Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

The uses and transformations of the concept of land use, occupation, and possession in West Central Africa from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century are examined. Rather than stressing the concept of wealth in people, this chapter explores how people exercised land rights and control and displayed wealth. In West Central Africa, as elsewhere in the continent, claims over land, people, and things were based on and shaped by notions of kinship, community membership, and the broader social context. The distinction between the public and the private was blurred. Recognition of claims and rights was the result of political and economic competition among rulers, subjects, and neighbors. All actors, some with more power than others, engaged in the definition of land use, rights, occupation, and inheritance, retaining control of goods and wealth that could be expressed in a variety of ways. With the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, more actors engaged in the principle of territorial occupation and subjugation to make bold claims of sovereignty based on the idea that land was unused or unoccupied. Since different ideas of possession and jurisdiction were at the center of these interactions, clashes between conceptions of land use, access, and occupation are analyzed.

The Khoekhoe and the hunter-gatherers of the Karoo, the |Xam, valued quagga meat, and used their hides and bones too; the |Xam told stories about quaggas and indigenous people portrayed them on rocks. This chapter describes hunting techniques of indigenous people andof the Europeans who settled in the Cape Colony. Hunting provided settlers with meat that they gave to their slaves and laborers and hides that were made into low-value items such as ropes, harnesses, whips, halters, bags, thongs, clothing, and veldschoen (rough shoes). In the nineteenth century, big-game hunters and hide-hunters joined in the killing. Settlers also used quaggas to protect their livestock and to pull wagons but this latter use was probably limited as quaggas were prone to fatigue; nonetheless, other plains zebras were harnessed with domestic equines and used to pull a stagecoach. Domestication of quaggas would have been disadvantageous as they could have harbored African Horse Sickness and this disease is transmissible by insect vectors to horses, donkeys, and mules, where it can be deadly. Quaggas did not need to be domesticated in order to be valued; biophilia could have prevented their extinction.

This chapter explores the foundation of poleis beyond the capital cities, as well as the alteration and renaming of settlements as marks of imperialism. Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey, the authors emphasize the methodological issues faced by historians of identifying and assessing new settlements – Mairs by focusing on the historiography and archaeology of the early Seleucid Far East, and Fischer-Bovet by offering a typology of Ptolemaic settlements. Seleucid settlements in Bactria can only be understood as a continuation of Alexander’s settlement policy. Their strong military character shows the early Seleucid interest in Central Asia and is not representative of the empire as a whole. The Ptolemaic empire was also connected through a network of either new or transformed settlements, whose variety was adapted to each region and actively shaped by local populations. The existing urban and administrative networks, moreover, did not create the need for new poleis – and complementary explanation to the question raised by Clancier and Gorre in the same volume – but the new and altered settlements reflect the Ptolemaic strategy of combining Greek and Egyptian elements.

This chapter outlines a possible explanation for the overall stability of the Israeli regime based on the concept of state capacity, namely, the ability of the state to use coercive and administrative capabilities to “get things done.” It therefore emphasizes the role of the state itself in explaining the regime. The first section provides a short conceptual clarification of the concept of state capacity and its relationship with regime stability. This is followed by a presentation of the historical origins of Israeli state capacity and some measures of its capacity. The main part of this chapter discusses the ways in which state capacity sustains the regime’s stability in light of three challenges: the internal aspect of the conflict, the challenge to state authority from political tensions among its Jewish citizens, and the ways in which the zones of control have shifted according to the limited ability of state capacity to ensure direct control of the entire Occupied Territories.

Chapter 4 chronicles how conflict—manifested in physical and structural violence—simultaneously ruptured and sealed government-citizen and citizen-citizen relations thereby casting citizenship as a site of enduring struggle for Liberia. It employs Long’s notion of the interface as well as Galtung’s conflict triangle to designate conflict as a dynamic process in which the ‘incompatibility of goals’ of different actors (contradiction) fuels their perceptions and misperceptions of themselves and each other (attitudes) thereby influencing actions (behaviour) that may range from opposition to accommodation.Specifically, the chapter maintains that Liberian citizenship has been constructed and reconstructed because of conflicts precipitated by four major interfaces between a range of actors beginning with the indigenous wars of resistance during Liberia’s state formation in the nineteenth century and climaxing in twenty-first century post-war rivalries over income, land tenure, and transitional justice. While strained government-citizen relations engendered dissent and divergence, improvements in those relations also ushered in intervals of consent and convergence. This chapter demonstrates that a decade-long impasse on dual citizenship reveals how Liberian citizenship has changed across space and time through conflict and crisis and is still undergoing transformation.

Chapter 3 examines the evolution of Israel’s foreign policy of engagement under the Rabin government. It explains why the Israel-PLO and Israel-Syria peace processes remained contested, while Israel’s negotiations with Jordan yielded a peace accord. The chapter uncovers the deepening tension between the government pursing Israel’s policy of engagement and the domestic opposition it unleashed. It concludes that Israel’s foreign policy transition from entrenchment to engagement remained reversible. On the one hand, Israel concluded a peace agreement with Jordan, continued negotiations with the PLO and Syria, and engaged in budding negotiations with Arab countries in the Gulf and the Maghreb. On the other, however, nearing the brink of peace obscured a less visible, but highly significant fact, namely, that the Arab-Israeli peace process was enfeebled by domestic challenges. These included, for example, the deadly terrorist attacks launched by Hamas, hostile public opinion, and mounting political opposition in parliament on the grounds that engagement posed security risks to Israel and was anathema to its Jewish and Zionist identity of the state.

Since 2000 the organization Women for the Temple has worked to paint the struggle with the Palestinians over Temple Mount in softer and less threatening colors. Instead of the fanatics of the Jewish Underground, who wanted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, these women say they want to ascend to the Mount ostensibly in the name of religious freedom, openness, and closeness to the divine. They say that they do not wish to provoke Muslims or the Israeli police but simply to mark their wedding day, their daughter’s bat mitzvah, or for personal prayer. They present their ascent as a negotiation between the unique experience of the holy and the mundane routine of life and weekly visits. The women speak of closeness, intimacy, and desire toward the holy that women are uniquely positioned to feel. In this way, they strive to domesticate the space as well as the debate around it, packaging it as less intimidating and explosive to the general Israeli public. In the course of this process, they also reconfigure the space from one that is divided and separate in the Israeli imagination to one that is united and ultimately indivisible.

Historians of violence in the French Empire have focused primarily on official agents of the state, such as soldiers, policemen, judges, and administrators. Violence perpetrated by non-state actors – that is, by European settlers, merchants, and travelers – remain far less explored in the historiography of French colonialism. In important ways, brutality perpetrated by non-state actors helped perpetuate the Manichean dynamics of colonialism so powerfully described by colonial and post-colonial critics alike. The prevalence of violence suggests that quotidian brutality was central to settlers’ sense of power and identity in regions where they felt under constant threat from larger non-European populations. This chapter examines how civilian mistreatment of colonial populations often differed starkly from the state’s efforts to legitimate its own use of violence in military, administrative, and judicial capacities. Indeed, such daily acts of violence were potentially threatening to the French power. They undermined administrative control of French citizens and destabilized what were often delicate balances of power between officials and subject populations. Equally important, uncontrolled violence jeopardized the central rhetorical claim that colonization brought rationalism and civilization to allegedly less-developed societies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

East and Central Africa were among the last regions to be colonized by European powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to limited trade with the region, along with more fragmented indigenous political organization in many colonies, colonial governments faced a particularly challenging task of establishing fiscal systems which would support the conquest and rule of these territories. This chapter examines the ways they tried to overcome these difficulties, focusing on the histories of the Belgian Congo, Kenya, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Uganda. In all of these, the imperial powers made use of older tools of colonial rule, including settlement and the outsourcing of government to chartered companies, but the implementation of these were shaped by the circumstances of the period. The chapter argues that these early policies influenced the development of both taxation and public spending during and after the colonial period. In particular, colonial and post-independence governments were more dependent on direct taxation, and faced fierce debates about the distribution of public spending.