The Global Community

The emerging global economy and the spread of international political cooperation have brought an unprecedented acceleration of migration across all areas of the globe since the 1980s. All of this means that aspects of world, rather than national, civilization are creeping up the historical and popular agenda as people seek to join a debate on the comparative merits of immigrants in the world today, so the importance of historical understanding of the movements of peoples in the modern world cannot be underestimated. This work traces the broad sweep of voluntary and involuntary global migration since 1500, addressing both migration within continents and transcontinental migration. It examines the causes of migration and evaluates the historical impact of relocated peoples; their skills, ideas and experiences, on their new homelands. The focus is thus on the fate of migrants, the reasons for their relocation and their contributions to new cultural and environmental settings.