Introduction

Summary

Why should any man take upon himself all the risks of sailing abroad to seek a livelihood?

Farmer in Shantou, China, c. 1934

Over the past 150 years, the scale of human migration within Asia has been vast, greater than at any other time and place in human history. This book argues that migrants have been central to enduring and significant changes in modern Asian history: to economic and environmental transformations; to the spread of new political ideas and religious practices; to social and demographic change. Until recently, most histories of Asia have emphasized the perspectives of states, empires, and sedentary peoples. This book seeks to place migrants at the heart of modern Asian history.

Migration has been a widespread experience in many regions of Asia, but one that has, over time, come to be seen by states (and many historians) as anomalous or exceptional. ‘We imagine that mobility is border crossing, as though borders came first, and mobility, second’, David Ludden wrote in 2003. Historians have been too quick to project into the past the modern world of nation-states with strict controls over movement into and out of their territories. This book seeks to consider Asian history in more mobile terms, by emphasizing the importance of movement and by seeking to illustrate the connections that migrants made between distant places. Borders did not pre-date mobility.