Preliminary Programme

Among the most ancient and endemic forms of mobility in the Mediterranean, slavery and captivity intensified on both sides of the Mediterranean in the early modern period, especially the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protean and mass phenomena, they formed an important part of the life of coastal communities in the early modern Mediterranean, while the familiar figure of “the captive” masked a more plural world, in which different categories of persons (prisoners, domestic and galley slaves, renegardes, mamluks, etc.) held different rights and statuses. This essay investigates the various configurations of captive mobility from the Iberian peninsula to the Black Sea and from the Maghrib to Provence. Precisely because it involves several spaces simultaneously without being reduced to a highly stylized confrontation between two quite distinct cultural areas, the study of servile and captive mobilities nevertheless invites us to confront the forms of discontinuity between them, with each local configuration producing not only specifically situated experiences, but also a specific historicity. (Show less)

Using the United States as a case study, this presentation extends my recent essay for the Cambridge History of Global Migrations. That essay examined the post-World War II worldwide development of merit-based migration policies that offer preferential treatment to workers with skills in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). One of the major conclusions from that piece was that the resulting national migration policies and stiff global competition among nations over migrants with STEM skills are deeply interrelated. They are also rooted in both the neoliberal organization of the global economy and the neocolonial underpinnings of the Cold War.
As one of the most powerful nations to emerge from World War II, the United States was one of the first nations to implement explicit policies to attract migrants with skills in the areas of science and technology. It, therefore, has a longer history than many other nations of grappling with the repercussions of its classist immigration policies for all workers. My presentation will discuss a selection of these ramifications, with an eye to the societal positions of the affected based on national origin, race, and gender. This discussion will be relevant to the exploration of similar issues in European countries. (Show less)

Early Modern Europe by no means invented long-distance migration. But the three hundred years or so after the beginning of European overseas expansion in the early fifteenth century witnessed migrations at a global scale of large numbers of people – voluntary or involuntary – in the service of European long-distance trades and the concomitant pursuit of empire. To analyze these movements, it is useful to establish some typologies of migration. Issues like sex ratios of migrants; the terms of migration – voluntary, involuntary, as part of a labor contract or a service obligation to a sovereign; and rates of return migration, to name some examples, reveal underlying similarities as well as highlighting some unique migration patterns that break down simple national categories. The typologies of migration patterns can be linked to settlement patterns in the areas of arrival; the societies in which the migrants arrived; and their overall impact on the receiving societies. Compared to the mass-migration patterns of the industrial era, Early Modern migrations were small in scale. Yet the migrations caused by European long-distance trade would end up changing the world. (Show less)