This chapter connects Black Atlantic and Indian diasporas in the Caribbean while also noting differences between them. Although a particular aspect of diaspora theory suggests a nostalgic longing for the original homeland in a dual home–host binary, the authors discussed here prefer not to ground themselves in a bounded ethnonational identity tied to a specific location. Rather, the very concept of diaspora is open-ended and multifaceted in their works. Even as they retain memory of and loyalty toward their several homelands and hostlands, they are also critical of the experience of continuing displacement, gender violence, and racism. Their embrace of different and evolving horizons avoids the melancholia associated with diasporic identities. Against the troubling narratives of their sense of unbelonging, they articulate a disjointed, provisional, productive sense of subject formation that is a critical counterpart to exclusionary discourse based on nationalist jingoism and nostalgic idealizations of the homeland.

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.

Songwork is central to the project of Elizabethan settler colonialism, with English ballads justifying the violence of conquest and reinforcing the stereotypes of Indigenous “savagery” in the Virginia colony. With the introduction of kidnapped Africans as slaves in 1619, the mysteries of African song become the preoccupation of British commentators, who can make neither head nor tail of it. Music becomes a site of colonial policing with the prohibition of African drumming and the attempted control of song. Yet the songs of the oppressed are not wholly stilled, neither in the fields and praise houses of the African bondspeople, nor in the ballads of indentured servants from the prisons and poorhouses of the British Isles. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, iconoclast Thomas Morton establishes his Merrymount settlement and infuriates the Puritan elders with his maypole and his bacchanalian ballads, marking perhaps the first instance of secular song as a challenge to the governing establishment. The musical soundscapes of two wars of Puritan conquest – the Pequot War and King Philip’s War – are set against the wars between hymnody and psalmody in the Puritan church. The songs of Bacon’s Rebellion and the poor dragoons of the French and Indian War conclude the chapter.

The Introduction provides an overview of the Caribbean, its Indigenous peoples, particular colonial and slave histories, as well as migrant and immigrant pasts, all presented as reasons regarding why each island/country is culturally and musically distinct. Understanding Caribbean history is essential to understanding the musics of the islands. This introduction provides that broad summary of Caribbean history, emphasising its binding relationship with the music of the islands – a necessary task for understanding and appreciating forthcoming chapters of the book.

The Tempest reflects early modern European trends in racial perceptions, especially in the play’s foregrounding of Caliban, who embodies many of the era’s cultural prejudices. Although Caliban was born on a remote island and is its sole human inhabitant when Prospero and Miranda arrive, his sexual assault on Miranda and their contempt for Caliban as savage, pagan, monstrous, and perhaps cannibalistic provokes Prospero to enslave him. This chapter contextualizes those demeaning categories in light of Caliban’s African and perhaps American roots. Among the developments that profoundly shaped England’s (and presumably Shakespeare’s) attitudes toward “Blackamoores” were the increasingly numerous Africans arriving as offshoots of the international slave trade. Concurrently, Spain’s and Portugal’s settlements in Central and South America and their exploitation, often enslavement, of the natives strongly influenced English policies toward racial “others” at home and in England’s colonies, as did Iberian America’s extensive importation of African slaves.

In the Anglo-American settlements of North America the most conspicuous causes of violence were rivalries at contested frontiers, weak government, racism, race slavery, indentured servitude and class differences, and state-sanctioned war. Unrestrained by laws and magistrates, migrants to North America in the seventeenth century violently attacked Native Americans and fellow Europeans at rates as high as 200 homicides per 100,000 population. In time public authority grew and tempered egregious violence, but it did not disappear. Frontiers shifted further inland, and at contested western and southern borders it proliferated. Racism underlay much of the violence, clearly in conflicts with Native Americans, such as King Philip’s War and Pontiac’s Rebellion, and in the enslavement of Africans and the violence which maintained the subordination of African Americans. Ironically, certain populations shared race, ethnic or religious prejudice towards ‘outsiders’ and these shared prejudices moderated violent behaviour within those populations. Indentured servants comprised a large portion of the immigrant population; their disorderly and violent behaviour taxed local governments and elites over two centuries. At the end of the era the American Revolution provoked a wave of internecine violence that outlasted the conflict with England and subsided especially with the expansion of white, male democracy in the nineteenth century.

From contact, gendered violence was critical to the European conquest of America. The Spanish conquistadors sexually exploited indigenous women as part of their subjugation of native societies in Mexico and Peru. French and English colonists also exploited native women, although they imagined themselves as victims of Indian sexual abuse. In the English colonies, the importance of the household as a unit of political organisation gave men enormous power over women and other dependents. This concealed sexual violence in the family and spousal abuse. Rape was illegal in the English colonies, but rarely prosecuted, except among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. The prevalence of unfree labour also contributed to gendered violence in early America. Indentured servants were often left to the mercy of their masters. Enslaved African American women were routinely brutalised and raped in order to reproduce more slaves. The Enlightenment and the American Revolution challenged colonial sensibilities. As the power of the household head weakened and marriages were idealised as loving relationships, spousal abuse and rape were problematised and prosecuted at higher rates. However, the persistence of slavery limited these changes to white women.