Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This introductory chapter explores links between Lake Tanganyika, East Africa, and the wider Indian Ocean World in history and historiography. It does so firstly by stressing the peculiarities of Lake Tanganyika’s shape and environment in the East African context. It then draws on a wider historiography of lakes and oceans in world history, and it argues that doing so necessitates taking on perspectives from the wider Indian Ocean World. But, far from being a place where patterns from the wider Indian Ocean World replicated themselves, Lake Tanganyika was a ‘frontier’ where phenomena traditionally associated with the macro-region (including e.g. Islam, boating technologies, and fashions) were negotiated and reimagined in particularly robust ways. This applies especially to the period c.1830–90, during which coastal and Great Lakes populations encountered each other in significant numbers for the first time, caused by the expansion of the global ivory trade.