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Course: World History Project AP® > Unit 6
Lesson 4: 6.3—Industrialization and Migration EmpireREAD: Migration and Empire
The world between 1880 and 1950 was a “world on the move.” Men and women—workers, merchants, officials, and more—crisscrossed the planet. This history of massive movement and migration was intricately tied to empire.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
First read: preview and skimming for gist
Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.
Second read: key ideas and understanding content
Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.
By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- What technologies helped to promote migration beginning around the end of the nineteenth century?
- What were some factors that prompted migration from Europe in the nineteenth century?
- How did the abolition of slavery shift patterns of migration to the Caribbean?
- What factors limited Asian settlement in Australasia and the Americas in the early 20th century?
- Why did many people from the Caribbean move to Britain in the period after the Second World War?
- What factors led to mass migration of Japanese civilians to Manchuria, Taiwan, and Micronesia in the 1930s?
Third read: evaluating and corroborating
Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.
At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:
- To what extent does this article explain how various economic, social, and cultural factors contributed to the development of varied patterns of migration from 1750 to 1900?
- Do you think empire was an important factor in causing and shaping patterns of migration in this period? Why or why not?
Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.
Migration and Empire
By Amy Elizabeth Robinson
The world between 1880 and 1950 was a “world on the move.” Men and women—workers, merchants, officials, and more—crisscrossed the planet. This history of massive movement and migration was intricately tied to empire.
Mass migrations
The period between 1880 and 1950 was a period of massive and shifting human migration. In historian Adam McKeown’s words, it was “a world on the move, flowing into factories, construction projects, mines, plantations, agricultural frontiers, and commercial networks across the globe.” But the men and women who crisscrossed the planet took different paths, and for different reasons. We cannot understand this mass migration—which peaked twice, in the years before and after World War I—without also considering nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires.
Sometimes imperialism includes colonization, a system that involves migration. Other times, imperialism can be a system of economic power that disrupts people’s lives. In both cases, a person’s “choice” to migrate may not actually be so “free.” In this article, we will learn about different waves of migration, and look at some of the ways that empires have shaped people’s experience of movement across the globe.
“Vast regions over which to roam” – Late-nineteenth century migration
The numbers of migrants traveling long distances grew throughout the nineteenth century. Then, near the end of that century, things changed. A lot. New technologies like railways, steamships, the telegraph, and the penny post made journeys between far-away places shorter and safer. The appeal of travel was more limited when the ability to write home, or even to ever return home yourself, was not possible. Now it was.
The people who travelled changed, too. For example, before 1870 more than 50% of European migrants who travelled across the Atlantic to the Americas were from the British Isles. Between 1815 and 1930, over 13 million British settlers spread across Australasia, South Africa, Canada and the United States and parts of Latin America. Migrants left the British Isles for different reasons: some, like the Irish, to escape colonialism and starvation, some to escape industrial poverty, some because the “new world” seemed to offer adventure and promise. As historian J.M. Mackenzie says, many British people saw the “wider world in general, and empire in particular, as vast regions over which to roam.”
After 1870, a global depression hit, right as religious persecution was intensifying in Eastern Europe. As a result, large numbers of migrants began to leave places like Portugal, Italy, Russia, Syria, and Lebanon. Most went to the Americas.
A lot was changing in eastern and northern Asia, too. In the 1850s the Qing state in China relaxed restrictions on the movement of its subjects, beginning a mass migration northeast to Manchuria. In 1861 the Russian state emancipated its serfs—non-landowning workers who had been legally bound to single estates—and then encouraged them to be part of Russia’s settlement in Siberia. In the 1880s both China and Russia created “homesteading” policies that promoted colonization of these regions, and new railroads made them even easier to reach. Japan, whose leaders wanted to compete with the European imperial powers, also began colonial migration projects.
Shifting ideas about movement, race, and belonging
The abolition of the slave trade and slavery also had a big impact on migration over the course of the nineteenth century. Planters and business owners in the Caribbean looked for new sources of cheap labor. Many landless peasants and workers hit by economic depression were recruited as contract or indentured laborers, sometimes under abusive conditions.
Most indentured workers were Chinese and Indian, but Japanese, African, Pacific Islander, and even a small number of Europeans were also recruited and transported in this way. Over one million Indians were indentured in parts of the British Empire: Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, Fiji, Uganda, Natal in South Africa, and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. An additional one million went to tea plantations in other parts of British India. Only about 260,000 went to non-British territories.
The indenture system lasted into the early twentieth century. Historians argue over whether it was a system of free labor or merely a new system of slavery. Regardless, it is important to know that over 90 percent of Asian migration in the nineteenth century was not indentured at all. Asian migrations were often organized through networks of village, family, or commercial connections. Singapore and Hong Kong were especially important connecting points in these networks, which extended across the Pacific and Indian Oceans and into the Americas, too.
Migration from Asia to regions beyond the continent began to decline by the twentieth century, because more discriminatory ideas about race, borders, and nationalism were taking root. Leaders in many colonies or countries of so-called “white settlement”—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, the United States, and Argentina, to name the largest—experimented with ways to exclude migrants whom they considered racially inferior, including Asians. In 1901, for example, Australia officially proclaimed a “White Australia” policy. Historians Peter Lake and Marilyn Reynolds call this “drawing the global color line.”
Japanese migration and empire
Just as the regions of “white settlement” were erecting new barriers against Asian migrants, Japanese leaders were becoming more interested in migration. Many thought that Japan was overpopulated, and that migration would relieve economic pressures. From the 1880s through the 1940s, Japanese farmers and workers left in large numbers for destinations in Asia, the Pacific Islands, and North and South America.
Empire was one of the factors pushing emigration from Japan, but not everyone agreed how and why the empire should grow. Some Japanese leaders thought that a more militaristic imperialism would help Japan compete with China and the European powers. They believed that Japanese armies and migrants should move north and west into mainland Asia. Others desired a kind of peaceful expansionism. They did not want to conquer land but wanted Japanese people to settle and prosper in new places. Others thought that colonial settlement on Pacific Islands would support Japanese commerce. And some advocated eastward migration to North and South America, to establish Japanese businesses and farms.
Where Japanese migrants actually went, however, depended a lot on international politics and ideas about race. For example, in 1908 the United States restricted the entry of Japanese workers. Then, a series of “alien land laws” made it harder for Asians to own land. Finally, in 1924 the United States completely banned Asian migration. In response, Japanese migrants headed to South America instead. Brazil and Peru became their primary destinations in the Americas. But by the 1930s racism was increasing in Latin America as well. Japanese settlers were excluded and even deported from the region. These trends in the Americas boosted Japanese migration to Micronesia (which had been under Japanese colonial rule since 1914) and to the Manchurian and Korean “frontiers.”
By the early 1940s, Japan’s leaders were focused on building an Asian and Pacific empire. Japanese migrants had been moving into these regions since the early years of the century. After Japan won the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, for example, they could more easily migrate into Korea, China, and eastern Russia. But mass migration into continental Asia did not really begin until the 1930s, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or “Manchukuo” as the Japanese called it. By 1942, 2.4 million migrants had settled in Japanese-controlled areas of Asia, especially Manchuria, and another half a million in Taiwan and Micronesia.
Japan used coercion and control to promote these levels of migration in the 1930s. The Soviet Union also used violence to force people to move across Eurasia in these years. But in most regions the Great Depression slowed migration. And then World War II significantly altered patterns of power and movement across the globe.
Post-World War II migration and power
The post-World War II era was a time of political realignment and decolonization. But migration was still influenced by the history of empires.
Australia maintained its “White Australia” policy until the 1970s. But in the wake of World War II its government leaders decided that Australia needed a larger population for “development and defense”. They enacted a large-scale immigration program, but all of the 4.2 million migrants who arrived were defined as “white,” and 40% came from the British Isles.
In Britain, industrial and government leaders also looked for sources of labor. Some workers migrated to Britain from devastated eastern European countries like Poland. Many others came from former or current British colonies. British Caribbean workers, for example, had crisscrossed the Caribbean Sea into Latin America and the United States since the late-nineteenth century. But when these places began restricting Black migration, Britain—which had never officially excluded its colonial subjects—became a more desirable destination. Recruitment offices were set up across the islands to help Black Caribbean British subjects migrate to Britain.
Chances are, when you look around your town or city, you are seeing people whose family histories have involved migration. Yours probably did, too. But migration has rarely been a simple choice to pick up and go. The need to move, desire to move, or ability to move usually depends on several factors. The speed and cost of transport or communication, government laws and policies, ideas about race and belonging, or the simple need to escape poverty and find a job are all part of the equation. And all of these things have been shaped by the history of empires.
Author bio
Amy Elizabeth Robinson is a freelance writer, editor, and historian with a PhD in the history of Britain and the British Empire. She has taught at Sonoma State University and Stanford University.