9 Global mobility

Before you start

Main focus

This period saw millions of people – enslaved people, convicts and free settlers – moving from Europe, Africa and Asia to the New World, where they developed new wealth and new markets. Growing racist ideas led to laws restricting the movement of Chinese, Indian, indigenous, Melanesian and Japanese people.

Why it’s relevant today

Studying the history of migration helps us to understand the distribution of peoples in the world today, and why people migrate or become refugees. With this understanding, we can learn how ordinary people built the world economy, and how migration affected racial prejudice.

Inquiry questions

• What differences were there between the causes for various peoples migrating and the different ways (free and unfree) they travelled? How were they similar?
• How did the movement of slaves, convicts and free settlers contribute to the economic development of the world?
• How can we know about the feelings and experiences of the migrants?
• What is the legacy of these population movements for the world today?

Key terms

• Boycott
• Chattel
• Diaspora
• Emancipist
• Girmit
• Indentured labour
• Muster
• Pogrom
• Xenophobia

Significant individuals

• Mackay family
• Mary Prince
• Olaudah Equiano
• Susannah Watson
• Totaram Sanadhya

Pronunciation

Let’s begin

The Industrial Revolution led to a demand for raw materials for European factories and to a great demand for labour to produce those raw materials in the New World of the Americas, and the European colonies in Australasia, Africa and Asia. The Atlantic slave trade saw millions of Africans captured and forcibly deported to the Americas. With the abolition of British slavery in 1833, cheap labour was supplied by Indian indentured workers, who signed up for five years’ work, often on a sugar plantation. Gold seekers, many of them Chinese, flocked to the goldfields in California and Australia. Later millions of Europeans left lives of poverty to seek their fortunes in the New World. They developed agriculture, commerce and industry in the New World. The goods they produced were vital to the development of capitalism on a global scale.

This helped to devastate the cultures and economies of indigenous peoples in the New World. The migrants created multicultural societies around the world.