ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the term ‘transregionality’ and offers a broader approach that can reinterpret such international business strategies. It reviews the terms ‘migration’/‘migrant’, ‘mobility’, and ‘transregionality’, and then explores the patterns of West African business people’s international journeys between important economic centres. The chapter uses the case study of the Senegalese in China as a way to assess whether the term ‘transregionality’ would be more suitable and useful for this type of mobility. The regional behaviour and conditions in which these mobilities are organized are in line with the general observation that ‘information, networks, and a certain amount of money are needed in order to leave’. The West African migrants settling in Marseille in the 1970s became bridgeheads, so to speak, and hence intermediaries to introduce newcomers to the big metropolis and local producers. Thus, Senegalese traders could seize new international business opportunities, thereby enriching their family, religious, migration, and business networks.
