This article asks under what historical conditions people who consider themselves as belonging to the ingroup resort to collective violence against free labour migrants. Based on cases in the North Atlantic, and largely limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers a starting point for a more global approach. By using the concept of boundary work, I conclude that once ethnic boundaries are in place they need maintenance, through discourse, legislation, and surveillance. Migrants defined as outsiders, who did not accept their inferior role and thus became direct competitors for such key resources as jobs and houses, were bound to evoke irritation, protest, and, in extreme cases, mob violence. The latter occurred a number of times in early modern England, but such incidents occurred especially in the period 1860–1880 (US and Australia), 1880–1900 (Western Europe), and on both sides of the Atlantic around World War I. In all these cases, boundary-making (through heightened nationalism, imperialism, and embedded racial hierarchies) was prominent, while, at the same time, the state was unable or unwilling to protect its citizens against competition on the labour market and to provide a welfare safety net. This lack of actual boundary maintenance could lead to mob violence, especially when authorities were unwilling or unable to intervene. Moreover, it is striking that violence was directed especially against outsiders who were considered racially or culturally inferior. These included the Chinese and African-American internal migrants in the United States and colonial migrants in the United Kingdom.

How can we explain the demise of the new postwar moral framework of anti-racism and equality and the subsequent rise of integration pessimism in Western Europe in the 1980s, a pessimism that led to the widely accepted idea, from left to right, that “multiculturalism” has failed? And how does this square with the simultaneous establishment of an extraordinary free migration regime within Europe that enables EU citizens to move and pick up work in any other member state? Answers to these questions can be found in three very different, yet complimentary studies that help us to understand more deeply the current alarmist public view of migration and integration, as well as its historical roots: The Crisis of Multiculturalism by Rita Chin, based in Ann Arbor; The European Migration Regime by Emmanuel Comte, from Berkeley; and Steven Jensen's (Danish Institute for Human Rights) The Making of International Human Rights. The studies by Chin and Comte offer a representative gauge of the blossoming field of migration studies and, in particular, show how this specialist niche can enrich insights into much broader (political, cultural, economic, and social) postwar developments in Europe and beyond. Jensen's innovative and critical book on the postwar “humanitarian turn” is highly relevant for migration studies, as it places the establishment of the United Nations (UN) and a number of its institutions, such as UNHCR and UNESCO, in a new light. Although many more books have been published on these topics in recent years, these three complement each other and provide a useful building block for a new understanding of the emergence of the postwar European migration regime, its paradoxes and consequences. In this review, I will first sketch the wider context and then detail the three books and how they relate to each other.

In this article we plead for a less state-centered definition of migration that allows us to understand better the relationship between cross-cultural migrations and social change and social development in the long run. Therefore, we developed a method that enables us to systematically compare CCMRs (cross-cultural migrations per capita) through time and space. This CCMR method puts issues of state policies and citizenship in a much broader social context. We conclude that the presentist approach to migration in the social sciences is highly myopic, as it privileges migrations crossing state borders over internal moves, and favors migrants who have the intention to settle for good. In itself this is a legitimate choice, especially if the core explanandum is the way migrants’ long-term settlement process in another (modern) state evolves. In the more empirical parts of this article however we have concentrated on the effects of Eurasian societies since 1500 that have received migrants. Sending societies and individual migrants and nonmigrants in sending and receiving societies have been largely left out. Finally, and paradoxically, integration and assimilation in the long run leads to diminishing opportunities of social development by cross-cultural experiences, because one could argue that due to globalizing migrations cultures converge further and thus cultural boundaries (as is already the case in migration to cities within culturally homogenous nation-states in the twentieth century) become less salient or disappear entirely. Logically speaking, this is also an implication of the model, presently to be developed further.

The aim of this article is to show the added value of global history that puts labour and labour relations as independent variables in the centre and uses structured long-term data by collaborating closely with historians in various parts of the world. The first part focuses primarily on the global labour relations approach, within the broader debate on social inequality and migration. The second part illustrates the potential of labour as an independent variable by reflecting on recent innovative work pertaining to labour-intensive industrializations in East Asia and Europe. The third part employs the perspective of migration to show the interrelated nature of labour relations and labour. Using the insights from the global labour relations approach and by taking labour seriously, the article will help to address core questions in labour history in a more structural way: why has work been valued and compensated in very different ways over the past five centuries? And how have people individually or collectively influenced these conditions? To find answers, it is crucial to make use of standardized empirical data, structured global comparisons, and more intensive collaborations.