Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia

Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. By sunil s. amrith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 240 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $27.99 (paper); $22.00 (e-book).

In narrating 150 years of migration in Asia, Sunil Amrith reflects the broad, fluid, and boundary-crossing spirit that animates the subjects about whom he writes. This book surveys the history of human movement and its powerful impact on communities and nations across the continent. Amrith's account echoes the multifaceted, circular, and sometimes involuntary nature of this movement. It traverses geographic space from the Middle East to South Asia, from maritime Southeast Asia to East Asia, crossing from European empire to Asian nation-state and back again repeatedly. Thematically, Amrith argues that migrants have been "central to enduring and significant changes in modern Asian history" (p. 1), in areas from the economy to the environment, in politics and religion, and in social and demographic change. His book balances an ambitious scope with fine-grained analysis to give this argument undeniable credence.

Acknowledging that the intellectual borderlines around "phases of Asian migration" (periodization) and "Asia" (abstraction of geographic spaces) can be disputed, Amrith nonetheless posits that there were four distinct phases in modern Asian migration. To locate the divisions between these phases, Amrith focuses on moments of intensification and suspension in Asia's "mobility revolution," which were determined by the vicissitudes of political upheaval, uneven economic development, colonial expansion, and environmental insecurity, and shaped by major changes in technologies of transportation and communication, as well as attitudes and norms regarding migration.

This framework constitutes the organizing sequence for the chapters in this book. From 1850 to about 1930 is the first migratory phase, marked by the rise and peak of mass migration in Asia, leading to the formation of wholly new societies and the redistribution of populations across the region. The second phase from the 1930s through the 1940s interrupted long-standing migrant flows altogether, while also prompting involuntary migration due to war and economic crises. It is in this period, Amrith points out, that growing nationalist movements and post-1945 new states begin to place pronounced pressure on what they perceived as "problematic" migrants and outsiders. A third phase from the 1950s to the 1970s is called a "golden age" of the nation-state in Asia, with reduced...