Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

The invention of money was one of the major factor that allowed governments, corporations, and individuals to consolidate power. This chapter reviews the history of money and its various forms. The globalized economy depends on the free flow of money, and trade is an enormous source of wealth and power. Trading economies have proven to be stronger and more flexible across history, and is the source of various power centers throughout history: the Mediterranean Middle East, the European West, modern China, etc. have all been made powerful through trade, whereas isolationists have found themselves at strong disadvantages. The pursuit of trading wealth has been the source of wars and social conflicts, as well as the spread of colonialism and chattel slavery. Disparities of power and wealth due to the economic power of the global economy continue to this day. However, globalization has also created enormous benefits for many populations around the world. Worldwide, literacy has increased and longer lifespans are the result of access to modern medicines and health care.

This chapter examines the Eurasian Transformation as a catalyst for the rise of the Asian and Western empires that together reshaped Asia during the early modern period. Specifically, I aim to understand how the Eurasian Transformation made it possible for ‘barbarians’ to establish primacy over pre-existing international systems in South and East Asia, despite their limited numbers and stigmatised status. I begin by offering a synoptic overview of Eurasia at c. 1500. I next introduce the Eurasian Transformation, a unique conjunction of military, economic, cultural and administrative macro-processes that together made new forms of empire-building possible from this time on. I conclude by considering the Eurasian Transformation’s diverse impacts on Eurasia’s sedentary power centres, and on the liminal ‘barbarian’ actors populating Eurasia’s land and sea frontiers.

This chapter explains how the imperial urban system expanded into south China. After the fall of the Han Dynasty, fighting in the north caused southern migration, particularly after the An Lushan Rebellion in 755. This led to the growth of commercial cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta, which were linked to the northern capitals via the Grand Canal after the reunification of China under the Sui Dynasty. At the same time, Chinese cities were linked to the medieval international world over land along the Silk Road, and over sea via Guangzhou. In northern capitals, which reflected the influence of the Kaogongji, cities continued to be walled and divided into wards. However, in the Lower Yangzi Delta commercial cities were more open plan. Meanwhile, the arrival of Buddhism and Daoism into China brought monasteries and temples into cities, while monks began to take responsibility for aspects of urban governance along with imperial officials. Wards divided cities socially as well as physically. The wealthy enjoyed lavish lifestyles, built palaces and mansions, donated to monasteries, and constructed gardens. Goods and people from outside China made cities more cosmopolitan, and writers reflected on this and other aspects of urban life in their poetry.

The early Bengal delta had a highly mobile population and dynamic economy that was open to both the immense expanse of the Indian Ocean and an enormous hinterland. For as far back as we can reconstruct, the delta was integrated into networks of long-distance trade, pilgrimage, political alliance, cultural exchange and travel. It served as a gateway to the wider world for people and goods from the landlocked Ganges plains in the west, from Tibet and Nepal in the north, and from the Brahmaputra valley and China in the east. Conversely, traders, Buddhist pilgrims, political emissaries and adventurers who wanted to visit these regions had to pass through Bengal. It was in the coastal waterways of Bangladesh that Southeast Asians, North Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Arabs, Central Asians, Persians, Ethiopians and Tibetans met from very early times.

“I’ll never forgive myself,” laments Professor Henry Jones Senior after hitting Junior with a large vase on the head. The subsequent scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade clarify that the Professor’s concern was not directed at his son – who had, after all, come to save him from Nazi captivity – but at the damage inflicted on what appeared to be a fine exemplar of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain.

The prologue explains how silkworms became an object of fascination in early modern Europe, as their economic and physiological properties began to be more thoroughly understood in areas far distant from the regions in which silk raising (sericulture) originated. It outlines the book’s objective, which is to offer a deep and wide-ranging interrogation of raw silk’s failure as a commodity produced in the Atlantic world. By attending more to historical experimentation and failure, it argues that we can better understand what was distinctive about sericulture and what was particular about the Atlantic world complex: its vast distance, cultural hybridisation, colonial fragility, and manufacturing imbalances. The chapter tracks the global history of sericulture’s spread outward from Neolithic China, synthesising existing scholarship to identify certain prerequisites that accompanied its successful transplantation from one region to another, and variations in systems of production. These included availability of materials, the environmental capacity to accommodate the effective symbiosis of Bombyx mori (silkworms) and Morus (mulberry) trees on which they feed, an adequate seasonal labour pool, and migrant expertise to help establish production and instruct in more complicated processes. It closes by considering the particular opportunities and challenges presented by the Atlantic barrier and oceanic transmission.

It appears clear that Mani embarked on a public career as a preacher, healer and wise man, debating with leading sages of the time and gaining adherents from varied religious communities. He travelled widely within Iran and Mesopotamia and even beyond to India, and he sought to convert kings and members of the aristocracy at the courts of the Sasanian empire. This chapter examines Mani’s missions and the community he founded within the context of the intellectual, spiritual and doctrinal traditions with which he interacted, including Mazdayasnianism and Buddhism, and the scientific lore of the time. Consideration of devotional imperatives (hagiography) and the tropes of ancient narrative and romance strip away much literary artifice for the processes of historical reconstruction.

The systemic crisis we face today imposes the need for a new paradigm of global order and governance that takes into account the dynamics brought by globalization.

First and foremost, the fate of mankind as a whole now faces a series of very large-scale threats. These threats require an endeavor beyond just optimizing nation-states’ self-interests, because they are of their nature transnational not international. Issues such as climate change, environmental problems, cybercrime, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terror have now reached a scale that presents a threat to everyone, everywhere, and are becoming increasingly difficult to resolve purely through inter-state relations based on “territorial sovereignty and hegemonic geopolitics” . There is a clear need for a comprehensive new system of values in which states and concerned international civil society can participate to address these threats to humanity’s shared destiny, together with conventions based on such a system.

From this perspective in the eight chapter of the book the principal elements of a vision for a possible new global order are analysed and the author’s recommendations on a result-oriented UN reform process are discussed.