This chapter illustrates how the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. It argues that departure and arrival reified the networks on which the Italian community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government avoided repatriation out of fear that the displaced population would disrupt the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. Seeking to locate themselves in this Cold War Mediterranean, Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the camps and holding centres. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community.

This chapter highlights issues around sexuality and migration. It examines more closely one particular type of migration, with a comparative analysis of migrations from southern Italy, China, and western India to the Americas, Africa, and South Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who were left behind by this migration. Traditional research on historical migrations has provided male-centred perspectives regarding motives, settlement, identity, and citizenship. Recent studies have sought to alter these perspectives by shifting women”s narratives from the margins to the centre in the context of agency, sexuality, and masculinity. Thus this chapter problematizes the sexual economy not only of the “women left behind” in the migration process but also that of their spouses and partners. It reveals how gender shapes migration and how migration defines gender relations. It alludes to attitudes and perceptions about gender and sexuality in a diverse geopolitical context, how the intersectionality of sex and emotions frames mobility behaviour and challenges sexual norms. It thus shifts the nexus between gender, sexuality, and migration to the centre of historical analysis rather than situating it at the margins.

This is the first of three chapters to unpack Baeck’s confrontation with the rise of Nazism. It details the Nazi ideology as grounded in race and space, and the idea of a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the Jews had no place. Baeck needed to respond to it as a thinker and community leader, having been chosen to lead the efforts of the Central Association of Jews in Germany. His political activities and writings show an insistence on Judaism’s lasting value, for Jews and the world. The chapter offers a close reading of a pastoral letter Baeck sent for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which in 1935 fell shortly after Nuremberg Laws. In his search for explanations of antisemitism in the mid-1930, Baeck returned to earlier ideas of Jewish existence as precarious, turning to surprising sources such as Martin Heidegger, at the time already affiliated with the Nazi party, and Karl Barth’s commentary on the scene of the crucifixion in Matthias Grünewald’s magnificent Isenheim altar.

Post-First World War intellectual relief failed; violence against intellectuals and sites of learning proved to be a reality of modern warfare, as demonstrated by attacks on universities in the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War, and the flight of intellectuals both within and from Europe after 1933. The symbolically rebuilt library at Louvain was destroyed again in 1940 during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the rise of totalitarianism showed that intellectuals were not bulwarks of democracy as post-war rhetoric had implied. The epilogue shows how post-First World War intellectual relief influenced the rescue of intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution as well as the way in intellectual life was rebuilt following the Second World War, notably through the establishment of UNESCO. The reconstruction of intellectual life after the Great War continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.

This essay considers Sebald as an academic. Arguably, the acdemy as an institution shaped his entire life. Originating from a non-academic background, studying in Freiburg was his escape ticket from the Allgäu province. His transfers to the universities of Fribourg and Manchester in turn determined his life as an expat and his profile as a Germanist abroad. By remaining at the university, his academic profession provided the basis for his intellectual career and secured his livelihood. His literary work emerged as a frustrated reaction to the neoliberal reforms of UK HE; Sebald conquered his own free space through the writing of literature. In the second part of the essay, Sebald’s teaching style and didactics are examined, not least on the basis of the author’s personal experiences. Sebald was an unorthodox university teacher who aimed to encourage his students in their own talents and abilities.

This chapter outlines the history of Mongol Central Asia, known as the Chaghadaid Khanate, the least documented but most enduring of the Mongol successor states. Squeezed between the Chinggisid polities, lacking a strong sedentary basis, and home to two competing uluses, the Middle Mongolian Ulus, as the Mongols in Central Asia called themselves, was often plagued by warfare and suffered from “brain drain.” Yet it not only played a leading role in the dissolution of the Mongol Empire, but also introduced a political culture that impacted Central Asia up to the nineteenth century; contributed to the Islamization of eastern Central Asia; was the root of two of the most influential early modern empires, the Timurids and Mughals; and gave its name, Chaghatay, to the Eastern Turkic language. The chapter discusses its political history during the Mongol moment, and briefly reviews its postimperial history and aspects of economy, administration, and culture.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

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 chapter examines free African Americans’ perceptions of the emancipated British West Indies. As I argue, beyond many of the concerns of their white abolitionist allies, free African Americans considered the experiment’s implications for their own future prospects of liberty, racial equality, and citizenship rights in the United States. In their autonomous newspapers, speeches, and print publications, they touted the success of the emancipated British West Indies as evidence against notions of black inferiority and as a model for participatory citizenship. But this narrative was complicated by a short-lived but provocative West Indian Emigration Scheme of the late 1830s, stimulating heated debates in the black press that reveal the limits of transnational identity.

This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.

Why do people migrate? We review existing answers that focus on the role of economics and social networks. This work fails to appreciate that, all else equal, far more people remain at home than express an interest in moving abroad.Focusing on political conditions, we argue that political conditions and institutions are just as important to understand human mobility. Analyzing a wealth of globally representative, individual-level data on the emigration process, we find that factors such as the quality of public goods, confidence in political institutions, and perceptions of physical safety drive migration decisions. The importance of political conditions grows with an emigrant’s level of education, and quality governance can mitigate the impact of other “push” factors such as declining economic conditions and social networks. We emphasize that any understanding of the decision to migrate must grapple with political conditions in migrant-sending countries.

This chapter defines the scope of the book's inquiry – understanding the causes and consequences of international labor migration for the global political economy. We summarize existing contributions to understanding the role of migrants in the global economy, illustrating the challenges to be taken up in the manuscript. Importantly, we discuss scope conditions, clarifying that our work, unlike much existing scholarship, does not examine political, economic, or social effects of migration on host countries.Rather, we discuss the importance of migration for sending/home countries.We provide a summary of our overarching argument – that politics matters for understanding patterns of global human mobility. Finally, we provide a plan for the rest of the book.