Obliterating Boundaries, Questioning Borders: A Comment on Globalising Migration History

Jan and Leo Lucassen have undertaken an ambitious task – to make migration universally legible to scholars and to public discourse by rendering migration worldwide comparable and measurable, like the gross national product or rates of literacy. In order to approach this task, they have, of necessity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International review of social history 2017-12, Vol.62 (3), p.495-500
Main Author: Moch, Leslie Page
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Ambition
Borders
Chinese languages
Cultural history
Culture
Datasets
Decolonization
Domestic service
Essays
GNP
Gross National Product
History
Literacy
Migration
Military personnel
Slavery
Social history
State employees
Suggestions and Debates
Young adults
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Summary:Jan and Leo Lucassen have undertaken an ambitious task – to make migration universally legible to scholars and to public discourse by rendering migration worldwide comparable and measurable, like the gross national product or rates of literacy. In order to approach this task, they have, of necessity, created new datasets – for this alone they are to be congratulated, for undertaking tasks that require a combination of hubris and the willingness to make important decisions about the categorization of human movement along with incorporating room for error. To bring twentieth-century Russia into the picture,especially after 1950, is a signal contribution. The databases used to calculate the cross-cultural migration rates (CCMRs) are a project and an achievement,only conceivable within the companion task of creating an analytic scheme that will work universally.If datasets are hard won, conceptual schemes are always debatable. The fundamental distinctions and decisions about human migration here were designed to create a scheme that would work in all the arenas from which most major migration studies originated: transatlantic, Western European, decolonizing, and transpacific – as well as the content of this volume, the great landmass of Eurasia. Some of this book focuses on what Adam McKeown calls the North Asian System – one of the three great migration systems in which millions of people moved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, and, in this case, it includes movement into Siberia, Manchuria, and Mongolia, regions in which the Russian and Chinese states settled colonists in competition for these vast areas.
ISSN:0020-8590
1469-512X
DOI:10.1017/S0020859017000402