In the 1930s, patterns of inter-Asian migration broke down and went into reverse. The middle decades of the twentieth century were a period of disconnection, shattering many of the links between East, Southeast, and South Asia. The 1920s marked the height of migration in Asia; not until the 1990s would levels of migration in Asia reach the same level. By the 1930s, and for the first time since the 1870s, the number of Indian and Chinese migrants returning home outstripped the number of new arrivals in the ports and plantations of Southeast Asia. Just as the circuits of migration began to reconstitute themselves with the first signs of economic recovery, a new age of global warfare intervened, producing mass migration of an entirely different kind: the mass migration of refugees, in flight from catastrophic violence and social collapse. The mid-twentieth century, in Asia as elsewhere, was the age of the refugee.