Non-Privileged Migration and Mobility Control in the Age of Global Empires

The decades between 1850 and 1914 saw mass migration on an unprecedented scale – and the simultaneous construction of regimes designed around the distinction between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrants. Non-Privileged Migration and Mobility Control in the Age of Global Empires offers a rigorous, globally comparative examination of how those categories were made, contested, and crossed in the age of high imperialism.Bringing together case studies spanning five continents, the volume traces the entangled histories of migration control and migrant agency across Central and Eastern Europe, colonial Africa, South America, the Dutch metropole, Russian Central Asia, and the transoceanic routes in between.From the Slovak wireworkers of Imperial Germany and Romani families crossing the Atlantic, to Jewish emigrants fleeing Tsarist persecution and Indian merchants navigating paper borders in Central Asia, contributors illuminate both the discriminatory logics of modern migration regimes and the strategies through which non-privileged migrants negotiated, challenged, and reshaped them.Attending to the roles of imperial networks, racialising discourses, mass media, and academic knowledge in producing ‘undesirability’, the volume speaks to a globally entangled approach to migration history. It will be essential reading for scholars of migration studies, modern history, imperial and colonial history, and border studies.Felix Brahm is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Münster. Eve Rosenhaft is Professor Emerita of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool.