Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective ― An Introduction

In this book editors Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler and Leo Lucassen bring together ten essays in an analytical framework which looks beyond the Transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a deliberate attempt to incorporate the experience of earlier periods and other continents into historical migration studies. The focus of analysis is on the mechanisms of interaction between polities, from city-states and emerging statehoods to empires, and migrants joining or taking over these polities, by force, choice or co-optation. It reconceptualises the migrant-state relationship as an engagement over the terms of membership and explores the variety of different outcomes this has had across time and space.

Ulbe Bosma, Ph.D (1995) is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and professor in international and comparative social history at VU University. He published five monographs, edited volumes and many articles on colonial history, plantations and migration. Forthcoming is his monograph, The Asian sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: industrial production 1770-2020, to appear at Cambridge University Press in 2013.Gijs Kessler, Ph.D (2001), European University Institute, is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He is co-editor of A Dream Deferred: New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) and has published in a number of journals, including Cahiers du Monde Russe, Continuity and Change, and The History of the Family.Leo Lucassen Ph.D (1990) is Professor of Social History at the Leiden University. He is co-editor of Migration History in World History. Multidisciplinary approaches (Leiden, Brill 2010) and published in 2005 The Immigrant Threat (Urbana, UIP). He has published a.o. in the International Review of Social History, the Journal of Global History, Social History, and History of the Family.