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Migration and World History: Reaching a New Frontier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2007

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Abstract

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Migration history has made some major leaps forward in the last fifteen years or so. An important contribution was Leslie Page Moch's Moving Europeans, published in 1992, in which she weaves the latest insights in migration history into the general social and economic history of western Europe. Using Charles Tilly's typology of migration patterns and his ideas on the process of proletarianization since the sixteenth century, Moch skilfully integrates the experience of human mobility in the history of urbanization, labour relations, (proto)industrialization, demography, family history, and gender relations. Her state-of-the-art overview has been very influential, not least because it fundamentally criticizes the modernization paradigm of Wilbur Zelinsky and others, who assumed that only in the nineteenth century, as a result of industrialization and urbanization, migration became a significant phenomenon. Instead, she convincingly argues that migration was a structural aspect of human life. Since then many new studies have proved her point and refined her model.

Type
Suggestions and Debates
Copyright
2007 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Footnotes

This discussion dossier is the result of a “Meet the Author session” at the SSHA conference in Portland (Oregon), USA, 3–6 November 2005. The panelists were Adam McKeown, Leslie Page Moch, David Feldman, and Ulbe Bosma. For this publication we also asked contributions from Prabhu Mohapatra and Sucheta Mazumdar as specialists on India and China.