Global History And Migrations

Gungwu Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429979828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Humans have been on the move for millennia. They have done so slowly as well as quickly, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes transported by force, often relocated at great cost in lives, but they have always moved. Over the centuries, improved transportation has eased the movement, even in the face of man-made or natural obstacles. But in modern times, migration has accelerated and its reach has become truly global.Whether it is Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany, Japanese Nisei in Seattle, Filipinos in Kuwait, or Haitians in Brooklyn, the costs and benefits of human mobility on such a wide and rapid scale are hotly debated. Global History and Migrations, the second volume of the Global History Series, explores the historical background of this issue by focusing on recent history, a time when human movements have been at their most dynamic. This book provides a rich, cross-cultural foundation for a more enlightened understanding of migration and its role in the unfolding shape of global history.

---

1
Migration History: Some Patterns Revisited

Wang Gungwu

When Bruce Mazlish invited me to join his global history enterprise, he gave me an opportunity to bring my work on Chinese migrations to a larger canvas. The invitation led me to write “Migration and Its Enemies”, which appeared in the volume of essays, Conceptualizing Global History (Mazlish and Buultjens 1994). It also led to the theme of migrations becoming the focus for further exploration of the scope and significance of global history. I was stimulated to bring some migration specialists from various disciplines and a small group of historians together in Hong Kong to test the usefulness of a global historical perspective on the subject of migration. That this approach might be different from world history has been argued eloquently by Bruce Mazlish, and I do not propose to open that subject here (see Mazlish 1994; Grew 1994; and Journal of World History, essays by McNeil [1990] and Frank [1991]). Following that meeting, we agreed that a book such as this one would help to extend the debate about the relationship between globalisation and the history of migrations.

The book would not be just another collection of writings about migration. The authors were asked to focus on what migration history had contributed to our understanding, and possibly the actual shaping, of global history. If such explorations should deepen interpretations of contemporary migration issues and perhaps also influence future thinking about migration patterns, so much the better. But that is not what we sought to do. The primary purpose was to take a few steps forward in grasping some features of globalisation and apply a global history approach to one of its most important manifestations. For myself, the starting point would be patterns of migration in history.

It is important that I set down why I am predisposed to link global history with migrations and why, throughout this chapter, I shall often use examples from the history of the two contrasting regions of China and Southeast Asia to illustrate some broader observations. I grew up as the son of a sojourner from China who decided to become an immigrant because it was time to acquire a new nationality. (Sojourning is a distinct form of temporary and experimental migration. See Wang G. 1992c and 1994.) The year was 1949 in the Federation of Malaya, eight years before it became an independent state. Immigrants were enjoined to take part in something quite profound, the noble task of nation-building. This was a common experience around me, and I took this to be the norm in the unfolding of modern history. Chinese sojourners were observing the emergence of a postcolonial state, a new nation in the making (Ongkili 1985; Horowitz 1985). The decision whether to become new citizens or to remain sojourners and aliens and forgo the chance to be the future nationals of an independent nation had to be faced. For all kinds of reasons, most of the Chinese chose to become citizens of Malaya.

In varying forms, this experience, following the end of empires around the world, could be replicated all over Southeast Asia for peoples of very different origins. The situation was seen as the inevitable sorting out of miscellaneous communities created by the great Western powers within newly drawn-up borders. It had the added characteristic of being a colonial experience in the special sense that it was the product of long-distance maritime empires in which the rulers were physically departing but leaving legal and administrative structures behind for indigenous elites to either maintain or dismantle. It was not obvious to me at the time that the phenomenon was anything more than historic long-distance empires running out of steam and recognising that it was time for the imperialists to leave. It was only when I came to study history that I became aware of a more global perspective (McNeill and Adams 1978; Kritz et al. 1981). My own family’s story of migration was merely one of the many that reached back to the beginnings of time. It was a universal story that had undergone great changes and had been intensified during the past 500 years of modernisation that had enveloped every part of the globe.

Where migration patterns were concerned, each region had its exceptional features (Contrast R. King 1993 with Emmer and Murner 1992 and Chan 1991). Three broad categories, however, may be recognised, each appearing at different periods of history. The first was migration within kingdoms, principalities, and empires of the three Old World continents, which shared similar cultures, religions, and languages. The second was emigration to distant lands that were conquered or colonised, which led to the formation of migrant states, notably in the Americas and Australasia. The third centered on immigration to states with fully developed or nascent historical identities. To the citizens of these states, the immigrants were of different racial or cultural backgrounds and therefore would have to be treated as foreigners or aliens. The study of history enables us to trace the different stories of settlement and mobility and distinguish among the three distinctive experiences. When it became clear that the modern world was being defined in terms of nationalities, nation-building stages, and nation-states, the many types of migration stories began to converge. It is this that has led me to global history as an approach that could capture the meaning of such a significant convergence of human experience. Attempting such an approach would not merely serve to narrate and explain the new terms of reference for new and aspiring nations and analyse their significance but would also project a kind of focus on pervasive global developments that uncover new connections and open up fresh areas of concern.

Let me return to the most exceptional example, Southeast Asia. This region, unlike its neighbours in east and south Asia, clearly belongs to the third category of migration (Pryor 1979). Before the in-migration of Indians, Persians, Arabs, Chinese, and Europeans, the region had its own migratory traditions within its many kingdoms and tribal groupings, each at different stages of state formation. The arrival from outside of new faiths, ideas, and peoples played an important part in the shaping of what was eventually to become nascent national states. But there was no conscious record of migratory forces playing any part in the origins of its various political entities, or of what was indigenous and what was not. Only those who came from outside the region, especially the Europeans after the sixteenth century, were fascinated by the early influences of Hinduism and Buddhism and by the later power of Islam in the archipelago and Theravada Buddhism on the mainland (Coedes 1948, 1968). In modern times, this interest was further extended to studies of the Christian (espe-cially Catholic) enterprise, of the usefulness of foreign traders, and of the economic value of imported Chinese and Indian labour.

It was the modern Western historians of the nineteenth century who began to present a picture that appeared to indicate that everyone except for a small number of aboriginal tribes—and there was a rigid definition of aborigines—had come from outside the region. Some suggested that the region might have been a larger one that began further north and west on the continental mainland and embraced a larger area than simply the lands between China and India. The Malay peoples were vividly portrayed to have been the earliest of the non-Chinese peoples to migrate from Yunnan some centuries before the Christian era and settle down in the various islands of the archipelago, which carried the name Malay (Winstedt 1947, 1961). What is more, the ancestors of the present Malays traveled even further—eastward toward the Pacific and beyond to people all the islands from Hawaii in the north to Tahiti in the south; and westward across the Indian Ocean to the island of Madagascar. Furthermore, as these ancestors of the Malays came down the mountains of mainland southeast Asia to the plains and the seas, they were followed by later migrating races, originally from even further north and west of Yunnan. The most notable of these were the various Tai (including Shan, Lao, and Thai peoples today), Vietnamese, and Burmese peoples. Finally, the smaller groups of latecomers bearing trading goods, challenging ideas, and other cultural artifacts from India, China, the Perso-Arab world, and including various kinds of Franks from Europe, simply confirmed the long-term pattern of migratory forces that helped to determine the region’s history.

The most striking of the modern perspectives on past migrations was the ready acceptance by the historians of Thailand that not only had their peoples come from Yunnan Province in southwest China, but their rulers had been the founders of the Nan Chao kingdom, once an empire that had ruled over southwestern China. It was speculated that its ruling house and the leading tribal leaders had brought their people south because their armies had been defeated by the Mongols in the thirteenth century (Hall 1964: 134–136). The picture of Thai southward migration matched that of the Malays and other Malay-Polynesian speakers as one that resulted from northern military and political pressures forcing people to move further south. However, this was presented by the modern historians in a very positive way. To such historians of expanding global empires, migrations were, like the process of colonisation and settlement, not only normal but also progressive and ultimately beneficial to the extension of civilisation.

A similar picture could be presented of Vietnamese southward expansion down the coast at the expense of the ancient kingdoms of Champa and Cambodia and of the Burmans pushing south into the territories of, among others, the Shan, the Kachin, the Karen, and finally the territories of the Mon peoples of the Irrawaddy delta. It was easy to see the whole movement as coming from further north, and the migration southward as responding to the population pressures of the Han peoples of the Chinese Empire (Wiens 1954; Lee 1978). Thus when Southeast Asia was brought into world history by the end of the nineteenth century as fragmented parts of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British, French, and American Empires, the context was one in which migration from land and sea, and from almost every direction, had for a long while been seen as an integral part of historical development. What was misleading in the history-writing thus produced, even though probably unintended, was the failure to recognise the native contributions to the dominant cultures of the region (Wolters 1982).

The migration bias in Southeast Asian history-writing lasted until the process of decolonisation began to lead to the era of new national consciousness in the 1950s. Strenuous efforts after that were made to restore the past to the indigenous peoples. As this seemed to have happened in all former colonies, my generation began to assume that our region’s history had always been like that of every other region and that the patterns of migration described for Southeast Asia would also have been similar to those everywhere else. Certain historical norms were identified, and the new historians of the region began to see the region’s growth and development as having always conformed to those norms. We joined the world only to find that we had always been part of it (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989).

The advent of the new globalisation should have strengthened that perception even further. But a contrary awareness slowly emerged. My own studies of the British Empire and Commonwealth led me to the whole course of modern western expansion into the Americas, with the Europeans seeking “Christians and gold” and, ultimately, territory in Asia and Africa, for the better pursuit of maritime trade. It was their historians who had projected a picture of Southeast Asia as an open region of active migrations. My studies, however, also led me back to the full length of Chinese history. The east Asian region gave me a totally different perspective on trade and travel. On the one hand, there was the dominance of a unitary and authoritarian civilisation that insisted on conformity of behaviour from ancient times. On the other, there were agreed-upon imperial policies against voluntary migration and, in particular, against emigration. The contrast to what I was used to in Southeast Asia and what I knew of the West was so great that I could not help reshaping some of my previous conceptions. I became more inclined to believe in the discreteness of regional history.

This inclination was reinforced by my undergraduate studies in Nan-jing after World War II. In succession, the Japanese were driven out of China, followed by Europeans and Americans and by foreign migrants of all kinds (Hooper 1986). Furthermore, there was a systematic welcoming home of overseas Chinese and new walls were steadily built to keep all Chinese inside (FitzGerald 1972). This was nothing new. It conformed to at least a thousand years of Chinese history and was the very opposite of my Southeast Asian experience. Thus, when I returned to the familiar open world of migrants on my return to Malaya, the sense of contrast at the time was never greater.

My own migratory life continued for the next forty years. I went on to more studies in colonial Singapore and cosmopolitan London and then returned to teach in multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual Kuala Lumpur. Twelve years later, I moved again. First, I was drawn to the research environment and facilities of Canberra, the capital of a successful migrant state that was just beginning to regret its racist past. It was most enlightening to see firsthand the truly long-distance efforts to strengthen global links through the reform of immigration policies, changing from allowing European immigration exclusively to opening the country to peoples from Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Jupp 1988). Then came the temptation, which I could not resist, for me to live in one of the great migrant centers of Asia—the yet un-decolonised metropolis of Hong Kong. Whether it is the Vietnamese refugees; the 50,000 to 60,000-per-year rate of emigration; the 100-per-day officially approved immigrants from the Chinese mainland; the foreign maids, labourers, or multinational executives; the Hong Kong migrants returning with foreign passports; the ubiquitous I.I.’s (illegal immigrants); or those being smuggled intercontinentally to more distant shores—not a day passes without a headline or two about subjects that tie migrations to the process of glob-alisation (Skeldon 1994).

In each place that I have lived, the growing force of globalisation was first slightly discernible and then became unmistakable. In contrast to the closed nationalism of Nanjing and the artificial internationalism of Beijing, much of the noncommunist world outside was advancing along the modernising capitalist road. These advances were led, for better or for worse, by individuals and companies who commanded the technology and skills to cross communal and national boundaries with relative ease. The insidious marketing networks of financial and labour mobility penetrated increasingly into the social and political systems of the postcolonial world (Cohen 1987).

All this time, I was introduced to the experience of being, like so many others of my generation who were educated abroad, ‘globalised’. This was happening while an increasingly more dynamic and intensive globalisation was transforming the rest of the world. There was also a growing sense that migrant peoples everywhere were being overwhelmed by the rapidity of political and economic change (Kritz et al. 1981). Among these migrant people were many whose identity was threatened by globalisation. Many would be stimulated by the excitement; yet others by fear and uncertainty at what lay ahead. The more they became aware of what could be learnt about global history and of the different migration patterns that could be found worldwide, the more difficult it was to distance themselves from the agonies of isolation, loneliness, and alienation that most migrants shared. The more their manifold struggles for community became widely known, the more unclear it was that the desire to lose one’s original identity by becoming assimilated was a positive value (Hall 1991). Some came to wonder if assimilation would turn out to be desperately unfulfilling and possibly futile.

In short, using global history as a response to globalisation would seem to point away from accepting the normative features of modernisation. For example, instead of confirming that the history of Southeast Asian migration has always shown how much it had in common with migrations in other regions, this approach stirred some opposite images. It brought forth the realisation that the prominence of migrations as a regular and continuous phenomenon in historical times made Southeast Asia’s ancient and early modern past quite exceptional. A region with the longest coastlines and the largest number of islands was more open than the largely land-based civilisations like China and India that had built their wealth on agrarian triumphs (Reid 1988, 1993). With the exception of the Caribbean, no other region had the natural land-sea formations that would create the same geographical condition. And before the age of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Migration History: Some Patterns Revisited
• 2 Moving Europeans in the Globalizing World: Contemporary Migrations in a Historical-Comparative Perspective (1955–1994 v. 1870–1914)
• 3 Africa and Global Patterns of Migration
• 4 The Global Migration Crisis
• 5 Diasporas, the Nation-State, and Globalisation
• 6 Migrant Workers, Markets, and the Law
• 7 Of Migration, Great Cities, and Markets: Global Systems of Development
• 8 Uncertain Globalization: Refugee Movements in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
• 9 Travel, Migration, and Images of Social Life
• 10 Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925
• About the Book and Editor