Cross-cultural migrations in Eurasia since 1500: towards a global comparative method

Professor Leo Lucassen, University of Leiden

Leo Lucassen, University of Leiden - Cross-cultural migrations in Eurasia since 1500: towards a global comparative method

In this lecture Professor Leo Lucassen will first argue that in order to understand social, cultural, economic and political changes in human societies the movement of people over cultural boundaries is crucial. So far migration studies has failed to come up with a generally agreed definition or typology, which makes it very hard to make comparisons between different parts of the world and between historical periods. This lack of clarity also explains why migration as such does not play a (dominant) role in larger historical debates. In order to take migration serious as an independent variable, therefore, we first have to develop a method that differentiates between the most important kinds of cross-cultural moves and furthermore enables us to quantify these. Professor Lucassen will present such a method which has recently been successfully applied to Europe, Russia and large parts of Asia (including China, Japan and India) in the period 1500-2000. Furthermore, the scholar will link these different kinds of cross-cultural migrations to the prevailing membership regimes to understand to what extent and with what results the human, social and cultural capital of migrants interacted with that of receiving societies.

Bio:
Leo Lucassen holds the chair of social and economic history and currently is academic director of the Institute for History of the University of Leiden. He is the author of The Immigrant Threat: old and new migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana and Chicago, IUP 2005) and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe. From the 17th century to the present. (New York: Cambridge University Press 2011). His current projects deals with global migrations and recently he published, together with Ulbe Bosma & Gijs Kessler, the volume Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective. (Leiden and Boston 2013: Brill) and with Jan Lucassen & Patrick Manning Migration History in World History. Multidisciplinary approaches. (Leiden en Boston 2010: Brill).

Organiser: Parvathi Raman

Contact email: pr1@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: 020 7898 4434