South Asian Migrations in Global History - by Neilesh Bose (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This collection explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography.

Including recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, this volume brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system.

Centering south Asian migrations as a site of analysis in global history, the contributors offer a lens into the ongoing regulation of labourers after the abolition of slavery that intersect with histories in the Global North and Global South. The use of historical biography showcases experiences from below, and showcases a world history outside empire and nation.

Review Quotes

South Asian Migrations is an ambitious, original and insightful collection of essays that incorporates large scale migrations, state regulations and individual lives, giving students, teachers and researchers of migration, indenture, legal history and global biography much to reflect upon and as such is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on the history of South Asian migration.
H-Soz-Kult

This important collection breaks new ground in global history, offering an array of case studies that chart subcontinental migrations within and and beyond the rubric of empire. Together, these essays demonstrate the agency of South Asians as their mobility highlights processes of the formation of the modern nation state, even as they seek to transgress the arbitrariness of its borders, identities and legal manoeuvres.
Kama Maclean, Professor of History, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

This wide-ranging collection of essays is full of surprises and of unexpected vignettes that illuminate broader historical patterns. The attention to individuals, social structures, and state policies brings into sharp focus the legacies of South Asian histories of mobility and dispossession. The valuable contribution of the volume is to stake an important place for South Asian migrations in the very making of the modern world.
Mrinalini Sinha, Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA

About the Author

Neilesh Bose is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in global and comparative history at University of Victoria, Canada. A historian of modern South Asia his interests include colonialism and decolonization, post-colonial history, nationalism, literary history, intellectual history.