Introduction

Abstract

The introductory chapter elaborates the book’s distinctive approach to the dynamics that have led to global labor migration and the ways migrant workers in past and present have shaped the conditions of their lives within institutional constraints. Four themes frame the book: colonial authority and the transimperial, gender and sexualities, national and transnational regulation, and global governance. These analytical categories count among the most significant dynamics of global labor migration. They embody a multidisciplinary approach that brings together sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians as well as a world historical perspective that recasts the study of labor migration in a longer (temporal) and a wider geographic (spatial) frame. The book specifically exemplifies broadening research to migration patterns around the world. This approach produces new insights by transgressing boundaries. It pushes the conversation on global migration in three key directions: the persistence of past labor regimes and power relations into the present that demand historical analysis; the interaction between the intimate, national, transnational, and global in shaping labor migration; and the complex responses of working people, states, and international organizations to one another over time