Migration and Globalisation

‘Migration has shaped the pattern of globalisation.’  - Richard Panniers

Migration has had a huge impact on globalisation over the last few centuries, shaping our current culture and the human societies of today. In this essay I will discuss the impact that migration has had on the global world, by looking at forced migration with the slave trade and also free migration in the hope of finding a better life and work. I will also investigate how migration has negatively affected the global world by looking at the prejudice migrants had to face and the conflicts that ensued.

I believe that there are two main categories we can split migration up into; forced migration and free-will migration. Forced migration is when migrants move against their will and moved all around the world as slaves. One of the main examples of this forced migration is the infamous Atlantic slave trade in which roughly eleven million Africans were transferred to the new world [1] to work as unpaid labour in plantations, mines and as servants.  Forced migration really started to expand in the 18th and 19th century, in which the increasing demand for slaves in Europe hit its highest.  However the pains of this slavery actually were extremely beneficial to the globalisation of the modern world. Slave migrants who had been forced away from their homes and into a new community, had to adjust if they were to survive, to do this many of the slaves learnt new languages.  For example the historian Patrick Manning argues that slaves learnt not only the language of the communities they were living in, but also that of their co-workers and also their masters[2]. This is very useful to the globalisation process, as by people all speaking a similar language or knowing how to speak a similar language, communication between two groups of different people is made a lot easier and this can be projected onto a bigger stage, with countries able to interact with each other through a similar language.

However as people began to oppose the Atlantic slave trade in the early 19th century, a law was passed to abolish the use of slaves, which opened up a whole lot of new jobs for the plantations and mines of the new world. This gave rose to contract labour migration, when millions of people left Europe and Asia to come and work on the plantations in America. It is estimated that in the 19th century alone, 50 million people left Europe to come and work in America[3]. With all these people leaving and going to different continents, transport was obviously an issue. However migration was able to help the transport issue, with so many people migrating around the world, technologies and techniques were shared around the world. Free migrants sailed abroad into the Americas using large steam ships and then supplemented these long transoceanic trips with smaller railroad journeys. It was railroads that influenced the shaping of globalisation significantly and it was migration that initially helped getting these railroads in place. It was Chinese migrants that moved to America that built the railroads and made it possible through cheap labour. It was also regional migrants in places across Europe for example in England that helped build these railroads. These railroads that were built did a lot for globalisation; making long journeys possible faster and less dangerous, allowing people to move around the world faster and also helping connect cities through trade and the setting of a regulated time.