This collection explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography. Including recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, this volume brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system. Centering south Asian migrations as a site of analysis in global history, the contributors offer a lens into the ongoing regulation of labourers after the abolition of slavery that intersect with histories in the Global North and Global South. The use of historical biography showcases experiences from below, and showcases a world history outside empire and nation.

Southeast Asia has long been a crossroad of cultural influence and transnational movement, but the massive migration of Southeast Asians throughout the world in recent decades is historically unprecedented. Dispersal, compelled by economic circumstance, political turmoil, and war, engenders personal, familial, and spiritual dislocation, and provokes a questioning of identity and belonging. This volume features original works by scholars from Asia, America, and Europe that highlight these trends and perspectives on Southeast Asian migration within and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach -- with contributions from sociology, political science, anthropology, and history -- and anchored in empirical case studies from various Southeast Asian countries, it extends the scope of inquiry beyond the economic concerns of migration, and beyond a single country source or destination, and disciplinary focus. Analytic focus is placed on the forces and factors that shape migration trajectories and migrant incorporation experiences in Asia and Europe; the impact of migration and immigration status on individuals, families, and institutions, on questions of equity, inclusion, and identity; and the triangulated relationships between diasporic communities, the sending and receiving countries. Of particular importance is the scholarly attention to lesser known populations and issues such as Vietnamese in Poland, children and the 1.5 generation immigrants, health and mental consequences of state sponsored violence and protracted encampment, ethnic media, and the challenges of both transnational parenting and family reunification. In examining the complex and creative negotiations that immigrants engage locally and transnationally in their daily lives, it foregrounds immigrant resilience in the strategies they adopt not only to survive but thrive in displacement.

This volume explores the reasons behind, and impact of, the migration of South Asian nationals (from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bhutan and Maldives, Afghanistan and Myanmar) in the Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain). The authors provide a broad overview of the demographics of the phenomenon, its mechanisms, and focus on the contribution of migrants in various sectors including construction, health and education, and the overall labour market in the Gulf. The book also taps into the regional geo-politics and its links to the South Asian Migration in the Gulf. This book is recommended reading to all those interested in international migration and labour issues.

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States.

South Asians constitute the largest expatriate population in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Their contribution in the socio-economic, technological and educational development of GCC nations is immense. This book offers one of the first systematic analysis of South Asia–Gulf migration dynamics and its varied impact on countries such as India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It deals with public policy, socio-economic mobility, remittance policy, global financial crisis and labour issues. Bringing together essays from contributors from around the world, the volume reveals not only the multi-dimensionality of the migration process between the two regions, but also the diversity and the underlying unity of the South Asian countries. This book will be invaluable to scholars and students of migration studies, development studies and sociology as well as policy-makers, administrators, academics, and non-governmental organisations in the field.

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.