Global Migration History Programme
Summary
"Global Voluntary Migration, 1999" from: P. Knox and S. Marston's Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context, 3rd Ed. (Prentice Hall, 2004)
To fully understand the causes and effects of migration and settlement processes in the current globalising world, a long timeframe and a global perspective are essential. Historical migration studies have long focused primarily on the European and Atlantic worlds. In this programmatic and long term project, we aim to broaden the perspective to include the full migration experience of the non-Western world while proposing both a short and long term series of studies to further this goal.
A short-term programme: three exploratory workshops (2005-2010)
- A first, interdisciplinary conference ("Setting the Agenda for a Long-Term World Migration History", Wassenaar, The Netherlands, December 2005) brought together mainstream migration historians and scholars from the fields of historical linguistics, population genetics, paleoarcheology and anthropology, whose methods allow them to make reconstructions of migrations as far back as 80,000 years.
- The second conference ("Belonging, Membership and Mobility in Global History", Minneapolis, USA, April 2008) focused on settlement and membership regimes and concentrated on the period 3000 BC-1800 AD. It brought together scholars with expertise on the way societies deal with newcomers, and vice versa.
- The third conference ("Migration and mobility in a global historical perspective", Taiwan, August 2010) will be dedicated to the process of migration itself, concentrating on the determinants of geographical mobility, again in a spatial and temporal comparative framework. >> Call for papers - Further Reading.
A long-term programme (2005-2015)
Drawing on the insights obtained from the three conferences, it is the intention of the organising committee to launch a package of initiatives to promote future development of the field of global migration history. This will include a website, a fund for organising follow-up conferences, a book series on Global Migration History, and a global PhD training programme.
The organising committee
- Ulbe BOSMA, International Institute of Social History (Asian history).
- David FELDMAN, Birkbeck, University of London (migration history).
- Nancy L. GREEN, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) (comparative migration history).
- Gijs KESSLER, International Institute of Social History, Moscow branch, (social and economic history of Russia and the Soviet Union).
- Jan LUCASSEN, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, (global and comparative labour history).
- Leo LUCASSEN, University of Leiden (Comparative migration history).
Advisory Board
- Klaus J. Bade (University of Osnabrück)
- Wim Blockmans (Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, NIAS)
- David Eltis (Emory University, Atlanta)
- Pieter Emmer (University of Leiden)
- Nancy Foner (Hunter College, New York)
- Donna Gabaccia (University of Minnesota)
- Wang Gungwu (University of Singapore)
- Dirk Hoerder (University of Bremen)
- John Lie (University of California, Berkeley)
- Patrick Manning (Northeastern University, Boston)
- Adam McKeown (Columbia University, New York)
- Ewa Morawska (University of Essex, Colchester)
- Leslie Page Moch (Michigan State University, East Lansing)
- Aristide Zolberg (The New School, New York)
Publications
- Position Paper (updated Oct. 2009, pdf, 1.5Mb)
Brill Publishers (Leiden and Boston MA) has started a Global Migration History book series, the first volume in which, edited by Patrick Manning, Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, will be published in 2009:
- Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Patrick Manning (eds.), Migration History. Multidisciplinary Approaches (Leiden and Boston, Brill Publishers, forthcoming 2009).
A second volume, based on the papers presented at the Minneapolis conference, is currently under preparation:
- Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler and Leo Lucassen (eds.), Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective (Leiden and Boston, Brill Publishers, forthcoming)