Globalization from Below. Circular Migrations between South Asia and Africa, c. 1850-2000 (GloBe)
Final Report Abstract
‘Migration raises high hopes and deep fears.’ The initial statement of the jointly written monograph The Age of Migration (62020) neatly pinpoints the oscillating associations individuals have when it comes to the topic of migration. This is reflected in current debates on migration, a highly politized topic in daily news. Frequently, it is overlooked that migration has always been an integral part of political decisions and socio-economic developments in colonial times across empires world-wide. As Joya Chatterji (2017) contends, migration is standard and remaining in one place the exception. Along similar lines, I argue that migration of people is a constituting element of humanity, and particularly, the post-imperial and global worlds. In scholarship, migration has attracted wide but asymmetrical historiographical attention. There are several imbalances: uneven attention to the different European Empires and border-crossings between them; a negligence to look across the ‘end of Empire(s)’ and to consider the post-colonial implications of flows established in colonial periods; a preoccupation with imperial agency to the detriment of understanding the agency of other groups; a neglect of flows that are not merely to and from the metropolis, but which include migrations within and outwith any particular Empire; and a relative neglect to consider the implications of migrations for those left behind as well as those who migrate. GloBe has put these themes at the centre of the historical analysis. The ‘Sachbehilfe’ enabled the required empirical research for GloBe. Within the general framework of GloBe research enabled by the ‘Sachbeihilfe’ focuses on multi-dimensional, circular migrations movements between South Asia, East and South Africa. It thus provides a novel perspective in the study of migration history by opening up comparative views on different types of migration movements, on flows of mobility across different empires and nation-states, and on social relationships between and among migrants and local populations. Flows – perhaps needless to say – do not always burble along. Natural and man-made restrictions hamper movements. By shedding light on such processes, GloBe generates insights that are central to understanding current debates about migration to Europe. GloBe’s path-breaking conceptualization of global history as connected history is translated into analysing south-south circulations of people, goods and ideas, and the pivotal roles of Africa and South Asia where these circulations occurred. Not only does GloBe conceptualize global history as a connected history, it also applies a mixed-methods approach taking into account experiences, trajectories, and perspectives of different social actors besides investigating written sources. GloBe contributes new aspects to existing scholarship: on the circulatory character of movements; on intra-imperial connections within the British and the Portuguese Empires; on inter-imperial connections between the British and Portuguese Empires, and from the mid-twentieth century on, between empires and nation-states bridging the colonial and post-colonial divide.
Publications
-
Doing Well but Also Doing Good? East African Indian Merchants and Their Charitable Work, c. 1850–1920. Knowledge and the Indian Ocean, 173-188. Springer International Publishing.
Frenz, Margret
-
Complicating Decolonisation: Mozambican Indian Experiences in the Twentieth Century. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47(5), 999-1020.
Frenz, Margret
-
‘Colonial Segregation, Apartheid State, and Rainbow Nation: Negotiating Diversty in Twentieth-century South Africa’, in Heijmans, Elisabeth and Sophie Rose (eds), Diversity and Empires. Negotiating Plurality in European Imperial Projects from Early Modernity (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 200-223.
Margret Frenz
