Histories of Migration and Global Capitalism Conference: Australia

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, hundreds of millions of people were uprooted or left their homes in search of wealth and a better life, for themselves and their families. Many sought escape from terrible hardship at home. 

The expansion of global transport options and information networks presented potential migrants living in remote or poor regions of the world with new opportunities in places like Australia, Canada, South Africa or the United States including the promise of gold, or land, or untapped natural resources. Cheap labor was also in high demand in industrializing centers. 

But these migration routes were not necessarily one-way streets. While migration history, particularly to these parts of the world, is traditionally understood within a settler framework, many seeking their fortune or escaping persecution did not necessarily come to stay in one place, but instead, were often highly mobile. Migrants were embedded in commercial, family and information networks that connected original homelands and new places, often moving between them to maintain old ties and creating new opportunities. At the same time, diasporic communities were often marginalised in the polities and economies of their new homelands, and often created their own cultural and economic spaces even as they were made a target of racial anxiety by white settler populations. The conference series sought to bring scholars of different migrant communities together to explore the period of mass migration since 1850. 

While the focus of the organizers was Jewish histories of mobility and trade, and global capitalism within both American and transnational contexts, we anticipated that this conference, and associated workshops would facilitate an innovative collaboration between scholars of Jewish and non-Jewish histories, and between scholars in the northern and southern hemispheres, that would open new areas of inquiry and create new connections in migration history.

Themes we considered included:

• Gender, work and mobility
• Hidden economies
• Ethnic capitalisms
• Diasporic networks (local and global)
• Migrant spaces and neighborhoods
• Family networks and mobilities