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Histories of mass migrations are almost always comparative, whether explicitly or implicitly. For example, claims about the modernity of the transatlantic migrations of the nineteenth century and their embeddedness in the processes of industrialization, liberalization, globalization, and improved communication technologies, establish a difference from earlier times and from other places such as Asia which did not undergo such massive transformation and are assumed not to have experienced so much mass mobility. Similarly, studies of Chinese emigration are suffused with assertions and counter-assertions about the distinctness and 'Chineseness' of those migrations, debating whether or not Chinese people had a unique propensity to be sojourners, to be unwilling to migrate, to be attached to their homes, to have a bias against female migration, to form associations, to resist assimilation, to engage in business, or to establish resilient networks and personal relations (guanxi). And studies of almost any specific migrant flow are framed by assumptions and demonstrations of what is unique and generalizable about that flow.
Unfortunately, however meticulous the original research, these comparative dimensions are often grounded in poor empirical knowledge and stereotypes. Claims about the uniqueness of Chinese migration often uncritically accept myths of the monodirectional European settler, who had weak ties to home, a weak associational life, and was readily assimilated. Historians of European migrations will easily recognize the inaccuracy of these characterizations. Similarly, claims about the unique nature of the Atlantic migrants often rest on stereotypes of Chinese migrants as mostly indentured, unaware of the world, unlikely to settle, and driven to move only by famine, overpopulation, coercion, and European intervention. Even accounts that are critical of racist and orientalizing attitudes tend to replicate these kinds of characterizations. While some of these causes have been found to have played roles in particular European migrations (such as the Irish potato famine), historians have largely downplayed them as important explanations of the broad scope of mass migration over the nineteenth century, preferring to emphasize such broader causes as industrialization, commercialization, transportation, and political liberalization. To continue to depict Chinese migration in the terms listed above is to understand it as having existed in isolation from the forces that shaped European emigration and Chinese people as having behaved according...