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Journal of World History 9.1 (1998) 129-131



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The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Edited by Robin Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xxi + 570. $125 (cloth).

The Cambridge Survey of World Migration is far from being a survey of world migration history. Only four of its fourteen major sections (each consisting of an introductory essay and several separately authored essays on related topics) are devoted to population movements before 1945: one on European colonization and settlement in [End Page 129] the Americas; one on Asian emigration and settlement; one on the great European migration to North America; and one on migration within Europe, 1800-1950. A few other essays refer to events before 1945, but there is no treatment of any migration topic before 1500 and, what is more surprising, no account of the African slave trades in the early modern period. While the nineteenth-century indentured-labor migrations from Asia are highlighted, the smaller, but still sizable, movements of indentured laborers from Africa and the Pacific islands are also ignored.

The reasons for the volume's preoccupation with recent population movements are not clearly explained in the editor's general introduction, which stresses the concern with providing thematic and geographical (as well as historical) diversity. Has the past half-century, as seems likely, seen the largest and most extensive movement of people in world history? The volume does not say. Indeed, statistics are not its strong suit. Only a few essays are concerned with defining the numerical parameters of their topics, so that most of the book's 45 tables and 7 figures cluster in a small number of essays.

Is the concern with recent decades the product of the authors' disciplinary training? The editor and two dozen of the ninety-nine other contributors are sociologists, and some forty other authors are social scientists. Twenty historians are also part of the project, but the division between the earlier periods and the more contemporary does not break down by discipline. Historically minded social scientists are as numerous as historians in the early chapters, and half of the historians deal with the post-1945 topics.

For whatever reasons, the volume's chosen area of greatest strength is its coverage of the multiple forms of population movement after 1945—including economic and political refugees, migrant laborers, settlers, and forced population movements, both intercontinental and intracontinental. Sections deal with migration to, from, and within Africa, Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania. There are also essays on repatriation and refugees, as well as a concluding section, "Emerging Trends." The majority of the essays survey a manageably narrow topic, but the breadth of a few is delightful. For example, Stephen Castles's essay on contemporary contract labor and Giovanna Campani's essay on contemporary women migrants both take a global approach. However, some essays are astonishingly truncated in their coverage. In the section on the Middle East (itself the smallest in the volume), the essay on Jewish migration into Israel mysteriously stops in 1948, though there is a brief mention of Soviet Jewish emigration in a separate essay elsewhere in the volume. [End Page 130]

As the general introduction concedes, the book does not strive for encyclopedic comprehensiveness. It is also surprisingly weak on the broader causes and underpinnings of population movement. Not a single essay is devoted to the importance of changing technology in affecting the ease, cost, and safety of long-distance travel. Nor is there any systematic treatment of the changing economics of human migration; many of the essays entirely ignore this fundamental factor. One could hardly expect a hundred authors to speak with one voice, yet the book is marked less by divergent perspectives than by the absence of analytical controversy, thus suffering from the lack of both dissension and synthesis. Nor can the assiduous reader easily overcome the volume's fragmentation. The index confines itself to the same categories of analysis as the individual essays (ethnicities, religions, places), leaving the reader with no way of finding themes that might not be present in...

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