ABSTRACT
The history of the world includes remarkable stories of migration in every era. Within the past fifty years, migration from countryside to city in every corner of the world caused the proportion of city-dwellers to expand from one-fifth to over half the human population. The book explores the social context from which migrations emerged, showing how migration stems from the very core of human behavior. It addresses a long time period and explores experiences drawn from many regions of the earth, and emphasizes connections in the human experience. The book also emphasizes migration as an engine for social change, by tracing the dynamics of ideas as well as the movement of bodies, and stresses the continuity and the transformation in migration over time. It gives a broad interpretation of macro-level change, and shows the connection between global change and local-level histories.
