Crossings

I strongly recommend these recent books to all who seek to make gender analysis central to their studies of human mobility. The three are best tackled in historical order, beginning with Poska's early modern study and concluding with Mahdavi's analysis of our own times. Such a reading powerfully conveys the malleability of migration as a gendered phenomenon. Focused on radically different times and places, the three books collectively point both to the considerable accomplishments of recent mobility scholarship and to challenges that remain.

It is no accident that all three titles feature the word crossing in their titles. Hoping to avoid powerful associations of the term migration with unidirectional or once-in-a-lifetime moves, mobility studies scholars often experiment with new terminologies—crossings, circulations, itineraries. Indeed, a review of books focused on settlers within the early modern Spanish Empire, merchants and laborers in South and Southeast Asia during the long nineteenth century, and women workers in today's world would have been unimaginable when immigration histories, centered on entrance into a few modern nations, were the scholarly norm. By focusing on crossings, scholars can compare travel, trade, settlement, and job-seeking, as well as the impact on the people and societies that migrants inhabit, depart from, cross, return to, or arrive in. The term also calls attention to the temporal, disciplinary, methodological, and spatial boundaries each author traversed as a scholar. No one is likely to conclude a reading of these three volumes with any reservations remaining about the usefulness of interdisciplinarity and commitments to multiple methods—quantitative or qualitative—from history and the social sciences.

Analysis of women migrants within immigration studies began in the 1970s and 1980s. After 1990, gender analysis of mobility developed alongside a scholarly shift toward spatial and temporal scales much larger than those of individual nation-states. Nevertheless, feminist critics have repeatedly raised concerns about the limited attention to both women and gender in world history and mobility studies. The three volumes reviewed here go a long way to rectifying these critiques.

The migrants in Allyson Poska's Gendered Crossings are best understood as settler colonizers—persons who were actively recruited, in family groups, by an early modern Spanish state concerned about populating and thereby governing its far-away colony in Patagonia. Male or female, most were desperately poor, marginal, and thus already mobile within Spain. Ultimately, 46 percent of the recruits were female, a much higher proportion than among the ubiquitous indentured servants and soldiers of the Atlantic's early modern empires. Deeply concerned about colonial reproduction, Spanish imperialists pressured migrants to marry prior to departure, driving down women's age of marriage and producing many portside and shipboard pregnancies and deliveries.

Poska's analysis pushes readers to recognize how the intellectual, cultural, and ideological dynamics of gender in sending societies shaped more than migrant gender composition. They also made travel (in this case by ship) and colonial settlements intensely gendered undertakings, producing quite different experiences of mobility for men and women. The gender ideologies of Spain could not easily be transplanted to South America, however. Poska is especially effective in showing how the colony's emphasis on reproduction as a tool of imperial rule affected the lives of women recruits, allowing some to improve their marital choices or negotiate enhanced material support from the state while also subjecting many to controlling, older husbands and constant moral scrutiny. Settler colonialism transformed migrant men into citizens, but women could not escape their old status as parishioners under religious supervision.

Sunil Amrith's Crossing the Bay of Bengal represents a large and growing scholarly literature on the heavily male labor migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World historians recognized a decade ago that sea and land migrations within and...