Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective

In this book editors Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler and Leo Lucassen bring together ten essays in an analytical framework which looks beyond the Transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a deliberate attempt to incorporate the experience of earlier periods and other continents into historical migration studies. The focus of analysis is on the mechanisms of interaction between polities, from city-states and emerging statehoods to empires, and migrants joining or taking over these polities, by force, choice or co-optation. It reconceptualises the migrant-state relationship as an engagement over the terms of membership and explores the variety of different outcomes this has had across time and space.