In a modernist interpretation of migration controls, nation states play a major role. This book challenges this interpretation by showing that comprehensive migration checks and permanent border controls appeared much earlier, in early modern dynastic states and empires, and predated nation states by centuries. The 11 contributions in this volume explore the role of early modern and modern dynastic kingdoms and empires in Europe, the Middle East and Eurasia and the evolution of border controls from the 16th to the 20th century. They analyse how these states interacted with other polities, such as emerging nations states in Europe, North America and Australia, and what this means for a broader reconceptualization of mobility in Europe and beyond in the longue durée. Contributors are: Tobias Brinkmann, Vincent Denis, Sinan Dinçer, Josef Ehmer, Irial A. Glynn, Sabine Jesner, Olga Katsiardi-Hering, Leo Lucassen, Ikaros Mantouvalos, Leslie Page Moch, Jovan Pešalj, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Annemarie Steidl, and Megan Williams.

For centuries, people moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran. This book studies the biographies of individuals and groups as different as rulers and revolutionaries, frontier bandits and merchants, soldiers and slaves from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Following their journeys across borders, the case studies of this volume emphasize the profound effect that mobility had on the lives and thoughtworlds of everyone with a Transottoman trajectory. The chapters reveal breaks, adjustments, and continuities in people’s biographies and the in-betweenness that moving typically created.

On Many Routes is about the history of human migration. With a focus on the Habsburg Empire, this innovative work presents an integrated and creative study of spatial mobilities: from short to long term, and intranational and inter-European to transatlantic. Migration was not just relegated to city folk, but likewise was the reality for rural dwellers, and we gain a better understanding of how sending and receiving states and shipping companies worked together to regulate migration and shape populations. Bringing historical census data, governmental statistics, and ship manifests into conversation with centuries-old migration patterns of servants, agricultural workers, seasonal laborers, peddlers, and artisans—both male and female—this research argues that Central Europeans have long been mobile, that this mobility has been driven by diverse motivations, and that post-1850 transatlantic migration was an obvious extension of earlier spatial mobility patterns. Demonstrating the complexity of human mobility via an exploration of the links between overseas, continental, and internal migrations, On Many Routes shows that migrations to the United States, to the nearest coalfield, and to the urban capitals are embedded within complicated patterns of movement. There is no good reason to study internal apart from transnational moves, and combining these fields brings ample possibility to make migration research more relevant for the much broader field of social and economic history. This work poses an invaluable resource to the understudied area of Habsburg Empire migration studies, which it relocates within its wider European context and provides a major methodological contribution to the history of human migration more broadly. The ubiquity and functionality of human movement sheds light on the relationship between human nature and society, and challenges simplistic notions of human mobility then and now.

Compelling and accessible, this Very Short Introduction challenges the perception of borders as passive lines on a map, revealing them instead to be integral forces in the economic, social, political, and environmental processes that shape our lives. Highlighting the historical development and continued relevance of borders, Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen offer a powerful counterpoint to the idea of an imminent borderless world, underscoring the impact borders have on a range of issues, such as economic development, inter- and intra-state conflict, global terrorism, migration, nationalism, international law, environmental sustainability, and natural resource management. Diener and Hagen demonstrate how and why borders have been, are currently, and will undoubtedly remain hot topics across the social sciences and in the global headlines for years to come. This compact volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, including geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, international relations and law experts, as well as lay readers interested in understanding current events.

This is the first book to examine the history of the country in a way that connects global processes to local developments. Taking account of social, political and economic dynamics over the last thousand years, the book addresses key questions that get to the heart of the Netherlands' role in the world, both historically and in more recent times: · Why did the 'West' become such a significant actor in the world, and what part did the Netherlands play? · What were the driving forces in state-formation, and in what respects and why did the Netherlands take a different path to most of Europe? · How did globalisation impact economic structures and socio-cultural life, and how did the Netherlands react to these new challenges? · How did this very Christian and bourgeois nation develop into a flagship for liberal tolerance? The book carefully balances a wider investigation of these issues with close inspections of how ordinary people experienced the changes they prompted. It also provide a convincing, judicious assessment of the ebbs and flows of this small country's global influence over time: prominent as a Golden Age economic powerhouse, colonial power, and bastion of political freedom in some eras, and yet impotent on the world stage at others. Supplemented with 12 images, 6 maps, a wealth of text boxes, charts and tables, as well as a companion website, this book is the definitive history of the Netherlands in a global context.

Mass refugee movements represent a complex policy problem to host governments as they challenge existing socio-economic and political structures. While scholarship on refugee migration tends to centre on the Global North, most refugees actually reside in the Global South, where the capacity to provide assistance is limited. Shifting the focus from sensationalist rhetoric about mass migration to the North, The Politics of Refugee Policy in the Global South provides a comparative analysis of Lebanon’s and Jordan’s responses to the Syrian refugee movement, one of the largest displacements in modern history. Through extensive interviews and process tracing, Ola El-Taliawi uncovers the complex realities of refugee hosting and the hard choices governments make in light of this challenge. Building on the concept of complexity, El-Taliawi employs a unique methodology and analytical approach, painting a nuanced picture of asylum provision and identifying a spectrum of refugee hosting models. More than ever, we need a better understanding of the unique politics of refugee policymaking in the Global South. This incisive book offers key insights for effective governance and reform of the global refugee regime.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian’s "breathtakingly original" (Junot Diaz) reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War. "Capatious [and] buzzing with ideas." --The Boston Globe Volume 3 in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of “sectionalism,” emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. And it identifies a sweeping era of “reconstructions” in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy. The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the United States became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life. As the book ends, the United States, now a global economic and political power, encounters massive warfare between imperial powers in Europe and a massive revolution on its southern border―the remarkable Mexican Revolution―which together brought the nineteenth century to a close while marking the important themes of the twentieth.