapiens to migrate to very different habitats is what allowed our species to flourish.

2. Peopled Planet

The world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

About 6,000 years ago, people began to ride on horses. From about 4,000 years ago, after the wheel was adapted for transport in central Asia, these were hitched to carts and wagons, allowing migrants to venture further and for longer and to take their families, food, belongings and even homes with them.

This ‘carnival parade’ also brought along animals and plants for food. As humans migrated through changing landscapes and different climatic conditions they learned how corn would grow in a wet plain, whether yams could be planted in the spring and when it was best to harvest rye.

As more and more groups of people migrated, the chances of meeting others increased. With these more frequent encounters came opportunities to exchange knowledge and goods. People learned novel ways of growing food, organising communities and dealing with health problems and other challenges.

As people innovated they acquired more options and, in turn, had to make choices. This conscious decision-making is what ‘makes us human’, argue anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow.¹³ The more our early ancestors explored and experimented, the greater the differences that emerged between them. Encounters between these distinctive groups were more productive as a result, but at times could be a source of conflict. This potential for both cooperation and competition helped shape human development and the diversity of human behaviours we see today.

Planting Seeds

Agriculture first spread through the movement of people, crops and skills from around 13,000 years ago. Migrants moved between communities, sharing their knowledge of different plants and at first hauling roots, grains and seeds on their backs. The birth of agricultural communities was just one manifestation of how humans organised themselves in different parts of the world.

A settled way of life did not preclude a migratory one. Often they complemented each other. Some migrants settled with the early farmers they visited while others moved on, leaving behind their know-how. Some adopted a culture and learned a new language; others imposed their own tools and technologies. Thanks to this continual movement back and forth, agricultural ideas ‘spread more rapidly and more thoroughly than farming communities could move’.¹⁴

People gathered and shared knowledge of plants along their journeys, taking advantage of what the world and other growers they encountered had to offer. Migration up and down mountain slopes, for example, helped humans understand how crops grew in different climates and offered a flexible environment in which to develop food systems. Neighbouring communities could grow several different crops at the same time and adjust to changing seasons or weather simply by moving up or down the slope, evolving rich, cooperative agricultural systems at a rapid pace.

Certain environments proved ideal for certain plants. Vast east–west stretches of land with differing soils, rainfall and weather patterns were helpful for developing robust, disease-resistant and productive varieties of crops. Mobile cultivation across wide, open expanses of Eurasia helped develop strong variants of wheat. Similar stretches in Asia allowed the cultivation of rice, while wide tracts of land in Africa helped develop the resilience of millet and sorghum.

The changing climate spurred the growth of agriculture. The end of the last ice age around 11,000 years ago had created a more verdant planet conducive to experiment and innovation. In the area known as the Fertile Crescent, wheat was first grown along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and sorghum along the Nile. Rice spread from southeast Asia, yams from western Africa, taro and bananas from New Guinea and squashes from the northern parts of South America.

Agriculture held communities in one place for longer, while also creating surpluses of food which could be carried away, enabling people to move more freely and in greater numbers. Patterns of migration transformed in line with crop cycles, as populations expanded and human settlements grew denser as the harvests exceeded the needs of farmers and their families.

As farmers were able to produce more food, more people gravitated to settlements. Pottery emerged, and with it a host of new ways of producing food and drink, such as soaking or fermenting grains and cooking stews. A reduction in the amount of tooth wear was just one of the many benefits.

The Rise of Cities

Simple towns grew into more structured settlements. Mesopotamia – the land between two rivers – was home to some of the first cities: Eridu, Uruk and Ur. Other cities emerged from fertile land along the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in South Asia and the lower Yangtze in China.

Irrigation allowed these riverine societies to reduce their dependence on rainfall, which might occur infrequently or even hundreds of kilometres upstream. Canals parallel to the Tigris and the Euphrates, for example, greatly expanded the area under cultivation. They were also suitable for compact boats, which were used to transport heavy goods over greater inland distances.

Four thousand years ago, the marshy landscape of Sumer and Akkad in southern Mesopotamia was dominated by a multitude of waterways, canals and ditches that aided in both the harvest and transportation of grains and other crops. Many of these basic irrigation methods are still used today.

Palm orchard in the lower Euphrates Valley

Urbanisation and agriculture made possible larger and more complex societies, as well as more hierarchical and unequal ones. This was by no means inevitable. Early egalitarian urban societies existed, as did autocratic agricultural or hunter-gathering communities. Cities in the Indus Valley and West Africa employed relatively cooperative systems, while in Mesopotamia they tended to be more coercive and elitist.

The first cities drew in people from the surrounding countryside and more distant settlements. Domestication of animals such as horses and camels enabled people to travel greater distances and carry heavier loads of goods. Farmers and traders transported produce and know-how from one town to another. Within the larger settlements, a ruling elite and groups of people with specialised skills accumulated knowledge, power and wealth. Artisans, traders, warriors, priests and rulers became privileged segments of the population.

All of these urban dwellers depended on farmers producing agricultural surpluses, although increasingly it was the rulers and traders and not the farmers who were able to exercise control over the distribution of food as well as farming methods. As new forms of control and power emerged, so too did different kinds of employment, ranging from slavery and bonded servitude to free wage labour.

Network Effects

Migration enabled the exchange of products as well as of ideas and practices. While trade was limited at first by the amount people or animals could physically carry, the advent of the wheel – and with it carts and wagons – allowed for the transport of heavier loads, as did the development of boats and sails.

Market places and ports developed along busy trading routes. Coastal trading cities such as Lothal, the port of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation in southwestern Asia, and later inland settlements such as Xi’an in China acted as centres of gravity where information, produce and resources were pooled. They also attracted a wide variety of people, including those who were curious, entrepreneurial or in need.

The migrants travelling between these trading centres were pollinators of ideas. As these ideas spread, so too did challenges to old ways of doing things. Cities became cauldrons of change. Trade networks expanded and the wealth and dynamism of their anchor communities grew. Improved transport and commercial links tied a growing number of regions together, with particularly dense exchanges in the eastern Mediterranean, southern China and India, and a finer web of connections radiating outwards to Africa, Europe, Central Asia, Indonesia and the Pacific.

It is through such exchanges that the early wheeled vehicles of Mesopotamia and the domesticated horses of the Black Sea converged to form animal-pulled carriages and chariots.

Reinventing the Wheel

Onager-drawn chariot, Mesopotamia c. 2500

bce

(British Museum)

We have no firm idea of when and where the first wheels were used. This simple yet most revolutionary of technologies was used for many purposes, from making pottery to grinding corn over 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. From a single solid wheel to a set that rotated independently of an axle, the technology was adapted over time to our evolving needs for transport. Archaeological sites around the Black Sea and in central Asia reveal that four-wheeled carts were being used to transport heavy loads from mines over 4,000 years ago. Around the same time the use of two-wheeled ox-carts became popular, as they were more adaptable and could turn corners. Chariots pulled by horses were an adaptation which offered much greater speed and offered advantages in warfare and communication. Wheelbarrows were being used by around 200 ce in China. Not all ancient civilisations used the wheel, however, and it appears that some abandoned it. People in the Americas built advanced societies without using the wheel before European settlers arrived.¹⁵

Crossroads and Canals

As trading between cities and regions intensified, roads, bridges and tunnels were built on the busiest routes. Waterways were dug to connect rivers and seas, including the canals built by rulers in Egypt to link the Nile Delta to the Red Sea, and the extensive canal network in China used to transport food and other goods between the Yangtze, Huai and Yellow river valleys and feed cities and standing armies in the north.

By 500 ce, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were connected to the Yellow River Valley in northern China by the Silk Road, which crossed the desert and open steppe in between. Other routes joined Yunnan with Bengal and the Indian Ocean, north India with central Asia, and Europe with parts of Africa via the Mediterranean. Ocean routes crossed the archipelagos of the western Pacific, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, where merchants could disembark and travel overland to the Mediterranean and from there to the Black Sea.

Migrants with highly specialised knowledge converged on crossroads to exchange ideas as well as goods. To keep track of their transactions, merchants developed more sophisticated writing systems and ledgers. These were often spread by traders, such as the Phoenician mariners who sailed along the Mediterranean coast from present-day Lebanon. By around 2,500 years ago coins were being used for exchanges of goods. A virtuous spiral emerged of growing wealth, increased trade and further migration, exchange and innovation.

Joining the Dots

Sedentary historians have tended to stress the value of cities and their elites and downplay the achievements of the ‘barbarians’ beyond the walls. But those who traversed the vast expanses of land and ocean between these centres of civilisation were just as highly innovative and creative, in addition to being unusually courageous and resilient as they ventured into the unknown.

Traders and other migrants learnt how to navigate on land and sea, acquiring knowledge about seasons, wind patterns and the weather, as well as the languages, cultures and crafts of the populations they encountered. The merchants and artisans who met in coastal trading towns and on the road helped forge bonds of trust between different communities, improving communication systems and creating vibrant marketplaces.

In the busy caravanserais of the Silk Road and ports of the Mediterranean, middlemen set up shop to help – or exploit – those who were passing through. On the open road, nomadic groups and roadside communities could protect trade as well as pirate it, as complex, informal systems of alliances, gifts and bribes evolved.¹⁶

Modes of Transport

People moved on donkeys and boats, on horseback and by foot, on ox-pulled carriages and in dugout canoes. Cities and communities exchanged raw materials in bulk as well as prestige goods and became increasingly connected with one another via commercial, political and military networks. Some goods were heavy, difficult and expensive to transport; some required rapid transport over short distances; some were urgently needed; some were sensitive and required protection. Grains, silk and armies travelled in very different ways.

Donkeys were domesticated thousands of years ago in northeast Africa and along with cattle, buffalos and horses were used to carry relatively heavy loads. Instead of hunting horses for meat, humans began to domesticate and harness them. Horseback riding became a radical new way to move around, spreading people and genes far and wide at an impressive pace.

Four-wheeled horse-drawn wagons emerged to transport heavy objects and as mobile homes. The terrain shaped the technology. On the Indo-European steppes north of the Black Sea and beyond, horses were harnessed to carriages and war chariots. In central and eastern Africa, by contrast, Bantu speakers migrated as farmers rather than warriors, moving by foot through the tropical forests of central and west Africa, which were impenetrable to other forms of transport.

Wagon nomadism became a distinctive way of living on the steppes, particularly in Central Asia and north of the Black Sea. While in Africa and the Americas migrants might disassemble or simply abandon their dwellings when it was time to move, Indo-Europeans such as the Scythians carried more robust homes in their entirety on solid wheels, pulled, slowly and steadily, by oxen. Wagon dwellers lived and died on the move. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of the Scythians who moved across the grassland steppes of the North Caucasus around 2,000 years ago:

They live upon flesh and an abundance of milk, and dwell in wagons, which they cover with rounded canopies of bark and drive over the boundless wastes. And when they come to a place rich in grass, they place their carts in a circle and feed like wild beasts … they place their cities, as we might call them, on the wagons … wagons form their permanent dwellings, and wherever they come, that place they look upon as their natural home.¹⁷

Travelling by Water

Vessels for carrying people and goods were built wherever humans lived near water. Irrigation ditches dug along the Euphrates and Yangtze were widened into canals for transport. Rudimentary sails were used on the Nile to take advantage of the prevailing northerly winds, which carried reed and timber boats hundreds of kilometres upriver, extending the reach of early kingdoms.

Sailing technology developed rapidly in the Mediterranean, as shown in this detailed scene from the 5th century

bce

‘Siren Vase’. (British Museum)

Norwegian fjords contain rock sculptures of skin boats used by early Eurasiatic peoples. In North America, sturdy bark canoes were used to roam the inland waterways as well as coastal waters. Reed boats carrying heavy loads navigated through the waves of the Pacific and the highland lakes of South America, while dugout canoes from the Amazon carried people between the Caribbean islands. The inshore waters of the Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean were peppered with simple plank boats long before long-distance shipping altered maritime transportation.¹⁸

Austronesians were remarkable mariners. Their outrigger canoes, powered by sails and oars, allowed them to populate distant islands and continents previously untouched by humans, navigating by observing the winds and the currents and following the paths of migrating birds.

Cultivators of the land and harvesters of the sea often depended on one another, as human communities gathered close to rivers, lakes and seas. An ever-widening range of vessel types emerged, from simple boats for fishing to sailing ships designed to carry cargo to more distant shores. Boats grew in size as well as complexity, enabling them to transport heavier loads and greater numbers of people over long distances.

Bananas, Beads and Belief

Commerce was more than a simple matter of moving goods around. It depended on dealings between people in geographically distinct places. These relations might be cordial or, as we see in the following chapters, exploitative and brutal.

Languages were exported, adapted and adopted, as were crops, animals, produce and technology. Systems of thought as well as spiritual and religious practices were exchanged over greater distances. The beliefs carried and disseminated by migrants sought to give meaning to hardship, suffering and death and to justify or challenge the growing stratification and inequality of societies.

Often their goods carried symbolic value too. In Central and South America, maize domestication and food security were central to religious observances. Migrants carried maize across the Americas from Mexico through Guatemala and the Caribbean to the South American lowlands and Andean foothills.¹⁹ The Aztec, Mayan, Yucatán and other Mesoamerican mythologies that arose in these areas gave maize gods high stature. The Toltec and Aztec god of wisdom and knowledge was the mythical discoverer not only of maize but also the techniques used to turn corn into tortillas, a staple food.

Bananas, xylophones and outrigger canoes were spread through Africa by Austronesian speakers. Rare decorative minerals such as jade and sky-blue lapis lazuli were traded or presented as luxury gifts in all the inhabited continents where they were found. The smell of Arabian frankincense became familiar from Rome to China thanks to its use in medicine, cosmetics and embalming rituals.²⁰

Bead Games in North American Villages

Indigenous North American women travelled from village to village to meet, exchange products – and bet on dice games. Plum stones, personal ornaments, moccasins, shell beads, baskets and pots have been found scattered across great distances as a result of these gatherings.

As travellers introduced unusual tastes and exotic items to foreign ports, they stimulated further trade. Rising demand for foreign products went along with a growing awareness and demand for the widening range of specialist skills provided by migrants. Trade diasporas developed. Small groups of people settled with trading partners, and later helped to host and assist new arrivals from the homeland. These migrations were entwined with linguistic, cultural, religious and other social interactions that connected the world in ever more complex ways.

3. Empire and Trade

The more people migrated, the more densely populated the planet became. Encounters between migrants and settled populations were often fruitful, but they could also lead to conflict. Almost always, one group was more powerful or more technologically advanced than the other. Trade and early peaceful exchanges could become hostile as one party dominated the other commercially and even violently, through invasion and forceful subjugation.

Wealth, power and resources accumulated in certain groups. The earliest empires grew rapidly through the use of forced migrant labour and travelling armies, although their influence extended through commerce as well as through conquest. Unequal encounters between populations – whether trading or warring – had profound consequences over time for the balance of power across the globe. Yet trade links between empires also enabled a vibrant global exchange of people and ideas.

Unequal Encounters

Early Afro-Eurasian societies appear to have made a number of important innovations earlier than peoples in other parts of the world. Starting around 10,000 years ago, they were the first to domesticate livestock – several thousand years earlier than in the Americas – which in turn gave them trade advantages. Through the wide networks of exchange that then developed they were able to absorb ideas and technologies from far afield.

Exposure to the many diseases that spread between people and animals also gave both settled and migrating Afro-Eurasian populations a degree of immunity against the contagions that devastated others. Diseases spread by migrant workers, traders, pilgrims and travelling armies have been one of the most decisive forces in encounters between humans throughout history.

The winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

Genetic data is beginning to reveal social and gender hierarchies that arose many thousands of years ago. Genomic analysis of men with West-Eurasian-related ancestry, for example, shows that they mixed with women of lower social standing between four thousand and two thousand years ago, forming genetic distinctions that endure in present-day caste and class hierarchies.²¹

Conspicuous consumption: Scythian gold neckpiece from a royal kurgan or burial mound dated to the 4th century bce.

(Image credit: D. Kolosov.)

The inequalities of the past are also visible in monumental architecture, grand burial places and luxurious artefacts, all redolent of power, social standing and conspicuous consumption – as well as telling us who was in charge at the time. Tens of thousands of Scythian burial mounds are scattered across the vast steppe region that stretches from northern China to the Black Sea, showing us how far the influence of these nomadic people extended more than two millennia ago.

The Reach of Empires

The largest surviving monuments of the ancient world, such as the pyramids of Egypt and ziggurats of Mesopotamia, required the labour, resources and reach of a settled civilisation. The first empires emerged from earlier city-states around 5,000 years ago. These include the Akkadians, Assyrians and later Babylonians in Mesopotamia as well as the kingdom of Egypt, which reached the peak of its imperial power in the second millennium bce. Subsequent empires emerged in the centuries that followed, including the Roman and more enduring Chinese empires.

As these empires grew in size and wealth, contact and trade between them became more frequent, with power imbalances and inequalities shaping their interactions. George Spencer points out that in the first centuries bce and ce, ‘the Romans desired far more from India than Indians desired from Rome.’²²

The earliest empiresall depended at their core on fertile river basins that generated large agricultural surpluses. As farming techniques improved, urban settlements grew and prospered, making economies more competitive and resource-intensive. More land meant the need for more people to work that land. Peasants were increasingly forced to work in fields other than their own.

Empires generated new forms of migration as coerced labourers, slaves and armies were forced to travel over great distances. Trade between cities was fuelled by demand for both raw materials and luxury items. By the late Bronze Age, the mercantile network of the Near East extended from tin mines on the Atlantic to pottery workshops in the Indus Valley.

Demand for new types of goods grew. The desire of the wealthy for rare fibres, foods, spices and other valuable commodities became the prime motivation for the opening of trade routes. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, much of the world’s population did not consume most of what was being transported. ‘Exotics’ were mainly bought by elites.

Even so, trade in rare goods had an impact felt far beyond the people who made, transported, sold and bought them. It affected the lives of people who met and hosted merchants along the road and those who were exposed to the new languages and cultures brought by these newcomers.

The influence of empires could be felt many thousands of kilometres away. Greek, Latin, Mandarin and, much later, Arabic were among the most widely spoken languages heard at great distances from their origins. Roman coins exchanged by merchants 2,000 years ago have been found across Europe, North Africa and the Gulf as well as in India, Sri Lanka and ever further east, providing a clue as to how widely Latin may have been heard.

Distances, as measured by time, were calculated in weeks and months at best.

Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony

For traders and other migrants plying these expanding routes, round-trip journeys might take years to complete. Despite these lags, ‘goods were transferred, prices set, exchange rates agreed upon, contracts entered into, credits … extended, partnerships forged, and … records kept and agreements honoured.’²³

Follow the Coins

Gold coins minted in the reigns of Caligula (37–41 CE) and Nero (54–68 CE) found in Tamil Nadu, southern India. (British Museum)

The first known coins from the Mediterranean region were minted in about 600 bce by the Lydians, in what is today Turkey. Before long they were being produced by many nearby states. Over 25 million ancient Roman coins are thought to reside in collections today. They became widely used in trade and have been found in almost all countries in Europe, Asia and North Africa. Much older Pacific and Indian Ocean seashells also reached European ports. Copper, bronze, silver and gold coins from northern China have been found across the Eurasian continent, showing that widely recognised currency systems enabled trade over vast expanses, based on an underlying trust and obligation to honour these tokens of exchange between distant economies and cultures.

Silk and Caravanserais

The Silk Road is perhaps the best-known trade route in human history, stretching over 7,000 kilometres between the Yellow River Valley in eastern China and the Mediterranean Sea. ‘Silk Roads’ plural or even ‘Silk Routes’ might be better terms for what was in reality a vast web of highways, paths and smaller trails connected to an extensive maritime trade network.

From their beginnings around 100 bce, as the British historian Peter Frankopan has shown, these Silk Roads continuously adapted to changing climatic conditions, trade interests and invasions. Over time, a stream of innovations such as paper and the printing press, astronomical models and new kinds of relief maps permitted ever more efficient movement and transport.

Silk was not the only commodity being carried along the route. Jade and other precious stones, porcelain and spices travelled west and were exchanged for horses, glassware, textiles and manufactured goods that were taken east. Ideas and new technologies were transported in both directions. Printing likely emerged from Buddhist monasteries in China around 700 ce, while gunpowder was invented by Chinese Daoist alchemists in the ninth century.

Traders, adventurers and travellers might spend a lifetime plying the route. As late as the thirteenth century, as Marco Polo recorded in his detailed travelogues, the journey from the Mediterranean to the East China Sea would take about a year, with about half the distance covered by roads within China.

The quantity of merchandise sold there exceeds the traffic of any other place; for no fewer than a thousand carriages and pack-horses, loaded with raw silk, make their daily entry; and gold tissues and silks of various kinds are manufactured to an immense extent.

Marco Polo on ‘Cambalu’ or Khanbaliq, the winter capital of China in what is now Beijing²⁴

The caravans of the Silk Roads connected populations separated by vast distances. This global exchange spurred the growth of connecting cities such as Xi’an and Samarkand as well as smaller towns, oases and wayside marketplaces that served as hubs of commercial, intellectual and cultural traffic. Caravanserais – inns with large courtyards that could house travellers and their animals – dotted the route, allowing for impromptu trade in goods and information as well as gossip and shelter within the relative safety of their walls.

In more remote areas, occasional markets would draw in merchants, carpet weavers, scribes, barbers and repairmen who travelled these fairs in circuits, exchanging goods and services and passing by impromptu food and drink stalls. Craftworkers, artisans, farmers and other local residents would descend on donkeys and horses from nearby hills and villages to meet the travellers.

East to West, South to North

To the south, the Silk Roads were connected via the Indian subcontinent to a network of maritime routes even more extensive than those on land. The Indian Ocean was the other ‘great highway’ for ‘the migration of peoples, for cultural diffusion, and for economic exchange’.²⁵

The Book of Roads and Kingdoms listed the many lands, peoples and customs that could be found along the Silk Roads and other trade routes. It was compiled in Baghdad in the ninth century ce by Ibn Khordadbeh. (Khalili Collections)

Today we are used to hearing about ‘Western’ influences, reflecting the cultural chauvinism of an industrial age that harked back to the cultures of classical Greece and Rome. But as the American sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod notes in Before European Hegemony, a process of ‘Southernization’ or perhaps Easternization was already taking place along webs of trade, learning and military might that originated from southern Asia at the height of India’s powerful Gupta Empire.

These exchanges transformed the cultures of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean and north-western Europe ‘more or less in that order’ from around the fourth century up to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth, when dynamics of Westernisation returned to the forefront.²⁶ During this time, the domestication of cotton in the Indus, combined with dyeing techniques that emerged in the region, led to ‘India virtually [clothing] the world’ by the eighteenth century.²⁷ Meanwhile, the Indian Ocean between the South China Sea and eastern Africa was criss-crossed by sailors and traders from Arabia to the Malay Peninsula.

Trade across this busy ocean followed three loosely defined circuits, partly shaped by prevailing and seasonal winds. To the northwest, merchants travelled from inland cities such as Cairo and Baghdad via the Red Sea or the Gulf to sail along India’s western coastlines. These passengers would sometimes settle and marry in cities along the coast, forming diasporas of partially assimilated Muslim traders.

Malays were perhaps the most notable sailors of the period, riding the monsoons and setting sail for destinations not visible from the shore, conveying their languages and customs all the way to Madagascar and settling in the Red Sea as traders of spices.²⁸

They navigated by the wind and the stars, by cloud formations, the colour of the water, and swell and wave patterns on the ocean’s surface. They could discern the presence of an island some thirty miles from its shores by noting the behaviour of birds [and] the animal and plant life in the water.

Lydia Shaffer, ‘Southernization’

Malay navigators’ ability to set sail against the wind by tacking diagonally to and fro was observed by people they traded and interacted with, inspiring Arabs and Polynesians to make innovations of their own, such as the triangular lateen sail. Indian pepper and cinnamon merchants populated islands near the Red Sea while Greek-speaking sailors rode the monsoons to India.

Without an adequate understanding of the seas and seasons, ‘crosswinds could immobilise an eastbound ship for up to a year’.²⁹ Ibn Majid, an Arab navigator, wrote a manual for travel between the Arabian and Indian coasts. Outlining wind patterns and directions, the best times to set sail and possible stopovers, his advice was followed by merchants and travellers from the late fifteenth century onwards. Guidebooks were also published and used by Italian merchants who travelled overland between China and the Mediterranean.

Interactions between people from southern and western parts of Asia as well as Europe led to the wider adoption of certain languages as well as systems of record and thought. The numerals used by Europeans are commonly known as Arabic, but Arabs themselves call them Hindi, because they originated in India.

Besides their accounting systems, merchants traded religious beliefs and other ideas along with their goods. Between the southern ports of the Indian subcontinent and the Strait of Malacca – the middle trading circuit – Muslim influence waned and Hinduism became more common. To the east, the South China Sea and its surrounding islands were dominated by Chinese sailors and traders, who practiced Buddhism and Confucianism.

Empire and Religion

The world’s most obvious dynamic in the centuries before Columbus was the expansion of the Islamic faith.

Lynda Shaffer

Modern ‘Arabic’ numerals have evolved on their journey west from Asia.

Empires and religion often moved in lockstep. In the seventh century, Arab armies under the banner of Islam had moved rapidly along the eastern and southern Mediterranean shores, taking Byzantine and other territories. By the end of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 ce this new Islamic empire extended from its capital, Damascus, west along the North African coast to the Pyrenees mountains on the northern border of what is now Spain and east across the Arabian Peninsula to present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the next centuries, as centres of influence in the Islamic world moved between regions and power shifted between the various dynasties of the Abbasids, Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Mongols, Safavids and Ottomans, most of the world’s traders had to deal with or pass through Muslim territories at some point. Iraq became ‘the most prosperous country in Islam’ and a ‘haunt of merchants’, according to a tenth-century geographer.³⁰

European merchants themselves were restricted from moving through the Muslim world, making it difficult for them to reach India and China unaided and often forcing them to pay for the services of local intermediaries. By contrast, Muslims were not only encouraged to travel across the empire, it was their religious duty.

From the time the hajj was performed by the Prophet Muhammed in 632 ce, hundreds and eventually hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would journey every year to Mecca (nearly 1.9 million Muslims made the journey in 2023). From the outset, people travelled great distances overland from Morocco and Siberia or by ship from India, the Philippines and beyond.

The Great Mosque of Uqba in Kairouan, Tunisia, founded by the Umayyads in 670, is the oldest surviving mosque in the Muslim West.

Although travellers were helped by the amenities of the Silk Roads and other well-trodden routes, many pilgrims died on the journey. Even so, Patrick Manning notes that the pilgrimage has ‘stood as testimony of the ability, in those centuries, of people of all social stations to travel a great distance for a religious duty, and then home again’.³¹

Conquest, Crops and Control

Despite religious differences and simmering conflicts, trade between different empires not only persisted but thrived. The profit motive tended to triumph over any travel restrictions. The Arab conquests generally reduced barriers and threats to trade and introduced merchants and other migrants to practices in distant lands, which were then adapted and adopted elsewhere.

New foods arrived in the Mediterranean. Agriculture in much of Europe was highly seasonal and based on monocultures, whereas plants from the east such as rice, sugar, chard, aubergine and spinach could be grown earlier in the summer in the warmer south as a complement to traditional autumnal crops, allowing farmers to use their land more intensively throughout the entire year. The English words for many of the foods brought to Europe at this time – artichokes, lemons, saffron and spinach – derive from their Arabic names.

Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the port cities of Venice and Genoa became important bases for sailing ships that connected Europe to North Africa and the dynamic economies of the east. At this time the Mediterranean was more of an ‘Arab than European sea’.³² Even the gold coins with which European merchants traded were minted in Constantinople and Alexandria.

States, empires and nomadic communities would periodically claim control over busy caravan and sea routes, allowing them to reap the benefits of passing people, goods and knowledge, as well as to collect taxes and duties. Merchants in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Oman and trading settlements in Persia grew rich on the traffic passing through the Gulf as well as the land routes that connected the Indian subcontinent to the Mediterranean.

In the thirteenth century, in a series of brutal campaigns, the armies of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan conquered vast swathes of land through which the Silk Roads passed. At its peak it was the largest contiguous land empire in history.

The Mongols exercised tight controls that enabled them to ease or restrict the passage of caravans and traders along the Silk Roads. By enforcing regular patrols and imposing severe punishments, they reduced banditry and instability in the regions through which merchants travelled. More informally, and sometimes for a fee, locals would protect convoys from one caravanserai to the next. For nomads and some pastoralists living close to busy commercial routes, raiding convoys could be more profitable than trading with them.

Disease and Quarantine

Venice used some of its smallest islands to quarantine new arrivals during the Black Death. During another bout of plague in the 1420s it created the first lazarettos – hospitals designed to isolate travellers infected with the plague. (Antonio Visenti, 1777)

As people and animals moved in greater numbers and over longer distances, so too did the diseases they carried. The Silk Roads and the other trade and migration routes of Eurasia became ‘one giant breeding ground for microbes’ as ‘flea-infested furs from plague-ridden areas’ travelled across Central Asia and Europe. The spread of the Black Death in the fourteenth century was helped by individual travellers but also the movement of imperial armies.³⁴

The Dance of Death: The Pedlar, by Hans Holbein (1538). The pandemics that began with the Black Death in the 1340s revisited Europe often over the following centuries and became indelibly associated with travellers.

As urban populations were decimated by disease, people moved from town to town in search of labour. Yet travellers were stigmatised in many cases due to their association with plague, especially in cities that were connected to faraway lands through their extensive trade links, such as Venice. When news came of approaching contagion, ships were prevented from docking, borders were closed and strangers and foreigners turned away.

It was in Italy that the concept of quarantine was popularised in the fourteenth century. As the Black Death spread, new arrivals were isolated for quaranta – or forty – days, leading to the English term. Mongol troops reputedly played on European fears of infection during the siege of the Genoese Black Sea port of Caffa in the 1340s, catapulting corpses and body parts over city walls.

Panicking, its inhabitants boarded ships, fleeing what seemed like certain death.

Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe, A Short History of Humanity

From its arrival in Italy at this time, the magna pestilencia lasted less than a decade but devastated populations across Europe. The Black Death is credited with encouraging migration and social mobility in the years that followed, as peasants were released from feudal obligations to go and work on land elsewhere. Yet it left a darker legacy in European culture. To this day, the association of migrants and disease continues to be promoted by politicians and media who wish to restrict migration and deny entry to foreigners.

Stories in Stone: Istanbul

Despite the undoubted horrors of imperial conquest, disease and the brutal consequences of competition between rising centres of power, diverse communities of people have interacted and lived peacefully alongside each other for much of human history. In cities ruled by different empires at different times, the legacy of these cross-cultural influences is represented in the extraordinary variety of languages, fabrics, foods and building styles that can often be found in a single neighbourhood.

Istanbul – formerly Constantinople and before that Byzantium – embodies this history in its architecture and even the layout of its streets and districts. Over the centuries the city has been ruled by the Persian, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and populated by the Genoese, Venetian and Pisan maritime republics that established colonies in the city from around the thirteenth century.

Hagia Sophia was built as an Eastern Orthodox church in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Behind its magnificent dome and facade lie a Roman-style basilica and centuries of strife between religions and empires. Following the Ottoman conquest in 1453, the original mosaics inside depicting scenes from the Christian faith were painted over and four minarets and other traditional Islamic architectural features were also added. Four hundred years later, Sultan Abdulmejid ordered the original Byzantine art to be restored.

A view of Hagia Sophia (lithograph after Fossati, 1852)

When the Ottoman Empire was dissolved at the end of the First World War, the Hagia Sophia was converted into a museum before being reconverted into a mosque again in 2020. Today, Islamic art and calligraphy sit side-by-side with the fainter Christian depictions on the wall, providing evidence of past conflicts and waves of change, as well as the diversity of cultures and civilisations embedded in this ancient crossroads city.

4. Voyages of Discovery and Destruction

Victorian history books characterised the fifteenth century as a great Age of Discovery, with heroic accounts of Columbus discovering the ‘New World’ and explorers sailing into open seas in search of new lands and people. Yet this period was also an era of widespread exploitation and destruction. Emerging states and empires were consolidating their power and trade links overseas in a process that continues to shape migration today.

Eurocentric narratives also fail to consider that these ‘discoveries’ of supposedly untouched lands were often intrusions into the home territories of people who had lived there for thousands of years. In many cases, too, European explorers were following routes familiar for centuries to Arab or Chinese navigators.

At first motivated by a desire for spices, glory and gold, European expansion was soon characterised by violent conquest – this was as much an age of ‘gunpowder empires’ as one of exploration.³⁵ Heavily armed strangers stepped off ships onto American and African shores and before long had established cross-continental systems of plunder and resource extraction which depended on the subjugation of indigenous peoples.

Viking Migrations

The Viking migrations from the seventh and eighth centuries onwards were early examples of European expansion during a period in which sustained contacts and colonisation were yet to assume a recurring pattern.³⁶ The Romans had previously conquered much of Britain and Europe as well as the North African coast, but even their largest merchant or troop-carrying ships tended to stay close to the shoreline. Thanks to the development of Viking longships capable of ocean crossing, Norse populations could venture further and settled in Iceland and Greenland – and temporarily even in North America around 1000 ce.

Viking migrations were the first phase of a period of European maritime expansion that the archaeologist Jon Erlandson argues ‘fundamentally altered the course of recent human history’, setting a precedent for subsequent ‘voyages of exploitation, plunder and settlement’ and the globalisation of cultural and economic exchanges.³⁷

‘A great heathen force came into English land’

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 865 ce. The meanings, origins and usage of the term ‘Viking’ are the subjects of much debate among etymologists. The English monks who first described these Germanic seafarers referred to þa Deniscan or the Danes. Researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary believe viking may come from the Old English wíc or camp, the formation of temporary encampments being a prominent feature of later Scandinavian raids. Other plausible theories focus on Old Norse nautical terms such as vika, which variously meant a ‘sea mile’ or a turn between rowers. These shifting linguistic theories often seem to mirror our changing historical views of Vikings as seagoing adventurers, marauders or settlers.

Early Arab Navigators

By the ninth century, Arab navigators were sailing frequently along the Iberian and Moroccan Atlantic coasts. Arab domination of the western Mediterranean had begun with the conquests of the late seventh century, when naval fleets used African ports as jumping-off points for conquests of Sardinia and Sicily and the later invasion of Spain.

The authority of the Islamic caliphs and sultans would ebb and flow in the centuries that followed. Trading and warring Muslim ships ventured along the Andalusian coast and the shores of the ‘sunset’ lands of the Maghreb west of Egypt, providing lessons that subsequent Iberian maritime explorations would draw on.³⁸ These projections of power and commerce were seldom peaceful. Berber tribes – who lent their name to the ‘Barbary Coast’ of North Africa – clashed with foreign rulers who tried to unite disparate communities and collectively convert them to Islam.

Following the Spanish Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s, the Mediterranean became divided into a predominantly Christian north and largely Muslim south. Throughout the sixteenth and later centuries, wars in North Africa between the invading Ottoman and other rival powers led to the repeated forced displacement of local populations. Ottoman imperial rule would persist – albeit indirectly in many cases – along the southern Mediterranean coast until the French conquest of Algeria in 1830.

During the long period of Ottoman rule in North Africa and elsewhere, conversion to Islam stood as a ‘certificate of citizenship’.³⁹ On the East African coast, conversion of the indigenous populations to Islam was as much a way of promoting economic integration as a means of spreading the faith. An exception to this general pattern were the wealthy Swahili communities of the coast, who deliberately restricted the spread of Islam inland in order to mark and preserve their superiority. Other Bantu language speakers – such as the Shona and Nguni, living around what is today Zimbabwe – converted to Islam, an act that facilitated trade with other Muslim societies.⁴⁰

Sephardic Expulsions

In Europe, relations between Jews and Christians deteriorated rapidly in the late medieval period. Anti-Semitic stereotypes became more common and Jews faced forced conversions and violent attacks, which intensified after a Vatican decree in 1215 declared that they should be held accountable for the killing of Christ. Many countries restricted the professions Jews could work in and forced them to wear distinctive clothing. In 1290, King Edward I issued an Edict of Expulsion which banished Jews from England; in 1306 they were expelled from France.

In 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed west, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, which ordered Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism to be expelled from all their territories. Those who remained risked being killed and tortured by the Spanish Inquisition that had been operating since 1478. The prohibition of Judaism extended across the Holy Roman Empire and the expansive Spanish realm and was later adopted in the newly created Spanish colonies such as Mexico, where it remained in force until the nineteenth century.

Today’s Sephardic Jews, from the Hebrew Sepharad, meaning Spain, are the descendants of those who escaped persecution in the Iberian Peninsula. They fled east through the Mediterranean and settled in various ports as well as inland towns and cities from Morocco to Egypt in north Africa and in Ottoman lands in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Jewish quarter of Fez, situated next to the Royal Palace

The Ottoman Empire was a relatively tolerant haven for Jewish refugees fleeing massacres and persecution. It encompassed a large area including Anatolia and, later, the Balkans and Palestine. Following the expulsions it became home to around 150,000 Jews, the largest of the regional diasporas. Over 30,000 lived in Constantinople alone.

Sephardic artisans, farmers, pharmacists and physicians brought their skills from the Iberian Peninsula to the cities of the Middle East. Combining raw material from the Balkans with technology from Iberia, these migrants spurred creativity and innovation in the cities and the rural areas where they were encouraged to settle. They also helped strengthen long-distance trade links between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, using their connections across the Mediterranean diaspora to create a demand for each other’s goods and to connect ports such as Venice with towns in the Levant.

As both the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire and the opportunities on offer became more widely known, Ashkenazi Jews escaping persecution in northern and eastern Europe also moved to its lands. By the sixteenth century the power and prominence of the Jewish community extended beyond commerce and trade to politics, as reflected in the appointment in 1561 of Joseph Nasi as governor of the island of Naxos, a position previously reserved for Muslims.

Voyages into the Atlantic

Modern replica of the Nao Victoria on which the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) led part of the first expedition around the world. (E. Gonzalez)

Early in the fifteenth century, Genoese and Iberian sailors began charting routes along the Atlantic coast of Africa, reaching the Canaries, Madeira and the Azores. By the end of the century, Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama had led expeditions further south, opening a new route to India around the southern tip of Africa. These voyages often brought European and Arab navigators into contact with each other, spurring an exchange of navigational knowledge that later mariners, including Christopher Columbus, could draw on.

The Atlantic voyages were built on violence and coercion, with guns and cannons the means to dominate routes and peoples. In 1526 the first transatlantic slave voyage from West Africa to Brazil marked the start of centuries of European exploitation of African slaves and subjugation of the Americas.

Stranger in a Strange Land

In the darkness of an October morning in 1492, three ships bearing the flags of Castile and Aragon approached a small island, part of the archipelago now called the Bahamas. Rowing towards its coast, Christopher Columbus believed he had finally discovered the western route to India. Even when it transpired this was an entirely different continent, Columbus’s early voyages to the Americas failed to meet the expectations created by Marco Polo and other overland explorers whose tales of the fabulous wealth of Asia had become legend in Europe. The rulers and financiers who supported Columbus’ voyage were initially somewhat disappointed by his ‘discovery’, which was not seen at the time as having much historical or commercial significance.

Sugar, Spices, Gold and Slaves

The European voyages of discovery were primarily driven by commercial ambition. Land routes to the east had become more precarious as the Mongol Empire, which had ensured the Silk Roads provided relatively safe passage for merchants, began to fall apart towards the end of the fourteenth century. Ottomans, Venetians and North Africans controlled much of the eastern Mediterranean, protecting it from outsiders and encouraging Europeans closer to the Atlantic to seek alternative routes and sources of wealth.

Meanwhile, the legendary riches of ‘darkest’ West Africa had for centuries been a target for Europeans. The Portuguese sailed south to establish direct ties with the Mali Empire and other powerful African states on the Atlantic coast, which later would become highly profitable sources of gold and slaves.

Portuguese success would have been impossible without the Chinese compass, Arabic tables indicating the declination of the noonday sun at various altitudes, and the lateen sail, which was also an Arab innovation.

Lynda Shaffer, ‘Southernization’

Resource extraction remained the primary motivation for these voyages. When mainland Europe was hit by grain shortages, colonising powers – including those in Italy, Spain, the Low Countries and France – turned to islands such as Madeira where they tried to grow crops. Later on, Madeira, the Canaries and other semi-tropical islands were used to grow sugar, an industry that would be developed on a much larger scale in the plantations of the Americas.

Ships sailed down the Atlantic coast of northwest Africa to Upper Guinea, Gambia and Ghana to establish trade relations. The coastal African states were portals to long-standing networks of trade within the African continent. Gold and ivory formed the basis of newfound wealth, as did human cargo. The need for labourers for the sugar and tobacco plantations across the Atlantic would lead to the formation of vast and lucrative slave trading networks in the centuries that followed. As we will see, the slave trade would come to constitute a new form of mass involuntary migration that would bind the fate of continents to each other and create unprecedented suffering.

Imperial Seville

Seville and the Spanish fleet in the 16th century. Detail from painting attributed to Alonso Sanchez Coello.

As Atlantic sea trade grew, provisioning stops were established along the busiest routes. Convoy systems ensured a degree of safety for ships and traders. Timetables with expected times of arrival and departure for different vessels were set up on islands and ports across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, the Panama isthmus and the eastern Atlantic. The Canaries came to be known as a ‘nutritive’ port, providing copious amounts of fresh supplies to seafarers thanks to their abundance of fruit, wine and seeds.⁴¹

Seville grew rapidly during the sixteenth century, as migrants from across Europe swelled its population from about 50,000 in 1530 to 130,000 around 1590. Located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula and with access to the sea through the navigable lower reaches of the Guadalquivir River, Seville gradually came to control the trade routes in the Atlantic. Ships, goods and slaves had to pass through on their way to and from the Americas and other European ports, with the Spanish Armada enforcing the monopoly.

Iberian monarchies amassed great power from this traffic. By the late seventeenth century, however, imperial competition, religious disputes and piracy – as well as the silting of the Guadalquivir River – combined to dissolve Seville’s monopoly and opened up the Atlantic to an era of more vigorous competition and trade.

Word Trails

The names of things can tell us as much about their journey as their origin. In English, the word ‘turkey’ was originally used for guineafowl, a native to Africa introduced to Europe by Ottoman merchants. The term was later reapplied to a similar-looking bird introduced by traders returning from the Americas. In India, turkeys are known as peru, the word used by Portuguese merchants. In Turkey, ironically, they are called hindi, a loan word from the Arab world. The Arabic for a turkey is rumi or Roman, a generic term for the lands of the Eastern Roman empire – including modern-day Turkey.

Age of Destruction

Long before Europeans arrived, the inhabitants of the Americas migrated across long distances for trade, religious, nomadic and other purposes. Mesoamerican cultures and societies shared knowhow about matters ranging from crop development to astronomy and religion.

When Europeans arrived they carried guns but also deadly pathogens against which the immune systems of indigenous peoples offered little resistance. The resulting spread of diseases led to a catastrophic loss of life. In the north, as native peoples travelled the waterways by canoe to trade and share news, they unknowingly took the germs to neighbouring tribes. Smallpox, measles, influenza, pneumonia, typhoid and the common cold reached Florida and Cuba.

These microbial weapons of mass destruction devastated the Americas north and south. In 1519, ships with no more than about 600 Spaniards landed on the coast of Mexico. Within a century the 20 million inhabitants of the Aztec empire were reduced to just over a million, many through violence but the majority from disease. Some decades later, Spanish conquistadores and French settlers found entire cities abandoned by their inhabitants, who had died from the pathogens that reached them before the foreigners did.

As the Inca and Aztec empires fell, the European invaders established control over ancient indigenous civilisations, imposing new hierarchies and forcing conversion to Christianity. The Spanish immigrants also relocated indigenous Americans to meet their labour needs, coercively drawing in labourers from a widening area that included the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and Peru.

The resources and riches the newcomers extracted were sent back to Europe, tempting more and more Europeans to emigrate to the Americas. As always, crops travelled with people. Sugar cane, for example, had previously been brought to the Mediterranean from Asia. After new labour-intensive farming techniques were refined in islands such as Madeira, sugar now crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean.

‘This Filthy Novelty’

As well as staple goods, returning ships brought exotic crops such as cocoa and tobacco to Europe and with them new rituals and customs. Not everyone was impressed. In 1604 the new king of England, James I, issued A Counterblaste to Tobacco, in which he expounded at great length on his distaste for ‘this filthy novelty’. The treatise had little effect. Tobacco would soon be growing in West Africa, China and other parts of Asia where it would be taken in a huge variety of forms, from cigars and pipes to chewing mixtures such as khaini, paan or ghutka.

The ‘Columbian Exchange’ which began in the decades that followed 1492 involved an irreversible cross-pollination of crops, animals, commodities, diseases, technologies and other ideas carried by migrants between the Americas and the European, Asian and African continents. The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto calls this ‘one of the biggest modifications ever inflicted by man on the rest of nature’.⁴³

Besides tobacco and cacao, the many plants introduced from the Americas to other continents included maize, potatoes, rubber, tomatoes and vanilla. The traffic went in both directions. Crops that were previously unknown in the Americas but would become central to their economies and cultures include sugar, rice, wheat, coffee, onion, mango, banana, apple and citrus, with many of these plants having initially been brought from Asia or Africa to Europe. Domesticated animals introduced by the Spaniards created new sources of food and transportation, including horse-riding.

Today, beef and pork are integral parts of the diet in the Americas. Similarly, the white ‘Irish’ potato from the Andean mountains in Peru became a staple in many parts of Europe, where Belgian moules frites, Swiss rösti and English fish and chips have become cherished national dishes. Much of modern Italian cuisine would be unimaginable without the tomato.

Ocean-Going Pigs

Horses, sheep, pigs and cows travelled the ocean on ships, arriving to completely new landscapes in the Americas. With few predators and abundant grazing, the domesticated animals reproduced quickly. The pigs fed on abundant plants and wild fruit, as well as the gardens of native communities. In 1514, just three years after Diego Velásquez de Cuéllar had conquered Cuba, he recorded that there were over 30,000 pigs on the island.⁴⁴ Escaped domestic animals roamed far and wide, so that when the Spaniards reached Texas in the eighteenth century, the offspring of the cows their predecessors had brought on ships some centuries previously had reached the interior before them.

Indigenous Philosophies

While settler states imposed themselves on indigenous peoples and territories, Americans and Europeans also engaged in more productive interactions.⁴⁵ Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow suggest that indigenous Americans had a significant impact on European thinking, particularly during the Age of Enlightenment.

The English artist John White accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on his attempts to establish a colony in what is now North Carolina, where he recorded life in the 1580s among the local Algonquian peoples. (British Museum)

Life in many American societies differed markedly from that in Europe, and indigenous peoples were scandalised by some European habits and behaviours and criticised them in ways that some settlers took seriously. It is possible that conceptions of freedom we tend to associate with the Enlightenment were, at least in part, developed from indigenous American ideas about personal liberty. At first, seventeenth-century Europeans tended to see this desire for freedom as ‘animalistic’, or caricatured the people of the Americas as ‘noble savages’, but personal liberty soon became a core idea of European philosophy and a running theme in art and literature. ⁴⁶

The Sixty-Two Ships of Admiral Zheng He

The Europeans were not the only ones venturing on voyages of discovery – or more accurately, of commerce. Decades before Columbus, Zheng He, a mariner and diplomat, had set out from Ming-dynasty China at the head of a vast fleet of sixty-two ships. Scholars argue about the exact nature of his journeys, but it is likely they were motivated by a desire to expand trade networks, project power and bring home luxuries as diplomatic gifts.⁴⁷

Under the admiral’s command, from 1405 to 1431 these expeditionary voyages sailed around the shores of southern and eastern Asia, along the Indian coastline, through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and down the eastern coast of Africa, projecting Chinese influence and power throughout the Indian Ocean.

One way to maintain foreign relations under China’s tributary system was to establish outposts where emissaries would represent Chinese interests and present other dignitaries with gifts. Foreign envoys similarly came from great distances bearing luxuries as tributes. Zheng He’s fleet transported these functionaries to and from places as far away as the east African coast, where he travelled in 1421 to bring home Chinese officials.⁴⁸

Zheng He vs. Columbus, size comparison of flagships (After illustration by Jan Adkins)

Zheng He is still revered not only as China’s most famous mariner but also as one of its greatest ship designers. His largest vessels had four decks and are thought to be twice as long as any that had sailed before.

Many of the routes that the ‘Ming treasure voyages’ took were already well known to Arab traders, but Zheng He’s journeys nevertheless transformed Chinese knowledge of the Indian Ocean and its engagement with the world. A series of new ports emerged to service well-used routes and bear witness to the cosmopolitanism of the Indian Ocean and the people who passed through it as traders, diplomats and warriors.

It was during this era that Chinese migrants began populating parts of Southeast Asia to establish commercial outposts and engage in trade, setting a pattern that future migrants would follow. During this period, too, cultures and beliefs from the west began to filter into the region, including the arrival of Islam in Indonesia, which today has the single largest population of Muslims in the world.

Filling in the Blanks

As adventurers and traders explored the oceans and continents, new and more accurate maps replaced older ones, pulling together partial scraps of knowledge and joining them into a more complete picture of our globe. Blank areas were filled in with greater resolution, with detailed geography gradually replacing ‘Terra Incognita’.

A Sea-Change in Perspective

Part of Ptolemy’s map as rendered in the 15th century, before European navigators discovered a route around Africa into the Indian Ocean.

Ptolemy’s second-century Geographia was an assemblage of all known geographical knowledge at the time. Despite its profound misrepresentation of the size, location and shape of most land and water bodies, it was reproduced by cartographers up until 1482, offering a fascinating – if distorted – understanding of the planet. Many European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries relied on it as a ‘portolan’ map, for listing the ports and other features of a coast. It helped Portuguese explorers to chart the coastlines of Africa and ultimately sail around the continent to enter the Indian Ocean. It was also used by Christopher Columbus, who extended the degrees of Ptolemy’s map eastward.

Detail from Mercator’s planisphere map of 1569, showing the Caribbean islands and part of the south American mainland

Mercator’s transformational map was especially useful to mariners not only for its reliability but also because it used a cylindrical projection in which latitude and longitude lines were kept at right angles when drawn on a cylinder. The map was then unrolled to create a flat surface.

Though it still placed Europe roughly at its centre, Mercator’s projection of 1569 was one of the first to depict the size of continents with a relative degree of accuracy. Its inevitable distortions (which make countries towards the poles look bigger, reinforcing a Eurocentric view) mean it has fallen out of favour in modern times. However, in its day it was especially useful to mariners due to the consistency of its measurements and regular north-south orientation.

With the development of the printing press, the exponential growth in the availability of affordable maps, travelogues and other books and pamphlets rapidly disseminated new knowledge from overseas. As ordinary people gained access to printed material the desire to read and write – and travel – grew. By the end of the sixteenth century, at least a third of the male population of England was literate.

In Europe in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had dominated cartography along with most other areas of knowledge, crafting maps that mirrored its own biases and beliefs. The Ebstorf Mappamundi, for example, represents a world centred on Rome and Jerusalem, with Europe embraced by the body of Christ. In China, mapmakers similarly portrayed the country as by far the largest and most central territory on the planet.

It was in Baghdad that cartography saw its greatest advances, aided by inventions not yet possessed by Europeans such as the magnetic compass. Later European maps would incorporate the fruits of both Islamic and Chinese map-making improvements, especially in their representations of Asian geographies.

The rapid spread of cartographic knowledge posed a threat to vested interests other than the Vatican. In the early sixteenth century, maps based on information gathered from the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic expeditions were kept under lock and key to prevent foreign states from challenging their trade monopolies and to protect routes from rival fleets, pirates and competing merchants.

Religious Persecution: Huguenot Dispersals

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the determination of Catholic rulers in Europe to eliminate other religions led to forced confessions and conversions, often at the threat of torture and death. To escape persecution, millions of Muslims, Jews and Protestants fled to territories where they could practice their religion freely. In France, the 1598 Edict of Nantes allowed French Protestants, known colloquially as Huguenots, to practise their faith. In 1685 the bill was revoked and Huguenots were officially declared heretics. Louis XIV cancelled their right to leave the country and those who failed to convert were threatened with life imprisonment.

Well over 150,000 Huguenots managed to flee France, settling in neighbouring countries including the Netherlands, Germany and England, where their arrival helped popularise the term ‘refugee’. Many migrants from Atlantic coast communities settled in port cities such as London, Bristol and New York, while others travelled much further to British North America or the Dutch Cape Colony in southern Africa.

French engraving describing Chinese silk-making traditions, introduced to France by Catholic Jesuits and practised by Calvinist Huguenots.

Huguenots were often encouraged to settle due to their association with the French textile industry. They would later introduce silk weaving technology – itself imported from China to France – to England and Holland. In 1914 there were still 46 silk weaving workshops in the Bethnal Green and Spitalfields areas of East London. Today, one in six people in the UK are believed to be of Huguenot heritage.⁴⁹

Empires and Migration

The early modern era of exploration, exchange, invasion and domination had a profound impact on global power, trade and migration that continues to this day. The rise and fall of empires and opening of new routes led to sharp swings in demand for raw materials and labour. Adventurers, merchants, soldiers and missionaries followed each other, establishing connections across land and sea.

The development by Gutenberg of the printing process underpinned the Renaissance by allowing the ideas that were generated and rediscovered to spread more rapidly. Then as now, the new information age made certain places more important, drawing innovators to cities such as Florence and allowing for more rapid exchanges of new ideas and technologies. Migrants from afar were attracted to this famously diverse city and served to pollinate the processes of creative destruction.

Pigments such as the lapis lazuli, azurite and malachite used in many Renaissance paintings were brought by traders from the Islamic world, as were the magnetic compasses, treatises and charts that guided European voyages and the gunpowder that enabled European conquests. Migrants and their ideas energised the European Renaissance, catapulting the region and all who encountered it into a new age.

As European powers occupied new lands, they established political and administrative control to keep out potential competitors and protect their interests. The dominant powers accumulated precious metals, promoted exports and limited imports: an approach known as mercantilism. By the mid-eighteenth century, European political and economic might would extend across the globe in unprecedented fashion.

5. Slavery

Slavery is as old as recorded history … In the Mediterranean and the Middle East, slavery was a major feature of empires and societies from the Roman Empire to the nineteenth century. Wherever slavery has existed, it has almost invariably been accompanied by slave trading.

David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Some of the earliest human records testify to the forced movement of migrants against their will. Over the centuries, vast numbers of people have been transported as slaves, serfs or workers bound by different forms of unfree servitude. Although forced labour has officially been curtailed in modern times, slavery continues to exist in the form of sex trafficking and the use of violence and deception to recruit and exploit migrants.

Imperial expansion, wars, colonisation and labour-intensive means of extracting resources such as mines and plantations are among the main historical causes of slavery. But wherever in the past we find highly unequal power relations we tend to find evidence of forced labour migration.

The long shadow of this past continues to be seen in the racial divides and urban inequalities that shape our societies. Slavery has violently uprooted communities, altered cultural practices and forced together populations with markedly different backgrounds. The legacy of former slaves is still evident in languages, food, music and architecture in places far removed from where these people originated.

An Ancient Wrong

Nubian slaves waiting to be sold in Egypt. (Archaeological Museum of Bologna)

The capture and forced movement of Nubian slaves is documented in Egypt in early papyrus records and on wall reliefs carved more than 4,000 years ago. Slavery was also common throughout ancient China until the Han dynasty (206 bce to 220 ce ) began restricting the enslavement of Chinese people – while still allowing the capture of foreign slaves.

Historically, a combination of power, coercion and the ability to subjugate peoples or territory encouraged the practice of slavery, as did demand for heavy labour. The Roman Empire likely required between a quarter to half a million new slaves every year.

Emperors loved great public works. Some were useful, like the Roman aqueducts bringing fresh water to citizens, but many were vanity projects designed to assuage the gods, massage the egos of powerful rulers, impress their subjects and intimidate their enemies.

Robin Cohen, Migration

Given the extent of their territories, later Muslim empires from Spain to Afghanistan required even more forced labourers. Slaves from the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa were forced to walk across the desert into servitude in Egypt, Morocco and other north African countries, or to be transported further afield from ports on the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts.

Slavery was an outcome of extreme power imbalances between societies as well as within them. For centuries, slaves were transported from poorer parts of central Asia and Eastern Europe to Scandinavia and southern Europe, as well as to the Middle East and North Africa. In the tenth century, there were more than 13,000 Slavic slaves in Córdoba in Spain.⁵⁰ In and around Prague, Viking Rus and Muslim merchants gathered to negotiate deals for purchasing grains, animals, furs, metals – and people. Throughout Europe, ‘shackles, manacles, and locks’ as well as ‘holding pens previously thought to have been for livestock’ trace old slave routes.⁵¹

Slavery in the Mediterranean

Extensive land and maritime slave trading networks carried people across central Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and the Mediterranean as well as between different regions in sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.

During the late medieval period the Mediterranean was a particularly active trading – and raiding – ground for slavers. While some countries frowned on enslaving their own people, outsiders were typically regarded as fair game. Religious differences often formed the basis for enslaving people. It was only later, with the advent of the transatlantic trade, that race became the primary basis – or excuse – for the mass subjugation of slaves.

Even so, racial biases shaped the trade in captive humans. The largest group of slaves came from the Black Sea. Household slaves were widely used by the wealthy throughout medieval Europe. Through shipping links to their colonies abroad, Genoa and Venice became hubs for the trading of Tatar, Russian, Circassian and Balkan slaves. There is anecdotal evidence of black men working as gondoliers in Venice, while Circassian women were prized for their beauty and ‘domesticity’.

Historian Hannah Barker quotes a mother in Florence advising her son in Naples on what slave to purchase, recommending ‘one of the Tartar nation, who are rough and advantageous for long hard work. The Russians are more sensitive and more beautiful; but, it seems to me, a Tartar would be better. The Circassians have a passionate nature; although all the others have that too.’⁵²

Leonardo, son of a freed slave? (Painting by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Uffizi Gallery)

The artist Leonardo da Vinci may have been the son of a freed Circassian slave. A 1452 note from Leonardo’s father, Piero, records his emancipation of an enslaved woman by the name of Caterina. A tax return from several years later lists the names of Piero and his son Leonardo ‘born of him and Caterina’, which according to art historian Martin Kemp suggests the artist’s mother was likely to have been brought from the northwest Caucasus to Italy and freed by Leonardo’s father six months after their son’s birth.⁵³

Slaves and Slavs

Slavery has left some surprising imprints on our modern vernacular. The word itself derives via medieval Latin from the captive Slavs who were once highly prized as gifts – a Tuscan embassy once sent a collection of precious swords, dogs, birds and forty Slavic eunuchs and women to Baghdad as a token of friendship. So great was the traffic in Slavs that it also impacted the Arabic language, as Peter Frankopan observes: ‘The word for eunuch (ṣiqlabī) comes from the ethnic label referring to the Slavs (ṣaqālibī).’⁵⁴ Individuals whose ethnicity was defined somewhat loosely as Slavic – such as Armenians, Bulgarians, Circassians and Tatars – were purchased by Venetian and Genoese merchants and were highly valued in Egypt, Syria, Sicily and Spain, including for work on sugar plantations.

Between the eleventh century and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, an estimated 6 million to 6.5 million enslaved people from Central Asia and Russia were forcefully moved via Black Sea ports controlled by Genoa and Venice.⁵⁵ However, central Asians and eastern Europeans had been traded in the Islamic and Byzantine worlds for several centuries before the Genoese and Venetians arrived.

Enslaved women, regardless of the work they were purchased to do, were assumed to be freely available for sexual exploitation by their owners. In many Christian and Muslim societies, they were therefore considered automatically dishonoured. For example, in the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria enslaved women did not wear the veil.

The sultanate was itself ruled by a military caste of freed slaves who had been brought to Egypt as mercenaries (mamluk means ‘owned’). After seizing power in the thirteenth century, the Mamluks ruled large parts of the Levant, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula from Cairo until their dynasty was extinguished by the Ottomans in 1517.

Mamluk lancers, early 16th century etching by Daniel Hopfer.

The influence and authority of the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire waxed and waned along the Maghreb or ‘Barbary’ coast, where in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries feared pirates captured Europeans in raids on fishing vessels and merchant ships as well as villages and coastal towns around the Mediterranean. The captives were sold in ports such as Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, adding to the many African and Asian slaves who were sold there by Arab traders. Estimates of the number of Europeans captured by Barbary corsairs vary enormously, from the tens of thousands to as many as 1.25 million people.⁵⁶

Religion and Slavery

One reason for the initial popularity of Slavs, Bulgars, Rus, Tatars and other pagan peoples of northeastern Europe as slaves is that they were neither Christian nor Muslim and so more acceptable to traders and owners in the Mediterranean. Yet the profit motive often trumped religious principles. As Hannah Barker points out, most ‘Slavs’ had converted to either Christianity or Islam by the late thirteenth century. ‘Nevertheless, Christian Italians continued to buy Christian Russians, and Muslim Egyptians continued to buy Muslim Tatars.’⁵⁷ During the Atlantic slave trade, similarly, shared religion did not stop Europeans enslaving Christian Africans. Conversion was even used to justify the practice. Slave owners could convert those they enslaved to their own religion and, in so doing, claim they were bringing people closer to the ‘right’ way.⁵⁸

The Atlantic

The European voyages of expansion set the stage for centuries of brutal exploitation of indigenous African and other populations, during which the barbarism inherent in slavery reached industrial levels.

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had greatly restricted the traffic in slaves from the Balkans and southern Russia into the northern Mediterranean, increasingly diverting them into Muslim markets. Yet even as this source of slaves was drying up, demand for cheap forced labour was growing rapidly. It was to Africa that slavers would turn.

The Europeans did not bring the practice of slavery to the continent. Sub-Saharan Africans and North African Berbers had been traded by Arab and other conquerors for centuries. Nevertheless, the transatlantic slave trade that began in the late fifteenth century stands out in shocking ways.

What made slavery in Africa and the Caribbean so visible was the low population density in Africa and the intensity of the plantation economy in the Caribbean and coastal Brazil.

Leo Lucassen, The Story of Work

The brutal slave trade that came to dominate the Atlantic was uniquely commercialised and racialised – with blackness as a key point of identification for enslavement. Over the course of just a few centuries, an estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans were transported across the ocean to the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the passage.⁵⁹ The initial number of captives was much higher. Many were killed resisting capture, died on long forced marches or succumbed to the dreadful conditions in the holding prisons before departure.

Slavery and Sugar

Funchal coat of arms showing five sugar loafs, flanked by the sugar cane and vines that were the source of Madeira’s wealth.

Sugar cane was central to the slave trade, and vice versa. The harvesting of cane is particularly arduous, with cane cutters having to stoop, cut and carry cane stalks in intense heat and humidity from dawn to dusk. It was the ready availability of slaves that made the labour-intensive cultivation of sugar cane plantations in new lands so lucrative. First cultivated for export on various Pacific islands, sugar had moved westward throughout Asia and eventually the Middle East before filtering into the Mediterranean between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when Italians set up sugar plantations on the islands of Cyprus, Crete and Sicily. The Portuguese, Spanish and Genoese then carried production to the islands of Madeira, the Canaries, the Cape Verde archipelago and São Tomé before exporting this model across the Atlantic. All these plantations depended on – and became indelibly associated with – enslaved labour. A full 80 per cent of African captives were taken to sugar-growing areas in the Caribbean.⁶⁰

Long before Europeans began to dominate the slave trade in the sixteenth century, African slaves had been sold by Arab traders to serve in European households. In 1550, enslaved Africans made up 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon. Along the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain large numbers of African slaves were forced into domestic service.⁶¹

The Europeans who enslaved Africans drew on Arab traders’ experiences of acquiring and transporting slaves from across the continent.⁶² This included the knowledge that some African kingdoms would sell slaves, either through the coercion of people captured in warfare or the sale of some of their own people, to augment their treasuries and increase their power. The ports where slave traders were active were widely known, and so too were the techniques that had been developed to cram the maximum number of manacled slaves into specially adapted ships.

By the sixteenth century the west African coast was becoming the primary point of departure for enslaved Africans. The vast majority – up to 90 per cent – of these slaves ended up in the Caribbean and Brazil. Some of the busiest ports in this trade system included Rio de Janeiro, Kingston in Jamaica, Havana and Salvador da Bahia. Charleston, the most important port in what is today South Carolina in the United States, was only one of the top twenty arrival points.

The Atlantic Trade Triangle

Adapted from Eltis & Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The shipment of enslaved Africans was part of a triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Europeans transported guns and ammunition, knives, swords, tools and iron implements, metal cooking pots and pans, cotton cloth, alcoholic drinks, colourful glass and ceramic beads and other manufactured goods to coastal Africa to exchange for humans. Slaves were chained and marched onto ships for the Atlantic crossing, with those who survived the journey being forced to work in plantations growing sugar, cotton, cocoa, tobacco and other tropical products, which were then exported to Europe.

Good relations with coastal African rulers were fundamental to the trade. Gifts were exchanged and captains often invited local leaders aboard their vessels. At times, more direct forms of payment were made and, less frequently, Europeans raided coastal villages themselves to try to take captives.

The European powers profoundly changed power relations in Africa. The firearms traded to coastal rulers for slaves greatly increased their military power, enabling them to build their wealth – and further feed the slave trade – by extending their territory deep into the interior. The expanding power of the Yoruba, Asante, Dahomey and Chokwe kingdoms between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries derived in no small part from the wealth and military might derived from the growth of the Atlantic slave trade. As slaves were captured and brought from ever greater distances, the migrant origins of African slaves grew to encompass most of the continent.

Vulnerable groups along the West African coast would often attempt to escape enslavement or hide from attack. In places such as Senegal and Gambia, people would evade slave raids by taking refuge in mangroves and other remote areas. Mangroves would become a refuge from slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, as runaway communities of fugitive slaves in Brazil – quilombos – established themselves in the relative safety of these inhospitable places while in North America groups of ‘maroons’ sought refuge in the swamplands of the American South.

The Crossing

Despite the horrors of the passage, even more deaths – an estimated 4 million people – are likely to have occurred before embarkation.⁶³

Andrew Sluyter, Death on the Middle Passage

Death plagued the transatlantic journey from beginning to end. Many people were killed even before reaching the coast as they attempted to resist capture. Captive slaves faced long and arduous forced marches to embarkation points where they were held in storage dungeons prior to departure. Those who did not succumb to the diseases rampant in the cramped cells filled with human ordure faced hellish slave quarters on ships, where captives were often given ‘less room than a body in a coffin’.⁶⁴

Starvation, dehydration and disease meant that almost two million slaves are estimated to have died while making the crossing, their bodies tossed overboard. That the slave traders devised a system that took such a terrible human toll reflects not only their gross inhumanity but also just how cheap and plentiful the supply of slaves was.

Engraving of a slave ship, 1789

Even for those who survived the voyage, life expectancy was horribly short. In the words of an eighteenth-century Antiguan farmer, it was widely considered ‘cheaper to work slaves to the utmost, and by hard face and hard usage, to wear them out before they became useless, and unable to do service; and then buy new ones to fill up their places’.⁶⁵

Four in every ten enslaved Africans destined for the transatlantic voyage were women, while about one in five were children.⁶⁶ In the brutally matter-of-fact words of a plantation owner, ‘in light of the low survival rate of infants, the loss of work to pregnancy by females, and the expense of feeding and clothing children before they could contribute much to the plantation, the gain from reproduction cannot be great,’ so there was little point in encouraging it.⁶⁷

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

‘O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you—Learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?’⁶⁸

Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in what is now Nigeria. At the age of 11 he was enslaved and transported to the West Indies and then Virginia, where he was eventually renamed Gustavus Vassa by a British officer. Years later he bought his freedom and began travelling widely, including on an exploratory voyage to the Arctic. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, went through nine editions during his lifetime and contributed greatly to the abolitionist cause:

‘At last we came in sight of the island of Barbados, at which the whites on board gave a great shout, and made many signs of joy to us. We did not know what to think of this; but as the vessel drew nearer we plainly saw the harbour … Many merchants and planters now came on board, though it was in the evening. They put us in separate parcels, and examined us attentively…

‘We were not many days in the merchant’s custody, before we were sold after their usual manner, which is this: On a signal given (as the beat of a drum), the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehension of terrified Africans … In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again.’

From ‘Nocturnal Dances’ to Revolution

Saint Domingue on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola became an economic powerhouse during the slave trade of this period. It produced sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao – all highly prized in Europe – and exported them in such quantities that they were soon worth more than the exports of Brazil and Mexico combined. As a result, by the 1780s Saint Domingue had become the ‘single main destination’ of the Atlantic slave trade.⁶⁹

There are early indications of unruliness and resistance among those enslaved on Saint Domingue, as well as paranoia among white colonists. Two thirds of the 15,000 inhabitants of the town of Cap-Français were slaves, and the Sunday market would bring in as many again from surrounding plantations. A government report from 1785 voices some of the grievances of plantation owners, who complained that ‘in towns and villages … evil is spreading bit by bit … if we tolerate their nightly gatherings and gambling dens, their nocturnal dances, associations, and brotherhoods.’⁷⁰ There were also reports of strikes by slaves, short-term or collective escapes as acts of protest, and thefts from plantation stores by underfed workers.

Coffee plantation in the Caribbean, 18th-century engraving.

In 1791, unrest culminated in the Haitian Revolution. Self-liberated slaves led by the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture rose up against slave owners, who were backed by British and French forces. As my Balliol colleague Sudhir Hazareesingh has vividly shown in his book Black Spartacus, the repercussions of the insurgency would be felt throughout the Americas. The revolution succeeded in establishing the independent state of Haiti, the first free country made up of African descendants, inspiring resistance and abolitionist movements elsewhere. In 1799, the streets of Kingston in Jamaica echoed to the lyrics:

‘One, two, tree,

All de same;

Black, white, brown,

All de same:

All de same.’⁷¹

In Venezuela, the news of Toussaint Louverture’s victory in Saint Domingue led to free and enslaved black communities singing ‘Look to the firebrand’ and ‘They’d better watch out!’⁷²

Escape From the South

As the ripples spread from the Caribbean revolt, the Atlantic trade from Africa was officially outlawed by Congress in 1808. Even so, the domestic slave trade continued to distribute enslaved Africans throughout the South. This traffic would continue well into the late nineteenth century and displace at least another 1.2 million men, women and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America.⁷³

Many enslaved African Americans attempted to escape to freedom to the northern states through an informal network of secret roads and safe houses known today as the Underground Railroad. Among those who helped were ‘maroon’ communities of former escapees, as well as abolitionists and indigenous Americans. Escaped slaves often came together to form isolated communities, usually in remote swampland, forests and mountains where they hoped to evade recapture.

Maroon States

‘Maroon states’ outside North America included the Palmares in Brazil as well as the Berbice region in Guyana, where escapees from Dutch plantations settled. In Saint Domingue before the revolution, runaway slaves were common. One newspaper advertisement was posted seeking information on a runaway whose partner was known to be a Voodoo priest:

‘Magdelaine, creole, about twenty-nine years old, extremely black, skinny, tall, and pock-marked. Has been missing about three months, presumed to have been lured away by the slave Hyacinthe of Mr. Ducoudray, with whom she has relations. She has free relatives in Port-au-Prince and Petit-Goâve, where she is from. She is in the habit of dressing up as a man and passing herself off as free.’⁷⁴

Death of Capt. Ferrer of the Amistad, June 1839. (New York Public Library)

An estimated one in ten slave ships experienced revolts, with at least twenty-six successful attempts recorded.⁷⁵ During a revolt in 1839 on the Amistad, a vessel transporting fifty-three enslaved Africans from Havana, slaves killed the captain and took control of the ship. After sailing on to the United States the escapees were arrested. Their case went to the Supreme Court where, as the international slave trade was now illegal, they were ultimately freed, many returning to Africa.

The abolitionist cause faced many setbacks. In 1850, the US government passed the controversial Fugitive Slave Act. The legislation criminalised those fleeing slavery as well as those who aided them, offering rewards and at times even requiring citizens to assist in capturing fugitive slaves, even if they had reached so-called free states.

Beyond the Atlantic: Slavery in Asia

Between 1500 and 1900 as many as 30 million sub-Saharan Africans were captured and enslaved, including those who were forced to work in Africa or died before embarking on slave ships.⁷⁶

Slaves had been transported across the Indian Ocean long before the Atlantic slave trade began, and they continued to be bought and sold in the eastern hemisphere long after the trade to the Americas was abolished. In total, more slaves were probably transported across the Indian Ocean over the centuries than across the Atlantic routes.

The slave trade from Africa’s east coast fed a market stretching from Cairo in the west through Ceylon to Malacca and beyond in the east. Many of the slaves imported into India were of Turkish and Slavic origin, while Indians were simultaneously exported to Japan, Indonesia and South Africa.

Compared with the relatively rigid world of Atlantic slavery, there were many more forms of forced labour in the Indian Ocean region. Slaves were used for a greater range of jobs and bound by a broader diversity of contracts and types of coercion, including different forms of domestic servitude, agricultural labour and mining. Some enforced labourers could even hope to see social mobility over their lifetimes.⁷⁷

Regions could be both importers and exporters of slaves, while land routes were at least as important as maritime ones. Many of the slaves transported across the Indian Ocean were not from Africa: Malay slaves, for example, were forced to work in the Dutch colony in the Western Cape of South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Regulation and Abolition

The slave trade was probably the first sea voyage that European governments made continued and prolonged attempts to regulate.

Herbert Klein, ‘Transoceanic Mortality’

Due to mounting pressure from abolitionists, resistance movements and the press, the slave trade came under increasingly intense scrutiny in the capitals of a supposedly Enlightened Europe. To assuage this growing criticism, new laws sought to dictate the carrying capacity of slave ships and the provisions they held, as well as the availability of on-board medical care. In Britain, for example, the Dolben Act of 1788 mandated the presence of surgeons and provided bonuses for crew on ships with low mortality rates.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the British, French, Portuguese and American navies were patrolling the Atlantic to enforce a more outright prohibition on slavery. Following the American Civil War (1861–65), gradually, unevenly and often in the face of stubborn resistance, enslavement was curtailed and other forms of coerced labour, together with new waves of European migration, came to take its place.

The prohibition of slavery and collective attempts at enforcing bans were early expressions of an international rules-based order. Besides the legal protection of human rights, they also establishing precedents for whether countries had the right to interfere in the affairs of another sovereign state. To escape scrutiny by European regulators, slave ships illicitly flew Argentinian, Sardinian, imperial Russian and Confederate flags, a practice that remains prevalent in the avoidance of sanctions today.⁷⁸

Officially sanctioned or tolerated slavery would persist well into the modern era. In 1970, Oman became the last of the Gulf states to abolish slavery. Mauritania was the last country in the world to do so officially, in 1981.

‘Making the Foreign Familiar’

Slavery left an indelible trace in languages across the Americas. Traders and landowners separated people with common origins to undermine solidarity and prevent resistance. Over time, new types of pidgin, creole and other hybrid vernaculars emerged among these isolated communities, as well as entirely new languages such as Gullah in South Carolina. Wherever they went, African slaves added ‘their own intonation, vocabulary and sometimes even syntax to English, Dutch, Spanish or French, thus making the foreign familiar’.⁷⁹

Languages reflect these centuries of conquest, colonisation and enslavement. Indigenous Americans spoke a tapestry of hundreds of languages before the arrival of European settlers. Over time different groups developed their own pidgin forms of English as a means for natives and settlers to communicate. But these hybrid tongues have existed throughout history wherever cultures have collided or coalesced, from the original lingua franca of the Middle Ages – a European pidgin combining Italian, French, Greek and Arabic – to Nigerian Pidgin and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea.

6. Coercion and Control

Historical records suggest that coerced labour has been the most dominant mode of labour transaction all the world over and in all ages. Conversely, free labour – labour-power obtained through free consent of the labourer, without involving psychological or physical coercion – has been the road less travelled.

Caf Dowlah, Foundations of Modern Slavery

Slavery is the most extreme version of the many different forms of coerced labour for which people have been forced to migrate. The line between free and unfree employment is often blurred. Similarly, there are subtle differences between the various types of coercion such as indentured or bonded labour, which may vary further among different cultures.

While slavery stands out from the historical record, there is a paucity of recorded evidence for other kinds of unfree labour. Even when documents exist, the underlying motives for employment may not be clear. A ‘voluntary’ legal contract doesn’t necessarily mean a worker hasn’t been coerced, for example: they may well have been forced to sign it. Clearly in the past people often had no choice as to whether to migrate for work or not, and this continues to be the case.

Feudalism and Serfdom

In the Americas, Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes established feudal labour institutions – encomiendas, haciendas and latifundia¹ – that relied on the forced recruitment of local peoples for agriculture and mining. Under these sixteenth century systems, indigenous families across the Caribbean and South and Central America were typically tied to working estates and their owners.

Under the repartimiento labour system introduced in Spanish America and the Philippines, as well as the similar mita system in Peru, indigenous people were similarly transported to live and work in mines, plantations or other public works. These forms of forced labour had many characteristics in common with slavery, as they bound workers to their all-powerful employers and placed them in abysmal living conditions with the constant threat of severe punishment and negligible rights. They often served as a foundation for the mass transport of African slaves across the Atlantic.

Long before colonialism, forms of serfdom and feudalism had existed not only in Europe but throughout Asia as well, in China, Japan and India. They were often accompanied by severe restrictions on mobility. Serfs were tied to an estate and allowed to move only if they abided by certain contractual obligations, which were often impossible to meet.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Russian state instituted a new system of internal passports that permitted seasonal migration with landlords’ consent. This temporary migration or Otkhodnichestvo – from an old Russian term for ‘departure’ – became an important source of urban labour through the nineteenth century, when working peasants were able to leave the rural estates to which they were bonded for short periods, to engage in seasonal or other work.

Indentured Labour and Colonialism

Imperial and colonial powers have historically used forced labour migration as a tool to expand into new territories. From the Romans to the Ottomans and the Ming Dynasty to the Mughal Empire, migrant labour had been a vital component of the imperial economy and a means of projecting power abroad.

European colonialism was no different. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as settlers colonised the Americas as well as large parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, indentured workers were commonly used in colonial plantations, homes and enterprises. This was not a recent innovation. Though strongly associated with migration in this period, the practice of indentured labour – in which a person is bound by contract to an employer, often without salary – had existed for much longer in many parts of the world, including pre-colonial Asia and pre-imperial Britain.

Average slave and indentured labour imports into the Caribbean and Mascarenes between 1810 and 1920. (From Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism by David Northrup)

Across Europe, rapid population growth had led to more people seeking work. Higher prices due to rising demand and food taxes forced peasants off the land, leading to further poverty. In desperation, many people took up the offer of a passage to newly established American plantations.

In return for the transatlantic voyage, accommodation and food, these migrants were often locked into a contract with a single employer for a lengthy and often uncertain duration. Indentures bound employees within a tight net of restrictions, including a prohibition on seeking employment elsewhere or remaining in the Americas after their contract ended. In many cases a notional wage was deducted to pay for the passage, accommodation and food, creating a system of debt bondage and servitude from which labourers seldom escaped.

‘Do Not Forget Me’

Richard Frethorne arrived in Virginia around Christmas in 1622 on a ship that carried passengers and armour but little food, settling on a plantation that had recently been attacked by Native Americans. As a poor English boy he had been indentured at the age of 12 by his parish which, under provisions in the 1601 Poor Law, could put children whose parents received poor relief to work as indentured workers. Richard Frethorne’s letters begging his parents to find the means to pay off his indenture or send him food give a glimpse of what life was like for the thousands of parish-indentured children who were sent to Virginia, Bermuda, Barbados, Saint Kits, Massachusetts and other English colonies:

‘I have nothing to comfort me, nor is there nothing to be gotten here but sickness and death, except that one had money to lay out in some things for profit. But I have nothing at all … My cloak is stolen by one of my fellows, and to his dying hour [he] would not tell me what he did with it; but some of my fellows saw him have butter and beef out of a ship, which my cloak [no doubt] paid for. So that I have not a penny, nor a penny worth, to help me to either spice or sugar or strong waters, without the which one cannot live here … I am not half a quarter so strong as I was in England, and all is for want of victuals; for I do protest unto you that I have eaten more in [one] day at home than I have allowed me here for a week.’⁸⁰

A Convenient Alternative

The use of indentured labour ebbed and flowed over the centuries, declining in some parts of the Americas when enslaved Africans became a cheaper and more widely available source of labour. As the practice of slavery was gradually eradicated on moral, economic or political grounds, indentured servitude often took its place.

Asian and African workers in particular were pressed into this conveniently legal alternative to slavery, often under duress or through deceit. Indeed, in the immediate post-slavery period, indentured labourers often found themselves under the control of the very same people who until recently had owned slaves. Needless to say, their attitudes and practices had not changed much overnight.

For employers, indentured Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Javanese and Melanesians had many advantages over enslaved Africans, not least due to their familiarity with the indenture systems that existed in Asia. Questions of consent aside, the establishment of a legal contract system was also more politically and socially acceptable to colonial empires, while barely increasing and often reducing the costs of moving indentured labourers in comparison with slaves.

Faster and more reliable ocean – and later rail – transport of seasonal workers also reduced reliance on permanent labour, reducing the cost to employers of year-round servitude. The British, French and Dutch mobilised millions of people from across the world for work in their plantations and other colonial enterprises. Between 1834 and 1941, an estimated 12 million to 37 million people worked on indenture contracts.⁸¹

Adapted from David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism

A Myriad of Cruelties

The road from slavery to freer forms of labour was long, tortuous and took in many forms of coercion in between. In various parts of the world, a variety of labour systems coexisted, ranging from contract work to forms of debt bondage that could ensnare generations of the same family.

Nor was it always a one-way street. In some places freer forms of labour preceded more unfree ones. On Cuban plantations, for example, Chinese indentured workers worked alongside slaves as part of a mixed system, while in Hawaii indentured servitude existed without the presence of any slave labour.

In the mid-seventeenth century, people in indentured servitude accounted for a quarter of all transatlantic migrants, their numbers rising considerably in the century to come.⁸² Systems of forced labour and recruitment came to be known by different names around the world, in ways that sometimes reflected the grim nature of recruitment and transportation as well as the attitudes of those involved: blackbirding in the South Pacific, the pig trade in China and the coolie trade in India.

When debt bondage became hereditary it was almost impossible to distinguish it from slavery.

Jan Lucassen, The Story of Work

At times, as Lucassen says, it is hard to tell many of these forms of indentured labour apart from overt slavery. Debt bondage, for instance, could result from coercion through fines or kidnapping, or from a voluntary decision to secure credit in advance of one’s work.

After the official abolition of slavery, the British, Spanish, Belgian, French and Portuguese colonial empires intensified their use of forced labour. In Congo, King Leopold II of Belgium carved out his own ‘private fiefdom where Congolese were compelled to collect rubber’ under the threat of extreme violence. Villagers were set quotas of rubber and if they failed to meet them hostages were shot or mutilated, gendarmes collecting severed hands as a tally to avoid expending bullets.

Elsewhere, European empires conscripted colonial subjects into their armies and navies. The French ‘greatly relied on troops recruited in their colonies to police their empire’. After subjugating Madagascar in the late nineteenth century, they obliged the local populace to work on public projects and support the military.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indentured migrants built the roads, bridges, railroads, ports and canals of empires, particularly the British empire. Chinese railroad workers also connected the western states of North America. Indian labourers built railways in East Africa and across the Asian subcontinent. Irish rail workers were shipped to the Americas in their thousands. Many Japanese labourers also migrated to work in Brazil, Peru, the United States and Canada, especially after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a major social and political transformation of Japan that opened the country up to the world.

American Railroads, Chinese Workers

The transcontinental railroad in the United States is often celebrated as a ‘marvel of American engineering’ and the ‘work of giants’, without crediting the Chinese workers who accounted for up to 90 per cent of the workforce on western parts of the line.⁸³ Chinese workers had been involved in railroad construction in Cuba and South

Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad.

America before being brought in for similar work in the north. They were among the millions of workers from China who in the early nineteenth century migrated under harsh and often coercive conditions across Asia and the Pacific to other countries for construction, mining and plantation work.

By 1880, Chinese railroad workers accounted for almost 10 per cent of California’s population. Even today, artefacts from China can still be found in the Utah desert along the railroad’s decaying tracks, including tea cups and soup spoons from Guangdong and opium tins stamped with the names of the shops back home that produced them.

From the 1830s until World War I, India was the largest single source of indentured migrants. Over this period as many as 6 million Indian labourers, many of them bound by indenture contracts, also went to work in Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya (Malaysia) and elsewhere.⁸⁴

Indians made up 85 per cent of the 1.5 million indentured labourers sent to British colonies, divided roughly equally between the British West Indies, Natal and Mauritius. Brij Lal notes that by this time, ‘migration was not a strange phenomenon in rural India’, where millions of illiterate Indian workers entered into contractual agreements with their recruiters by placing their thumbprint on a piece of paper before departing the country.⁸⁵

Village Hires

The kangani system, used to recruit southern Indian labour for plantations in nearby Ceylon, Burma and Malaya typified the cycle of bondage experienced by many indentured labourers. A headman, the kangani, would recruit a group of men from Indian villages when export prices for crops were high. Although the workers recruited under this system were initially considered free men, in practice they were bound to their employers through a cycle of cash advances and debt bondage. Between 1852 and 1937, 1.5 million Indians travelled to Ceylon, 2 million to Malaya and 2.5 million to Burma.⁸⁶ In Sri Lanka, the descendants of the Tamil population, many of whom were recruited as indentured labourers during the nineteenth century from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, still constitute the majority of the labour force in the highland tea plantations.

Colonial administrators enforced divide-and-rule policies, apportioning jobs and housing on the basis of origin and supposed abilities, often based on racial prejudice. From Indians in Fiji and South Africa to Chinese in Malaya and the Caribbean, indentured workers were assigned jobs and settled separately from local populations, fostering divisions across ethnic lines that helped colonial rulers maintain control. Slaves and indentured labourers from the Malay Peninsula were brought to South Africa in the seventeenth century and from the outset were defined as a separate racial category, centuries before apartheid was formally introduced in 1948.⁸⁷

Segregation between different groups of migrant workers and their families often broke down over time. In Mauritius, Chinese, French, African and Malagasy immigrants formed a creolised population. Such a blending of the cultures, languages and genes of diverse groups is to be found in many of the destinations of previously isolated migrants.

All in the Same Boat

For those who came from rural villages in India, the journeys taken for indentured work were often traumatic. Many were from the margins of society and subject to manipulative and dishonest tactics that sometimes extended to kidnapping.

In the crowded country depots and in the living quarters in Madras and Calcutta, people rubbed shoulders with those of unknown castes, something that would never have happened in the villages regulated by age-old norms and protocols of social intercourse that respected hierarchy and separation. Old adhesives of society were slowly loosening, such as the caste system. Occasionally men and women were finding partners from different social backgrounds. A sense of togetherness, of being passengers in the same boat, was slowly taking shape… Indenture was a crucible in which was forged a new society.⁸⁸

Brij Lal, Indian Indenture

The children of indentured labourers could find themselves bound in servitude to their parent’s employers, perpetuating systems of bondage and forced labour that could last for generations. Migration through labour offered a glimmer of hope for others, however. For those who belonged to the lower castes in Indian society, indenture could be an opportunity to create new lives and identities abroad. The norms and habits of home, the social significance of caste and the oppressive nature of family hierarchies faded the further they travelled and longer they spent away.

While many Indian indentured workers returned at the end of their contracts or when debts were paid off, most ended up settling permanently in the colonies, with profound effects both on the societies they now called home and the ones they had left behind. Those who remained overseas took advantage of settlement benefits provided in their contract, or negotiated residency from their new social positions, paving the way for their descendants and future waves of immigrants.

Comparing the first Indian indentured workers with later generations of Indian immigrants reveals ‘remarkable leaps in social mobility’.⁸⁹ Descendants of the workers who migrated to British colonies have reached the summit of their professions across the English-speaking world. One of many such examples is VS Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, whose grandparents were Indian indentured workers sent to Trinidad.

The Mauritian Enterprise

When the British took over Mauritius from the French in 1810, it was an island largely dependent on outside resources and a burden to the British treasury. Seeing potential, Britain created incentives to investors for the expansion of sugar cane production, but this coincided with the gradual abolition of the island’s slave labour system.

Immigrant ticket of Umoyee, who arrived in Mauritius from Madras (Chennai), 21 and single, in 1866. Additional notes on the ticket show who she married and when she died. (Adapted from Reshaad Durgahee, The Indentured Archipelago)

As an alternative, the colonial office set up quotas for the import of Indian indentured labourers, a relative novelty at the time. This led to a ‘massive inflow of labour [that] made Mauritius Britain’s premier sugar colony from the mid1840s’.⁹⁰ Between 1834 and 1912 almost half a million Indian migrants arrived in Mauritius as indentured workers.⁹¹ The ex-slaves living on the islands found their wage demands undercut by the newly arrived indentured migrants, who were obliged to work at a low wage over a fixed period of several years. While many of these workers returned to India, a significant share stayed. Today, Indo-Mauritians occupy key positions in government and business and often maintain close ties with India.

Transportation of Convicts

Just as the British did not invent slavery, they were not the first to use forced exile as a punishment, which dates back at least as far as Greece and the fifth century bce. But they were the first to use it systematically, combining banishment with the colonial project to form a pliable workforce and subjugate local populations.

In 1718, the British parliament passed the Transportation Act, formalising a system which had been operating since 1670 that provided an option of being shipped to the colonies to serve a crime. Expulsion was a form of punishment, offering a means to gain a conditional pardon for debtors, military and political prisoners, criminals and even some of those convinced of murder.

Transportation would become a common punishment for those accused of petty crimes or labelled as vagrants, struggling to make ends meet in the industrialising towns of the British Isles. Long-term imprisonment at home was more costly – and potentially more risky in the case of political prisoners – than sending them away.

Sending convicts abroad and selling their labour became the favoured and fiscally efficient option. At times, convicts were sold to private companies, who would ship and sell them at auctions abroad, supposedly for a fixed period corresponding to their sentence but often into permanent servitude. In theory, a convict was permitted to return at the end of their sentence, but because they had to pay for their own transport home, many remained trapped overseas.⁹²

Convicts had no power to decide where they were sent. While serving their sentence those sent to America were generally restricted to working on tobacco, wheat and corn fields and plantations. An estimated 340,000 convicts were sent to colonies in the Americas, Australia, French Guiana, New Caledonia and elsewhere by the British and, to a lesser extent, the French.⁹³

The Adventures of Martin Cash

Martin Cash was a convict worker who arrived in 1828 in Botany Bay from Wexford in Ireland and would go on to become a notorious bush-ranger – an escaped convict hiding from authorities in the wilderness. His autobiography was ghost-written by another former convict, James Lester Burke. Cash grew up wealthy in Ireland but shot at a man making advances at a woman they both liked. He ended up being sentenced to seven years of penal transportation.

‘On the morning after my arrival I was employed in digging a hole four feet square, and not being accustomed to manual labour, my hands were soon covered with blisters … I was then sent to break up land with a hoe in an adjoining field for the remaining portion of the day, at the close of which, I repaired to my wretched tenement, weary and dispirited.’⁹⁴

Cash would attempt to escape several times. He later arrived a free man in Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tasmania, but was sentenced for several more years of labour soon after for stealing eggs.

South Africa: The Coal Train

Following the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, South Africa became the greatest source of precious metals in the world. The mining boom was predicated on the ability to recruit growing numbers of African men and force them into arduous and dangerous work.

Collection points and routes of WNLA migrant workers. (Adapted from Robin Cohen, Migration)

The state, railways and private mining companies joined forces to bring millions of migrant labourers from neighbouring countries to the mines. As demand grew, recruitment agencies used buses and trains packed with people in rail wagons designed for coal or cattle to transport millions of workers across ever greater distances.

Set up in 1901 as a recruiting agency for migrant workers, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA, also known as ‘Wenela’) reached deep into the interior of the subcontinent. Among the most active routes were those carrying workers to South Africa from what are today Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, but recruitment also took place in Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and elsewhere.

Mining magnates and their recruiters targeted deprived areas with the collusion of colonial administrators, who aggravated the poverty of the rural peasantry by dispossessing them of their land and imposing tight controls on movement. Other forms of repression included imposing a tax for each hut or home. With few options to generate the cash required, young men were forced to go to the mines.

On board the trains and trucks of the recruitment agencies, migrants were often confined to their carriages day and night with little or no access to water, food or toilet facilities. Trains carrying mine workers were not classified as passenger trains, but treated more like freight trains. This meant that they were allowed to travel at higher speeds, did not receive priority on the tracks and did not require experienced drivers.

African labour was recruited out of sight, delivered to the industrial centres invisibly, and then made to disappear into the darkness of the underground workings of the mines before being smuggled back home, also unseen, in the middle of the night. Industrial capitalism then, as now, had an aversion to too much outside scrutiny. For white South Africans, economic progress was built on the backs of a mass of black miners who were only ‘temporarily’ present in ‘their’ cities and who remained largely out of sight until they were returned to ‘their’ homes. African workers were part of a largely invisible labour force.

Charles van Onselen, The Night Trains

Only single men were recruited, minimising the costs of housing or sustaining dependants. Conditions on the way to the mines were bad, but life in the mines was far worse. Miners were forced to work in dark, humid and extremely hot and dangerous conditions. For the most part, those who worked underground could not stand it for more than two years. Tens of thousands died, while others developed tuberculosis and pneumonia.⁹⁵

Once a contract was signed, it was often a criminal offence to resign. Recruitment agencies kept a team of investigators to track down those who broke contracts. At the mines, workers were housed near the mine shafts in male-only barracks where they slept in prison-like dormitories on rows of concrete bunks.

Under practices developed by the nineteenth century British colonial administration and entrenched after 1948 under apartheid laws, African workers were forbidden from entering cities or other places inhabited by white people, including areas reserved for white workers and supervisors in the vicinity of the mines.

‘They always cuss, and they curse the coal train, The coal train that brought them to Johannesburg’

‘Stimela (The Coal Train)’ by Hugh Masekela (1939–2018), the Grammy Award-winning South African singer, composer and trumpeter, is an evocative song about the journeys made by black migrant mine workers.

1 A latifundium was originally a Roman term for a large landed estate in the Mediterranean that typically produced grain, wine or olive oil.

7. Age of Mass Migration

In terms of the sheer number of migrants and the distances they covered, the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the start of World War I in 1914 was unlike any other. This age of mass migration was the result of unprecedented unrest, pogroms and famines as well as new opportunities created in imperial colonies. Millions of European migrants crossed the Atlantic looking for a better life in the Americas. Comparable numbers of people were also moving across southern and central Asia as well as the Pacific.

Across the Atlantic

In Europe, several factors contributed to mass emigration. Rapidly growing populations created more job seekers, with their ranks swelled by higher taxes and the erosion of rights to common land. Others fled persecution and political upheaval or sought an exodus from rural life and hunger, especially during the Great Famine in Ireland.

There were pull as well as push factors. Draws for immigrants included the emergence of new industries in the Americas and employment opportunities in the colonies. The decision to seek work or a new life abroad was eased by the fall in the price of the sea passage.

As sail gave way to steam, the new ships crossing the Atlantic became safer, more reliable and faster, taking about ten days to cross the ocean by the middle of the century, compared with several weeks on an older sailing vessel. With shipping companies competing fiercely for the growing market, crossing times continued to improve and the price of a transatlantic passage fell by 70 per cent in the late 1800s.

Friends and relatives who had already settled in the Americas made it easier to migrate. Often they could contribute to the cost of the passage and were able to help new arrivals find work and a place to stay as well as introduce them to useful contacts in their ever-growing community of expatriates.

Importantly, too, there were no visa or other restrictions for many destinations. Most governments actively encouraged migration, with states seeing their role as that of a facilitator. Passports and more pervasive controls were only introduced after World War I, when they would dramatically transform the way we think about and control migration to this day.

Reshaping Societies

The proportion of the population that left their home countries was far higher than today, as was the migrant share in many destination countries. Mass migration increased the labour force in the United States and Australia by a third, while reducing it in Europe by about one eighth. From 1850, around half a million Europeans were migrating to North America every year, with this rising to more than one million a year in the early twentieth century. In some years more than 3 million migrants crossed the ocean. Over a 65-year period, around 55 million Europeans travelled across the Atlantic to the Americas.⁹⁶

Migration patterns varied over the years. The industrial revolution in Britain and Germany led to the use of machines on farms and in cities. Many peasants pushed off the land found there were too few urban jobs to go around. As poverty and unemployment grew in the early part of the nineteenth century, so too did the attractiveness of emigration, fuelled by stories of the opportunities to be found in the Americas.

Europe’s population growth in the 19th century

Between 1800 and 1860, two thirds of migrants to the United States were from Britain, while a further 22 per cent were from Germany. From 1860 to 1920, by comparison, most of the 30 million migrants to the US came from the less industrialised countries of Scandinavia, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe. By 1920, 13 per cent of the population of the United States was foreign-born.⁹⁷

Entry to the United States remained free for Europeans and Latin Americans, but the economic depression in the 1870s led to the scapegoating of foreigners – particularly Asians – for unemployment and low wages. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act banned entry and citizenship for Chinese immigrants, reversing the free movement for all promoted since the 1860s. This first major restriction on entry to the US marks the start of racial profiling of immigrants, which further fanned fears regarding competition from Asian workers.

Although they were still a small minority among the inhabitants of the East Coast, by the 1870s Chinese migrants constituted about a quarter of the workforce in California.⁹⁸ As with many subsequent restrictions, the ban on both skilled and unskilled Asian workers caused a sharp drop in agricultural, manufacturing and mining production in the western United States, resulting in fewer job opportunities and lower wages for all employees.⁹⁹

Culinary Hierarchies

Gin Ling Way in ‘New’ Chinatown, 1930s Los Angeles. (Herman J. Schultheis/Los Angeles Public Library)

In the United States today, it is difficult to point to a single national cuisine. Over time, a hierarchy of tastes has developed, with recipes from immigrant groups that became wealthier over time gaining greater prestige. French, Italian and Japanese cooking is considered haute cuisine, while Chinese or Indian food come further down the pecking order, a tendency reflected in restaurant prices. Less ‘prestigious’ cuisines are also lumped together into reductive national labels.¹⁰⁰ Recipes from Pakistan or Nepal are often marketed as Indian to secure greater recognition.

Food has long helped migrants feel closer to home, by preserving recipes and ingredients from their past. Migrant communities may reject but also enrich the culinary cultures of their host countries, resulting in constantly evolving cuisine. Peruvian cookery has famously incorporated elements from Chinese, Japanese and African food cultures to create a fusion that reflects waves of immigration over the centuries.

Southern Europeans tended to prefer migration to South America despite the lower wages on offer, possibly due to greater similarities in food, culture and climate as well as the presence of well-established migrant communities. About half of the Italian migrants heading across the Atlantic went to South America, mostly to Argentina and Brazil.

Argentina offered financial incentives to attract European farmers and by 1920 some 30 per cent of the country’s population were foreign-born.¹⁰¹ Brazil similarly subsidised the passage of families to try to replace slaves with migrant workers and settlers, which helped it raise coffee production in the decade following abolition. By 1920, these migrants owned 16 per cent of Brazilian farmland. By 1936, four million Europeans had migrated to Brazil.¹⁰²

Although outright slavery was largely a thing of the past, European immigrants were encouraged to ‘whiten’ and ‘civilise’ the local populations. In Argentina and South Africa, immigration policies drew on pseudo-scientific racist beliefs that whites were superior to others, with these governments offering land and paying for the passage of white European migrants and their families.¹⁰³

A Virtue Made of Necessity

The age of mass migration was remarkable not just for the sheer numbers of people on the move, but also because migrants were encouraged by their host governments. The abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies in 1836 and in the US in 1865 meant that governments and employers were keen to attract voluntary migrants as well as indentured labourers.

As we have seen, however, decisions to migrate are seldom truly free. Often a combination of rising pressures eventually compels people to leave home. These forces might be economic, such as poverty and rising joblessness, or political, as was the case into the nineteenth century for Jews escaping discrimination and the horror of the Russian pogroms. In many cases it was both, as for the Irish, who suffered harsh British rule as well as impoverishment.

Ultimately, this period of mass migration entailed the movement of millions of people who were motivated by a combination of necessity, opportunity and simple curiosity. Some were driven by the desire to explore the new horizons that were opening up. Others fled from danger or because they had no choice.

Pogroms

Jewish communities in Russia and Eastern Europe suffered from new waves of targeted violence and mass killings that began around the 1880s and continued into the twentieth century. Gruesome images – as depicted in photographs, postcards and artwork – offer a stark reminder of the traumatic impact of the pogroms on Jewish communities from the Baltics to the Black Sea.¹⁰⁴ Historians Eugene Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad describe the ‘dark shadow on Jewish life’ that the term ‘pogrom’ still holds, standing as ‘a metonym for Jewish pain and suffering across the arc of a century’.

Present-day Ukraine was the site of many horrifying pogroms. One of the worst massacres happened in February 1919 in the city of Proskurov, where more than 1,500 Jews were murdered in less than four hours.¹⁰⁵ Among the deeply disturbing aspects of such pogroms was that they took place in areas where people of various backgrounds – in this case Jews, Poles, Russians, Greeks, Romanians and Ukrainians – had lived closely together and in relative harmony for generations.

Postcard reproduction of ‘Home at Last’ (1906) by M. Maimon. A Jewish soldier returns to find his wife and child murdered in a pogrom. (Blavatnik Archive)

Those who could escape the pogroms fled. Some went to Palestine, which then was part of the Ottoman Empire. My paternal grandfather’s family arrived in Cape Town after fleeing what is now Lithuania. Some of his siblings made it to the United States and Canada; another reached Buenos Aires. Argentina hosted a significant Jewish population. About 83 per cent of the 60,000 foreign-born Jews in the city’s 1936 census had fled from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Romania and Latvia. Others came from Turkey, Syria and Morocco.¹⁰⁶

Moving In Next Door

Most European emigrants went to the Americas, but not all migration in this period was long-distance. Journeys across oceans and continents tend to be more visible in the historical record, due to colourful travel accounts as well as better records. But in much of Europe, moving between countries for seasonal or temporary work was a way of life. Many transatlantic migrants would keep up these peripatetic habits, with up to a third of Italians returning home after finishing short-term contracts.

Until the 1890s, the scale of migration within Europe mirrored the numbers emigrating from Europe. People moved in search of safety, stability and opportunity. The industrial revolution led to the birth of new industries in new locations, encouraging job seekers from across Europe to migrate to these mushrooming towns and cities. Others moved to rural areas to work in mines and farms, supplying industrial raw materials and food for rapidly growing centres of activity. As urban economies grew, so too did the need to dig canals, lay roads and railways and build new steam ships and ports.

As was the case for migrants overseas, travellers within Europe often sought out places with languages, climates, foods and customs similar to their own. Belgian emigrants mainly headed to neighbouring France and the Netherlands, while almost half of the 15 million Italians who emigrated between 1876 and 1920 moved to neighbouring European countries.¹⁰⁷

Observers at the time noted how these foreigners were ‘welcomed with open arms’ and how their passage was cleared as much as possible.¹⁰⁸ All European states at the time considered free movement to be the norm. To the extent that passports existed they were mere formalities. Historian Alan Dowty describes the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as ‘the closest approximation to an open world in modern times’.¹⁰⁹

Well-Trodden Paths

At this time of relatively unfettered mobility, migrants increasingly moved on their own initiative. Friends and family abroad made migration seem more feasible as news arrived of opportunities and the achievements of those who had built a better life elsewhere. Many Europeans travelled on prepaid tickets that were financed by previous waves of migrants.

This chain migration, also known as the ‘friends and family’ or ‘network’ effect, was evident in the large numbers of people from certain regions who chose to move to the same location many thousands of kilometres away, shaping patterns of migration for generations to come. Over 90 per cent of the emigrants who arrived in the US from the Dutch province of Zuid Holland, for example, settled in Patterson in New Jersey, Nordeloos in Michigan and South Holland, Illinois.¹¹⁰

MIGRATION IN NUMBERS

Differences in emigration rates within countries were often larger than those between countries. The proportion of people leaving could vary enormously from one town to the next. In 1881 and 1882 in northern Italy, for example, people left Bologna at a rate of less than 0.1 per thousand, while the rate was 46.4 per thousand for Belluno to the northeast.¹¹¹

Historical events could lead to fluctuations in migrant numbers, often with enduring effects. The relatively low number of French migrants compared with other European nationalities during this period has been attributed to land reforms following the French Revolution a century earlier, which abolished the feudal system and serfdom and allowed peasants to remain on the land.

By the same token, a surge in Irish emigration in the late 1890s has been attributed to the famine that occurred half a century earlier. Not only did emigration continue long after the ‘Great Hunger’ had ended but the number of people leaving Ireland would eventually far exceed those who died from famine in the 1840s. The six decades that followed saw an exodus of more than 4.5 million people, a loss not reversed to this day: Ireland’s population is still smaller than before the disaster.

Huddled Masses

Statue of Liberty under construction, Paris 1884. (Albert Fernique, courtesy of Musée Bartholdi/Christian Kempf)

Ellis Island held a legendary sway over the imaginations of immigrants arriving in the United States. Gateway to the ‘land of the free’ and symbol of the melting pot of nations, the island held a processing centre for arrivals, most of whom had travelled from northern European ports such as Liverpool, Bremen, Hamburg and Glasgow. To avoid the cost of having to repatriate rejected immigrants, steamship operators often carried out medical inspections and even set puzzles and tests for passengers to make sure they were physically and mentally fit before they reached the island in New York Harbour.

Not too far off Ellis Island stands the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886, with the poem engraved at its base, ‘Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…’¹¹² As was the case for the tens of millions of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic, the statue was transported by ship. Built in Paris, it set out from Le Havre having been dismantled into 350 pieces.

Memories of Migrants Past

Ellis Island served as the gateway and inspection checkpoint for millions of migrants entering the United States up until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1954, the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital was abandoned. Artist JR revisited the national archives to create installations by pasting archival photography onto the abandoned buildings on the island.

This image shows children treated in the hospital. (Revised by JR; courtesy of the National Archives.)

The reality for new immigrants looking for work in America was not always as bright as the glowing ‘world-wide welcome’ promised by Lady Liberty’s verses. Many ended up returning home – some as success stories, others in destitution. Those who stayed often remained poor and faced discrimination. Most were compelled to adopt a ‘hyphenated identity’ as Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans and similar terms, as a way of ‘reconciling ethnic origins and national loyalties’.¹¹³

Complex racial and ethnic classifications were expressed in quotas and restrictions that privileged northern Europeans over those from the Mediterranean or Eastern Europe, who were seen by some as inferior. Non-Europeans came even further down the ladder. Many immigrants from rural backgrounds endured hardship and isolation in the new American cities, secluded from the rest of society in ghettos. For these first-generation migrants, life could be tough in the extreme.

Birds of Passage

About half of the migrants who arrived in the Americas from Europe returned to their home countries, although the proportion differed greatly by country of origin.¹¹⁴ About the same number of Spanish and Italian immigrants returned home as stayed on, compared with only 5 per cent of Russian, Irish and Scandinavian arrivals.

Some destinations attracted fewer settlers and more temporary visitors than others. About half of all migrants to Argentina returned home, compared with less than a third of those who made it to the United States. However, a significant proportion were seasonal workers whose numbers increased as the cost of the Atlantic passage declined. In Argentina these seasonal migrants, many of whom were Italians, were called golondrinas (swallows)¹¹⁵ or ‘birds of passage’.¹¹⁶ They would travel when they heard jobs were available and return home at the end of their contracts. Safer, quicker and cheaper steamship passages greatly increased their number.

Some migrants returned for good, for reasons of both success and failure. Research on pre-WWI Irish returnees from the United States suggests those who came back generally had an edge over those who never migrated at all, and may even have fared better than those who did but remained abroad.¹¹⁷ By contrast, returning Norwegian migrants in this period seem to have been worse off than their peers who remained in the United States, but upon arriving back in Norway still ended up in better-paid jobs compared with those who had never left.¹¹⁸

Poster from the 1890s advertising the popular Red Star Line shipping company.

The agents of steamship companies encouraged people to migrate, even going so far as to promise jobs that turned out not to exist and at times actively discouraging migrants from returning home. A single story of failure might ‘keep 300 more from trying’, it was felt.¹¹⁹ Agents were also known to bribe immigration officials, thereby ‘artificially inducing’ migration to the Americas.

Asia: Newfound Freedoms

Settlement remained the primary pattern for migrants in the Atlantic world. For workers from other regions, however, circulatory and temporary migration over long distances was established practice. In the Americas, Irish and Italian workers who arrived to work on the railroads or similar large construction projects found themselves living in makeshift camps alongside Chinese and other indentured labourers from Asia.

The flow of European migrants to the Americas was not the only great migration of this period, with comparable mass movements of populations from China, Russia and India into southeastern and northern parts of Asia. Over 50 million Chinese migrated in the second half of the nineteenth century, a not dissimilar figure to the numbers of migrants leaving Europe. An additional 30 million Indians headed abroad. Millions of people moved within Africa and Latin America as well.

From Bombay to Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Shanghai, emerging centres of industry and commerce were attracting workers to farms, factories and foundries, commodity exchanges and banks. The spread of steamships and railways, which were central to the mass movement of Europeans, also sped the transport of Asian and other migrants in greater numbers, while creating employment opportunities for them as they were built.

The era of forced labour migration was waning. Most of the Indians moving to British colonies in Malaysia, Ceylon and Burma now did so of their own accord, with the first groups establishing networks that assisted future waves of migrants. Less than 10 per cent were indentured labourers forced into debt bondage in order to pay for their passage.

Similarly, of the 19 million Chinese workers who migrated to Thailand, French Indochina, the Dutch Indies and the Philippines, only about 750,000 travelled on indenture contracts. Most worked for Chinese employers as wage labourers, some with the prospect of profit sharing. The development of extensive Chinese merchant networks throughout Southeast Asia helped to channel labour within the region.

As in the Americas, not all arrivals settled permanently. While many Indian migrants returned home during this period, this varied considerably between destinations. A significant share of those who went to Mauritius and eastern Africa put down permanent roots – or attempted to do so. Many African Asian families were later evicted by nationalist governments in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming ‘twice migrants’ or refugees for a second time.

Migration flows, 1846–1940 (Adam McKeown, Global Migration, 1846–1940)

Homesteading

In northern Asia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, migration was encouraged through homesteading settlement programmes run on behalf of the Russian and Chinese governments. Russia had recently emancipated serfs while the Qing government had relaxed restrictions on movement into Manchuria.

As a result of this newfound freedom, around 30 million Chinese and about 13 million Russians moved into parts of northern and central Asia, greatly expanding the Chinese and Russian populations living in Manchuria and Siberia respectively. Although both regions held opportunities in farming and industry, Chinese and Russian workers and their families were particularly encouraged by their governments to settle in order to claim and fortify these borderlands.

During this period of restless movement, Japan was at first an outlier in discouraging migration. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Meiji government was persuaded by joblessness and deflation to allow Japanese workers to migrate abroad in greater numbers, with many going to Brazil and the United States. Recruited to work on coffee, sugar and cotton plantations, they left for Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Lima, where many set up small businesses such as barbershops and restaurants.

Merchant of Landscapes: A Japanese Gardener in Mexico City

Every spring, Mexico City’s tree-lined streets erupt in purple jacaranda flowers. When the blossoms fall, the roads, parks and pavements are carpeted with violet petals.

Tatsugoro Matsumoto (Matsumoto Family Collection).

This vibrant display is all thanks to a former Japanese royal gardener.¹²⁰ Tatsugoro Matsumoto first came to Latin America in the 1880s. He was one of the first Japanese immigrants to make the journey across the Pacific freely as the new reformist government of Japan relaxed curbs on emigration. After working in Lima and San Francisco, as well as several years spent back in Japan, Matsumoto eventually settled in Mexico. In the 1930s he was working as a master-gardener for the presidential palace when President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, inspired by a trip to Washington, requested that cherry trees be planted throughout the capital.

Knowing that cherries would not blossom in Mexico City’s mild winters, Matsumoto instead proposed jacarandas, a flowering plant he had come across in Peru. Today, their purple flowers seem an indelible part of springtime in the capital, having coloured its streets for nearly a century – due to the recommendation of an immigrant gardener from Japan.

Settlement and Displacement

Migration went hand in hand with imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, as empires conquered new territories and settled their citizens in their colonies. The British empire established settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies, alongside their territories in India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa. Settlers, soldiers and bureaucrats from the core of the empire moved to these areas, bringing with them their languages and cultures.

These influences are felt to this day. English is still the language of government for up to a quarter of the world’s population. French is spoken in the former colonies and outposts of France across Southeast Asia, West Africa and the Maghreb as well as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly a Belgian colony. The past imperial power of the Netherlands is evident from the South African use of Afrikaans among the descendants of Dutch settlers and former slaves.

‘You cannot sing African music in proper English’

Fela Kuti, Nigerian musician and singer, ‘King of Afrobeat’ (1938–1997)

The colonial legacy of Britain and France in Africa shapes English and French to the present day, despite high-minded attempts by institutions like the Académie Française to patrol usage. The Afrobeat (or Afrofunk) musical genre that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s blended West African languages such as Yoruba and Igbo with pidgin English and French slang. Young Africans continue to change French ‘One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time,’ in the words of Senegalese professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who highlights how from rooftops in Abidjan to online media platforms youth are reinventing the languages of their former colonisers.¹²¹

It is no coincidence that, according to Patrick Manning, ‘the period from 1850 to 1930 was the most intensive era of migration in human history.’¹²² Colonialism and migration often perpetuated one another. Migrants could become unknowing agents of empire by virtue of their settlement, which often involved the displacement of indigenous people and earlier waves of migrants.

The consequences for those displaced were often disastrous. In the Americas, for example, the killing and forced relocation of indigenous peoples to make space for the millions of European and other arrivals to the continent is the flip side to the stories of opportunity that often illustrate this age of mass migration. From Alaska to Argentina and across Asia, global migration had two very different faces, as the historian Sucheta Mazumdar points out:

The same processes that led to Europeans leaving and arriving in these different parts of the world also affected the peoples in the lands they came to. If ethnic Han migration to Manchuria made it ‘more Chinese’, and thus a more integral part of the empire, European homesteaders in the American Midwest and West did no less for the American state.¹²⁴

8. Passports and Problems

Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without a passport and without ever having seen one.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

In the decades prior to the First World War, the view that open borders encouraged prosperity and provided a means to escape hardship began to be eclipsed by rising nationalism, chauvinism and economic protectionism. A widening variety of rules on movement were introduced which sought to control entry and exit on the basis of race, nation, age, class, religion and skills. New and more efficient bureaucracies helped to enforce them.

The global conflict of 1914–1918 greatly increased antipathy towards foreigners, bringing the age of mass migration before it to an abrupt end. Gone were the days when individuals, not states, could make decisions on where they would live and work. ‘Nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after the First World War than the restrictions on man’s freedom of movement and the diminution of his civil rights,’ wrote the Austrian author Stefan Zweig.

Vagrants, Vagabonds and Revolutionaries

States had long tried to regulate the free movement of people. In Europe, forms of documentary identification and controls on movement existed intermittently from as early as the Middle Ages. States recognised that unless they knew who their subjects were and where they lived they could not control, tax or enlist them as soldiers. If their identities were unknown, people could also more easily evade punishment of crimes.

A fourteenth-century English statute prevented ‘all but peers, notable merchants, and soldiers’ from leaving the country without a licence, on the grounds that uncontrolled travel might encourage ‘religious deviance’. In 1548, Prussia banned the circulation of ‘beggars and vagrants’, who were seen as a threat to law and order.¹²⁵ Movement of ‘gypsies and vagabonds’ was prohibited by edict in many parts of Europe, reflecting a view that nomadism and mobility were abnormal and that populations should become more sedentary.

A 16th-century English woodcut depicting a beggar and a gentleman. Poor relief and vagrancy were topics of public debate.

Seventeenth-century German laws tried to tie servants more firmly to their masters. In England, the 1662 Settlement Act prevented the poor from seeking more generous relief or work by moving between parishes. Until the 1834 Poor Law abandoned these controls, generations of families remained trapped in one place in poverty. In the years before the French Revolution, control over the movement of serfs and citizens had been ‘a vital mechanism of domination of the old regime’ and was a key grievance of French revolutionary leaders.

Yet many of restrictions that existed during these centuries were very hard to police. The use of identity documents and systems to control movement would not become prevalent until modern times. In fact, to the extent they existed at all, these controls on movement fell away during the nineteenth century as ‘useless papers to a world in prosperous motion’.¹²⁶ They were seen as outmoded relics of feudal systems, tying people to the land they tilled, or symbols of redundant mercantilist thinking, which held that the wealth of a nation was measured by its stock of capital and people rather than by what it produced and traded.

Goodbye Open Borders

Like many ‘extraordinary measures’ implemented in times of crisis – often under the guise of security – the supposedly temporary restrictions on free movement at the start of World War I became permanent features hindering migration.

From that time onwards, a growing number of countries required identity documents, passports and visas for travel. When the war ended, negotiations failed to re-open borders. Despite Japanese, Chinese and Indian demands for the free movement of labour, the new League of Nations failed to abolish the new passport system or liberalise controls on international migration.

Passports and citizen identification soon became hallmarks of the modern nation state. By the time decolonisation took place in the mid-twentieth century, passports and visas were widespread. New states followed the example of established ones. All of a sudden, people could no longer cross a border without a document that included their photograph, birthplace and nationality.

New York Times, 1914

The Times of India, 1917

Quotas, Passports and Border Controls

War, nationalism and state-building required large and elaborate bureaucracies, which were tasked with regulating migration flows. Quotas as well as passports and other new forms of border control were introduced to restrict how many people entered a country, where they come from, and what rights and resources they could access.

Political ideas of national security, culture, language and race became as influential for immigration and migrant flows as economic policies had been in the nineteenth century. States increasingly allocated citizenship rights on the basis of nationality, making it necessary to belong to a state to be officially recognised and so able to move and work.

A growing preoccupation with managing the movement of people was entwined with exclusionary attitudes based on race and ethnicity. Economic failure and other social problems were blamed on foreigners, and migration began to be seen by some as a form of deviant behaviour. Elaborate hierarchies of race, ethnicity and nation were built across Europe and its settler colonies, drawing on a misreading of Darwin’s widely publicised ideas. ‘Social Darwinism’ was used to justify establishing a highly stratified society with white northern Europeans at the apex.

The perceived threat to social order posed by immigrants, along with pseudoscientific theories of race and media-inflamed prejudices, combined to generate a growing suspicion of ‘foreigners’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These were increasingly given expression in discriminatory immigration policies, expulsions, savage pogroms and populist purges.

In 1905, Australia implemented a ‘dictation test’ which required a prospective immigrant to write down 50 words in any European language of the immigration officer’s choosing, including Gaelic. Anyone who failed the test could be deported. The test was used to enforce the recent Immigration Restriction Act, which became a cornerstone of the unofficial ‘White Australia’ policy.

The proposed ‘Americanese wall’ (Library of Congress)

Other countries tightened up their entry requirements. In 1917, France started requiring all foreigners to carry a form of identification with a photograph, indicating the bearer’s nationality and occupation. Germany and Britain introduced similar regulations to identify foreigners. The United States also policed its borders more aggressively; in 1917 it too introduced a literacy test that had to be passed by all migrants.

From No Exit to No Entry

In earlier centuries, governments had tried to control who left the country. Migration policies from the mid-1800s began to focus on who was allowed in.

States viewed – and still view – their populations as a valuable source of taxation, labour and military or economic power. Private employers similarly kept their workers close, often coercively. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some European states discouraged or forbade emigration. Feudal Japan prescribed the death penalty for those who left the country without permission.

While concerns over people leaving never went away, governments after the First World War became much more preoccupied with restricting entry. The change in attitude also reflected changes in the origins and destinations of migrants and their reasons for moving.

With the rapid growth of industry and a gradual decline in birth rates, north-western European economies became migrant destinations rather than sources of labour. While migrants had previously travelled from wealthier countries in Europe to the less prosperous regions of the world and more distant colonies, after the First World War a growing proportion of migrants came from poorer parts of southern and eastern Europe, typically moving north or embarking for Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand.

The Death Ship

The ease with which people once moved within Europe and their shock at the tightening of regulations was captured in fiction by the author B. Traven. The narrator of The Death Ship (1926) is a sailor from the United States who on leaving France shortly after World War I is surprised when asked for papers:

‘I have no passport. Nor have I any identification card of the French authorities. No immigration stamp. No customs-house seal. I have no papers at all. Never in all my life did I ever have any papers’ … ‘You ought to have some papers to show who you are,’ the police officer advised me. ‘I do not need any paper; I know who I am,’ I said. ‘Maybe so. Other people are also interested in knowing who you are.’¹²⁷

The Birth of Big Brother

In earlier centuries, private enterprises such as the Dutch East India Company and institutions such as the Church had helped to shape global patterns of migration. Identity cards and passports now allowed nation states to choose who got to come and go. By regulating the free movement of people, governments could also decide what resources, jobs and social services people had access to.

There was another, unintended consequence: large groups of people suddenly found themselves without a state from which they could derive rights and protection. The emergence of a more rigid interstate system led to the rise of stateless people and refugees.

The Nansen Passport

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent civil war in Russia sent more than 1 million people fleeing west into Europe, where governments redoubled their efforts to develop new rules and institutions to deal with the refugee crisis. To oversee the newly created category of stateless people, the League of Nations established a High Commission for Refugees (HCR) in 1921 to address what was then considered a specific and short-term problem. The HCR created ‘Nansen passports’ for stateless persons, named after Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian statesman and polar explorer who had promoted the idea. European states agreed to recognise the documents, as well as allowing temporary residence for people who could not return to their home countries. Like passports more generally, however, the League’s temporary refugee programme became permanent. Nansen passports soon began to be issued to displaced Armenians, Turks, Assyrians, Syrians and Kurds.

While wars and famine may have caused them to flee, refugees were also the product of increasingly rigid legal definitions of citizenship and impenetrable borders. A combination of state sovereignty and strict identification of citizens made ‘foreigners’ legal outsiders, as the sociologist Saskia Sassen has highlighted in her work. Refugees became a distinct, institutionalised category excluded from the rights offered to citizens. Deprived of citizenship, they became trapped in legal limbo, denied the right by many countries to work, vote, travel or access services offered to citizens.

Local vs Foreign Workers

In the interwar years, rising nationalism was coupled with protectionism. Industries that felt threatened by rival manufacturers abroad lobbied their governments to impose tariffs on imported products. Similarly, trade unions fearing competition from foreign labour sought to limit migrant numbers and curtail the rights of foreign workers to remain and access social services.

In the United States, debates around ‘Americanisation’ and immigration have driven politics for over 150 years. Under the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, an early version of the ‘guest worker’ programmes that would appear in other parts of the world, Chinese workers were given the right to work in the US – albeit under certain restrictions.

Shifting public attitudes towards foreigners were accompanied by more stringent legislation in the decades that followed. In 1882, the US passed laws curbing the entry of Chinese workers, as well as those perceived to pose potential threats to ‘national interests’, including ‘convicts, lunatics, idiots, and persons likely to become public charges’.¹²⁸

Immigration policy became more centralised under institutions dedicated solely to the task of identifying and preventing the entry of a growing list of people deemed unsuitable for entry. The Immigration Act of 1924 charged American consuls overseas with administering quotas, including submitting applicants to financial checks and medical examinations before issuing visas.

In practice, the legislation extended the reach of border control to other countries, allowing the United States to restrict entry long before prospective migrants embarked in Europe or elsewhere. This was framed as benefitting travellers and protecting them from having to sell their possessions before attempting futile journeys. As immigrants increasingly attempted to cross into the US by land as an alternative to arriving by sea or by air (planes began to carry commercial passengers soon after the First World War ended) the US Border Patrol was created in 1924.

Pilgrimage Passports

Hajj railway tax stamp. The Hejaz railway transported pilgrims from stations in Syria and the north to pilgrimage sites in the south.

For centuries, making the hajj to Mecca at least once in their lifetime had been a customary practice for Muslims. An increase in maritime traffic and improvements to rail and road links led to a surge in pilgrim numbers in the late nineteenth century, particularly on routes from British India and across the Ottoman Empire.

Both empires sought to establish visa and passport regimes that would regulate this movement. The hajj was big business. While purporting to protect the safety and security of pilgrims, the imperial authorities and their shipping industries tried to ensure they only travelled on ‘approved’ vessels and routes. As ticket costs rose, poorer pilgrims were essentially priced out of the journey. By controlling who was admitted, authorities sought to pick and choose pilgrims, excluding those they regarded as a threat or undesirable.¹²⁹ Preventing the spread of epidemic diseases such as cholera or plague was often cited as a reason.

Passports and visa regimes were still a work in progress. Attempts by British and Ottoman authorities to regulate movement across their territories fell short of expectations. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had tried to introduce a series of measures requiring travellers to carry passports and official documents of passage, similar to modern visas. It was claimed this allowed authorities to distinguish between people travelling for legitimate reasons, such as pilgrimage, trade or work, and those engaged in undesirable activities such as smuggling or vagrancy.

Early photo of the hajj, Mecca, 1888. (al-Sayyid ´Abd al-Ghaffar/British Library) and a ‘Mecca Pilgrimage Ticket’ from T. Cook & Son.

Whatever its aims, the policy flopped. Travel documents could only be issued by Ottoman consuls, and no Indian port except Bombay had an Ottoman consulate where pilgrims could apply for entry from one empire to the other. In practice, when pilgrims showed up for their journey without visa or passport, they were generally admitted.

In 1886, the British colonial rulers of India authorised Thomas Cook & Son to be the ‘official travel agent of the hajj’. This created a formally sanctioned monopoly over the transport of pilgrims and ceded responsibility for the control of pilgrims to a private firm.¹³⁰ The outsourcing and privatisation of border control set a precedent that continues to this day. Increasingly complex and often hazy systems of control allowed private sector operators to draw on the authority and information systems of states to manage migration.

Brokers, Traffickers, Smugglers

Early passports and visas rarely lived up to their promise. Border authorities lacked the infrastructure and international cooperation needed to ensure they were an effective means of control. For the same reason, travel documents also failed to guarantee the rights of travellers to go where they pleased.

Where state controls failed, private operators stepped into the gap. Before the twentieth century, brokers frequently helped recruit, finance and transport migrants and put them in contact with prospective employers. The proliferation of regulations and controls in the past century has only increased the role of these intermediaries.

States often claim that their aim is to protect migrants from being exploited by unscrupulous go-betweens. But far from being eliminated, brokers have become ever more powerful intermediaries, many helping migrants to navigate an increasingly complex maze of regulations.¹³¹ They also come in the form of traffickers, smugglers and other opportunists, whose existence is in many ways a direct consequence of the imposition of tougher border controls.

Restrictions seeking to limit entry were introduced as early as the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century that much tighter, widespread border regulations became the norm. The sense of crisis created by World War I spurred and legitimised more stringent controls as foreigners came to be viewed with mistrust and suspicion. States armed and fortified their borders and the liberalism of the nineteenth century gave way to protectionist tendencies which persist to the present day.

9. Wars, Mass Mobilisation and Expulsions

A war in Europe … must necessarily set the whole world ablaze.

F. H. Grautoff, 1906

The World Ablaze

By 1914, the whole of Africa was under European control, with the exception only of Ethiopia and Liberia. Great Britain and France controlled the largest colonial empires, which became an invaluable source of soldiers and workers on the outbreak of war.

Britain recruited approximately 1.5 million Indian subjects into its war effort, with another 1.3 million coming from the dominions. New Zealand’s overseas contribution of 100,000 men aged 15–49, of whom about 5,000 were killed, was one of the most significant within the British empire relative to its very small population.¹³²

More than half a million Africans were recruited as soldiers during the First World War, with at least 350,000 serving as combatants in Europe. The rest served in Africa itself. In addition, another 252,000 Africans were recruited from across Africa to serve as labourers in Europe. Around 1.5 million worked in Africa as porters or in other support roles in the armies of their colonial rulers.¹³³

It is estimated that more than 85,000 African soldiers lost their lives in the conflict, and that around 200,000 porters died on their gruelling, long forced marches from exhaustion and disease. The combined African losses exceed the total number of Canadian, Australian and Indian troops who lost their lives in the Great War.¹³⁴

Sinking of the SS Mendi

More than 1,700 black South African servicemen died in WWI after being recruited to undertake non-combat roles. A third of these recruits drowned in a single disaster in 1917 when the SS Mendi steamship taking them to France sank in the English channel following an accidental collision with another troop carrier.

The SS Mendi sank on 21 February 1917 with the loss of 30 British and Sierra Leonean crew and 616 troops, most of them men of the South African Native Labour Corps (SANLC)

None of the soldiers would have seen action had they survived. Africans who volunteered for service were not permitted to take on combat roles, reflecting the racist views of the South African government, who feared that weapons would empower them. Instead they were given menial jobs, starting with swabbing the decks and peeling the potatoes on the ships that took them to Europe. In 2024, their sacrifice was finally commemorated with the creation of memorial garden in Cape Town.

France recruited half a million colonial troops to join the 90,000 soldiers already mobilised in its colonies before the war. The new recruits included about 166,000 West Africans, 46,000 Madagascans, 50,000 Indochinese and around 211,000 Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans, most of whom served in Europe.¹³⁵

Britain and France also recruited nearly 140,000 Chinese contract workers in non-combatant roles in a dedicated labour corps, which freed troops for fighting. In France, Chinese workers served as technicians for locomotives, tanks, power and pumping stations and in port construction. It was said that in French ports at the top of almost every crane sat a Chinese worker.¹³⁶

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps in Europe in WW1 (Chatham House)

Erased Identities

The migrants who served during and between the wars as combatants, auxiliaries or labourers were often subject to discrimination. Wartime nationalism fed off prior prejudices and segregation based on race, class and social status. This not only applied to foreign troops but also to people of colour who served as soldiers, such as the 400,000 African American troops, about half of whom served in the US army in Europe.

While often segregating them, governments also encouraged migrants to become more like locals, by discarding their prior identities and assimilating into whatever was considered mainstream culture. ‘Americanisation’ programmes taught migrants English and ‘American’ ways. The different peoples of the greater Russian empire were similarly ‘Russified’ by giving up their own languages and cultures, often through more forceful subjugation than in the United States.

Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

Attempts to create homogeneous societies have led throughout history to the attempted extermination of entire populations, as was the case with the systematic killing of Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the killing of Jews, Roma people and others during the Holocaust of World War II and the mass murder of Tutsi and other people during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. In a grim echo of how the policies of Russification under the Soviet Union have continued, the United Nations Human Rights Commission in early 2024 documented the removal to Russia of over 240,000 children from the occupied areas of Ukraine and their forced transfer to Russian schools and assimilation into Russian society.

Despite the racism many migrants encountered, wartime mobilisations also led to ‘unprecedented interracial and cross-cultural encounters, experiences, and intimacies’.¹³⁷ Besides Europe, Indians were also sent to the Middle East while East Africans were recruited for campaigns in North Africa. One black South African labourer was reported to have said that the most remarkable part of his war experience was ‘to see the different kinds of human races from all parts of the world’.¹³⁸

Far from being mere ‘sideshows in the grand European narrative of the war’, the distant communities from which colonial troops were enlisted were vital to the war effort. For many the conflict was a profound and at times emotionally shocking experience.¹³⁹ In villages across Africa and Asia, hundreds of thousands of people on what was called the ‘colonial homefront’ lost husbands, brothers and fathers.¹⁴⁰

Vietnamese were recruited by France to serve as soldiers in Europe and work in its factories, hospitals, farms and construction sites. In addition, almost 50,000 Vietnamese soldiers and a similar number of workers from Vietnam were sent to Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. The French government housed many colonial workers in guarded barracks, to which they were confined in the evenings. Despite attempts to limit social contact, some met and married French women.¹⁴¹

‘The world’s fiercest mercenaries’

Gurkhas in action with a 6-pdr anti-tank gun in Tunisia, 16 March 1943. (IWM)

In Britain and France, the idea that there were naturally ‘warlike’ races (races guerrières) influenced who was sent to the battlefront and who was assigned auxiliary tasks behind the lines, such as transport or farm work. European generals were particularly taken with the so-called ‘martial races’ of the Nepalese Gurkhas and Punjabi Sikhs. Since the nineteenth century, soldiers from these groups had played a vital role in enforcing and defending colonial rule.¹⁴² More than 200,000 Gurkhas were enlisted to fight for the British in World War I, of whom at least 20,000 died.¹⁴³ The notion of martial races would persist in popular culture. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. News & World Report suggested recruiting the Gurkhas, the ‘world’s fiercest mercenaries’, for a UN rapid reaction force: ‘Let’s hire the nerves-of-steel warriors who defended the Raj to do the world’s dirty work in Bosnia and Rwanda.’¹⁴⁴

The Interwar Years: America

Of the 200,000 or more African Americans who served in Europe, those who survived returned to a country that was changing rapidly. From the 1920s, US immigration policy began to curtail incoming migrants from Europe, who increasingly came to be seen as a threat to American values and identity.

Migrant labourer picking cotton, California, 1938. Jobs remained limited for black workers in poor and rural areas of the US. (Dorothea Lange/Getty Museum)

At the same time, the quickening pace of industrialisation required more workers. Not coincidentally, many African Americans were moving northward during this period in what historians have called the first ‘Great Migration’. Fleeing segregation, lynching and the harsh economic conditions of the South, many found jobs no longer filled by European immigrants.

Within decades of the end of the First World War, Detroit’s black population had grown by 611 per cent, Cleveland’s by 308 per cent, Chicago’s had more than doubled and New York’s had increased by 66 per cent.¹⁴⁵ Profound changes to the racial composition of cities across the country were related to their industrial growth and the many emerging factory and mill jobs.

Life in many northern parts of the United States was less humiliating and arduous than it had been in the South. Black Americans could sit in buses and streetcars more freely and, as one Philadelphia migrant said, one didn’t have to ‘mister every little white boy comes along’.¹⁴⁶ Nevertheless, Black Americans continued to suffer from widespread discrimination and were concentrated in ghettos and confined to inferior jobs.

The Second Great Migration

A group of migrant workers heading for New Jersey to pick potatoes in 1940. (Corbis via Getty)

Another mass migration of more than 5 million African Americans from the South to the Northeast and Midwest of the US would begin in the early years of World War II and continue until the end of the 1960s. This second Great Migration was much larger than the first. This time migrants also headed west, where cities like Los Angeles and Oakland offered skilled jobs in the defence industry. The arrival of so many people transformed the cities they arrived in as well as the migrants themselves, many of whom learnt new skills and became socially active. The Black Power movements of the 1960s, such as the Black Panther Party, emerged in tandem with the new kinds of social interactions brought about by these Great Migrations.¹⁴⁷

A Low Dishonest Decade: Fleeing Jews

In the years before World War II, Jews fleeing Nazi Germany were unwelcome in many European countries. At this point Nazis viewed their emigration as a solution to what they had framed as the ‘Jewish problem’.

Few countries were willing to help. In 1939, Britain closed Palestine to incoming Jews. Ships such as the MS St Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Bremen, were denied entry to the US and Canada and had to return to Europe. Many of those who returned to Germany were murdered during the Holocaust.

The reasons European and other countries gave for restricting the entry of Jews still echo in the more extreme anti-immigration sentiments of today. The Dutch government proclaimed in 1938 that ‘a further intrusion of alien elements will be harmful to the maintenance of the Dutch race. The government finds that, in principle, our limited territory should be reserved for its own people.’¹⁴⁸

Following the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 – the Night of Broken Glass – in which 267 synagogues were destroyed and over 30,000 Jews were taken to concentration camps, a series of humanitarian efforts known as the Kindertransport (children’s transport) were initiated. Fearing the worst, parents in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland sent their children to be cared for abroad. The British government prohibited fleeing adults from entering Britain, but visas were granted to about 10,000 children under 17 years old, provided a guarantee was given by a British family that they would be supported and sent back when conditions allowed.

The youngest were barely a year old. The Kindertransport effectively ended on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war, although a group of children from the Netherlands arrived in the UK on the 14 May 1940, the day the Dutch army surrendered to Germany. Most of the parents and relatives who remained behind were killed in the Holocaust, leaving  the  children orphaned in Britain. Often they were adopted by their foster parents; many also later moved to Israel, the US and other countries.

Kindertransport arrivals to Britain, 1939

‘A Big Adventure’

Bob Kirk left Germany through the Kindertransport just before his fourteenth birthday in 1939: ‘I didn’t really know where I was going. There were about 200 children on that transport, and we were all, to say the least, a bit nervous … My parents were so intent on not making it seem like a parting that they didn’t include anything which might suggest we wouldn’t see each other again.’

Bob’s wife Ann also left on the Kindertransport: ‘Everyone around us was in tears but my dad tried to joke about it. I was going on a big adventure. What a wonderful chance for a little girl to have. Then they must have jumped into a taxi to get to the next station but one, and there they were waving – waving until their hands almost dropped off, and that’s the last sight I ever had of them.’ Both of her parents later died in Auschwitz.

Despite the inhospitality of neighbouring countries, at least half a million Jews managed to flee the Nazi campaign of terror that followed Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. When war in Europe closed all exits from 1940, the Jews left behind were those who had not anticipated the danger or been unable to escape. Other emigrants and refugees were forcefully returned to Germany, where they faced almost certain death.

The Return of Forced Labour

Forced labour, which had never completely gone away, re-emerged as nations around the world descended into conflict. Prisoners of war and other enforced workers often filled key gaps as countries experienced shortages of labour due to military mobilisation.

Countries responded in different ways to these pressures: in both global conflicts France and Britain recruited colonial labour, while Britain also employed many more women than before. Germany primarily resorted to prisoners of war – by the end of the First World War over 2 million prisoners worked in the German empire.

During the Second World War, Germany also entered into agreements with Italy, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, which between them sent around 400,000 workers. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Poles were coerced into working in the German economy and supporting its war effort. By 1944, Germany had compelled 8 million workers from twenty-six foreign countries – amounting to a third of the country’s workforce – into work in conditions which at times were comparable to slavery.¹⁴⁹ As de Haas, Castles and Miller have noted, the ‘Nazi war machine would have collapsed far earlier without foreign labour’.¹⁵⁰

In addition to the 6 million Jews who were killed in concentration camps and mass executions, more than half of the 5.7 million Soviet and other prisoners of war under German command died due to starvation or disease, or were shot.¹⁵¹ Fritz Sauckel, the Nazi general responsible for labour deployment, stated that the basic principle for approaching foreign workers was that, ‘all the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.’¹⁵²

Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and Eastern Europeans, among other targeted groups, fared dramatically worse under the Reich’s systematic denial of the rights of people they defined as foreigners. de Haas, Castles and Miller show how the ‘Nazis took exploitation of rightless migrants to an extreme which can only be compared with slavery, yet its legal core – the sharp division between the status of national and foreigner – was to be found in both earlier and later foreign labour systems’.¹⁵³

‘I Was Accepted Because I Was Tall’

During the Second World War, around 15 per cent of Victoria Crosses – the highest and most prestigious decoration for valour in the British honours system – were awarded to troops from India and Nepal (including Gurkha soldiers). ‘If you look at Commonwealth graves, you can find burial spots of Indians everywhere,’ the author Yasmin Khan observes. ‘There’s a scattered memory of their sacrifice all over Europe.’¹⁵⁴

As in the first global conflict of 1914–1918, the battles of World War II drew in millions of colonial troops from around the world. They were paid far less than soldiers from Europe or the US, and denied the same possibilities to rise in the ranks. More than half a million black African soldiers who fought for the British Army in the 1940s were paid about a third of what their white counterparts of the same rank received. Many did not receive the usual lump sum, known as a war gratuity, when the war ended. If they were killed or wounded their dependants were not given the benefits British families received.¹⁵⁵

An official British document from 1945 outlining army pay scales for different nationalities. (Kew Archives)

Britain didn’t fight the Second World War, the British Empire did.

Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War

Soldiers in the colonies were often ‘volunteered’ for enlistment by the colonial administrators or local leaders. Others signed up because they desperately needed a job. Britain recruited soldiers from Ghana (then the Gold Coast), Kenya, South Africa and other colonies with little regard to their age or health. Many were severely malnourished, and were ‘built up in three months on an army diet’.

Wartime recruiting poster in Accra, 1942. The Ministry of Information promoted an image of smart, modern soldiers.

Seventeen-year-old Kwame Asante, who joined the army in the Gold Coast in 1942, recalled: ‘I was accepted because I was tall. There were many boys in the army who were only fifteen.’¹⁵⁶ British propaganda leaflets were distributed in villages throughout the African colonies. Vans with loudspeakers toured towns and villages broadcasting colonial recruiting propaganda that railed against German and Italian racist ideologies. Propaganda films depicted brave African soldiers training and fighting.

Indian forces in Italy, 1943. (IWM)

Indian, African and Arab troops fought against Italian, German and Japanese troops in North Africa and East Asia, sacrificing their lives to defend the crumbling British empire. About one in five of the Africans fighting in the Second World War died.

Massacres, Expulsions and Population Exchanges

Peace agreements forged after both world wars led to the redrawing of national boundaries. Large numbers of people were forced to move or were alienated from their communities. In many areas such as the Balkans, the associated religious, cultural and familial dislocation would have long-lasting consequences.

In the years before conflict, most migrants made individual decisions to move for personal advantage; during and after the war, most migrants moved as members of groups identified for expulsion or oppression.

Patrick Manning on WWI, Migration in World History

The movement of people was often used to assert colonial authority. As it expanded, the Ottoman Empire frequently moved its Muslim subjects to settle in newly acquired territory: islands such as Cyprus or Crete or inland in the Balkans. The Turkish government would employ this strategy again many decades later after invading Cyprus in 1974.

Over the century from 1820 to 1920, the Ottomans provided refuge for asylum seekers – such as migrants fleeing Russian expansion into Ottoman territories in the Caucasus – as well as expelling groups it felt were hostile to its imperial ambitions – such as Balkan nationalists. Over two million people crossed the empire’s borders as a result in this period.¹⁵⁷

In the early 1920s, the rise of the Turkish Republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire led to new waves of migration. As the Ottoman Empire dissolved, non-Turkish populations, including Greeks and Armenians, were persecuted and expelled, with Turkish settlers occupying the homes of the exiled communities.

In addition to making a lasting impact through the passports named after him, Fridjof Nansen oversaw the 1923 population exchange between the newly independent Turkey and Greece. Following a massacre of Greeks in Turkey, and on the basis of their declared or perceived religious affiliations, at least 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians were forced to leave Turkey and move to Greece. In exchange, 400,000 Muslims were compelled to leave Greece and make Turkey their home. This ‘compulsory exchange’ involved stripping ethnic Greeks or Turks of their Turkish or Greek citizenship and giving them new nationalities.

Armenian Genocide

In the Old Testament, Noah’s Ark is depicted as landing on the slopes of Mount Ararat, a site of great symbolic importance for Armenians which now lies in the eastern part of Turkey. Between 1915 and 1917 over 1 million Armenians were systematically killed and millions more expelled by the Ottoman Empire under a ‘Turkey for the Turks’ policy.¹⁵⁸ It is considered by many to be the first genocide of the twentieth century.¹

Lebanese stamp with a surcharge for the relief of Armenian refugees, early 1920s.

The landlocked Republic of Armenia finally gained independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The small Central Asian country is all that remains of the Urartu and Armenian kingdoms that existed for over a thousand years until 428 ce. Around 10 million Armenians still live outside the republic, more than three times its population. Over the decades, the Armenian diaspora has sustained a language and traditions that would otherwise have perished.¹⁵⁹ In Beirut’s neighbourhood of Bourj Hammoud, streets are daubed with anti-Turkey graffiti and draped with flags in Armenian colours.

In 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority enclave in Azerbaijan that was governed by an Armenian government, surrendered to Azerbaijan after a bitter conflict that resulted in more than 100,000 people fleeing to Armenia in just one week.

Japanese Imperialism and Displacement

In the early twentieth century, as Europe descended into political and economic turmoil, a newly industrial Japan extended its reach in Korea and China. Rather than sending unskilled labourers or farmers, it sought as part of its imperial policy to export traders, artisans, shopkeepers and ‘adventurous merchants’, who gravitated towards Chinese and Korean commercial centres.

Between 1900 and 1930, 2 million Japanese moved to Taiwan and another 10 million moved to Korea.¹⁶⁰ The number of Japanese living in Manchuria increased from 180,000 in 1933 to 820,000 in 1940. Japanese-run coal mines and construction projects employed hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants, many of whom had been displaced from their homes by drought, famine and civil war.¹⁶¹

The movement of Japanese throughout the region was part of a national modernisation program that involved securing control over Chinese and Korean labour. In 1920, Japan’s population was 56 million, while over 21 million worked abroad in its territories and colonies, including Korea and Taiwan.¹⁶²

Japanese officials directed the production of industrial and military supplies in the colonies. Dispossessed Korean peasants were recruited to work in Japanese factories, where they were given menial jobs spurned by nationals. The number of Koreans living in Japan increased dramatically. From 1939, a policy of forced recruitment was implemented to fuel the Japanese war economy. Well over 50,000 Korean women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.

By 1945, around 10 per cent of Korea’s population worked outside of the country. In Japan, however, they were not accorded full citizenship, few were promoted to white-collar roles and they faced systemic repression. Koreans working in Japan were later designated as ‘third-party nationals’ and most were forced to leave the country after the war.

The Japanese state replicated European models of imperialism, including land dispossession, violence and forced recruitment of poor people into menial jobs. As in other parts of the world such as Africa, the withdrawal of colonial powers from Asia in the years after the Second World War would lead to further waves of refugees, adding to the millions already displaced by war.

1 As defined by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. The killings are not recognised as a genocide by the Turkish government, Israel, Azerbaijan or the UK.

10. Migrants in the Postwar World

Readjusting, erasing and drawing new borders was often the first step toward ‘decolonisation’.

Jessica Namakkal, Unsettling Utopia

The immense upheaval of World War II has been likened to a ‘demographic whirlwind’ or tsunami that left many millions of refugees stranded on foreign shores.¹⁶³ They were among the fortunate ones. In addition to 40 million civilians killed – including at least 6 million people executed, gassed and starved by the Nazi regime – more than 25 million soldiers died in the global conflict.

The war forced an estimated 30 million to leave their homes. When the fighting finally ended in 1945, at least 11 million refugees found themselves outside their country of origin.¹⁶⁴ Most of the people displaced later returned home, but many settled in the United States (329,000), Australia (182,000) and Canada (123,000). In all, about 132,000 Jewish displaced persons were absorbed by the new state of Israel, the majority originally from Eastern Europe.¹⁶⁵

The Role of Relief Agencies

Behind the acronyms are some of the largest international organisations of the modern era. Created during wartime, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was set up to ‘assist victims of war in any area under the control of the United Nations’. By the time its mandate came to an end in 1947, the agency had helped over 7 million people to return to their home countries. Another body, the International Committee for European Migration, helped another 3.2 million people relocate overseas. This included a million refugees who went to Australia, Canada, Israel and the US and about 823,000 refugees and migrants who moved to Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. UNRRA was succeeded by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), which in turn was replaced by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also known more colloquially as the UN Refugee Agency. The Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe was born in 1951. After a succession of name changes, it became the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Today, the IOM and UNHCR are the UN affiliated agencies with responsibility for migration and refugees.

The sheer volume of refugees placed huge strains on the organisations set up to deal with the crisis. Their task was further complicated by the imposition of new borders. As the postwar powers moved old boundaries and drew up fresh ones, they uprooted whole communities that had otherwise avoided being displaced by war. More than a third – 12 million – were ethnic Germans expelled from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe following the Potsdam Conference, which in August 1945 shifted Germany’s border with Poland westward.

Germans within about a quarter of what had once been Germany now found they were living in Poland. Their properties were confiscated, their lands seized. German speakers in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech and Slovak Republics) and other territories also faced retribution for the terrible loss of life and damage the war had inflicted, even though many had not fought for Germany. Germans had been living in Eastern Europe for centuries, some families having migrated from West Prussia to the Black Sea as far back as the 1780s.

Rebuilding Europe

While hundreds of thousands of refugees headed west to the Americas and elsewhere, others moved to fill the vacuum. Faced by labour shortages at home, European governments and private employers encouraged migrants from their former colonies to move to the old centres of imperial power. The colonial territories would provide a ready source of workers for the postwar reconstruction of Europe.

Between 1945 and 1973, 8.5 million white colonials and ‘nonwhite auxiliaries’ migrated to Italy, Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands from their respective colonies. The path to independence for many African and Asian countries during this period was not a peaceful one. In Africa, colonial regimes suppressed mass protests and insurrections in Algeria, Kenya, Congo, Zimbabwe, Zambia and elsewhere. Former colonies were partitioned to violent effect. Significant white populations remained in eastern and southern Africa, where a white minority also maintained power, denying over 85 per cent of the population the vote and access to land and commerce.

In Europe, colonial settler ‘returnees’ found themselves the object of discrimination. Pieds-noirs, once a pejorative French term for native Algerians – possibly deriving from the use of North African labourers as barefoot coal stokers in the navy – was applied to returning European settlers and their descendants. In 1962, after Algeria achieved independence following a ferocious eight-year struggle, the Harkis, native Muslims who fought with the French army against Algerian independence, would also suffer prejudice when they sought refuge in France.

In the aftermath of war, Britain was keen to attract workers from its colonies in the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Africa. All Commonwealth subjects acquired British citizenship in 1948, giving them full rights to work and settle in the UK. By 1951, 218,000 people from member states (including Pakistan, which later left the Commonwealth) had migrated to the UK. That number would double in the ten years that followed. While later immigration acts would restrict the entry and rights of immigrants, by 1981 there were 1.5 million people of Commonwealth origin living in the UK.

Windrush: Opportunities and Broken Promises

When my ancestors arrived in this country under the Nationality Act of 1948, they arrived as British citizens. They were British subjects not because they came to Britain, but because Britain came to them, took their ancestors across the Atlantic, colonised them, sold them into slavery, profited from their labour and made them British subjects.

David Lammy, British Member of Parliament

Encouraged by recruitment campaigns and the 1948 British Nationality Act, thousands of Caribbean men and women moved to Britain, attracted by the availability of jobs and the prospect of a better life. Newspaper images of the Empire Windrush passenger ship docking in Tilbury Docks under a ‘welcome home’ banner have come to symbolise the hopes of the migrants, who were told that Britain wanted its ‘sons of Empire’ to help build a multi-cultural country.¹⁶⁶

Some of the first Caribbean migrants from Jamaica disembarking the Empire Windrush in 1948. (Alamy Images.)

These hopes were often misplaced. Newcomers from the Caribbean were the victims of racist attacks and discriminatory attitudes which persist today, as demonstrated by the recent ‘Windrush scandal’, when it transpired that at least 83 people had been wrongly deported while many others had had their legal rights to British citizenship and benefits denied. Despite the mixed reception, the new arrivals made an essential contribution to the postwar development of Britain. While many worked in manufacturing, the majority were employed in the rapidly expanding public services of the UK, including the new National Health Service and the London Underground.

While Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal could recruit workers from their former colonies, Germany (which had ceded its colonies to Britain after World War I), Austria and Switzerland lacked large diasporas from which to draw labourers. Instead, they sought to attract labourers from southern Europe.

Other migrants came from Turkey, which had traditionally enjoyed strong economic links with the German-speaking world. Under an official Gastarbeiter agreement signed in 1961, around 650,000 Turkish ‘guest workers’ would later come to Germany, many of them bringing their children and other relatives.

The Dismantling of Empire

Population exchanges had taken place across the former Ottoman Empire as it was dismantled after the first Great War, notably in the Balkans. The Second World War would hasten the disintegration of the colonial empires that remained.

In many cases the departure of imperial powers was as chaotic as their arrival. Major population movements followed the division of territories, which included Palestine at the end of its British mandate in 1947, the same year as the violent partition of India and Pakistan. The defeat of imperial Japan in 1945 led to the division of Korea, which was formalised in 1948.

Nationalists in other Asian countries resisted a return to the colonial status quo. Laos gained independence in 1949 and Cambodia in 1953, heralding the final collapse of French Indochina. Vietnam would be arbitrarily split in 1954 along the 17th parallel – a line of latitude – leading to the migration of over a million Vietnamese who suddenly found themselves in a divided country.

As had been brutally apparent at the 1884 Berlin Conference at which European colonial powers carved up Africa, the new borders they created rarely aligned with local realities. Communities were divided, the victims of ‘cartographic violence’.¹⁶⁷ Many boundaries cut across historical routes used by traders, nomads, workers and people visiting their families, curtailing movement or making international migrants of people who had once moved freely within their own countries.

Cartographic Violence: Partition

The protracted, unruly end of empire in South Asia was a shock of epic proportions that destabilised life for millions of its inhabitants.

Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition

On 3 June 1947, South Asians ‘greeted with a mixture of joy, horror, bewilderment and fury’ the news that an entire subcontinent was to be divided, ending some 300 years of European colonial rule.

The decision to partition India had been taken thousands of miles away, in London. The task of defining the new borders was assigned to the British barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had travelled no farther east of Whitehall than Paris. Under the decidedly sketchy plan, two independent countries would be created: a Hindu-dominated India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.

Drawn along ostensibly religious lines, the new frontiers left millions of families and communities stranded. Not only did it create two halves of Pakistan more than 2,000 kilometres apart (West Pakistan and East Pakistan, the latter of which would eventually become Bangladesh), but the new borders carved through two of the most populous British provinces, Punjab and Bengal. The result was one of the largest and fastest migrations in human history, with around 17.9 million people forced to move between the new territories.¹⁶⁸

For many living in remote areas, the news only came weeks later. For some, the first inkling of the partition was when they found themselves violently pushed out of their homelands. The absence of clarity regarding the laws that would govern the new states and the implications for Muslims living in India and Hindus living in the newly formed state of Pakistan fanned rumours and then unrest. Mobs and militias terrorised communities. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children died in the ensuing carnage.

Muslim refugees crowd a train leaving New Delhi for Pakistan, 1947. (AP Photo/Getty Images)

As the attacks continued, antagonism between the newly born countries grew. Communities that straddled the new border were cut in two. As India and Pakistan were now vaguely defined on the basis of religion, citizens with different beliefs became ‘minorities’ and ‘others’ overnight, many forced to flee their ancestral land for their safety. With so many workers, business owners and farmers gone, shops and banks were shuttered, commerce ground to a halt and crops were left unharvested and rotting in the fields.

Sikh refugees forced to migrate to new homelands following the Great Partition of 1947. (Margaret Bourke-White/Getty Images).

In some areas such as Punjab, the two new states agreed to a complete ‘transfer of populations’ based on religious affiliation. In Delhi and other cities, Muslim refugees boarded trains seeking refuge hundreds of kilometres away in what was deemed to be their new homeland, Pakistan, ‘the land of the pure’. Their former homes would in turn be occupied by Hindu and Sikh refugees coming from the north.¹⁶⁹

A global framework for refugee responses did not yet exist, so the new governments of India and Pakistan were left to solve the mass migration crisis alone. When the Red Cross sent a fact-finding mission in 1947, its report stated that the crisis of Partition was ‘so enormous’ that it was beyond their capability to deal with it.¹⁷⁰

Many migrants were undocumented. One newspaper headline from the summer of 1947 reads, ‘Passport rules believed to be needless at present.’¹⁷¹ Few could appreciate that the division would ultimately result in some of the harshest border regulations in the world. Today, Indians and Pakistanis remain separated by fortified borders and bureaucratic procedures, and there are still no direct air and rail links. There is currently just one Indian diplomatic mission in Pakistan, in the capital Islamabad, and only one Pakistani high commission in the whole of India, in New Delhi.¹⁷²

As many as 2 million people ultimately died in the upheaval and violence caused by Partition. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the disputed region of Kashmir, in 1947, 1965 and 1999. The simmering conflict between two now-nuclear powers continues to cause frictions between the countries and destabilise the wider region, as well as preventing many migrants from returning.

Why the decision to divide India was taken remains contested.¹⁷³ Some credit – or blame – the head of the All-India Muslim League, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, for persuading the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, of the need for partition. Dividing to rule may have appeared attractive to Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the independence movement was gathering momentum and colonial administrators were struggling to maintain order. Jinnah would become the first governor-general of Pakistan, where he is revered by many as its founder.

Promises of Land

More than 3,000 kilometres west of Karachi, another forcible partition was taking place that would have violent repercussions to this day.

During World War I, after the Allies defeated the Ottoman troops in the Sinai and the eastern Mediterranean, the League of Nations had granted Britain a mandate to control Palestine and Jordan – then Transjordan – which comprised 92,300 square kilometres of territory on the east bank of the Jordan River. At the time there were about 75,000 Jews in the region, and roughly ten times as many Arabs.

In 1917, the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour issued a statement supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The so-called Balfour Declaration energised the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism, which centres on the concept of aliyah – the return of Jews from the diaspora to their original ancestral home, from which they were expelled by the Romans two thousand years ago. Simultaneously, Arab nationalist movements gained traction as Palestinians found themselves swept aside by international agreements.

Many Jews who had escaped the horrors of the Holocaust made their way to Israel. In 1947, despite strong opposition from Arab states, the newly formed UN partitioned Palestine into separate Jewish and Palestinian states. In May 1948, Israel declared independence, prompting five Arab nations (Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon) to invade. An armistice in 1949 ceded the West Bank to Jordan and the Gaza strip to Egypt.

By independence, the Jewish population had grown to about 1.2 million, with hundreds of thousands of Jews migrating from Arab states and Europe. Of the 950,000 Palestinian Arabs resident in what became Israel, 726,000 were expelled or fled, creating a persistent and escalating refugee crisis. Palestinians recall these events as the Nakba, which means ‘catastrophe’ or ‘cataclysm’.¹⁷⁴

Palestinian Refugees

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was created in 1949 to provide support, recognition and protection to Palestinian refugees. In 2018, its budget was severely cut after the US withdrew its contribution. The agency’s vital work was further undermined when key donors suspended funding following allegations (to date not substantiated) that a number of its staff participated in the atrocities committed during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The tragedies in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank unfolding at the time of writing are rooted in the entangled and often unspeakably violent histories of Jewish and Palestinian forced migration. New waves of Palestinian refugees are being created by the conflict. Palestinians already account for over a half of Jordan’s population, many families having fled there some three or four generations ago in 1967. More recently, Jordan has accepted around a million Syrians displaced by war, making it the most generous country globally towards refugees.

The rising tensions would culminate again in the 1967 Six-Day War, during which Israel seized the territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, resulting in a further displacement of Palestinians to neighbouring countries.

Israeli forces would also seize the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt in this conflict. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the United States had stepped in and forced Israel, Britain and France to pull out of the territory. But allegiances had shifted and times had changed. Israel held the peninsula until 1982, with the backing of the US. Its struggles with its Arab neighbours were now being played out against the backdrop of a deepening Cold War.

The Iron Curtain Descends

On the morning of 13 August 1961, Berliners awoke to find armed guards and barbed wire dividing their city. Overnight, families were separated from relatives, loved ones and friends. The four-metre-high, 155-kilometre wall and corridor of mines alongside it became known as the ‘death strip’. Streets, rivers and subway lines which traversed the city were abruptly cut.

Despite the dangers, around 5,000 people succeeded in escaping from East Berlin. Hundreds died trying. The wall’s first victim was Ida Siekmann, 58, who jumped from the third-floor window of her building, which had become part of the wall just nine days beforehand. Peter Fechter, 18, scaled the wall a year later, but was shot several times in the back and fell to his death in the trenches on the eastern side. A 15-month-old child, Holger H., was suffocated by his mother as she tried to quieten him in the trunk of a car being searched at the border.¹⁷⁵

Numerous tunnels were dug, some enabling dozens of people to cross the border and be reunited with family and friends. Some escapees tried to ram vehicles through the wall. In 1962, three people filled a dump truck with sand in order to give it more power and slammed it into the wall at almost 100 kilometres an hour. The driver was shot, but a man who hid in the sand survived.¹⁷⁶

A young girl in the Eastern Sector looks through barbed wire into Steinstucken, Berlin, in October of 1961. (National Archives.)

The Berlin Wall, separating the communist East and the capitalist West of the city, was the most famous of the many barriers erected to prevent emigration from Soviet states. Even so, about 840,000 people managed to escape the Soviet bloc between 1961 and 1989.

Migration and the Cold War

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had been established in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the bloody civil war that followed. By the 1920s it incorporated not only the four main territories of the former Russian empire but other countries that subsequently came under Russian control.

Under Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953, strict internal controls on movement between different parts of the USSR were introduced. These were managed through a highly regulated system of permits, severely limiting the ability to escape oppression, hunger and natural disasters.

Non-Russians endured especially harsh treatment under the Soviet regime. Ukrainians and Kazakhs were deliberately starved in the first half of the twentieth century, while in 1944 large numbers of Muslim Crimean Tatars were killed and deported. At the same time, Russian settler colonists were moved into conquered lands, establishing Russian populations in Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. Sparsely populated but resource-rich regions in Kazakhstan and Siberia were targets of similar resettlement policies.

The Soviet Union would come to comprise 15 states and span a vast geographical expanse of the Eurasian landmass roughly two and a half times the size of the United States. The world polarised around these two centres of power and influence. In 1955, the Warsaw Pact countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania) entered into a mutual defence treaty. The US and its allies, such as Britain and France, offered support to countries which aligned against the Soviet Union. For its part, Russia sustained allies such as Vietnam, Cuba and Ethiopia as well as socialist liberation movements around the world.

Cold War allegiances mattered more to either superpower than human rights and development. As Roosevelt supposedly remarked in 1939, referring to the brutal and corrupt despot running Nicaragua, ‘Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’.¹⁷⁷

Despite internal travel controls, migration continued between the Soviet Union and the outside world. People travelled between aligned countries for military, educational, cultural and other exchanges. Evidence of these Cold War movements can still be seen and heard on the streets of Hanoi, for example: older Vietnamese speaking fluent Russian, Hungarian, Polish or German, selling Russian fur caps and Czech beer and driving ageing Ladas or Russian Minsk motorbikes.

Levi Jeans and Winston Cigarettes

The Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University of Russia was founded to ‘give an education to people who had liberated themselves from colonialist oppression’. Named after the non-aligned Congolese premier, who was assassinated with the connivance of Western powers in 1961, the university drew students from across Africa and Latin America as well as countries such as Lebanon and Nepal. Travel costs and a modest stipend were provided. The initial year of studies included Russian, the language of instruction.

African students at the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow. (RIA Novosti)

For Russian students, interactions with young foreigners also brought them into contact with American goods such as Levi jeans and Winston cigarettes, which were shared during friendship evenings designed to encourage bonding between Soviet and foreign students. Nevertheless, Africans experienced considerable racism.

By 1990, a year after the Berlin Wall came down, there were around 180,000 foreign students in Russia and similar numbers in Eastern Europe. A 1972 article in the New York Times claimed an American visitor to the Soviet Union could ‘pay part or all of his expenses’ by trading in his denims, with young Soviets reportedly approaching Western tourists to offer exorbitant sums for their dzhins.¹⁷⁸

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of refugees and asylum seekers worldwide. Cold War politics and the turmoil of decolonisation drove the massive involuntary movement of people in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Europe. These larger migrations were accompanied by a steady stream of defections, most but not all from East to West.

Attitudes to migrant workers were coloured by the Cold War, with the US and other countries admitting people as refugees on the basis of their declared anti-communist sympathies. This was thought to embarrass communist states and destabilize fledgling communist governments, although there is little evidence for these claims.

One Defector Says to the Other…

‘What do you call the Bolshoi after they stopped over in Gander?’

‘Maly.’

A popular joke in the East, referring to Moscow’s famous Bolshoi (‘Large’) and Maly (‘Small’) Theatres.¹⁷⁹ Gander, an airport in Canada, was a frequent stopover for flights to Cuba and other Soviet-aligned South American countries. As planes flown by Aeroflot, Interflug or Cubana refuelled on the runway, passengers were allowed to disembark and pass the time in a waiting room. Many took the opportunity to find a Canadian border guard and request asylum. In some cases, people would hide in the washroom or under the stairs and wait until their plane departed, or run across the runway and over the fence into the forest. In 1979, the Bolshoi’s star ballet dancer, Alexander Godunov, defected to the US while on tour in New York City.¹⁸⁰

A Time of Revolutions

For many parts of Asia, the Cold War was a time of revolution, occupation and further conflict. Chinese refugees fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan to escape communism after Mao defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in 1949. Tens of thousands would also flee China’s occupation of Tibet. Millions of refugees fled civil conflicts in Burma and Sri Lanka.

More than two decades after the partition that created India and Pakistan, the violent creation of the state of Bangladesh (previously East Pakistan) in 1971 led an estimated 10 million Bengalis and Hindus to move to India. An additional 30 million were internally displaced.

In the 1970s, conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan forced millions to flee their countries. In Cambodia, the Maoist Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in 1975. To escape the terrifying brutality and mass executions, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Thailand and Vietnam. Over a million people who remained were killed and buried in Cambodia’s notorious ‘killing fields’ during the Khmer Rouge’s four years in power.

Vietnamese Boat People

A series of evacuation flights were organised by the US military fleeing Vietnam after their defeat by communist forces in 1975. ‘Operation Babylift’ carried away 2,000 South Vietnamese war orphans to a new life while ‘Operation New Life’ evacuated 110,000 Vietnamese who risked being targeted for their complicity with the US-backed regime. In the final operation, ‘Frequent Wind’, 7,000 people were air-lifted from Saigon by helicopter, including the remaining US troops.

Thirty-five Vietnamese refugees wait to be rescued after eight days at sea. (Phil Eggman)

After Saigon fell, ethnically Chinese Vietnamese were especially vulnerable, their businesses closed, farms confiscated and they and their families sent to rural areas to work. More than 2 million Vietnamese fled, with at least 800,000 making their way on small boats to other countries. Singapore and Taiwan welcomed many of those who had fought against communism, as did the British colony of Hong Kong. But many ‘boat people’ didn’t survive the passage, their rickety craft overwhelmed by stormy open seas or in some cases attacked by pirates.¹⁸¹

Rising tensions between Vietnam and China, and the closing in April 1978 of about 30,000 ‘bourgeois’ businesses owned by the Chinese Hoa minority, led to a new wave of refugees. Most fled to China. Of those who travelled further afield, many Vietnamese headed to France to join a community which now numbers more than 350,000 Vietnamese. Over a half a million went to the US.

In Afghanistan, the 1978 revolution and the killing of King Daoud and his family were quickly followed by an invasion by the Soviet Red Army, which helped the Moscow-aligned government fight against anti-communist Muslim fighters, the Mujahideen. Over 2 million Afghans were internally displaced by the conflict. About a quarter of the population (as many as 5 million people) left the country as refugees, most settling in Pakistan and Iran.

The End of the Cold War

On 9 November 1989, following a series of revolutions in Poland and Hungary and mass demonstrations in cities across East Germany, the Iron Curtain fell as suddenly as it was erected. In the decades since more than 3.6 million people, roughly a quarter of the former residents of East Germany, have resettled in the western part of the country.

In 1991, when the USSR itself collapsed, the 15 former Soviet socialist republics reasserted their independence, including Ukraine, the Baltic states and the Central Asian republics. Many ethnic Russians moved back to Russia as the newly independent countries restored their languages and customs.

Millions of others moved between the former republics in Central Asia as well as heading west from East Germany, Poland and Hungary. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics and Yugoslavia into Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia led not only to the redrawing of borders and transformation of national identities, but also to the migration of people who were compelled or chose to re-establish their lives within a different country.

Cubans Abroad

Cuba sent over 200,000 troops to defend socialist governments in Africa and Latin America during the Cold War. By 1987, over 50,000 Cuban soldiers were deployed in Angola, where together with Angolan MPLA troops they defeated South Africa and a pro-Western alliance of Angolan soldiers in a major battle at Cuito Cuanavale. Following the collapse of the USSR, support within Russia or the US for intervention in Africa evaporated – at least for the time being.

For the apartheid regime in South Africa, the writing was on the wall. In 1990 it was forced to grant independence to Namibia and release Nelson Mandela from the prisons where he had spent 27 years, leading to him becoming President of a democratic South Africa in 1994. The unbanning of his party, the African National Congress, and the end of apartheid terror laws led hundreds of thousands of South Africans who had studied and lived abroad to return from exile.

New Nations, New Migrants

The politics of the Cold War and the unprecedented mechanised violence of the twentieth century provided a fresh impetus for mass migration. Newly defined borders and nations prompted the movement of millions of migrants, both voluntary and involuntary.

At times, migration offered people a homeland, security and a taste of prosperity. At others, it brought disillusionment, with promises broken and chances of a better life left unfulfilled. Following the Vietnam War, the United States gave refuge to half a million Vietnamese, as well as 182,000 Laotians and 126,000 Cambodians.¹⁸² Its acceptance of refugees then stands in marked contrast to its position today, when the US admits less than 10 per cent of its prior intake of those seeking safe harbour from wars, persecution and economic ruin elsewhere.

Independence struggles and conflicts have accompanied the collapse of empires and the redrawing of borders for centuries, dividing communities in often arbitrary and violent ways. Building on our understanding of these upheavals from this shortest of histories, the next chapters move to a thematic exploration of the contemporary world of migration.

PART TWO

Migration Today and Tomorrow

11. Who Is a Migrant?

This book adopts the widely held convention that a migrant today is anyone who crosses an international border. Beyond this basic definition, ways of classifying migration vary considerably. Does a day trip count? A month-long visit? Should students, tourists and business travellers be considered migrants? To these questions can be added the usual problems associated with statistics, from poor record keeping to distortion by politicians.

Migration is Exceptional

What we do know is that the number of migrants worldwide has been rising steadily in recent decades, nearly doubling from 153 million in 1990 to 281 million in 2020, the most recent year for which the UN has published its global tally.¹⁸³ As a share of the total population, however, there are not many more migrants today than in the past. The world’s population has increased by almost 3 billion in the past thirty years, meaning that the proportion of people migrating has in fact remained relatively constant. In 2020, about 3.6 per cent of all recorded citizens were born in a different country; thirty years earlier, it was 2.9 per cent.

While this percentage could well fluctuate in future, the overall number of people on the planet may be approaching its peak. The pace of global population growth is slowing after a period of rapid increase – from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 5.3 billion in 1990, to today’s figure of 8 billion. The world’s population is expected to reach somewhere around 9.5 billion in the middle of this century, then fall to below current levels by the end of it.

Source: 2022 World Migration Report, IOM

Numbers Game

Migration statistics should be regarded with great wariness. Not only are they notoriously difficult to collect and analyse, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation for political purposes.

Countries define and count migrants in different ways. Some measure a stay or period of absence from day one, others only after a year. Some add estimates of undocumented travellers to their overall tally of migrants, while others do not. There is no border control between the twenty-nine ‘Schengen’ countries of Europe, for example, so a large amount of guesswork is necessarily involved.

Even the richest countries are unable to measure migration accurately. The United Kingdom is one of many places that record entry and not departure. This results in significant discrepancies between reported figures for immigration and those for emigration. For example, Poland’s records of its migrants to the UK show far lower numbers than the British statistics reveal – and neither of the two is likely to be accurate.¹⁸⁴

Often figures vary wildly depending on who you ask. The Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that there were about 200,000 Bulgarians in the UK as of January 2019. Yet at the time the UK’s Office of National Statistics put the figure of Bulgarian-born people living in the country at 110,000.¹⁸⁵

A Wizz Through the Numbers

Even when they are not massaging statistics, governments can be surprisingly bad at gathering them. Britain, for instance, revised its official estimates of migrant numbers by hundreds of thousands in 2023. The Financial Times ran a story, ‘When Wizz Air wrecked the immigration stats,’ explaining how fickle migration counts could be. Official numbers of people leaving the UK were based on a few, non-representative surveys of passengers who were willing to stop and talk at a limited number of airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester. Meanwhile Wizz Air, a low-cost Hungarian airline, had been flying to and from smaller airports such as Luton that cater to budget carriers, bringing hundreds of thousands of people from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and other more recent EU members. Many ended up settling in Britain – having completely evaded the International Passenger Survey.¹⁸⁶

Migration is inherently difficult to define. Distinguishing between travel with the intent to settle and a journey made for tourism, business or study is not easy, even with the help of specific visas, entry cards and permits. We have much more accurate data on the flow of goods than on the movement of humans across borders.

While most authorities consider a migrant to be someone who moves across an international boundary, there is no consistency as to whether a brief stopover is counted in the same way as a visit for permanent settlement. Nor is there always agreement on what constitutes an official border.

More than fifty new countries have been created in the past fifty years, from newly independent ex-Soviet republics to those born from the fragmentation of other European, African and Asian countries. People who previously moved within these countries are now regarded as international migrants – one more reason why statistics on migration trends should be analysed with care.

Internal Migration

Although the focus of this book is on cross-border migrants, this is not to deny the importance of migration within borders, which far exceeds that across national frontiers. This internal movement often follows the routes migrating humans took long before the days of nation states and borders. People may move within countries for seasonal work, to settle in larger towns where there are more opportunities, or for a host of other reasons – including moving to a big city as a stepping stone for a longer journey.

Indeed, the distinction between internal and international migration can be exaggerated. Ethnic or racial minorities who move within their own country often share similar experiences with those who cross borders, particularly in large and ethnically diverse countries where languages, religions, cultures and lifestyles differ greatly from one place to the next.

As we have seen, historical events can create migrants. A citizen can suddenly become an international refugee when a border is drawn. Or the reverse may occur when countries are absorbed into wider frameworks, as happened with the creation of the Soviet Union and more recently the European Union. Understanding these movements in isolation from one another, or in terms of rigid legal categories, ignores the fact that on a social, economic or political level, internal and cross-border migration often entail very similar things.

Leave or Stay?

Around 97 per cent of the world population do not become international migrants. Most people are not prepared or able to venture into the unknown. They may prefer the comfort of their familiar surrounds or be prevented from travelling abroad by poverty, age, ill health or other restrictions.

The fact that there is vastly more migration within countries than migration between countries also reflects the difficulties of crossing borders and the desire of many people to remain close to home. It is hard enough to move within one’s own country; moving abroad is harder and riskier still.

Migration is often an enormous sacrifice taken on behalf of others. In many poor communities the eldest sons – or daughters, as is more often the case in the Philippines – may be encouraged to migrate to support their families. The perilous journeys, hardship and loneliness migrants frequently endure on behalf of others is testimony to their self-sacrifice and courage. Refugees and other forcefully displaced people tend to travel as short a distance as possible so they can return when it is safe to do so. Anywhere from a fifth to a half of all migrants return home or move to a third country within five years. This may be because they have saved money, gained a qualification or are coming back to settle, raise a family or retire.¹⁸⁷

Migrants are unusually prepared to take risks and make sacrifices. These qualities prevented the extinction of our species during its early evolution, when threatened by droughts and famine. They lie at the heart of the extraordinary progress made by humans since. Though migrants are in the minority, we should not assume that being sedentary is somehow better or more natural. Migrants may be simultaneously very ordinary and highly exceptional people.

A descendant of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants poses by the Windrush float in Brixton on 22 June 2023. (Rod Olukoya / Alamy)

Where Are the Migrants?

Of the estimated 281 million migrants in 2020, over two thirds were workers, of whom over a half (59 per cent) were men and two thirds were working in high-income countries.¹⁸⁸

Europe is currently the main destination for migrants, hosting 87 million, or almost a third of the total number worldwide. Very close behind is Asia, where there are an estimated 86 million migrants, or 30 per cent of the total. About 59 million (a fifth) live in North America and 25 million (9 per cent) in Africa, although the statistics regarding border crossings between Africa’s fifty-two countries are particularly unreliable, so this last figure is likely to be far higher.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, migration has doubled in the past fifteen years to 15 million people (5 per cent of the global migrant population), although these too are significant underestimates given the scale of undocumented flows between Central American countries and recent emigration from Venezuela.

Trace the Face

Social media groups and online forums can be a useful tool for relatives trying to find loved ones who have lost contact while migrating. The ‘Trace the Face’ initiative, managed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), publishes photographs of those looking for family members who have gone missing along their route in the hope they are recognised and their relatives informed. It can be found at tracetheface.familylinks.icrc.org.

Geography and population sizes explain some statistical features. The extremely large, diverse and sparsely inhabited region of Oceania has the highest proportion of migrants, with about 22 per cent of those living in one country being born in another. By comparison, migrants constitute 16 per cent of the population of North America and 12 per cent of Europe’s.¹⁸⁹

The United States is home to the largest absolute number of migrants – 51 million, or 15 per cent of the total – with most originating in Mexico, India, China and the Philippines, in that order. Over 11 million migrants have entered the US from Mexico, with the border between the two accounting for the most recorded crossings globally.

The US is followed by Germany, which has 16 million migrants, constituting 19 per cent of its population. Saudi Arabia is the third largest destination: the 13.5 million migrants living there make up 38 per cent of its population, with India, Indonesia and Pakistan as its top three origin countries.

As a share of its population, however, the United Arab Emirates hosts the most. About 88 per cent of people living in the UAE are foreign-born.¹⁹⁰ Around 3.8 million Indians work in the country, with over a million coming from Kerala and half a million from Tamil Nadu state.¹⁹¹

Mayotte and the Right to Citizenship

Around the world, citizenship is commonly acquired through jus soli (right of soil – based on where an individual is born) or jus sanguinis (right of blood – according to the nationality of a person’s parents). In France and its overseas territories, citizenship by birthplace – jus soli – is enshrined in law. Yet in February 2024, the government announced that children born of immigrants in the islands of Mayotte would no longer automatically become French citizens.

France colonised the islands alongside those of the Comoros archipelago in 1843. Since 1975, the Indian Ocean territory has been one of twelve French special-status territories outside Europe. These are home to more than 2.6 million people and are subject to French laws, with representatives in the French national assembly. In 2009, Mayotte islanders voted by a large margin to be an overseas department of France.

Mayotte’s past has been shaped by migration. In the fifteenth century it was occupied by Arabs, who converted its Bantu and Malay-speaking inhabitants to Islam. In the eighteenth century, invaders from Madagascar also left a lasting legacy including a Malagasy dialect. In recent years, however, the island has experienced protests against migrants, notably those arriving from nearby Comoros, one of the poorest countries in Africa. As a result of migration and a high birthrate, Mayotte’s population has increased five-fold since 1985, with more than half considered foreigners.¹⁹² Mayotte MP Estelle Youssouffa says she fears that if jus soli is not ended, ‘we will be perpetually the prisoners of our geography… welcoming all the misery of the Comoros and of Africa – all so that people in Paris can parade their grand principles.’¹⁹³

Forced Displacement

The UN Refugee Agency estimates that in the second half of 2023 there were 114 million migrants forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence and violations of human rights. That figure is forecast to be 130 million by the end of 2024.

Of these, 35.3 million were refugees under the agency’s mandate, 5.9 million were Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, 62.5 million were internally displaced people and 5.4 million were asylum seekers waiting for legal recognition of their need for protection.

Three quarters of all refugees were hosted by low-income and middle-income countries. The forty-five least developed countries, as classified by the UN, were providing asylum to 20 per cent of the total.

MIGRATION IN NUMBERS

75% of refugees live in low- or middle-income countries.

Source: UN Refugee Agency

Top 5 host countries of refugees in 2023. (Source: UN Refugee Agency)

Most refugees flee to the closest place of relative safety. Nearly 70 per cent of people in need of international protection live in neighbouring countries. Turkey and Iran host the most refugees globally – about 3.4 million each, mostly from Syria in Turkey and from Afghanistan and Iraq in the case of Iran. The United States receives the most individual applications for asylum, but it ends up hosting a relatively small number of refugees.

Together with the estimated 6.8 million displaced Palestinians, more than half of all refugees and others in need of international protection originate from just three countries – Syria (6.5 million), Afghanistan (6.1 million) and Ukraine (5.7 million). The conflict in Sudan is expected to add considerably to their number.

Some 1.7 million of these Palestinian refugees are living in Gaza. As a result of Israel’s military retaliation for the horrific events of 7 October 2023, their homes and communities have been destroyed. At the time of writing, over thirty thousand had been killed, while many more had been injured and faced starvation as well as further violence, creating new waves of refugees.

Source: UN Refugee Agency

In the two years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, more than 14 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes, triggering one of the worst refugee crises since 1945. Their reception in much of Europe was in marked contrast to the responses to previous waves of refugees from other parts of the world. The fact that Ukrainians look much like other Europeans and are perceived to share closer religious and historical ties means they have enjoyed a warmer welcome than Syrian and Afghan refugees and been spared the hostility shown to African migrants.

‘Twice Migrants’

In the nineteenth century, South Asian indentured labourers helped build the Kenya–Uganda Railway and worked in sugar plantations in Mauritius and the Natal area of South Africa. After their contracts ended, many settled in their adopted homes and went on to establish successful firms and farms.

Generations later, the 1960s independence movements swept African countries into a post-colonial era, with many governments implementing ‘Africanisation’ policies that sought to empower indigenous Africans after centuries of exclusion. African Asian minorities were discriminated against and many were expelled. In Uganda, a year after seizing power in a coup, Idi Amin decreed in 1972 that all people of Asian descent were to leave the country within 90 days. Most of the 80,000 affected had spent their entire lives as Ugandans. They were only permitted to take £55 in cash and a trunk of goods.

These ‘twice migrants’ moved to Britain, Canada or India. However, even those with British passports – including South Asians from Kenya who had been forced to leave after refusing to renounce their British citizenship – encountered difficulties moving to the UK, where they were barred from entry unless they could prove familial or other connections. Those arriving ‘back’ in India faced the challenge of integrating into a country that was no longer familiar to them. Some spoke Swahili as their first language.

The parents of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of rock band Queen, were Parsi Indian migrants to Zanzibar who in 1964 fled to England during the Zanzibar Revolution, when many Arabs and South Asians were persecuted. Rishi Sunak’s grandparents were displaced during the partition of India and Pakistan and migrated from Punjab to Kenya and Tanzania. His parents subsequently came to the UK, where the future prime minister was born.

The Long Wait

The legal limbo in which asylum seekers find themselves typically hinders them from working or establishing themselves in their host communities. Many are housed in refugee camps, given meagre food rations and not permitted to leave to find work. Countries decide at their discretion whether the situation ‘back home’ is safe enough to warrant accepting refugees. In the first half of 2023, around 400,000 refugees returned to their countries of origin, with most returning to Ukraine despite the war and to South Sudan from Sudan as it too descended into civil war.

The US and Canada admit more refugees for resettlement than any other countries. Yet the numbers are still tiny, both in relation to the number in need and the size of the respective populations. In 2022, the US accepted only 29,000 permanent refugees, while Canada, whose population is around 10 per cent that of the US, accepted 47,600. ¹⁹⁴

This picture is in stark contrast to the mid-nineteenth century, when half a million European migrants were arriving in the United States every year. In recent years, the US has lowered its admission ceiling for refugees as well as introducing new restrictions prohibiting travel from ‘high-risk’ countries on the grounds their citizens might pose a security threat.

Since refugees generally travel to the closest place of safety, Greece and Italy have found themselves carrying a disproportionate share of the burden of those seeking shelter in Europe. In 2023, the twenty-seven states of the European Union agreed a ‘solidarity mechanism’ which compels all members to accept up to 30,000 refugees a year or pay other members to house their quota. It remains to be seen whether this proves enforceable.

African Migrants: Fact vs Fiction

‘Tidal wave of migrants could be the biggest threat to Europe since the war’

Daily Mail headline, 26 June 2015

‘Migrants: the invasion has begun’

L’Opinione delle Liberta, 15 September 2023

Xenophobic warnings of ‘invasions’, ‘tidal waves’ or ‘swarms’ of undocumented African migrants by politicians and media outlets can create a sense of impending crisis or threat. While politically convenient, these toxic metaphors are callous and highly misleading.¹⁹⁵

Origin of all migrants living outside Africa

Around 95 per cent of African migrants arriving in Europe do so on an authorised flight or ship. They account for just 14 per cent of the world’s migrants living outside Africa. Well over half of African migration is between countries within the continent. According to recent research, 80 per cent of Africans considering migration ‘have no interest leaving the continent, and no intention of moving permanently’.¹⁹⁶

The Missing and the Dead

Globally, the overwhelming majority of migrants make authorised border crossings. Undocumented or irregular migration, however, is by its nature difficult to quantify as it often involves clandestine, perilous journeys made by desperate people.

At least 60,000 people have died in the past ten years in the attempt to migrate to another country, with nearly half having disappeared without trace, their bodies never found.¹⁹⁷ In 2023, the deadliest year for migrants in the past decade, an estimated 8,565 people died trying to reach their destinations.¹⁹⁸ The Mediterranean is perhaps the biggest graveyard for missing migrants, with tens and at times hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants attempting to cross every year.

Syrian refugees arriving on the Greek island of Kos. (Freedom House)

MIGRATION IN NUMBERS

93%

Migrants presumed drowned in the Mediterranean whose bodies are never found. Only one body is found for every fifteen identified deaths.

(Source: IOM)

A tiny fraction of the bodies of migrants who drown at sea are recovered; most of these ‘invisible shipwrecks’ vanish without trace.¹⁹⁹ Among those seeking to enter the US from Mexico, thousands disappear or die each year because of kidnappings, vehicle accidents, snake bites, dehydration and starvation.²⁰⁰

Walls and fences are not solutions. They encourage migrants to take clandestine and dangerous routes, and embolden traffickers who prey on the vulnerable. Tighter borders also encourage some migrants to stay longer than they would like or remain undocumented instead of leaving and running the risk of never being able to return.

Such restrictions interrupt historical patterns of seasonal and circular migration for work. This has been shown to be the case for migration between Mexico and the United States, as well as between both Morocco and Turkey and the EU. Hard borders do not protect host nations from threats, but they do prevent their economies from benefiting from the value that migrants can bring.

12. Migration and the Economy

Impact on Destination Countries

Migration is a much misunderstood phenomenon. Most people vastly over-estimate the numbers of migrants in their countries, as media and politicians stoke fears of an ‘invasion of illegal aliens’²⁰¹ or a ‘flood of migrants’.²⁰² In France, Britain and the US, among others, between a quarter and a half of voters rank immigration as one of the top challenges facing their countries. This encourages governments to restrict migrant flows, at the risk of undermining future prosperity.²⁰³

The problem is partly one of perception. On the one hand, the costs of migration are highly visible and are typically borne in the short run by a small number of communities. On the other hand, its benefits tend to be intangible and widely dispersed and can take time to make themselves felt.

Over time, migration more than repays any initial expense, but to reap these long-term rewards governments must first tackle its short-term costs. This means lifting the burden from those who feel it most – by building more housing in some areas, for example, or spending more on public services to compensate for the extra demand that migrants may place on them.

These measures are rooted in sound economics as well as good politics. Left unheard, local grievances can sap public confidence in migration and feed the polarisation that prevents societies from enjoying its huge potential benefits.

Economic Impact on Receiving Societies

Rich countries owe much to the migrants who have worked in their factories, hospitals, mines and farms in the past. These workers are just as necessary today. Far from taking the jobs of locals, migrants typically improve local employment rates, particularly for women. Care for the elderly falls disproportionately on women as well as the older working-age population: in Britain about a quarter of adults aged 50 to 64 would like to take up paid work but are prevented from doing so by caring duties. The proportion is similar across Europe.²⁰⁴ Migrant domestic workers make child and other home care services more affordable, freeing locals to work.

Studies of countries with large foreign-born populations have consistently shown that migration boosts and sustains their growth.²⁰⁵ In the UK, incoming migrants are forecast to contribute £7.4 billion by 2028. In the US, migrants paid an estimated $520 billion in taxes in 2021 alone.²⁰⁶ Impressive as they are, these numbers significantly underestimate the overall economic contribution of migrants.

Another common fear, that migrants undermine local wages, appears to be unfounded. The economist George J. Borjas, a one-time leading critic of migration, now concludes that while the impact of immigration on native wages fluctuates widely from study to study – partly depending on the type of work involved – it seems to ‘cluster around zero’.²⁰⁷

Foreigners generally fill crucial gaps in the local workforce, taking up jobs such as plumbing or banking where trainees are in short supply, or work that locals prefer to avoid, such as fruit picking, heavy labour or night-shift roles. Some countries, such as those in the Gulf, rely so heavily on migrants that their economies would collapse without them.

Economic growth and migration tend to go hand in hand. Countries with relatively high immigration levels in the postwar period, like West Germany, Switzerland and Australia, experienced the highest rates of growth. Those with relatively low immigration rates at the time, such as the US and UK, saw their economies grow far less rapidly. Of course, thriving economies naturally attract more migrants. But this in turn boosts productivity, with immigration and economic growth creating a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle.

A Turkish Gastarbeiter family in their apartment in Essen, 1977. The children are busy with their homework. (Süddeutsche Zeitung/Alamy)

Poorer countries with fewer jobs also take in migrants but for different reasons. Economic migrants frequently travel to Greece in the hope of transiting to Germany and northern Europe, for example. Refugees may also end up in places with high unemployment because they have been forced to find the nearest safe haven, as with Syrian refugees who fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

Social Benefits

Despite lurid caricatures of migrants as ‘benefit scroungers’, foreign workers typically contribute more to social security systems in taxes than they receive in assistance. This is because a greater share of migrants are of working age. They also work longer hours on average than natives and are less reliant on services such as schooling, pensions, health and care for the elderly.

In Canada and the United States, for example, non-refugee immigrants tend to claim fewer unemployment benefits and less social security or housing support than domestic residents. In Europe, which has a far higher share of refugees and asylum seekers, the cost of support can initially outweigh income received in taxes in some countries, but this changes over time as migrants integrate and are allowed to work.

Indeed, in Germany, Greece, Portugal and Spain, migrants depend less on social services than locals. In the UK, a study of the foreign-born population shows that migrants contribute about 10 per cent more to government revenues than they receive through benefits. Without immigrants, ‘either public services would have to be cut or the government would need to increase the basic rate of income tax by one penny in the pound.’²⁰⁸

Undocumented workers also pay significant sums into the public purse. In the US, unregistered migrants are actually more likely to be in employment than native workers or documented immigrants.²⁰⁹ Afraid to reveal their status, these ‘hidden’ workers rarely claim welfare benefits, boosting government coffers to their own detriment.

MIGRATION IN NUMBERS

$2.15 trillion

Amount gathered in US ‘suspense files’

Since many undocumented migrants use fake social security cards to obtain work, the social security contributions paid by their employers cannot be matched with a name. Between 1937 and 2022, the US authorities accumulated over $2.15 trillion in so-called ‘suspense files’. These funds, contributed by undocumented migrants, are eventually earmarked for other spending.²¹⁰

The US government estimates that in the decade to 2034, migrants will contribute $7 trillion to the economy.²¹¹ Plans to reduce migration would therefore severely reduce growth and indirectly lead to job losses. Rust Belt states would be hit particularly hard as migrants play a vital role in reviving their economies and reversing population decline.

Homeless, Tempest-Tossed

At least 2.5 million people sought to cross the 2,000-mile southern border of the US in 2023, with more than 12,000 attempts recorded in a single day. These numbers reflect the pressures of poverty, climate change, conflict and political repression that are forcing people to migrate from Asia and Africa as well as Latin America. Nearly 8 million people have left Venezuela alone, most for Colombia and other neighbouring countries but some making the arduous journey north through Mexico. Despite substantial increases in funding for the US Customs and Border Protection service – to $22bn in 2023 – only 500 asylum cases a day at most are processed by the courts, leading to a rapidly growing backlog. Applicants are able to remain in the US while waiting for their case to be heard, with many getting lost in the labyrinthine system.²¹²

Demographic Headwinds

For the ageing societies of Europe, Asia and Latin America, migration is a crucial remedy to the problem of population decline. Over half the world’s countries have fertility rates below replacement levels, which together with longer lifespans are leading to a rapid increase in median ages. By 2050, the number of people over 60 is expected to double to over 2 billion.²¹³

The working-age population is shrinking fast in Europe and much of eastern Asia. In China, the number of economically active people in the workforce is falling by around 4 million each year, with those in employment having to support a growing number of elderly and other dependants. This raises the pressure on workers, who are likely to have to pay more of their salary in taxes and work longer hours.

Anti-immigration protest in Seoul, 2018 (Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images)

As countries age, the economic case for migration becomes more compelling. Yet there appears to be very little correlation with public attitudes. Some of the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the world, such as Poland, Hungary and South Korea, are among those most opposed to migration. This profound disconnect is rooted in nationalist beliefs as well as deeply entrenched discriminatory attitudes towards foreigners.

Italian Shipbuilding

In the heartland of the conservative Brothers of Italy, the need for foreign workers due to Italy’s very low fertility rate has trumped the rhetoric of the right. Of the 8,500 people employed by the Fincantieri group, which is building three large cruise liners near Trieste on the Adriatic coast, 6,800 are skilled migrants. The foreign population of the town of Monfalcone has grown from 3 per cent to 30 per cent of the total as a result, with Bangladeshi Muslims the single largest group. Even so, the Muslim community of Monfalcone has not yet been granted planning permission to establish a mosque.²¹⁴

Attitudes can and do change, as people grow used to foreigners in their midst and to appreciate their contribution. In Romania, low fertility and outward migration have reduced the population to about 19 million from more than 23 million in 1990, yet robust economic growth is creating an unmet demand for labour. Migration provides an answer. In 2017, visas were only granted to 3,000 non-EU nationals. By 2030 this figure is expected to exceed 600,000 a year.²¹⁵

Cleaners and Clinicians

Highly skilled migrants tend to gravitate to certain occupations in certain countries. In Switzerland and Ireland, for example, many migrants work as teachers. In the UK, they are an important share of doctors and nurses, while the US technology sector employs large numbers of foreign specialists.²¹⁶

Immigration and the NHS

One of the nurses went into a family one night and there was a very obstreperous man and he said ‘We’ll have none of them Irish and none of them blacks in here,’ so she said, ‘Fine, no problems. I shall leave now but there won’t be anybody back because we are all them Irish or them blacks.’

Clodagh, Irish migrant nurse²¹⁷

The national healthcare system of the UK has been heavily dependent on migrant doctors and nurses throughout its 75-year history. In 2023, almost 19 per cent of NHS staff were non-British citizens. More than a third of doctors – 35 per cent – were foreign nationals.²¹⁸

By 2029, the NHS anticipates it will be short of 108,000 nurses.²¹⁹ Immigration restrictions, the cost of living and poor pay relative to other destinations are a big part of the problem. The starting salary for nurses in the NHS is about £30,000 or £15 per hour, which is about a third below that in France and under half of what is offered in the United States. The growth of private medicine in the UK over the past 40 years has also lured many medical professionals away.

Health systems in other countries are competing for both foreign and British medical staff. Gulf states advertise their shorter shifts, modern hospitals, safety and friendliness in contrast to conditions in the understaffed hospitals and overworked medical professions of Britain. Other vacancies are advertised through sites such as nurses.co.uk for jobs in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

Exceptional People

Migrant workers are by definition exceptional, the few bold enough to take the plunge and move country despite the many risks involved. These same characteristics mean they are more inclined to be entrepreneurs and original thinkers. In the US, immigrants file three times more patents than locals and are 80% more likely to start a firm.²²⁰ In Silicon Valley, half of all venture capital-backed firms have at least one immigrant founder. Over half of US start-ups valued at $1bn or more that have yet to go public – the so-called ‘unicorns’ with potential for high growth – are led by immigrants.²²¹

Migrants make up more than three times as many Nobel laureates, National Academy of Science members and Oscar-winning film directors than would be expected from their share of the population. In the UK, one-third of all Booker Prizewinning authors have been migrants.²²²

Of course, not all migrants are great intellects or upstanding citizens. But crime rates are typically lower than for the native population. There is a degree of positive selection at work here. Compared with those they leave behind, migrants tend to be more ambitious, creative, resourceful and determined. Countries that deter migrants from settling lose out on the creative and intellectual capacities of these often remarkable people.

Entrepreneurship can be a crucial emancipatory activity, allowing migrant families to acquire assets, provide a good education for their children, move to better neighbourhoods, and eventually achieve middle-class status.

de Haas, Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration

Walls and Fences

If migration is so tremendously beneficial, why do so many oppose it? Why do politicians seek to curtail immigration, even as their countries rely on migrants to staff health and other services? Farms, factories, construction sites and care and cleaning services all require workers, yet those who could perform these essential roles are often the very people that migration policies prevent from gaining easy, safe or legal entry.

Controlling migration is far less important to populist leaders than appearing to control migration.

Robin Cohen, Migration

The disconnect between the economic reality and the political discourse is striking. Surveys show almost no relationship between the number of migrants that a country admits and popular attitudes to migration. Anti-immigrant rhetoric seems to be a useful electoral gambit for parties across the political spectrum, with even voters who themselves are migrants, or the descendants of migrants, succumbing to its cynical appeal.

From ‘Migration and the Economy’, Oxford Martin School (2018)

Most people, stirred by warnings of ‘floods’ of foreigners or even ‘rivers of blood’, believe there are far more migrants than is actually the case. Scaremongering political sound-bites resonate with vulnerable people worried about unemployment or access to local services. Ironically, though, migrants may be the answer to many of their troubles, such as staff shortages in schools, hospitals and public transport.

Walls and fences occupy a special place in politicians’ playbooks. Like other hard-line policies, they act as symbolic displays of strength. In practice they are generally counterproductive, keeping people in as much as out and forcing the most desperate to risk their lives in the attempt to circumvent them. Physical barriers also pander to fears of the foreigners gathered on the other side. Trump’s ‘big, beautiful wall’ is just a recent example.

The US/Mexico border wall near Mexicali, California Photograph: Kevin Cooley/Redux/Eyevine

Is Migration Good for Migrants?

In the long term, migration is undoubtedly a net benefit for societies on the receiving end, but what about migrants themselves? Migrants from particular ethnic backgrounds sometimes fare markedly better than locals in terms of average earnings, as is the case for Indian-born migrants in the US or for Indian and Chinese migrants in the UK. On the other hand, black African and Caribbean as well as Pakistani migrants have done less well in Britain than those from other social or ethnic groups.²²³

Migrant women tend to be concentrated in care work and on informal hourly contracts, in what some have termed the ‘feminisation of precarious work’.²²⁴ In many countries, they work in private homes as cleaners and cooks or care for children or the elderly. In interviews these domestic workers reveal the pressures of isolation and loneliness as well as the patronising attitudes, vitriol and even violence they have to endure from employers.²²⁵

‘We Asked For Workers, We Got People Instead’

Migrants often do essential but difficult or dangerous jobs shunned by locals, including shift work in slaughterhouses and cleaning work in hospitals.

Despite the rhetoric, most governments are prepared to allow immigration when it suits them. Today, labour recruitment from abroad is often privatised and outsourced, or in the hands of informal smugglers and agents. Yet by tweaking the rules, governments can still shape who is recruited from abroad and with what skills. This became abundantly clear during the pandemic, when fruit pickers from Eastern Europe were permitted to board westbound flights unhindered by disease containment protocols. Without these workers, crops would have rotted in the fields. Economic needs trumped the risks of contagion, as well as the risks to the migrants’ own health: during the COVID-19 pandemic they suffered a disproportionately high number of deaths.

State-sponsored labour recruitment plays a particularly important role in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Without workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere, the roads, hospitals, schools, soaring apartment buildings and stadiums of Gulf states would not exist. In the UAE, most of the migrants who make up almost 90 per cent of the total population are temporary contract labourers with no rights to permanent residency and citizenship.²²⁶

The Gulf’s migrant workers are highly vulnerable to deportation. At the same time their mobility may be limited by the confiscation of passports for the duration of their contract.²²⁷ Initial recruitment can involve hefty fees that are deducted from salaries. Pakistani taxi drivers in Dubai say they must work three months in the year simply to pay back the recruiter who secured the job and visa for them.

The FIFA 2022 World Cup in Qatar drew global attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of these migrants. Contractors were under enormous time pressure to build stadiums and other infrastructure for the tournament, with little attention paid to working conditions, including perilously hot weather. One investigation revealed that ‘Nepalese migrants constructing infrastructure for the games were dying at a rate of one every two days’.²²⁸

Migrants Without Borders

The European Union and the Schengen borderless zone are the largest modern experiments in unhindered migration. EU enlargement has led to over 400 million people being able to work, study, and live without obstacles across more than 30 countries. These include the 27 members of the EU and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. Anybody can move across the signatory countries with no border controls whatsoever, except in Ireland, which opted out of Schengen, and Cyprus, which has not yet joined.²²⁹

Similar blocs have been set up in West Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and between Australia and New Zealand. The details differ, but all provide evidence that removing border controls and easing labour migration can bring great benefits.

Despite popular fears, the removal of barriers to labour mobility in Europe has been hugely beneficial to its economies. Following the 2004 accession of several Eastern European states, the expected influx of migrants to the UK and Ireland neither displaced local workers nor stoked unemployment. In fact, newcomers to Britain from the new EU member states paid significantly more in taxes than they received in benefits and services.²³⁰ The average native citizen, on the other hand, cost the public purse £70 more each year than they paid in taxes.

Despite the dire warnings of migration sceptics, droves of poorer Europeans have not migrated to wealthier countries in search of handouts. Even though social security payments in Germany were approximately double those in Greece in 2023, Greek nationals only migrated north if jobs were available.

Even during the financial crisis of 2008–2011, when Greece and Spain experienced soaring joblessness, over three quarters of the young people there remained unemployed and stayed at home. When times are tough, people tend to rely on the support of their families and communities rather than choosing to live off benefits in other countries.

Hard Shell, Soft Centre

The ability of Europeans to migrate within the Schengen area rests on a shared understanding that their common external border needs to be rigorously patrolled. Once in Europe, even migrants can move between countries with relative freedom as is evident in the daily tragedy of people who have entered Europe via Italy or Greece and then head north to the French coast to attempt to cross the deceptively treacherous Channel into England.

Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, has an annual budget of over €845 million. It also coordinates the payments and other support given to neighbouring countries to stop migrants entering Europe. Since 2016, Turkey has received more than €5bn to prevent refugees from entering Europe. In a similar fashion, Italy’s 2008 ‘Friendship Treaty’ with Libya offered the regime in Tripoli €5bn to stop migrants, while Europe has committed €1bn to Tunisia and €5bn to Egypt for the same purpose.

These controversial deals give huge bargaining power to the transit countries in their negotiations with Europe. They also help fund the criminal gangs and warlords who control migration routes and often imprison and abuse migrants in places such as Libya.²³¹ In June 2022, Morocco engineered a border crisis by allowing a large group to seek refuge in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. At least 37 migrants were killed. The use of migrants as a geopolitical tool has been described by Kelly Greenhill as creating ‘weapons of mass migration’.²³²

Good and Bad Policies

Wrong-headed migration policies often make matters worse. A US decision to restrict entry to foreign farm workers several decades ago ultimately led to all farmers experiencing losses. Food prices rose, with poorer customers among those worst affected. As farms struggled due to labour shortages, suppliers and other businesses were badly affected. The impact across the industry and beyond was devastating, with economists estimating that for every four migrants kept away one US citizen lost their job.²³³

By contrast, an example of a beneficial policy is the Foreign Domestic Worker programme introduced by Hong Kong, which in the late 1970s allowed an unlimited number of immigrants to enter the country in response to job offers. The arrival of tens of thousands of domestic workers led to a 10 per cent increase in women with young children entering the workforce.²³⁴ Although the policy was subsequently abandoned, similar improvements in female labour force participation have been observed in the United States, Italy and Malaysia as a result of the easing of visa restrictions.

Overall, the economies of receiving countries are greatly strengthened by migration. Migrants of all skill levels boost growth. Even in the short term, wages tend not to fall – and they rise as the wider economic benefits take effect. Migrants contribute more to public finances in taxes than they cost in welfare and other services. Their propensity towards innovation and entrepreneurship injects dynamism, lifting the prospects of all.²³⁵

Even so, migration can incur short-term costs and these need to be addressed by local and national governments. There are tremendous gains to be reaped from migration, but much more effort is required to ensure that migrants are successfully integrated into societies, and to overcome the prejudices and discrimination that prevents them – and us – from realising our full potential.

The central challenge for modern, diversifying societies is to create a new, broader sense of we”.

Robert Putnam, 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

13. Migration and Development

Impact on Sending Countries

While the impact of migrants on receiving countries draws considerable attention, the effects on the communities they leave behind is just as important. These vary enormously between places and depend greatly on the nature of the move. Is it coerced or voluntary? Is it a journey born of necessity, or one made with work and opportunity in mind?

As this brief history has shown, migration is rarely a one-way street. Many migrants return home for a variety of reasons or travel back and forth between countries, with these patterns of circulation spanning many years and further complicating any overall assessment.

Optimists highlight the benefits of the money migrants send back home, focusing on the role of remittances in promoting development. Pessimists point to the departure of skilled workers and professionals, claiming this drain of talent reduces the potential for innovation at home while perpetuating cycles of dependency between sending and receiving countries. Both these depictions are highly simplistic.

Shock Absorbers

In 2023, the volume of remittances sent home by migrants to low- and middle-income countries was an estimated $669bn, three times the amount of aid and much more than foreign investment. Including the flows between rich countries, total remittances that year were put at $860bn.

Even these very large official figures hugely underestimate the true scale of remittances, as many migrants use informal channels that are not captured in the statistics. In Egypt, remittances generate more income than the Suez Canal, in Morocco more than tourism, and in Sri Lanka more than exports of tea.²³⁶

While these funds shouldn’t be viewed as a catch-all solution to poverty or inequality, they are often a vital source of income for the poorest in society. Cash transfers provide families with safety nets, helping them to diversify their incomes and to pay for education, health and housing.

Migrants sent around $29bn in remittances to lower- and middle-income countries in 1990. The amount more than doubled to $74bn in 2000, then quadrupled to $302bn in 2010, and has more than doubled again since.²³⁷ This reflects both rising numbers of migrants and the greater need for support back home. Migrants send back more money when times are tough, as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since many migrants travel to nearby countries for work, transfers between neighbouring developing countries constitute a major share.

Migration and Development Brief 39, KNOMAD (Dec. 2023)

Internal migration is similarly important, especially within very large, diverse countries. In 2020, there were around 376 million internal migrants in China and an estimated 600 million in India.²³⁸ Not only do these numbers represent significant proportions of the population, but they also dwarf the numbers emigrating abroad. During that same year, for example, China’s overseas emigrants were estimated at 10.5 million and India’s at 17.9 million – yet this latter figure still constitutes the largest diaspora in the world.²³⁹

Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean have grown rapidly with the increase in migrants from these countries working in the United States. Deepening poverty in these regions has also led to more money being sent home, as was particularly evident during the pandemic, when remittances rose by 48 per cent. The stimulus packages that protected US workers from a loss of income also helped sustain remittances.

Lifelines From Abroad

In El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Jamaica, remittance flows account for over 20 per cent of national income. Most is spent on essential items such as food and medicine, with additional savings put into paying for education and housing. For every 10 per cent increase in the numbers of migrants from Mexico and Central America working in the US, it is estimated that there is a 9 per cent decline in the number of people in their home communities living in extreme poverty, which the World Bank defines as living on less than $2.15 per day.²⁴⁰

MIGRATION IN NUMBERS

$74bn

Remittances to lower/middle-income countries in 2000

$669bn

Remittances to lower/middle-income countries in 2022

(Source: World Bank)

In most parts of the world, remittances provide indirect benefits to local economies. Regions with high rates of emigration tend to see high rates of growth. Remittances help to build new houses, generate social activity and kick-start new businesses, driving up demand for labour and goods. This in turn generates ‘replacement migration’ as people are drawn back into revitalised areas.

Remittances have underpinned the revival and development of many modern economies. Migrant associations established by Jewish communities during World War I helped to finance reconstruction in Europe. Between 1914 and 1924, concerts, balls and banquets organised by New York’s Jewish hometown organisations all became occasions for fundraising for war-ravaged communities back home.²⁴¹

Today, migrant associations are directly involved in socioeconomic development in home communities all over the world, helping to build and fund clinics, schools, universities and other works. Diasporas have also helped to mobilise financial support, supplies, volunteers and online advocacy after natural disasters and conflicts. Recent examples include responses in 2023 to the Turkish and Afghan earthquakes as well as relief efforts for the war in Ukraine and conflict in Israel and Gaza.

Flying Money

Ancient informal money transfer systems such as hawala and hundi have been used for centuries across South Asia, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and North Africa. These systems are founded on trust and draw on extensive networks based on family, clan, tribal and religious affiliations. In China, an age-old system, fei-chien – also known as flying money – has been in use since the seventh century.

Banks and official money transfer schemes such as Western Union are still slow and expensive and are often unavailable in remote villages or rural areas. Many migrants rely instead on large trust-based networks and other informal ways of sending money home. These are often more efficient and less costly than official alternatives, while having the added advantage of avoiding the scrutiny of tax and other authorities in both sending and receiving countries.

The IMF estimates that unofficial money transfers account for one and a half times more than the sums sent through formal channels.²⁴² Based on Work Bank estimates for recorded remittances for 2023, this equates to more than one trillion (thousand billion) dollars, roughly equivalent to the GDP of the Netherlands.

Seven Sisters Road in North London is home to a wide array of ethnic groups. Among its halal butchers, kosher shops, Turkish barbers, Caribbean greengrocers and Somalian internet cafés are dozens of remittance brokers. Labels on small businesses promise, ‘Once sent, your money is there’ and ‘Homeboy, instant transfer’ and specialise in sending money to Jamaica, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Ghana and elsewhere. One hand-written sign in an African language states: ‘We send money to Uganda at a good rate.’²⁴³

Around the world, migrants often prefer these personal services over formal channels, sending money home via hand-to-hand transfers to, for example, a willing taxi driver who will drive across a border for a small fee, or a small business with a trusted international network. In the town of Hosanna, Ethiopia, around 10–15 per cent of shop owners as well as returning migrants assist with these informal payments. Flight attendants and travelling merchants also help transfer money for migrants.²⁴⁴

Covert Remittances

What happens to migrants and their remittances when their families back home are cut off? Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 31,000 Koreans have defected from the North to the South, around 70 per cent of them young women. To pass through the ‘demilitarised’ border zone is considered too dangerous, so most flee along long, hazardous and expensive routes after crossing the Yalu River into China.²⁴⁵

When they arrive, remittances can only be sent back to North Korea through covert, informal channels. Brokers in the north use phones smuggled from China and connect to Chinese mobile networks close to the border. With these go-betweens taking 20–50 per cent of the funds transferred, these are likely the most costly remittance transfers made by exiled migrants in the world.

Brain Drains and Hidden Gains

The emigration of highly skilled professionals can have important financial and social costs, particularly for developing countries. On the face of it, ‘brain drain’ statistics paint a devastating picture of the impact of skilled emigration on some of these countries. Small, low-income countries and island states experience some of the highest skilled emigration rates, with over 90 per cent of Guyana’s most educated and two thirds of the educated populations of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Zimbabwe heading overseas.²⁴⁶

For many poor countries, the outflow of medical professionals has imperilled already weak public health systems. Malawi, for example, lost more than half of its nursing staff to emigration over a recent period of just four years, with many being recruited by the British NHS. This exodus has left only 7 nurses per 10,000 people, compared with 150 per 10,000 in the UK.

China, India and the Philippines send the highest total number of educated migrants abroad, but sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Central America and many small island states send a much higher share of their graduates. Over 20 per cent of people from sub-Saharan Africa with a degree are outside their countries and more than half of the graduates from universities in the Caribbean and Central America have left.

For sub-Saharan countries, where only around 4 per cent of people have university degrees, the migration of any skilled professionals threatens prospects for development. Yet many of these graduates would otherwise remain unproductive at home. School leavers typically pursue further education to improve their chances of getting a job elsewhere, so the success of graduates who have found work abroad can encourage people back home to study. Paradoxically, the number of students and highly skilled workers in a country may actually increase as more graduates leave.²⁴⁷

When skilled migrants move to another country, they establish connections with prospective employers, remit more money and inject dynamism into their home economies in ways that spread beyond their immediate families. With return and circular migration, ‘what initially seems to be a loss, may become a gain over the longer term’.²⁴⁸

For these reasons, concerns about the flight of educated migrants may be less justified than at first appears. Using the brain drain as an excuse to stop the entry or exit of migrants may actually worsen the problems in their home countries, by reducing not only remittances but the desire for further education.

A National Asset: Training Workers for Export

For some countries, the training of nurses and care workers is part of a deliberate government remittance strategy. Overseas workers were a major source of the $40bn sent back to the Philippines by citizens in 2023. Far more nurses are trained than leave, so that the country has a better ratio of health professionals to its own population than many of its peers.

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) has engaged in what it calls ‘labour diplomacy’ by signing bilateral labour agreements with over 125 countries. Some destinations have been decertified because they do not meet the POEA’s standards for working conditions and human rights, making it one of the few examples of a country setting standards of working conditions for its citizens abroad.

In 2023, the government reported that 2 million of its citizens worked overseas. Robin Cohen notes that ‘rather than being seen as a brain drain, overseas Filipino workers are seen as a national asset and praised for the sacrifices they are making for their families and country.’²⁴⁹

Other developing countries could benefit from a more systematic approach. In South Africa, Jamaica, Malawi and others, a large amount of taxpayer money is spent educating doctors, nurses and other professionals only for them to leave for richer countries. Imposing minimum ‘national service’ periods of work after graduation and writing-off student loans if the graduate stays for a few years are two practical measures which can reduce the cost of this drain of talent.

Returning Home

The world’s most flexible and resilient trading networks – the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Indians in East Africa, and the Lebanese in Latin America.

Robert Guest, Borderless Economics

People who choose to live overseas are often among the most ambitious and creative people of their home countries. With their feet in more than one place, they act as pollinators, cross-diffusing the benefits of migration to both sending and receiving countries. These migrants can weave close-knit transnational networks which enable the exchange of ideas across great distances.

Diaspora communities are well placed to recognise opportunities that transcend borders. For example, specialist universities in India train graduates for jobs in Silicon Valley, with these workers often returning armed with new experience and ideas. It is easier to start a business and find capital in California, but software engineers are more plentiful and costs are lower in Mumbai or Bangalore, so entrepreneurs have founded a series of cross-border companies that link the two worlds. Other countries including Ireland, New Zealand and China have also developed policies which seek to capture the expertise and the finance of their diasporas and attract some of it back home.

Africa’s Iron Lady

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia from 2006–2018, was the first elected woman head of state of any African country. In 2011, she won the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karmān. Sirleaf was forced into exile twice, becoming an influential economist at the World Bank. As president, she inherited an impoverished country devastated by civil war, but during her years in office she helped stabilise the economy, established a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to manage corruption and quell ethnic tension, and sustained Liberia’s first peaceful and democratic transfer of power in over seventy years. From exile to presidency, Sirleaf’s journey encapsulates the profound impact that returning migrants can have on their home countries.

At first, the loss of charismatic leaders to migration can deprive a country of its visionaries and community builders. However, their subsequent return can fundamentally change the political trajectory of their home nations. Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf are among the dozens of leaders who spent their young adult years overseas, where they assimilated new ideas that allowed them to later play crucial roles in nation-building on their return.

The Pain of Exile

During apartheid, the banning of the African National Congress and other repressive measures forced thousands to flee, including the president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo. When South Africa finally became democratic in the 1990s, many surviving exiles returned to be reunited with families and friends and help build a new country. I was proud to be among them. Not so fortunate were the thousands who had died before they could come back, including those killed in South Africa’s dirty war against exiles. Victims include Dulcie September, an anti-apartheid activist assassinated in Paris, and Jeanette and Katryn, wife and daughter of my friend Marius Schoon, who were killed in Angola in 1984 by a parcel bomb sent by the South African security services.

The Power of Diasporas

Diasporas can provide crucial political as well as financial support for certain countries. Jewish and Taiwanese diasporas have formed powerful lobby groups which help sustain Israel and Taiwan politically, with these overseas networks also providing investment finance for the technology and other sectors. Despite being defined by the World Bank as a high-income country, Israel has received over $300bn in aid from the US alone and receives over $2bn a year in philanthropic donations from individuals – with the strength of the diaspora, at least in part, underpinning this political and financial support.²⁵⁰

Similarly, Lebanon’s diaspora has played a key role in supporting the country through decades of conflict and perennial financial crises. Today, Lebanese businesses can be found around the world, with a strong presence in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa. Although estimates vary wildly, from 4 million to 16 million people, the number of Lebanese abroad greatly exceeds the number living in Lebanon today. Lebanese migrants send home over $7bn annually, equivalent to almost half of the national income, making Lebanon one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world.²⁵¹

Whether diasporas can participate formally in politics back home differs from country to country. In Colombia, for example, expatriates are listed as one of five minorities for whom seats are reserved in parliament. France, Italy and Portugal also set aside parliamentary seats for expatriate representation. Many other countries, including Argentina, Brazil, the US, Canada, Germany and South Africa, allow their citizens abroad to cast absentee ballots.

India’s diaspora has been the world’s largest for more than a decade and is, according to The Economist, more influential than any other in history. India has recently overtaken China as the most populous country, with more than 1.4 billion citizens. A further 18 million abroad sent back a record $108bn in 2022, around 3 per cent of Indian GDP. There are 3.5 million Indian migrants in the UAE, 2.5 million in Saudi Arabia and about the same number in the United States, followed by around 850,000 in Britain.

India’s abundant good schools and universities help explain why it has become the leading global exporter of talent, as does the fact that most graduates speak English. In 2022, three quarters of the speciality-occupation H-1B visas granted by the United States were awarded to Indian computer scientists and other highly skilled graduates. As its educated workforce and diaspora grows, the role of Indian migrants is likely to become even more significant in the decades to come.

Art and Thought in Exile

Banishment and exile have been used as a punishment for as long as states have existed. Aristotle relates how in ancient Athens from the 480s bce any citizen could be ostracised if they were thought to present a threat to the state (the ostrakon from which the word derives was a pot sherd or shell on which their name was written). Many hundreds of world leaders have been forced into exile over the centuries, from Napoleon to the Shah of Iran. But influential émigrés have also included artists, writers, scientists and theorists as well as politicians. A tiny sample of prominent figures follows.

Palestinian-American scholar and literary critic Edward Said’s writings vividly capture the experience of exile.²⁵² Said fled British-ruled Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and never returned. He spent his formative years in Cairo and later became a professor at Columbia University in the US. His seminal work, Orientalism, critiques Western perceptions of the East, establishing the foundations for much present-day work on post-colonialism. In his ‘Reflections on Exile,’ Said poignantly suggests that it is ‘strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience’.²⁵³

Miriam Makeba, the singer, was forced into exile when in 1960 the South African government prevented her from returning to South Africa for her mother’s funeral. Her songs criticising the apartheid regime were listened to worldwide. President Nelson Mandela said upon her death that ‘her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us’.²⁵⁴

Miriam Makeba, 1969 (Nationaal Archief, Netherlands)

Expulsion has led to the creation of politically significant art and literature in ways that may have not been possible at home. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda could not return to Chile, where he had served as a senator, after a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1948. While in exile he wrote his collection of poems ‘Canto General,’ an epic for Latin America. He later won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Czech author Milan Kundera went into exile following political persecution by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Prague Spring. Despite The Unbearable Lightness of Being and his other books not being available in Czech, he became one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century. He became stateless after his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, before France accepted him as a refugee. Forty years later, when he was 90, his Czech citizenship was finally restored.

Migration and Development

The relationship between migration and development is complicated: migration can lead to development and development can lead to migration. The poorest people often lack the means to migrate far, so tend to move within their countries or to neighbouring ones. Long-distance migration is more common among semi-skilled and skilled migrants and those from more affluent countries.

Migration can bring about profound changes to home communities. For example, women from rural Ethiopia who migrate to the Gulf often improve their social and financial positions and can explore avenues for work that would not have been possible before. Put simply, migration allows them to feel like they can ‘do something’ with their lives.²⁵⁵

Migrants can also earn more abroad. By sending money to their families and other dependants at home, they contribute to the development of the countries they leave. The World Bank has shown that increasing the number of international migrants by a third would raise global incomes annually by $1.4 trillion, producing a much greater boon to the world economy and a more rapid reduction in poverty than trade reforms and development assistance ever could.²⁵⁶

14. The Future of Migration

The future will probably be as messy as the past, and all predictions are likely to be wrong, but one thing is clear: there is no return to the neat idea of closed-off nation-states with homogeneous national communities.

Stephen Castles²⁵⁷

Migration is as old as human history. It has shaped our past and will define our future. The patterns of migration flows are constantly changing. So too are attitudes. Widespread hostility to foreigners in our recent past may give way to a more welcoming approach in the decades to come.

What Might Change? What Might Stay the Same?

Migration has remained relatively stable at around 3 per cent of the world’s population over the past century, regardless of the size of that population. While migrant numbers are at record levels, in relative terms they are not remarkable historically.

As migration statistics record the movement of people crossing national borders, one might expect the number of migrants to rise in line with the number of countries created. People who previously moved within a country such as the former Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, for example, now have to cross international borders to make the same journey. Indeed, the number of sovereign states has almost doubled over the past seventy years (from 105 to over 200).

Together with much more rigorous monitoring of border crossings, this might be expected to lead to a proportionate jump in recorded migration, but it has not. Instead, migrant numbers have increased steadily in line with global population growth, which is expected to peak in the middle of this century. New borders may create new migrants, but they also act as barriers that prevent others from leaving.

Fears of countries being overwhelmed by migrants have proved far-fetched. Even when people are free to move, they typically only do so if there is a prospect of a job. During the last financial crisis, only a tiny fraction of the unemployed moved country, even when – as in Europe – they were free to do so. When in need, people chose to remain at home supported by friends and family.

Demographics

Just to stabilise its population, the European Union will need to accept at least 50 million foreign migrants in the next 25 years, according to the OECD think tank. Commenting on the finding, Spanish immigration minister José Luis Escrivá said it shows that there is an ‘absolute need’ for migration significantly above already all-time highs, ‘simply for the maintenance of the welfare state’.²⁵⁸

Fertility levels are falling to below replacement levels in over half of the countries in the world, so that in the future each worker will have to support a growing number of elderly dependants. As the labour force shrinks, it is also becoming wealthier and better educated, with fewer people interested in taking on hard manual work in construction or agriculture, or working long, low-paid hours in care jobs. Unless that changes, migrants will be essential to perform tasks that locals are not available or willing to do.

The pressures stemming from labour shortages and ageing populations are likely to lead societies to accept higher levels of immigration once all other options have been exhausted. Japan was among the first countries to experience a collapse in fertility alongside a rapidly ageing population. On average, 1,000 more people are dying every day than are being born. Each year, as a result, the Japanese labour force is contracting by around 250,000 people.²⁵⁹

Robots at Work

Singapore, South Korea and other Asian countries have turned to robotics to ease pressures on their healthcare systems. (Changi General Hospital)

Due to a political aversion to large-scale immigration, the Japanese strategy has been to substitute robots and automated systems for workers. Robots have replaced people in the repetitive tasks involved in the manufacture of electronics, vehicles and household white goods. Japan now has among the highest ratios of robots per person. The only countries with a greater density of robots are the small island of Singapore and South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world and an even more acute workforce problem.²⁶⁰ But machines are not yet able to look after the elderly properly or engage in meaningful conversation.

Even in Japan, attitudes are gradually changing and the number of immigrants is creeping up. Warabi, north of Tokyo, is now home to over 2,000 Turkish Kurds. In the neighbouring city of Kawaguchi, some 40,000 foreign-born migrants constitute around 7 per cent of the population, a level which would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Overall, the number of migrants has tripled since 1990 to a record 3 million foreigners, 2.4 per cent of the Japanese population. Although this is still low by international standards, it reflects a marked change in the historical trend.²⁶¹

Fertility fell around the world between 1960 and 2022. In 1960 only a few countries had fertility rates below replacement level; today the majority find themselves in this situation. Africa is now the only continent with countries that have very high fertility rates. (Terra Incognita and Our World in Data)

In Europe, countries like Britain and Italy, whose citizens in past centuries left in huge numbers to seek work elsewhere, are now themselves experiencing labour shortages. These will become more acute over time. Africa remains the most youthful continent. Well over 100 million young adults will come onto the labour market over the next ten years, but their job prospects at home are poor.

Geopolitical pressures are fuelling nationalism and protectionist policies, as well as the re- or near-shoring of global supply chains. Low-cost manufacturing and services such as administrative back offices and call centres underpinned the modern development of China and southeast Asia. Everywhere, in fact, repetitive unskilled and semi-skilled jobs have provided a step up from rural jobs to better-paid urban ones. Now these middle rungs of the ladder are disappearing as robotics and automated systems spread. At the same time, rural livelihoods are becoming untenable due to extreme weather events and other effects of climate change. The inevitable result is that in countries where population growth is high, the pressures to migrate will only grow.

The Great Disruptor

In Warsaw, dating apps brim with returning Poles looking for socially undistanced fun.

The Economist

The COVID-19 pandemic became known as the ‘Great Disruptor’ as governments closed their borders and outsiders were shunned as potential disease carriers.²⁶² By mid-2020, pandemic-related restrictions, including entry and exit bans and quarantine measures, had left nearly 3 million people stranded outside their home countries.²⁶³

Countries that had attracted migrants saw a ‘great reverse migration’, as many of those who had left their home countries for work returned home. In Europe this was mainly from west to east: an ‘estimated 1.3m Romanians went back to Romania – equivalent to three times the population of its second-biggest city. Perhaps 500,000 Bulgarians returned to Bulgaria – a huge number for a country of 7 million.’ Lithuania also saw more citizens arriving than leaving for the first time in years.²⁶⁴

Digital Nomads

COVID-19 forced a rapid change in attitudes regarding remote work, although these had already been shifting in the years before the outbreak. Improvements in Wi-Fi connectivity and the wider availability of free or low-cost apps supporting remote meetings have made it much easier to work from home or on the move. The pandemic also prompted many who could afford to do so to reconsider their work/life balance and escape to less congested and more desirable locations, which were often also less expensive.

The potential for some to telecommute and work remotely has existed for decades, but the pandemic brought so-called ‘digital nomads’ into the mainstream of migration. More than 50 countries now grant visas for families which permit the holder to work remotely. There are estimated to be about 30 million digital nomads worldwide, with some expecting this figure to double to 60 million by 2030. While many work in technology, a growing number of lawyers, accountants, designers and other professionals have chosen this way of life, at least for part of the year.

Climate Change

‘Migrant Mother’ is perhaps the most famous picture of Dust Bowl migrants, taken by the photographer Dorothea Lange. The sitter, Florence Owens Thompson, was born on a Cherokee reservation and was travelling with her family in California in 1936 when Lange photographed her. (Getty Museum)

Humans have always moved in response to environmental pressures. Like any other species, it is how we have survived. But in the twenty-first century, human-induced climate change is leading to far more frequent and unpredictable environmental disasters, with the most dramatic changes racing ahead of our potential to adapt to them.

The decision to migrate is complex. It cannot be attributed to a single cause, but rather to a combination of incentives and threats. Climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’ because it aggravates other pre-existing challenges such as poverty or conflict. As the availability of fresh water or food is threatened, jobs disappear and conflicts may arise over scarce resources.

The effects of climate change are already evident. Coastal cities house a growing share of the world’s population. Rising oceans and extreme tidal surges, hurricanes and flooding now jeopardise numerous homes. Around the world, people are having to cope with both sudden and slow-onset events, ranging from unbearable heat and devastating storms to dwindling water and food supplies and gradually rising sea levels.

The pressures of climate change are compounding the many other reasons for migration. Some 2,000 migrants arrive in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s sprawling, flood-prone capital, every day.²⁶⁵ Ever more frequent natural disasters and rising oceans are leaving greater and greater numbers of people without homes or subsistence.

The quickening pace of change is already compelling a rising share of the world’s population to seek opportunity and security elsewhere. Predictions vary wildly as to the number of people who will be forced to cross borders because of climate change. Gaia Vince in Nomad Century forecasts this could be over 3 billion this century, almost a third of the projected world population, while the International Organization for Migration claims there could be over a billion environmental migrants by 2050.

These soaring guesstimates are not grounded in how people have responded to extreme weather and disasters in the past, or in the current experience of migrants around the world. The World Bank thinks the figure may be as low as 44 million or as high as 216 million climate refugees by 2050.²⁶⁶ This leads to a central estimate in the bank’s models of about 140 million people having to migrate due to environmental pressures over the coming decades.²⁶⁷

For the time being, even the World Bank’s estimates remain a best guess. We don’t know how environments will change, how quickly countries will achieve net zero ambitions, or how people in different places will respond to climate change, poverty, conflict and other stresses. Nor can we be sure how receiving countries will respond to migratory pressures, although if current trends are a guide, more effort will be invested in keeping people out.

Climate change will certainly be an important driver of migration over the next century, but lurid talk of ‘invasion’ or ‘apocalypse’ misses the mark. Rather than describing the reality of how migration works, these inflammatory words merely serve the purposes of populist politicians.

In practice, when people’s livelihoods are affected by environmental or other threats, they seek refuge as close to home as possible. Not only is this common sense when escaping danger, but it is also the best way to retain ties with one’s community and, when possible, return home. The most vulnerable migrants are often the poorest, who lack the resources, education and networks to travel long distances. The rich are able to insulate themselves from harm, for instance in airconditioned cocoons in the desert, as the rapidly growing cities of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh attest (following a path trailed by Las Vegas and Phoenix). But the great majority of the world’s population cannot afford to take these protective measures and have no second homes to escape to.

In 2022, an estimated 32.6 million people were displaced within their own country’s borders due to disasters such as floods, storms and droughts. This was 41 per cent higher than the annual average across the previous ten years, with climate change cited as a prime cause.²⁶⁸ The countries with the most internally displaced people due to disasters that year were Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Sudan and the United States.

There is currently no formal category under international law for refugees who are forced to migrate due to climate change. This bureaucratic blind-spot requires an international solution.²⁶⁹ Australia recently signed a treaty with the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu to allow 270 Tuvaluans affected by climate change (out of a total population of 11,000) to move to Australia every year, a tiny but symbolically significant gesture.²⁷⁰ When New Zealand introduced a similar scheme for Pacific Islanders in 2017, they ultimately had to drop the plan as people preferred to stay at home as long as they could.

The mixed record of these one-off relocation schemes shows the need for systemic solutions to both environmental degradation and migratory pressures. In the coming century, hundreds of millions if not billions of people will be forced to move because of the loss of their livelihoods, environmental disasters, conflicts over resources or a combination of these and other factors. How to manage this migration and ensure countries live up to their responsibilities as historical users of fossil fuels are vital unanswered questions.

Alternate Futures: Trillion-Dollar Bills

Today the idea of open borders seems extreme or utopian. Until the twentieth century, however, they were the norm. They lie at the heart of a highly successful modern experiment, the Schengen Area. Migration within this bloc of twenty-nine countries has proven remarkably responsive to economic conditions. Less restriction on movement enables return and circular migration. Counterintuitively, stricter controls can encourage settlement and higher levels of migration.

According to a study by the World Bank, global GDP could be boosted by more than $356bn in under a decade if rich countries increased their population by just 3 per cent through immigration. Economics professor Michael Clemens has famously said there are ‘trillion-dollar bills’ waiting to be picked up if borders were opened.²⁷¹

A Migration Policy for the Future

As the economist Lant Pritchett asks, ‘If everything else is globalised then why not labour?’²⁷² We live in a highly interconnected world, but labour mobility is still highly restricted.

As we have seen, migration can be highly beneficial not only for migrants themselves but also for the countries that send and receive them. This is not to mask the terrible suffering that still bedevils the experience of migration, or the pain of separation that migrants and their communities experience. Rather than limit migration, our response should be to improve the well-being of migrants and give them safer, more predictable and cheaper ways to travel abroad and return home. Crafting a more humane and more open system that harnesses the tremendous benefits of increased migration, while minimizing and mitigating its costs, is a vital unresolved challenge.

A mature, evidence-based conversation about the pros and cons of migration is long overdue. We must attend to the real fears of individuals and communities about migration, not simply dismiss them out of hand. Facts are important, but so are perceptions – and they are rarely changed by facts alone. They reflect deep, everyday anxieties that stem from rising costs and other pressures. Many of these problems are the result of underinvestment in everything from housing to hospitals and roads to railways; but they also arise from staff shortages and travel restrictions. Migration can provide some answers.

Attitudes to migration would likely change if people didn’t feel their backs were up against the wall or that their elites were ignoring them. A bargain in which more migrants were accepted under strict conditions of rights and responsibilities should be politically feasible. Responsibilities would include abiding by the law, paying taxes and agreeing to be documented. They would be balanced by rights – to equal treatment before the law, to a minimum wage, to a healthy and safe workplace and so on. Another crucial element of the bargain would be for governments to make a commitment to invest in the places where migrants settled. This would help allay the legitimate worries of locals about access to public healthcare, schools, housing and other vital services.

A global migration agenda would need to be accepted by a host of diverse stakeholders and ideally would be embodied in an international agreement, advanced and defended by international law. But with the United Nations seemingly gridlocked, to wait for this to happen would be to delay progress indefinitely. The way forward therefore lies in building from the bottom up, through bilateral and regional agreements, such as those that already exist within the European Union and in West Africa.

In the end, humans will persevere in their desire to move, regardless of the obstacles in their way. Attempts to radically curtail migration will almost always fail. The future, as Simone Weil probably said, is made of the same stuff as the present. People will carry on migrating for the same reasons as they do today: to improve their welfare, to escape conflict and disasters and to explore opportunities. The increasingly complex, unstable and interconnected world in which we are all entangled will prompt ever more people to move, with new virtual and physical links providing the knowledge and means to do so.

Migration has never been easy and its history is one of great loss and sadness as well as discovery, opportunity and remarkable progress. Migrants take exceptional risks and make enormous sacrifices, often on behalf of their families and future generations. When they arrive in foreign lands they are frequently mistreated or shunned as strangers. Yet they are catalysts for innovation and bridgeheads for future migrants. By bringing new ways of doing, thinking and understanding, they challenge parochial attitudes and extend frontiers.

Migration is not a problem to be solved; it is the driving force for human progress and the thread that links our common history. If the history of migration has taught us anything, it is that we are all migrants and that we should embrace our common humanity to meet the existential challenges of the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgements

It is to Ben Yarde-Buller that I owe this Shortest History. From his first approach to his final edit, he has initiated, shepherded and shaped this book. As a publisher, Ben has demonstrated an awesome ability to focus on the overall structure and narrative while also improving every line. Kieron Connolly provided numerous helpful suggestions, as well as taking the lead with marketing and publicity, while Digby Lidstone’s extraordinarily close and careful edit of the entire manuscript has greatly enhanced the final product, as have James Nunn’s maps and infographics.

I have been most fortunate to be able to rely on the excellent research assistance of Alexander Bossakov. His profound and wide-ranging knowledge of migration has informed and enriched every page and his cheerful willingness to prioritise this book has enabled me to meet tight deadlines. This book draws extensively on Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, which I co-authored with Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan. Their insights have contributed to its foundations.

Many colleagues and friends have nurtured my understanding of migration, starting with Francis Wilson, whose lecture to first-year undergraduates on the role of migrant labour in the South African mines was the reason I decided to pursue economics. Decades later, I was fortunate to be able to develop a programme on migration with Stephen Castles, whose work on migration I have found inspirational since my student days. Sadly both Francis and Stephen died before I could discuss this book with them.

Robin Cohen is a friend and a giant in migration studies. His books on migration history and diasporas provided the springboard for many of my chapters. Hein de Haas continues to compel us to think in new ways and to produce material which has enriched this book and challenges the orthodoxy. I am deeply grateful for his comments and generous sharing of data. Alan Hirsch, who like me was taught by Francis Wilson, currently leads a project on African migration, which is providing much needed insights into this poorly understood topic. My Balliol historian colleague John-Paul Ghobrial has helpfully suggested a number of avenues to pursue. Michael Strong’s knowledge of animal and human evolution never ceases to amaze me and his imprint is firmly implanted on my description of our early evolution.

While writing this book I have benefited enormously from Oxford University generously granting me a sabbatical, which I spent as a visiting fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). STIAS provides a wonderfully undisturbed opportunity to write in a magnificent setting.

I could not wish for a better or more stimulating intellectual home than the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. My research programmes on The Future of Work and Technological and Economic Change are funded by Citi, and my programme on The Future of Development by the Allan and Gill Gray Foundation. In addition to the support of my team of 25 post-doctoral and other researchers, the generosity of these benefactors has enabled me to employ an exceptional assistant, Anna Harris, without whom I could not have found the time or be organised enough to write this book.

Finally my greatest debt is to my children Olivia and Alex, who have suffered most from my migratory instinct, living in four countries before they were teenagers, and to my wife Tess, for her extraordinary tolerance, continual support and love.

Further Reading

Chapter 1: The First Migrants

Robin Cohen – Migration: the Movement of Humankind from Prehistory to the Present

Peter Frankopan – The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan – Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and Will Define our Future

Rene J Herrera and Ralph Garcia-Bertrand – Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations

David Reich – Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

Chapter 2: Peopled Planet

Richard Bulliet – The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions

David Graeber and David Wengrow – The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe – A Short History of Migration

Patrick Manning – Migration in World History

Denis J Murphy – People, Plants and Genes: the story of crops and humanity

Chapter 3: Empire and Trade

Janet Abu-Lughod – Before European Hegemony

David Christian – Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years

Peter Frankopan – The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Josephine Quinn – How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History

Lynda Shaffer – Southernization: Essays on Global and Comparative History

Chapter 4: Voyages of Discovery and Destruction

Paul Butel – The Atlantic

Alfred Crosby – The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

Caroline Dodds Pennock – On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

Ian Goldin and Christopher Kutarna – Age of Discovery

248

Christine Harzig and Dirk Hoerder – What is Migration History?

Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat – A History of Food

Chapter 5: Slavery

David Eltis and David Richardson – Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Sudhir Hazareesingh – Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard (eds.) – The Routledge History of Slavery

Cheryl Janifer LaRoche – Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance Craig Perry, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, David Richardson, Seymour Drescher, Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (eds.) – The Cambridge World History of Slavery

Ronald Segal – Islam’s Black Slaves

Chapter 6: Coerced Labour Migration

Clare Anderson (ed.) – A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

Caf Dowlah – Foundations of Modern Slavery: Profiles of Unfree and Coerced Labor through the Ages

David Eltis – Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives

Hein de Haas, Stephen Castles and Mark Miller – The Age of Migration

Ashutosh Kumar – Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies

Jan Lucassen – The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind

David Northrup – Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism

Charles van Onselen – The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, circa 1920–1955

Chapter 7: Age of Mass Migration

Eugene Avrutin – Pogroms: A Documentary History

Dirk Hoerder – Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium

Adam McKeown – Global Migration, 1846–1940

Adam McKeown – Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders

Krishnendu Ray – The Ethnic Restauranteur

Jeffrey Williamson and Timothy Hatton – The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact

Mark Wyman – Round-trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930

Tara Zahra – The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

Chapter 8: Passports and Problems

Marianne Dowley – Closed Borders: Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement

Mahmoud Keshavarz – The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent

Mark Salter – Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations

Saskia Sassen – Guests and Aliens

John Torpey – The Invention of the Passport

Chapter 9: Wars, Mass Mobilisations and Expulsions

Dawn Chatty – Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East

Santanu Das – Race, Empire and First World War Writing

Yasmin Khan – The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War

Fred Khumalo – Dancing the Death Drill

David Killingray and Martin Plaut – Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War

Heather Streets-Salter – Martial Races: The Military, Race & Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914

Chapter 10: Migrants in the Postwar World

Benedict Anderson – Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Peter Gatrell – The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent

Pedro Iacobelli – Postwar emigration to South America from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands

The International Rescue Committee – https://www.rescue.org/uk/latest

Yasmin Khan – The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

Panikos Panayi – Migrant City: A New History of London

Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee – Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century

Mira Siegelberg – Statelessness: A Modern History

Chapter 11: Who is a Migrant?

Ruben Andersson – Illegality, Inc.

Peter Gatrell – The Making of the Modern Refugee

International Organisation for Migration (IOM) – World Migration Report

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – World Migration, Return, Reintegration and Re-Migration

Doug Sanders – Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World

World Bank – World Development Report: Migrants, Refugees and Societies

Chapter 12: Migration and the Economy

Michael Clemens, Cindy Huang, Jimmy Graham and Kate Gough – Migration is What You Make of It

Ian Goldin and Benjamin Nabarro – Migration and the Economy: Economic Realities, Social Impacts and Political Choices

Max Nathan – Your Place or Mine? The Local Economics of Migration

Robert Winder – Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain

Chapter 13: Migration and Development

Hein de Haas, Stephen Castles and Mark Miller – The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World

Jason DeParle – A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century

Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin – Age of the City

Robert Guest – Borderless Economics: Chinese Sea Turtles, Indian Fridges, and the New Fruits of Global Capitalism

Peggy Levitt – The Transnational Villagers

Rhacel Parreñas – Servants of Globalisation: Migration and Domestic Work

Dilip Ratha – KNOMAD Migration and Development Brief

Chapter 14: The Future

Hein de Haas – How Migration Really Works: A Factful Guide About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics

Andrew Geddes – Governing Migration Beyond the State

Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) – The IMPACT of Migration on Future Population Change

Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah – Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years

International Rescue Committee – ‘The Top 10 Crises’

Parag Khanna – Move: Where People are Going for a Better Future

Gaia Vince – Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval

Endnotes

1 Schewel, ‘Understanding Immobility’.

2 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/essential-timeline-understanding-evolution-homo-sapiens-180976807/; https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22114

3 Pederzani, Nature Ecology and Evolution, 31 January 2024.

4 Herrera and Garcia-Bertrand, Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations, 113.

5 Hodgson, ‘Decoding the Blombos Engravings, Shell Beads and Diepkloof Ostrich Eggshell Patterns’; Henshilwood et al., ‘An Abstract Drawing from the 73,000-Year-Old Levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa’; Rito et al., ‘A Dispersal of Homo Sapiens from Southern to Eastern Africa Immediately Preceded the Out-of-Africa Migration’.

6 Herrera and Garcia-Bertrand, 134.

7 Chi-Shan Chang et al., ‘A Holistic Picture of Austronesian Migrations Revealed by Phylogeography of Pacific Paper Mulberry’, 13537–38.13537\\uc0\\u8211{}38.”,”plainCitation”:”Chi-Shan Chang et al., ‘A Holistic Picture of Austronesian Migrations Revealed by Phylogeography of Pacific Paper Mulberry’, 13537–38.

8 https://paleolexicon.com

9 Herrera and Garcia-Bertrand, 248.

10 Harari, Sapiens, 56.

11 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 31; Goldin, Balarajan, and Cameron, Exceptional People; Goldin and Lee-Devlin, Age of the City.

12 Reich, 125, 135, 188, 207.

13 Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, chaps 1, 3.

14 Manning, Migration in World History, 63–70, 75–76.

15 Bulliet, The Wheel; Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel.

16 Chase-Dunn and Hall, Rise and Demise, 163–64.

17 Ammianus Marcellinus, Ammiani Marcellini Rerum gestarum libri qui supersunt [electronic resource], Vol. II, Libri XXVI-XXXI; Bulliet, The Wheel, chap. 4.

18 Doumas, The Wall-Paintings of Thera; Van de Moortel, ‘A New Typology of Bronze Age Aegean Ships’; Van de Moortel.

19 Matsuoka et al., ‘A Single Domestication for Maize Shown by Multilocus Microsatellite Genotyping’, 6084.

20 Manning, 79–85, 91–92; Newton and Zarins, Dhofar Through the Ages, 100.

21 Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, 243.

22 Spencer, The Politics of Expansion, 76.

23 Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 8.

24 The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian, trans. John Masefield (1929 ed.).

25 Abu-Lughod, 251–53, 261.

26 Shaffer, ‘Southernization’, 1, 21.

27 Shaffer, 2; Gittinger, Splendid Symbols, 13, 19.

28 Shaffer, 4.

29 Abu-Lughod, 255.

30 Abu-Lughod, 189; Minorsky and Bosworth, Hudud Al-’Alam ‘The Regions of the World’, 137.

31 Manning, 94–96.

32 Abu-Lughod, 67, 102.

33 Gearon, Eamonn, The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age.

34 Abu-Lughod, 183.

35 Harzig and Hoerder, What Is Migration History?, chap. 2.5.

36 Erlandson, ‘Ancient Immigrants: Archaeology and Maritime Migrations’, 207.

37 Erlandson, 207–9.

38 Butel, The Atlantic, 16–17.

39 Lefevre-Witier, ‘Human Migrations in North Africa’, 179, 180.

40 Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, chap. ‘Dawn of Swahili Culture’, p. 108.

41 Butel, 65.

42 Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables , 165.

43 Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables, 165.

44 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 76.

45 Graeber and Wengrow, chap. 2.

46 Graeber and Wengrow, chap. 2.

47 Lunderberg, ‘Zheng He and the American Liberal Arts Education’, 12.

48 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Zheng He | Biography, Facts, & Significance |’.

49 The National Archives, ‘Huguenots in England’; Summers, ‘Fugitives from France’.

50 Frankopan,101.

51 Frankopan, The Silk Roads, 99.

52 Barker, 72.

53 Vecce, ‘Per Caterina’; Neher, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mother Might Have Been a Slave’.

54 Frankopan, 101–2.

55 Lucassen, The Story of Work, 279.

56 Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters.

57 Barker, ‘The Trade in Slaves in the Black Sea, Russia, and Eastern Europe’, 118.

58 Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise, 24.

59 Gilder Lehrman Institute of America History

60 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade [Electronic Resource],1.

61 Eltis and Richardson, xix–xx.

62 Lucassen, 249–50.

63 Klein and Engerman, ‘Long-term Trends in African Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, 39. Lucassen, 270; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades, 171.

64 Cohen, Migration, 42.

65 French, Born in Blackness, chap. 19.

66 ‘Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - Database’.

67 French, chap. 19.

68 Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

69 Geggus, ‘Slavery and the Haitian Revolution’, sec. Introduction.

70 Geggus, 9.

71 Geggus, 85; Renny, An History of Jamaica.

72 Geggus, 86.

73 Gilder Lehrman Institute of America History.

74 Geggus, 16.

75 Eltis and Richardson, 161.

76 Lovejoy, ‘Slavery in Africa’, 44; Lucassen, 270.

77 Campbell, ‘Slavery in the Indian Ocean World’, 57, 60.

78 Campbell, 23.

79 Berlin, 78.

80 Frethorne, Richard Frethorne to His Father and Mother.

81 de Haas, The Age of Migration, chap. 5.

82 Eltis, Coerced and Free Migration, 45.

83 Khor, ‘Railroad Frames: Landscape and the Chinese Railroad Worker in Photography, 1865–1869’; Chang et al., The Chinese and the Iron Road, 27.

84 Lal, ‘Indian Indenture’, 83, 81.

85 Lal, 80–81.

86 ‘World Economic and Social Survey 2004: International Migration’.

87 Lal, 92; Ian Goldin, Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Identity in South Africa.

88 Lal, ‘Indian Indenture’, 88, 90.

89 Cohen, Migration, 46.

90 Carter, ‘The Transition from Slave to Indentured Labour in Mauritius’, 123.

91 Mishra, ‘Indian Indentured Labourers in Mauritius’, 233.

92 Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Convict Labour Extraction and Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615-1870.”

93 Forster, ‘Convicts: Unwilling Migrants from Britain and France’, 260, 265.

94 Martin Cash and James Lester Burke, The Adventures of Martin Cash: Comprising a Faithful Account of His Exploits, While a Bushranger under Arms in Tasmania, in Company with Kavanagh and Jones, in the Year 1843 (Hansebooks, 2021).

95 Cohen, Migration, 65.

96 Goldin et al., chap. 2; Hatton and Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration, 3, 7.

97 de Haas, Age of Migration, 103.

98 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-bloody-history-of-anti-asian-violence-in-the-west

99 Long, Medici, Qian and Tabellini, The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the U.S. Economy, Harvard Business School Working Paper Series, 2022.

100 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur.

101 Solberg, ‘Mass Migrations in Argentina, 1870–1970’; Hatton and Williamson; Goldin et al., chap. 2.

102 Klein, ‘European and Asian Migration to Brazil’;

103 Bastia and vom Hau, ‘Migration, Race and Nationhood in Argentina’.

104 Avrutin and Bemporad, Pogroms: A Documentary History.

105 Avrutin and Bemporad, Pogroms.

106 Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1939 In Search of an Identity.

107 Hatton and Williamson, 9; Goldin et al. chap. 2; de Haas, chap. 5.

108 Torpey, “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System,” 256;

109 Dowty, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement, 54.

110 Hatton and Williamson, 17.

111 15.

112 Cohen, 70–71.

113 Cohen, 73.

114 Harzig and Hoerder, What Is Migration History?;

115 Wyman, ‘Round-Trip to America’, 82.

116 Hatton and Williamson, 9.

117 Fernihough and Grada, Across the Sea to Ireland.

118 Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson, “To The New World and Back Again: Return Migrants in the Age of Mass Migration.”

119 Wyman, ‘Round-Trip to America’, 29.

120 Cantú and Carrasquero, ‘“Merchant of Landscapes”’.

121 Peltier, Bashizi, and Morales, ‘How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time’.

122 Manning, chap. 8.

123 Manning, chap. 8.

124 Mazumdar, ‘Localities of the Global’, 124–25.

125 All quotes in this paragraph originate from Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 22, 26–27.

126 Torpey, 112; Goldin et al. chap. 3.

127 Traven, The Death Ship, 57

128 Torpey, 119.

129 Low, Imperial Mecca, 225, 219.

130 Low, 230.

131 McKeown, ‘How the Box Became Black’, 22.22.

132 Das, ‘Experiences of Colonial Troops’.

133 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_africa

134 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_africa

135 Das; Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 114–15.

136 Das; Bailey, ‘“An Army of Workers”’, 36.

137 Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing, 4–5.

138 Das, ‘Experiences of Colonial Troops’.

139 Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing, 4–5.

140 Das, ‘Experiences of Colonial Troops’.

141 Hill, ‘Sacrifices, Sex, Race’, 60.

142 Rand and Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”’, 232; Storm and Al Tuma, Colonial Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1945 [Electronic Resource], chap. Introduction.

143 Gellner, ‘Warriors, Workers, Traders and Peasants’, 142.

144 Streets-Salter, Martial Races, 2–3.

145 Barnes, ‘Great Migration’.

146 Barnes; Painter, Creating Black Americans, 177.

147 Boehm, Making a Way out of No Way; Gerardo, ‘Great Migration, Second’.

148 de Haas, 112–13.

149 Lucassen, 314–15.

150 de Haas, 113–14.

151 Lucassen, 314–15.

152 de Haas, 113–14; Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany, 113.

153 de Haas, 113–14.

154 Abi-Habib, ‘The Forgotten Colonial Forces of World War II - The New York Times’; Khan, The Raj at War.

155 The Guardian, 13 February 2019.

156 Killingray and Plaut, Fighting for Britain, 43, 75.

157 McCarthy, Death and Exile; de Haas, 202.

158 Torosyan and Vardanyan, ‘Peculiarities of Transforming Diasporas’; Shirinian, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire.

159 Migliorino, ‘(Re)Constructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria’, 68, 209.

160 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 481–83;

161 Potts, The World Labour Market, 152; Hoerder, 495.

162 Hoerder, 483.

163 Charles Tilly, ‘Migration in Modern European History’, in The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies, ed. Anthony M. Messina and Gallya Lahav (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005); This chapter draws extensively on Goldin et al., chap. 3.

164 Torpey, ‘States and the Regulation of Migration in the Twentieth-Century North Atlantic World’.

165 Kay, ‘The Resettlement of Displaced Persons in Europe, 1946–1951’;

166 Goulbourne, ‘Windrush and the Making of Post-Imperial Britain | The British Library’.

167 Namakkal, Unsettling Utopia, 65, 109.

168 Bharadwaj, Khwaja, and Mian, ‘The Big March’, 39.

169 Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, 7–8.

170 Khan, 168–69.

171 Khan, The Great Partition, 194.

172 Zamindar, 236.

173 See University of Oxford, History Faculty, Why was British India Partitioned in 1947?

174 Cohen, Migration, 80–81.

175 Bennhold, ‘The Fall of the Berlin Wall in Photos’.

176 ‘Driver Slain Crashing Berlin’s Wall but 2 in Truck Live’.

177 Cavendish, ‘General Somoza Takes over Nicaragua’.

178 New York Times, 21 May 1972.

179 A Popular Joke Once Recounted by Bozhil Galabov, Alexander Bossakov’s Grandfather

180 Martin and Times, ‘A Canada Airport Lures Would-Be Defectors’.

181 Cohen, Migration, 92–97.

182 Torpey, ‘States and the Regulation of Migration in the Twentieth-Century North Atlantic World’, 44.

183 UN DESA, World Population Prospects 2022.

184 Scheel and Ustek-Spilda, ‘The Politics of Expertise and Ignorance in the Field of Migration Management’; European Union, ‘Database - Eurostat’.

185 Office for National Statistics, ‘Population by Country of Birth and Nationality--January 2019 to December 2019 Edition’; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Bulgaria, ‘Response to Request for Information, 95-00-108’, 31 January 2019.

186 Harford, ‘When Wizz Air Wrecked the Immigration Stats’.

187 OECD, ‘Return Migration’, 163.

188 ‘World Migration Report 2022’, 36.

189 ‘World Migration Report 2022’, 24.

190 ‘World Migration Report 2022’.

191 ‘World Migration Report 2022’, 26.

192 UN DESA, ‘World Population Prospects | Population Division’, accessed 8 May 2024, https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/content/international-migrant-stock; Jerome Talpin, ‘France Moves to End Birthright Citizenship in Overseas Mayotte’, Le Monde.Fr, 12 February 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/02/12/france-s-move-to-end-birthright-citizenship-in-overseas-mayotte-looks-to-answer-local-anger_6516742_7.html.

193 Shofield, ‘French Citizenship Row Engulfs Indian Ocean Island of Mayotte’.

194 UNHCR, ‘Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2022’, 39.

195 The Guardian, 10 August 2015.

196 ‘Africa Migration Report’; International Organisation for Migration, ‘African Migration to Europe: How Can Adequate Data Help Improve Evidence-Based Policymaking and Reduce Possible Misconceptions?’

197 IOM, ‘Missing Migrants Project’.

198 IOM, ‘Missing Migrants Project’.

199 ‘How Many Irregular Migrants Go Missing?’ The Economist, 19 July 2023.

200 ‘How Many Irregular Migrants Go Missing?’

201 ‘Border Insecurity; Criminal Illegal Aliens; Deadly Imports; Illegal Alien Amnesty’, CNN Transcript, Lou Dobbs Tonight (CNN, 14 April 2005), http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0504/14/ldt.01.html; This section and others in this chapter draw extensively on Goldin et al. Chap 6.

202 Drozdiak, ‘Europe Braces for New Immigrants’

203 The German Marshall Fund and Bertelsmann Foundation, ‘Transatlantic Trends: Immigration, 2022’.

204 https://www.ft.com/content/6b625a64-9697-11e9-8cfb-30c211dcd229; https://www.carersuk.org/policy-and-research/key-facts-and-figures/.

205 Ortega and Peri, ‘The Causes and Effects of International Migrations’i

206 https://map.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/locations/national/

207 Borjas, ‘The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping’.

208 ILO, Towards a Fair Deal for Migrant Workers in the Global Economy. Report 92 VI, 7; Goldin et al., chap. 6.

209 Jacoby, Immigration Nation.

210 https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/022330.pdf

211 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-08/immigration-to-boost-us-gdp-by-7-trillion-over-decade-cbo-says

212 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/us/us-immigration-asylum-border.html

213 Goldin and Nabarro, ‘Migration and the Economy: Economic Realities, Social Impacts & Political Choices’, 5.

214 Financial Times, 6 February 2024.

215 The Economist, 19 April 2023.

216 de Haas, chap. 12.

217 Simpson et al., ‘Writing Migrants Back into NHS History’; Ryan, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

218 Baker, ‘NHS Staff from Overseas: Statistics’.

219 Cohen, Migration, 157.

220 The Economist, 3 June 2023.

221 Goldin and Nabarro; https://nfap.com/research/new-nfap-policy-brief-immigrant-entrepreneurs-and-u-s-billion-dollar-companies/

222 Goldin and Nabarro; Goldin and Muggah, Terra Incognita.

223 Office for National Statistics, ‘Focus on Ethnicity and Identity’; https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/ethnicitypaygapsingreatbritain/2012to2022#pay-gaps-by-country-of-birth

224 de Haas, 289

225 de Haas, 289, 290; Mendoza, ‘Triple Discrimination: Woman, Pregnant, and Migrant’.

226 ILO, ‘United Arab Emirates’; ‘World Migration Report 2022’, loc. Interactive online version; Cohen, Migration, 146–49.

227 Cohen, 146–49.

228 Cohen, 146–49.

229 Goldin et al., chap. 3.

230 Goldin et al., chap. 6.

231 The Economist, 14 October 2023.

232 The Guardian, 14 December 2023.

233 Clemens et al., Migration Is What You Make Of It, Center for Global Development, May 2018.

234 Cortes and Pan, Foreign Domestic Workers and Native Labor Supply In Hong Kong, Journal of Labor Economics, April 2013, pp. 327–371.

235 Goldin, Balarajan, and Cameron, Exceptional People, chap. 6.

236 Dilip Ratha, ‘Back to Basics: Resilient Remittances, F&D, Sep. 2023 (9798400250804)

237 Ratha et al., ‘Remittances Brave Global Headwinds, Special Focus: Climate Migration’; Haas, Castles, and Miller, The Age of Migration, 337–38

238 Chan, ‘Internal Migration in China: Integrating Migration with Urbanization Policies and Hukou Reform’; Saldanha, D’Cunha, and Kovick, ‘India’s Internal Migrants and the First Wave of COVID-19’.

239 UN DESA, ‘International Migrant Stock | Population Division’.

240 The Economist, 1 April 2023.

241 Foner, In a New Land, p. 65.

242 Cassara and Poncy, Trade-Based Money Laundering.

243 Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘World Economy: Migrants’ Remittances Not a Cure-All’.

244 Zewdu, ‘Irregular Migration, Informal Remittances’.

245 Ghani, ‘In North Korea “If You Have Money, You Can Do Anything”’.

246 Kerr et al., Global Talent Flows; UN DESA and OECD, ‘World Migration in Figures’.

247 Guest, Borderless Economics.

248 de Haas, 344–45

249 Cohen, 122–24.

250 https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts

251 https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/features/lebanon-remittance-dependent-country-world/

252 Hackl, ‘Key figure of mobility’

253 Said, Reflections On Exile.

254 ‘Miriam Makeba’. “Pata Pata” (1967)

255 Schewel, ‘Aspiring for Change’; de Haas, Castles, and Miller, The Age of Migration, chap. 14.

256 World Bank, Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Prosperity, June 2018

257 Castles, ‘Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization’, 1168.

258 Financial Times, 23 October 2023.

259 Schneider et al. Land of the rising robots, Finance and Development. June 2018

260 International Federation of Robotics.

261 The Economist, 28 October 2023.

262 Ian Goldin, Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World.

263 ‘World Migration Report 2022’.

264 ‘How the Pandemic Reversed Old Migration Patterns in Europe’.

265 ‘Climate Change Is Likely to Increase Migration’, The Economist, 18 November 2022.

266 The Economist, 1 July 2023.

267 ‘Climate Change Is Likely to Increase Migration’.

268 IDMC, ‘2023 Global Report on Internal Displacement: Internal Displacement and Food Security’, 10–11.

269 ‘Climate Change Is Likely to Increase Migration’.

270 Fildes, ‘Australia Offers Tuvalu Residents Climate Change Visas’.

271 Vince, Nomad Century; Clemens, ‘Economics and Emigration’.

272 Pritchett, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Deadlock on Global Mobility, 31.

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