ABSTRACT
The search for better living conditions for individuals, families, clans, communities and societies has been an omnipresent aspect of human history. In this search, migration has become a universal historical phenomenon that has occurred throughout time and across space. Migration, therefore, is neither a phenomenon of the modern industrial state and its almost permanent labour shortages, nor is it a crisis of modern capitalism. That said, the migration of people from the midsixteenth century in the form of slaves, indentured servants, indentured labourers, convicts and colonists saw a considerable increase in the trans-continental dimensions of migration.1 Recent research has therefore understood the modern era as a period in human history during which the foundations were laid for a global labour market, which has been increasingly supplied with circulating and migrating labourers. Migration history can thus be seen as an integral part of the economic, social and cultural history of humankind.2
