ABSTRACT
Inquiries into why people move in the first place, by contrast, usually settle fairly quickly into a search for material incentives or, for some migrations, religious freedom. This chapter discusses the group self-perceptions and social values are taken as the starting point of the migration instead of one of the consequences of migration. Transatlantic migration from the sixteenth down to the mid-nineteenth century was strikingly unusual. Return migration and the maintenance of contact between source and host societies made possible a hemispheric “community.” In the Atlantic, the peculiar multi-regimed pattern of migration before 1870, as well as the racial basis of the different regimes, is related to the very sudden increase in large-scale intercontinental contact after 1492. There were even fewer to question the idea that free migration was the only morally justifiable way to organize long-distance migration.
