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From the Balkans to Baghdad (via Baltimore): Labor Migration and the Routes of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Keith Brown
Keith Brown*
Affiliation:
Watson Institute at Brown University
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Abstract

While scholars of the Balkans have frequently emphasized the importance of nationalism in the region, labor migration has long been a critical component of economic, social, and cultural life. In this article, Keith Brown examines the connections between two well-documented cases of the risks faced by long-distance migrants from the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia, separated by a hundred years. Putting each case into its larger context—U.S. industrial expansion in the early 1900s, and U.S. military occupation in the early 2000s—Brown argues that the study of contemporary Macedonia demands attending to imperial and colonial histories that make clear the larger systems of power in which the country and its people have long been suspended.

Type
Challenging Crossroads: Macedonia in Global Perspective
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , Winter 2010 , pp. 816 - 834
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

The primary research on which this paper is based was conducted with the support of a fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Earlier versions were presented at the Institute and at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to audiences at these venues and to the participants at the conference "Re-Thinking Crossroads: Macedonia in Global Context" organized by the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago for their feedback, especially Victor Friedman and Susan L. Woodward. I would also like to thank Catherine Lutz, Jane Cowan, and Ann Laura Stoler for their close readings and encouragement.

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36. Report no. 1, Relating to “Induced Emigration,” submitted to Daniel J. Keefe, Commissioner-General of Immigration, by Inspector John Gruenburg, 18 December 1908. RG 85, Entry 9, Box 79, File 52066/1, Folder 2.

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53. Ibid.