Migrations

Abstract

Nation-state making in settler societies was based on the state displacement, attraction and importation of populations and the attempt to forge national identities out of the resultant ethnic mix. Political movement was always intimately related to other forms of travelling. The latter half of the nineteenth century had been marked by mass population transfers in the still developing capitalist sectors of North America, Britain and Oceania, as, despite periods of recession, the drive for economic growth and its seemingly insatiable demand for labour, sustained an expansionary world-view. What also linked these societies in the early twentieth century, in elite and mass majority terms, was a vision of an increasingly exclusive ethnic and racial destiny and the use of putative physical and cultural signs of potential assimilability as a marker of entry to national membership of the state. An era of optimism, heralded in the jingoism of the Great War, was soon followed, however, by a period of insular uncertainty that dampened migratory movements. This interlude proved to be short-lived and events, as Castles and Miller recall, took an unanticipated turn:

After 1914, war, xenophobia and economic stagnation caused a considerable decline in migration, and the large scale movements of the preceding period seemed to be the results of a unique and unrepeatable constellation. When rapid and sustained economic growth got under way after the Second World War, the new age of migration was to take the world by surprise. (Castles and Miller 1993: 65)