Migrations may be region-specific or they may be transcontinental or transoceanic. In the so-called Age of Revolution in the Atlantic World, British and continental European anti-revolutionary warfare made migration perilous. The hemisphere-wide migrations systems are emerged of men and women moving independently, in family units, or sequentially as families or siblings. Discrimination against resident minorities and to enforce assimilation male state bureaucracies added a new type of forced migration motivated by nationalism. In the 1960s, decolonization, new markets, intensifying economic relations, and new alignments led to major revisions of immigration policies. 'Global apartheid', dividing South and North, extreme exploitation of many migrant workers, displacement by environmental deterioration and developmental projects, an assumed 'feminization' and globalization of migration all characterize migration in the early twenty-first century, and form the major themes of research. Migrants, who carefully assess costs and rewards of their moves, are entrepreneurs in their own lives, trying to make the most of their human capital.

This chapter approaches migrations by first summarizing in broad strokes the continuities and changes by macro-region across the globe from the earlier centuries to about 1500. Next, the penetration of heavily armed mobile Europeans into the societies of the Caribbean and South America, West Africa, the Indian Ocean's littorals and Southeast Asian islands are analyzed in terms of displacement of and dominance over resident settled or mobile peoples. Since the European, powerful newcomers lacked knowledge of the languages, cultures, and customs of the economically or politically annexed territories and peoples, they required intermediaries. The mobility of intrusive investors and supportive state personnel resulted in vast, mostly forced, migrations of men and women as laborers to produce for the Europeans' demand. The chapter also summarizes the migration of Europeans who also had difficulty in gaining their livelihood, the ideology of European superiority and whiteness discourses veil the poverty endemic in many regions of Europe, forcing rural and urban underclasses to depart.