ABSTRACT
Steamships and railroads opened a new world of mobility not only for colonial rulers but also for ordinary workers – those who actually mined the coal and laid the rails to make such travel possible. In the six decades from the Irish potato famine to World War I, more than 50 million people journeyed back and forth around the globe in search of opportunity. Of this great proletarian migration, the majority left Europe as free workers and settled in the temperate climates of North and South America and Australasia. Large numbers of Asians and Africans traveled as indentured workers, often called coolies, and became the primary source of labor for tropical plantations after the abolition of the slave trade. As the Chinese and Italian examples show, migrants overcame difficult working conditions and frequent discrimination to recreate traditional lifestyles and recipes, even while experimenting with novel foods in a display of working-class cosmopolitanism that contributed significantly to culinary globalization.
