Solving migration problems: Trans-Atlantic and trans-Indian Ocean approaches, 1890--1930.

摘要

Since the late nineteenth century, the "problem" of long-distance migration has made migrants, their social networks, and institutions which promote or constrain mobility subjects of fact-finding missions and social science theorization. More recently, perceived disconnects between the "global" and the "local" in world history and between "macro" and "micro" level explanations of population movements in migration studies have led these two discourses to a similar conceptual position: "mesolevel" theories identifying social structures which connect parts of the world by channeling information, people, capital, and policy-making styles among them. Yet such calls for meso-level analysis have obscured the fact that a desire to investigate the relationship between migrants and transimperial, transoceanic, or transnational social institutions that may shape their possibilities, is not a new phenomenon. Using migrant travel narratives, shipping company promotional literature, immigration inspectors reports, colonial labor board archives, and early twentieth-century studies of the "problems" caused by international migrations, this dissertation illustrates how the complex interactions of migrants, non-migrants, former migrants, and possible future migrants have shaped directions and conditions of emigration and return across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins.;In the early twentieth century national and imperial governments, as well as profit-minded transportation companies, sought ways to investigate, infiltrate, and alter existing migration-promoting socioeconomic structures that present-day analysts would label "migration systems," "networks," or "migrant family economies." Within an Atlantic-centered migration system, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Immigration dispatched immigration inspectors from Washington D.C. to Central European cities to investigate the relationships between migrants and the non-migrating individuals employed by transportation companies; while the transportation companies, including Hamburg Germany's HAPAG, attempted to increase their profits while alleviating public fears about the emigrants they were transporting. Across the Indian Ocean the bureaucratic structure of the British Empire cast migrant laborers and their living conditions as a source of debate and negotiation between native Indian politicians and labor recruiters, and the Office of the Protector of Labour in Singapore. Throughout, the dissertation argues that such transoceanic processes of intervention, expansion, and negotiation illustrate why the phenomenon of long-distance migration requires a mesolevel analytical approach.