Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

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.

Chapter 5 is about the economic dimensions of premodern cities. After a discussion of economic growth, the chapter contrasts commercial and command economies and discusses urban craft specialization and the division of labor as well as regional and international exchange systems.

If one picks up the travelogue of any nineteenth-century explorer, chances are it will discuss the payment of transit levies, or hongo as it was commonly called. Most European travellers dismissed hongo as mere blackmail. But to understand roadblock politics today, we need to acknowledge how significant such transit taxes were for the transformation of African politics. Chapter 2 zooms in on the heyday of these roadblock polities, roughly between 1820 and 1890, along two of the main long-distance trade routes into Central Africa: the Congo River and the trunk road from Zanzibar. Out of the narrow points of passage along them, the increasing circulation of goods valued in Europe and the USA allowed African communities to manufacture veritable roadblock polities. They forged power out of the capacity to withhold the minimal logistical requirements necessary for these pre-colonial supply chains to operate: the right of way, protection against robbery, and access to water and other basic supplies on which caravan travel relied. Control over such points soon became so important that it overtook other sources of power as the central driving force behind state formation in the region.

This essay uses the stratigraphic large-scale excavations of Post-Roman Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, on the Straits of Corfu as a new source of evidence to examine the economic history of the Adriatic Sea region between the seventh and the eleventh centuries. The archaeology depicts the measured transformation of one key site that permits new interpretations of the Adriatic Sea, its history and archaeology to made. Interpretations ofPost-Roman history of the Mediterranean Sea as a whole are discussed, showing how archaeology is beginning to reframe the nature and character of western Byzantine intervention in this region.

Merchants were an important feature of the ancient commercial landscape. This chapter examines the merchant’s dilemma, the conditions that gave rise to their appearance, and the way that merchants operated in the ancient world. Structures of operation discussed include commenda partnerships, diaspora communities, and the role merchants played in the development of the putting-out system of managed production. Examples discussed include tribal merchants in New Guinea and South India as well as merchants in the state-level societies of Bronze Age Assur and Aztec Mexico.