ABSTRACT
Especially with regard to patterns of social inequality, transnationalization is frequently viewed as a new phenomenon that sets in with twentieth century globalization. It is explicitly or implicitly considered to be of no consequence for the assessment of earlier or ‘classical’ inequality contexts – for which the nation-state framework is still considered appropriate. Recent scholarly concepts coined in order to address issues of inequality in the context of globalization are often mistaken for the newness of the phenomena themselves. The present chapter instead departs from the premise that inequalities have been the result of transregional processes for more than five centuries. Systematic transregional migration is considerably older than the transnational migration hailed as both a new trend related to globalization and as a new means of global social mobility. At least since the European expansion into the Americas, intercontinental migration, the Atlantic trade in enslaved people, and the unequal economic exchange between shifting metropolitan and peripheral areas have provided transregional entanglements that decisively shaped the inequality structures of both the former colonizing as well as the former colonized regions – none of which were yet nation-states. The chapter explores the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological blind spots derived from viewing the transnationalization of inequality as a new phenomenon today.
