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.

During different moments of conflict, post-revolutionary Iranian’s formal and informal legislation ebbs and flows between plans to condition, eliminate or limit citizenship. This trend in the country’s post-revolutionary history also leaves much space for mediation and slippages that reconfigure national governance projects on the local terrain. In post-revolutionary Iran, then, it is not only the state’s republican elements that make it unpredictable through elections and the press (Osanloo, 2009). Women and the Islamic Republic has argued that when we integrate acts of citizenship into the state-building process, we see that the post-revolutionary Iranian state is heavily conditioned by the gendered legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. Moreover, authoritarianism is an ambiguous project when examined from within society.

This section considers the record of women’s political, economic, and social engagement in postcolonial Tunisia and its legacies beyond the 1960s. Despite continued restrictions on associational life, political repression, and a harrowing intellectual climate, women were involved in reformist projects into the 1970s and 1980s, and under the regime of Zine Al-Abidin Ben Ali as women’s rights were again instrumentalized as a cover for authoritarianism. Whether in political parties, human rights organizations, student groups, religious movements, or women’s journals, activists insisted on the relevance of gender to visions of social, economic, and political change. Sophie Ferchiou’s work on women in agriculture illustrates the limits of liberal models of women and development implemented in Tunisia in the 1970s and 1980s, and the structural causes of rural protests, such as those of 2010. Working within the establishment, nationalist women raised questions about the intersections of class, gender, and the urban-rural divide, even if their visions of emancipation fell short of challenging patriarchy. However, in their activism and publications they demonstrated a plurality of women’s experiences that could not be captured in the singularity of state discourse on the modern woman.

Earlier accounts of Eslanda Robeson have tended to focus on her stage-managing her husband’s career, minimizing her decision to go to Africa as an outcome of the breakdown of their marriage. Yet after the 1945 publication of African Journey Robeson became a household name among African American intellectuals, famous for her shrewd analyses of race and empire in the emerging Cold War. Building on recent work on the history of black international thought, this essay foregrounds Robeson’s journalism and involvement in internationalist and Pan-African networks. Robeson was an activist-intellectual whose international thought centered on the struggle for women’s participation and the significance of the so-called Third World. She astutely observed the limits of action imposed by international organizations. Committed to promoting women as political actors, Robeson nonetheless remained wedded to maternalist thinking. Yet, her widely read writings offered new representations of global politics to her readership, highlighting Robeson’s pedagogical commitment.