Connecting Atlantic, Indian Ocean, China Seas, and Pacific Migrations, 1830s to 1930s

Abstract

Only recently have historians begun to study the world's oceans and their role in connecting formerly isolated societies. For a long time oceans have rather been regarded as empty spaces between continents and barriers to communication. The approach to migration has also undergone several changes in recent decades. Discussions have moved away from the traditional historical emphasis that isolates continents and nation states toward broader concepts of social space. The conference Connecting Atlantic, Indian Ocean, China Seas, and Pacific Migrations, 1830s to 1930s that took place December 6-8, 2007, at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, organized in cooperation with the Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, aimed at bringing together the new interest in maritime history and the history of migration in order to examine oceanic worlds as systems or networks of migration. The conference program was based on the assumption that transoceanic communication and exchange was a major force of globalization, with the inten tion of broadening perspectives beyond the Atlantic and looking at migrations in different oceanic world regions and on relationships between these migration systems. The conference brought together scholars from all parts of the world and thus offered a true global-history approach from beyond the Atlantic core of knowledge production. Though the century from the 1830s to the 1930s, when the Great Depression and Second World War in Asia and Europe put a halt to much migration, seems to be an adequate periodization for several seas and migration systems, conference participants agreed that global history must be careful not to impose periodiza tions that make sense in some regions but not in others. As Adam McKeown (Columbia University) pointed out in his keynote lecture, historians instead have to look closely at how each flow was shaped by its own specific history, regu latory environment, economic opportunities, and power relations, even when pro cesses and cycles of migration grew increasingly integrated across the globe. Questions of state regulation and the mechanisms of control that influ enced the movements of people were recurrent themes of the conference. Mary Blewett (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) focused on shifts between the 1860s and 1920s in markets, capital investment, acquisition of raw materials, and sites of production in the transatlantic worsted trade, and the preceding and ensuing labor migrations. Showing how the McKinley