Migration, Historical Geographies of

William Jenkins, Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Assimilation A process whereby a minority group gradually adopts the attitudes, customs, and identity of the prevailing
majority culture, thereby shedding its own distinctive cultural practices and identity.
Cultural landscape The visual result of human interaction with the natural world as represented, for example, in the farms,
fields, houses, villages, and cities that dot the Earth.
Diaspora The dispersion of people from their original homeland and the common ties and identities that such people form
across their various sites of settlement.
Indentured labor Where “unfree” laborers are placed under contract to work for another person for a specified period of time,
often without pay, and in exchange for accommodation and/or free passage to a new country.
Moral panic A sudden increase in public perception of the possible threat to societal interests and values due to the activities of
certain sections of society, such as youth and/or immigrants, as reported through the media (e.g., newspapers and television).
Nativism A set of hostile ideas, attitudes, and actions held against foreigners by established and native-born inhabitants,
founded upon a fear of their impact in a host society.
Pogrom An organized attack, often a massacre, against a minority group and often carried out with the tacit approval of official
authorities.
Racialization The process whereby racial categories are created and assigned to a previously unclassified relationship, social
practice, or group; its effect is to provide “race” with a clear social meaning in a way that divides societies.
Remittance Money that is sent from one place or person to another, often from a family member abroad to family or relatives
back home.

Migration, as studied within geography and other humanities and social sciences disciplines, generally refers to the permanent and
semipermanent movements of individuals and groups across space. Such moves may range from the short distances involved with
changing addresses within a city, town, street, or even building to more long-distance relocations across states and continents.
Volume-wise, movements also occur at individual, family, and group-based levels. The reasons for migrations are clearly many
and do not always have a planned or predictable quality. Because of its often profound impacts on the welfare of peoples and
the reshaping of places around the globe in the past as well as the present, migration continues to be a key topic of interest for
not just geographers but also anthropologists, economists, historians, psychologists, and sociologists. For geographers at least,
and those who pursue historical geography in particular, long-standing approaches to the study of migration have ranged from
quantifying the numbers of migrants moving within and between various nations and regions to evaluating the social and cultural
impacts of those migrants on ordinary landscapes, rural and urban, in more local contexts. These have since been supplemented by
topics such as the representation of migrants and their placement within wider discourses of race and nationalism.

Conceiving Migration

The forces and circumstances that have caused people to move around the globe throughout history are many and varied. Analysts
of migration, such as economic historians and geographers, traditionally adopted models distinguishing between the origin and
destination regions of migrants. These models typically involved, to varying degrees of sophistication, the quantitative comparison
of an array of economic, social, and political variables within each region (e.g., wage rates, underemployment levels, land prices,
and population densities) that were held to inform peoples’ migration decisions. Within this framework, a series of “push” factors
in places of origin were contrasted with “pull” forces attracting migrants to destination societies. The roots of such approaches lie in
19th-Century neoclassical economics as well as the work of scholars such as E.G. Ravenstein, who sought to formulate a series of
“migration laws.” Among the most noteworthy of Ravenstein’s “laws” were his claims that the major cause of migration was
economic, that most migration occurred over short distances, and that migration proceeded mostly from rural to urban areas. While
it is true that many migrants, with an eye to bettering their economic situations, compared the opportunities existing at home with
those offered elsewhere, the factors affecting migrations were frequently more complex. At a broad level, the contexts behind move-
ments can be differentiated between “free/voluntary” and “unfree/involuntary” where the enterprising moves of “adventurer
traders,” for example, contrast clearly with the forced evacuations brought on by events such as environmental disasters, civil strife,
and the raiding and trading of slaves.

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112 Migration, Historical Geographies of

Although the push/pull framework draws useful conceptual attention to the conditions behind peoples’ decisions to move, it
oversimplifies migration as a straightforward movement from A to B while neglecting its human and experiential dimensions.
Migration has proved to be a more restless phenomenon than previously assumed. Microscale research has revealed medium-
and long-distance migration to be more of a stage process with stepwise, circular, and return patterns of movement. Fixed descrip-
tions of migrant groups as “sojourners” or “settlers” are therefore of limited analytical value; migrants can oscillate between such
categories at several points in their lives. Traditional approaches to migration have also neglected the specificities of political–
geographical contexts, such as the historical role of states and empires in channeling and regulating the flows of subjects, citizens,
exiles, and guests. As geopolitical entities, they could not only expel sections of their population but also control the mobility of
others resident within their borders or between their colonies.
Broad conceptions of the historical migration process are thus moving forward in at least two ways. First, the context that leads to
migration can be considered as a continuum whereby those possessed with the freedom to make their own independent decisions
to move are located at one extreme and those without such freedom at the other. Second, the complex geographies of migration,
occurring at varying intensities and over different lengths of time, can be viewed within the framework of a “migration system” that
describes a cluster of moves from a well-defined region of origin to one or more receiving regions over a given period. As political,
economic, or environmental conditions change in any of these societies, the dynamics of movement within the migration system
become transformed and redirected, or the system ceases altogether.
Migration systems were sustained in various ways. For one thing, opportunities needed to exist in destinations, whether to spur
the movement of forced labor or to entice “pioneer settlers.” Among the latter, personal correspondence relayed migrants’ informal
commentaries about living conditions and the likelihood of success to those they left behind. The connections these engendered
between kin, relations, friends, and communities in origin and destination localities that spurred further movements to the latter
have been termed “chain migration.” Mailed tickets for passage and financial remittances were crucial to a process whose demo-
graphic strength sometimes justified descriptions and perceptions of it as “mass migration.” At another level, policy and propaganda
by private shipping and railroad companies and government ministries played crucial roles in maintaining migration flows as long
as opportunities remained in destination societies (Fig. 1). The images presented within such documents of rich and cultivated
agrarian landscapes bristling with promise and profits, for example, were often exaggerations of reality with descriptions of
haphazard weather patterns kept to a minimum. Whether it was a personal letter or a government-issued pamphlet, potential

Figure 1 Poster: Canada 160 Acres fritt land till hvarje Nybyggare, ca. 1905–06 (the Norwegian version of a Canadian immigration poster offering
160 acres of free land on the prairies). Source: Library and Archives Canada/Department of Immigration fonds/C-132141.
 Migration, Historical Geographies of 113

migrants were learning about, and forming imaginations of, places and landscapes elsewhere. For those escaping oppressive polit-
ical regimes, slippages of detail were not as important as being free itself.
Historians and historical geographers have typically viewed the Atlantic Ocean as a key arena in which several migration systems
of varying magnitude became established between Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the 17th Century onward. The most infa-
mous of these is undoubtedly the forced movement of slaves from West Africa between the 17th and the early 19th centuries. Over
the same time period and beyond it, Europeans moved in dramatic numbers to the Americas as well. In the case of the United States,
migrants responded to the powerful place-centered myth that was (and is) “the American Dream” with its “promise of freedom”
from the economic, political, and religious oppressions they experienced in their homelands. In the 19th-Century North Atlantic,
for example, the flight of Irish peasants from the mid-century potato famine was followed in later decades by the labor migrations of
Italians and the movement of Jewish families from their “pale of settlement” within the Russian Empire as a result of continued
persecution and pogroms.
This scholarly focus on the Atlantic is gradually becoming balanced by studies dealing with other parts of the world. Internal
migration within Russia, including the movement of peasants eastward across the Ural Mountains to what had been the remote
colonial fur-trading territory of Siberia, involved between 10 and 20 million people in the century before 1914, for example.
The Pacific Rim, meanwhile, has witnessed similar displacements of people during the last two centuries. Under constant threat
of drought and civil strife in the southern provinces of China in the second half of the 19th Century, for example, those who could
flee spread themselves out to other parts of Asia as well as to the west coasts of the Americas from Vancouver to Santiago. Other
studies have been insightful regarding the gender composition of migrant flows. While many of the aforementioned Chinese
were male, Filipino females settled themselves in North America, Western Europe, and the oil-rich Gulf states in the second half
of the 20th Century. In many ways encouraged by their own government cognizant of the value of remittances, these labor migrants
have become concentrated in the areas of domestic service and healthcare in their destination societies.
At a global scale, the mechanics of empire building fostered intercontinental migration systems, principally to satisfy settlement and
labor demands across various sites of colonization. With Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the ending of practiced slavery
in its colonial possessions in 1833, the initiation of new migration systems of indentured labor from Southern Asia was crucial to main-
taining labor forces on plantations of sugar and other commodities in the Caribbean, southern Africa, and Fiji, intensifying the multi-
ethnic composition of these societies. Although indentured labor migration was nothing new in itself, it is not surprising that some
historians have referred to this movement as a “second slavery.” Other South Asian migrants who were not indentured were also recruited
to build railroads and develop mercantile activity in eastern Africa during the 19th and early 20th centuries (Fig. 2). These examples illus-
trate well the “political economy” interpretation of migration that views flows of migrant labor as integral to global capitalism’s
unceasing search for new markets while minimizing labor costs. Migrants were thus located at the center of a network of power that

Figure 2 Principal overseas migrations, 1830s–1919, of Asian indentured and free migrants. From Hoerder, D., 2002. Cultures in Contact: World
Migrations in the Second Millennium. Durham, Duke University Press. Hoerder’s map is adapted from Northrup, D., 1995. Indentured Labor in the
Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Maps 1 and 5 from de Gèrard, C., Jan, M., Rageau, J.-P., 1994. Atlas His-
torique des Migrations. Paris, Le Seuil.
114 Migration, Historical Geographies of

drew the interests of imperial and state governments together with those of private capital, the latter comprising variously shipping and
railroad interests, merchants, agricultural producers, resource extractors, or urban captains of industry.

Mapping, Measuring, and Representing Migration

Historical geographers have used a variety of sources and methods to understand not only the large-scale effects of migration in
different parts of the world through time but also the lived experiences of migrants. National census returns, cartographic surveys,
and the papers and reports of state parliamentary committees, in both manuscript and published forms, have facilitated studies of
internal migration, emigration, and immigration in urban and rural contexts over the past two centuries and more. Surviving
passenger lists from steamship companies, as well as a variety of ecclesiastical records, have often shed important light upon the
regional origins of migrants and their context of departure.
At a more qualitative level, newspaper accounts offer national and local perspectives on, and reactions to, migration in the
context of receiving, or “host” societies. They contain evidence on how migrants were represented and perceived by host societies
not only in the text of editorials and reporters’ accounts of their living conditions and public behavior but also in images such as
political cartoons. Within the evolving “media culture” of the 19th Century, such cartoons often depicted migrant bodies and life-
styles in an unflattering light which served to underline their essential differences from their hosts and cast doubt on their abilities to
adapt to their new cultural contexts. In some instances, newspaper reports of migrants as disease carriers sparked moral panics and
street demonstrations by nativist groups against “dangerous foreigners,” with the widespread use of terms such as the latter serving
to underline who belonged and who did not.
Letters, diaries, autobiographies, institutional records, and historical novels offer other important qualitative insights into the
private lives of migrants and their journeys. For studies of recent migrants, including later 20th-Century designations such as refu-
gees and asylum seekers, oral history has been invaluable in mapping and contextualizing the places they experienced, the chal-
lenges they faced, and the agency they were able to exercise within each. Scholars have also used the cultural landscape itself as
a field-based archive to study the “imprints” of migrants in various places, with house architecture, graveyards, and place names
providing evidence of sociodemographic patterns as well as tastes and traditions among migrants. Such exercises in “landscape
reading,” while not without limitations, can nevertheless serve as an important supplement to what is gained through indoor
research in archives and libraries. Finally, the presentation and visualization of data gleaned from these various sources has been
enhanced by the ongoing development of geographical information systems (GIS) software and its use by historical geographers
and historians (some of whom now term this subfield “spatial history”), especially in “big data” research projects.

The Consequences of Migration

Migration has often been discussed in relation to the creation of new states and societies, which frequently occurred at the expense
of preexisting ones. Scholars have usually illustrated this point by considering the encounter between European migrants and Indig-
enous peoples in various parts of the world where land was not only expropriated by the migrants on their own terms but the path-
ogens they carried had deadly effects on local populations. This “disease impact” of conquerors and settlers was especially apparent
in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America, where pandemics of smallpox, measles, and typhus devastated preexisting
populations in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many Indigenous survivors would be on the move over succeeding centuries, marshaled
into labor forces for the mining of mercury and silver in the highlands of Bolivia and Peru, for example. At later times, the arrival of
migrant settlers prompted states to develop technologies designed to obtain knowledge about and subsequently regulate the move-
ments of those dispossessed from their lands. Here, the role of the American government in the aftermath of the 19th-Century
displacement of Native American tribes from the Great Plains is instructive. The system of territorial reservations that resulted
enabled the monitoring of movements of what was regarded as a potentially troublesome population while aiming to assimilate
them to the ways of “civilization.” Where some populations were concerned, the ability to move was viewed as an act of subversion;
for others, it was considered an act of freedom.
The capacity of migrants to dominate the political contexts of their new settings was not always so assured, however; in such
instances, migrants were recognized as minorities and their patterns of social incorporation and acceptance took many forms.
The retention of separate cultural identities by migrants was often as much an imposed creation of host societies as it was of the
migrants themselves, since the former were usually quick to form judgments about the capacity of the latter to fit in or “assimilate,”
citing biological and climactic factors among the reasons. Cities, especially port cities, were places where migrant visibility was
heightened and issues of “migrant difference” were played out in the search for work, shelter, and education. Prevailing ideas about
racial difference also informed the reaction to different groups of migrants. While the “Chinatowns” of San Francisco and Vancouver
emerged as minority migrant enclaves in atmospheres of hostility and prejudice in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that of Sin-
gapore emerged in a situation where the Chinese became a demographic majority within a British colony. The creation of such
urban diversities from migration was nothing new, however. Amsterdam and Vienna were profoundly affected by surges of immi-
gration in earlier centuries, while the Venetian “Ghetto” of the 16th Century represented an early attempt to deliberately segregate
an outcast cultural group (Jews) within the boundaries of the city.
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In other places and at other times, the contribution of migrants to the shaping of landscapes was far less recognized, especially if
those migrants were not permanent settlers. Depending on the context, their participation in labor markets brought them into
contact with urban employers, rural landowners, native-born workers, and other migrants of different origins. Migrants worked
on rural lands not just as pioneer farmers but also as low-paid laborers, whether on the tea plantations of Darjeeling or the citrus
groves of central California. The creation of popular idyllic images of landscapes such as California often blinded viewing audiences
to the often-bitter struggles between capital and labor that underlay their production and reproduction through time. In California,
the East Asian and Mexican laboring men who had to tolerate the deplorable squalor of housing camps were (and remain) hidden
in precisely this way. Viewed and treated as “expendable foreigners,” credit for the landscape’s beauty was accorded to the excep-
tional climate and enterprising landowners, not the workers. The latter situation was similar for migrants from southern Africa
converging on the diamond and gold mines of the South African Rand from the late 19th Century onward. Again, these migrant
activities illustrate their role in underpinning capitalist societies whether through the cultivation of land, the exploitation of natural
resources, or the development of urban industries. Despite the intermittent hostility of regional and state-level legislation,
employers could not easily afford to do without such cheap sources of labor though it is important to remember that these
“foreigners,” far from always being docile servants of capitalism, were often also important transmitters of radical ideas who
engaged in strikes and other struggles to improve their conditions of work as much as they were important agents in the transfor-
mation of material landscapes.
Migration has therefore brought about a plethora of cultural interactions and intermixing in many places, with consequences for
territorial identities, and the idea of the “foreigner” connects to the place of migrants within the development of national political
systems and identities over the past two centuries. With more pronounced and popular ideas of national identity, citizenship,
culture, and sovereignty circulating through the period, issues related to the comings and goings of people within the “national
territory” received increased attention from state governments and institutions. Immigration entered the policy arena and, as already
noted, became directly linked to economic development and nation-state building, especially in parts of the so-called “New World”
(e.g., Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States). What nation builders saw as the “blank spaces” of
cultivable land in these countries was aggressively promoted in order to stimulate migrant imaginations, particularly in Europe. In
the United States, immigration and the promised freedom of internal movement served an ideological purpose in glorifying the
libertarian and democratic values at the heart of the nation’s constitution. But the emphasis on attracting Europeans to America
betrayed the essential racialization behind this ideology, illustrated with the banning of Chinese immigrant laborers in 1882
and the aforementioned confinement of Indigenous peoples to remote reservations. There and in Canada a hierarchy of immigrant
preference, based on prevailing notions of race, served to “guard the gates” until the 1960s in order to preserve fixed notions of
a white, English-speaking, and Christian North American continent.
In other parts of the globe, emerging ideas about nationhood also became formulated with the ideal of “cultural congruence”
in mind. An imperative existed, in other words, to align the geography of the “national people” with the boundaries of the state in
such a way that would produce such congruence. Through the narration and popularization of ideas about who counted among
the national “imagined community,” displacements and expulsions were often resorted to in order to effect “unmixing” and to
ensure the removal of the excluded “them”; “purified geographies” of the nation could thus become realized. Such quests for
national congruence have led to the movements of populations and selective immigration and citizenship policies in many coun-
tries over the past century and more. As is well known, the aftermath of World Wars I and II witnessed the redrawing of the polit-
ical geography of Eastern and Central Europe along such idealized “nation-state” lines and, in the case of the Balkan states, led to
later ethnoreligious conflict. World War II resulted in massive population transfers within the same region while the decimated
Jewish population looked to the new state of Israel as the place to forge new lives. Postwar decolonization within the British
Empire also resulted in the redrawing of borders and movement of peoples. The mass transfers of some five million Hindus,
Muslims, and Sikhs across the newly created border between India and Pakistan between August and November 1947 exemplifies
how the imperative to spatially align nation, faith, and residence displaced many (Fig. 3). This episode also exposed the gruesome

Figure 3 Train carrying refugees in the aftermath of the partition of India and Pakistan in August 1947.
116 Migration, Historical Geographies of

effects of intercommunal violence when people traveling by train and road were exposed to attack by the opposite community; an
estimated 200,000 adult and child migrants were killed during these dramatic months. The now-familiar idea of some migrants as
refugees was given formal definition at the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention in Geneva.

Migrants, Identity, and the “Homeland”

Migration was not just about arrival; it was also about departure. Migrants’ affections for, and relationships with, the lands they left
were varied. Some looked back, forever feeling a melancholic sense of exile in their destination societies; others, thankful for getting
out when they did, were far less sentimental. Not all intended to leave their “old countries” behind forever either and by the 20th
Century, developments in ocean transportation in particular meant that many could afford to travel the long distances home to visit
or, finances permitting, resettle permanently. One American government report from the early 20th Century cited southern Italians as
the group with the highest rate of return. The loyalties of these return migrants remained evidently weighted in favor of their region or
nation of origin. Such patterns of migration were not always welcomed by their American “hosts” who expected migrants to settle
within and embrace the values of their new nation, the “cradle of liberty.” The image of the opportunistic transnational labor migrant
or “bird of passage” was born out of such debates, where his or her “flexibility” was not necessarily seen as a good thing.
For others, temporary migration was part of a more clear-cut career trajectory. The “homeland” was rarely forgotten by those who
forged their careers on its behalf in an imperial context as governors, civil servants, soldiers, and others. Empire building depended
on the migration of these sorts of personnel from the metropolitan center to the colonial periphery for the purposes of government,
administration, military defense, law, and economic development, a process that became more formalized in the case of the British
and French empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some formed part of ruling elites in more than one colony, for
example, Thomas Pope Hennessy, who served as a British governor in both Barbados and Hong Kong. In colonies with formidable
summer climates such as India, British families were provided with periodic visits to the more familiar and “suitable” climatic envi-
ronment of their place of birth in the early 20th Century, although such visits often made clear that imagining and experiencing
Britain as “home” were often two different things. After years abroad, it was not uncommon for many of these Britons to feel a sense
of displacement once the everyday reality of “home” had to be negotiated. Only then did the emotional relationships they had
forged in India come into focus, leading to a somewhat hybridized sense of belonging. Spending extended periods in the colonies
did not necessarily engender a prolonged sense of “exile” for many of such movers, and while some “went native” (wholly
embracing a culture otherwise described and perceived in racially differentiating and primarily disparaging terms), the majority still
anticipated Britain as their final resting place.
The previous section discussed the challenges migrants faced when encountering the assertion of nationalist identities in their
places of settlement, especially when such identities revolved around fixed notions of culture and race. It is worth remembering,
however, that such migrants did not remain passive to, and in some cases initiated, similar nationalistic impulses in their home-
lands of origin. Scholars in both the humanities and social sciences now use diaspora as a summary term to describe the often-
wide “scattering” of people to places separate from what they recognize as their ancestral “homeland.” Although diaspora remains
a somewhat under-researched area among historical geographers, they are nevertheless developing understandings of the multiple
ways in which migrants and their descendants continued to imagine these homelands and the significance of these imaginations.
For some, such actions hardly extended beyond the symbolic cultural nostalgia felt during annual festivals, while others assumed
more active and militant stances in the politics of their homelands. Such was particularly the case where projects of nationalist
“liberation” remained unresolved. Among the key actors in the late 19th-Century Irish nationalist agitation, for example, were
the urbanized Irish migrants in North America who provided money to support not only political campaigns at home but also
more radical initiatives such as the purchase and use of weaponry. By the early 20th Century, the Irish and Poles in the United States
had become well known as proactive campaigners for the national independence of their homelands, taking their passions into
streets and meeting halls as well as in print. Migrant or “ethnic” leaders such as newspaper editors, religious figureheads, intellec-
tuals, and other members of the middle class were important in such instances. Interpretations of migration as enforced exile caused
by imperial injustice and mismanagement were particularly effective in mobilizing support among rank-and-file migrants for dia-
sporic nationalist projects such as these, while the culture and “imagined community” of the homeland was relentlessly translated
through journalism, art, vernacular theater, literature, poetry, music, personal letters, and often stirring occasions such as the street
parades and lectures of visiting agitators. When the moment of liberation came, responses in the form of permanent return varied.
While the process of building cohesion in the new state of Israel after 1948 depended on an inflow of hundreds of thousands of
migrants from the global Jewish diaspora, it also involved the displacement of Palestinian Arab refugees as a result of the 1948
Arab–Israeli War and preceding civil conflict. Neither could the new Israeli state discount the possibility that some of its Jewish pop-
ulation would later choose to emigrate as a result of continued political instability.

Conclusion

While this discussion has concentrated explicitly on the migration of people, it is clear that the movements of these same people
facilitated the spatial mobility and exchanges of other entities such as texts, animals, foodstuffs, and plants, which contributed to the
circulation of different forms of knowledge as well as the transformation of landscapes and societies in different parts of the world.
 Migration, Historical Geographies of 117

While there has not been sufficient space here to cover these dimensions of migration, it would not be inaccurate to say that migra-
tion now forms one aspect of wider interest among geographers on “mobilities.” While migration continues to be an area of concern
for historically minded geographers, it is becoming increasingly bound within wider inquiries about the ideologies and practices of
capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, and liberal state building as well as the development and deployment of sociopolitical cate-
gorizations such as race, ethnicity, and citizenship. As far as understanding migration as a process in itself is concerned, traditional
push/pull perspectives have given way to more sophisticated understandings of migration systems and the consequences of move-
ments on intercultural relations in different places. The coming decades should see such historical–geographical studies of migra-
tion continue to move into the post–World War II era while embracing parts of the world beyond the Euro-American Atlantic axis;
they should also seek to deepen their understandings of migrant diasporas in a global context characterized by intensified intercon-
nection. At the urban level, fine-grained studies of streets and buildings associated with migration promise to enhance accounts of
the experiences of arriving men, women, and children and their contributions to the dynamics of city and nation building.

See Also: Archives; Ghettos; Imperialistic Geographies; Migrant Workers; Remittances.

Further Reading

Anderson, K.J., 1991. Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada 1875–1980. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal.
Baily, S.L., 1999. Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Blunt, A., 2005. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Blackwell, Malden.
Bodnar, J., 1985. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Cohen, N., 2010. From legalism to symbolism: anti-mobility and national identity in Israel, 1948-1958. J. Hist. Geogr. 36, 19–28.
Grigg, D.B., 1978. E.G. Ravenstein and the ‘the laws of migration’. J. Hist. Geogr. 3, 41–54.
Hannah, M.G., 2000. Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Harzig, C., Hoerder, D. What Is Migration History? Cambridge: Polity Press
Hoerder, D., 2002. Cultures in Contact: World Migration in the Second Millennium. Duke University Press, Durham.
Houston, C., Smyth, W.J. Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links and Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Jenkins, W., 2013. Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston and Montreal.
Knowles, V., 1992. Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540–1990. Dundurn Press, Oxford.
Lambert, D., Lester, A. (Eds.), 2006. Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Mitchell, D., 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN.
Northrup, D., 1995. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Nugent, W., 1992. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Ostergren, R.C., 1988. A Community Transplanted: The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West 1835–1915. University of
Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.
Robinson, D. (Ed.), 1990. Migration in Colonial Spanish America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wauters, R., 2017. Migrants in the midst of city life: spatial patterns and arrival logics of foreign newcomers to Brussels in 1880. J. Hist. Geogr. 58, 39–52.
Western, J.C., 1992. A Passage to England: Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Relevant Websites

http://www.history.ac.uk Scholarly work on world migration history through the Institute for Historical Research in London, Institute of Historical Research.
https://iehs.org The Website of the Immigration and Ethnic History SocietyTheshipslist.com.
http://www.theshipslist.com/ A website containing passenger lists to Canada, USA, Australia, and South Africa in addition to immigration reports, newspaper records, shipwreck
information, ship pictures and descriptions, and fleet lists.
http://www.slavevoyages.org/ The Trans-Atlantic Database with information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
http://www.globalmigration.umd.edu/ The Center for Global Migration Studies, University of Maryland.