ABSTRACT
Few people doubt that migration has a history. Many deny that globalization has one. Most analyses of globalization are deeply invested in assertions of its newness. Even accounts that do believe in a history of globalization before the 1970s can rarely agree on when it started, what it looks like, or if that history is relevant at all. But there is a majority consensus on one significant point, even if only a consensus of common omission and indifference. It is that we need not look beyond Western Europe and the North Atlantic to find the history of globalization (Hart and Negri 2001, Held et al. 1999, O'Rourke and Williamson 1996, Robertson 1992, Sassen 2006). The many histories of mass migration that claim up to 90 percent of world migration moved across the Atlantic from the 1840s to 1914 are often used to support this narrow geography of the “global” (Castles and Miller 2003, Emmer 1992, Glazier and De Rosa 1986, Hatton and Williamson 1998, Sassen 2000). Thus, even the histories offer little challenge to the idea that at least the “global” part of globalization is new. Belief in the spatial isolation of the West and the temporal break of “newness” are mutually reinforcing.
