Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Using two composite case studies the following chapter outlines the intersection of legal and forensic pathways to justice for persons with developmental disabilities in Ontario, Canada. Their pathways include a number of junctures where decision making by different stakeholders across sectors is required pertaining to legal determinations of either criminal fitness to stand trial and culpability as well as the health care presence of a contributory mental illness or disorder. Despite having similar profiles, people with developmental disabilities can have vastly different access, processes, and outcomes depending upon a number of variables including legal factors such as the severity of the offence and offence history; and extralegal factors including support network, discretion of multiple decision makers, legal resources and jurisdiction. The pathways recognise the importance and need for ensuring equitable and therapeutic justice for such individuals.

Drawing on abundant fossil fuels endowments, Canada has built one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world. Within the Canadian federation, provincial governments control the vast majority of natural resources, including both hydro-electric potential and fossil fuels. However, the uneven distribution of those resources has yielded tremendous variation in the carbon intensity of provincial economies, and equally great variation in provincial governments’ climate ambitions. In this chapter, I identify three phases in Canadian climate federalism. From 1990 to 2006 a ‘joint decision trap’ prevailed in which the most fossil fuel-dependent provinces vetoed national solutions. From 2007 to 2015 a truncated innovation and diffusion dynamic emerged in which provincial leaders adopted ambitious and sometimes innovative climate policies. However, fossil fuel-dependent provinces did not follow their lead. Emissions reductions hard won by provincial leaders were undone by emissions growth by their recalcitrant neighbours. The third phase, since 2016, is characterised by federal unilateralism. While the mere threat of federal action initially yielded provincial collaboration in an ambitious pan-Canadian climate plan, successful implementation ultimately turned on the federal government’s willingness to follow on that threat. I conclude that, on balance, federalism has exacerbated the challenge of climate action in Canada.

Of all the north circumpolar lands, only Greenland extends farther towards the top of the globe than the uppermost reaches of the Arctic Archipelago. Politicians and media commentators regularly extol Canada’s identity as a northern nation, yet this area’s official name since 1954 – the Queen Elizabeth Islands – is not widely known or often used, and most citizens’ knowledge of High Arctic geography is rather vague. Only the military station at Alert on the north coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 km from the pole, stands out clearly amid the general blur.

The High Arctic region’s southern boundary is Parry Channel, the major east–west waterway through the archipelago, in latitude 74° north. Parry Channel also divides the islands where Indigenous people have lived continuously for millennia from those that were abandoned during the harsh climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age (which lasted roughly from 1300 to 1850 ad).

George Angohiatok (pronounced ‘ano-HI-tok’) is a keen observer of Arctic landscapes, animals, and peoples. Raised on the land by his parents and grandparents in the western Canadian Arctic, George talks easily about his deep appreciation for the land and his significant concerns for the future of the Arctic and Inuit. George shares his observations of changes to the physical and social environments – changes he calls overwhelming – through richly detailed personal narratives. In the conversations presented in this chapter, George deftly weaves together changes to both settings, and illustrates the importance of considering our two worlds holistically. George’s story and words are transcribed here with minimal interruption from the other authors. Conventional academic reflections on methodology and literature are found within George’s story and afterwards.

The European quest for a passage by water across North America long pre-dates the nineteenth century, but it was to be then that it took on the urgency of national achievement, and it was to be one man – Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) – whose career came to symbolize the entire era. It may seem an ironic honour, given the disaster that his final expedition of 1845 became, but it must be remembered that the search for his ships was the spur for many more expeditions than had been launched before him. As Joseph Conrad noted in his 1924 essay “Geography and Some Explorers”, ‘This great navigator, who never returned home, served geography even in his death. The persistent efforts, extending over ten years, to ascertain his fate advanced greatly our knowledge of the polar regions.’

The first written description of the muskox was published in 1744 by Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit and historian, within a description of ‘New France’ (the French colony of North America) in his multi-volume Journal d’un voyage. He describes an animal encountered in the area of Hudson Bay with long, beautiful hair and a musky smell in rutting season – and he gave it the name boeuf musqué.1 Musk was originally a label for the odour from the gland of a male musk deer, a native of Asia, which was used in perfumes, but animals with similar type odours were given musk names, like the muskrat and musk shrew. Charlevoix’s original descriptor for the animal stuck: it became muskox in English, moskusokse in Norwegian, myskoxe in Swedish, Moschusochse in German, and stayed boeuf musqué in French.

At first appearance, asking individuals from and connected to Nunavut, an eastern Arctic jurisdiction of Canada, to contribute to a collection of polar history would seem to be a practical and straightforward request, both for the reader and for the contributors themselves. Yet, as is often the case, the reality of things is not as simple as it first appears.

As most readers are probably aware, many scholars and self-identified experts of polar history do not necessarily live in the polar regions. This is the case for Nunavut. While the contributors to this chapter are well-aware of the extensive expertise, knowledge, skills, generosity of spirit, and critical thinking that exists year-round in the communities that populate Nunavut, this knowledge has not yet found a home in the broader discipline of polar history.

Writing in 1916, shortly after his appointment as ‘Geologist in Charge of Explorations’, the celebrated Canadian geologist and explorer Charles Camsell reflected on the prospects for development in Canada’s ‘unexplored’ Arctic: ‘It is to the mining industry more than any other that we must look for co-operation and assistance in the exploration of our northern regions.’1 Camsell hailed the prospects for mining to launch the transformation of remote, sparsely populated Arctic and Northern regions into prosperous, modern Euro-Canadian settlement frontiers. Nearly forty years later, reflecting on his geological career and the surge in mineral development activity in Canada’s north in the decades around World War II, Camsell confidently concluded, ‘To my mind the whole future of the North country depends primarily upon its mineral wealth.’2 Camsell’s visions of mining’s capacity for transforming the Arctic both echoes and anticipates the ideology of ‘frontierism’ characteristic of industry boosters and state agencies around the circumpolar Arctic.

When and why did the originally tropical being, Homo sapiens, enter the circumpolar north? What attracted human societies to this part of the Earth characterized by extreme seasonal variability, long periods of darkness, rough and cold weather, barren tundra, high mountains, ice caps, and vast areas of sea ice? Through analyses of ancient material remains such as stone-built structures, artefacts and bones preserved in cultural layers on dwelling sites, Arctic archaeology provides some insights into these basic questions about the expansion of human societies into the circumpolar north and how they managed to thrive there for millennia.

Social Justice Education (SJE) has become the defining orientation of many educators and educational researchers, but is not without its detractors. Because of its overt political investments, SJE has been accused of brainwashing students and violating the terms of democratic legitimacy. In this chapter, I offer a philosophical defense of some SJE. Using Canada as an example and comprehensive liberalism as a framework, I argue that many practices that we wish to protect under the banner of SJE can be defended by appeal to the foundational values that are common to liberal democracies and find expression in contemporary legislation. I suggest five criteria for distinguishing between defensible and indefensible forms of political education, allowing that not all self-proclaimed SJE will be defensible, and some less progressive education will be. I conclude by anticipating two objections to this strategy.

This chapter turns to the comparison of cases. By analyzing the discontented cases, a clear pattern emerges. The positive cases share few characteristics save one: democratic discontent that arose when sharp economic contractions intensified the imperfections and contradictions of the political status quo. This argument is made using paired comparisons of the positive and negative cases (Canada with the USA/UK, Portugal with Spain, Uruguay with Brazil/Chile) to evaluate competing explanations. The second section of the chapter analyzes how discontent was avoided during the Great Recession by looking for shared features of the three negative cases. It finds that escaping the initial pain of a crisis was not a necessary condition for avoiding discontent. Instead, the key to maintaining democratic legitimacy lay in the political response to the crises, and in the adaptability and health of left-wing parties. In all three negative cases, center-left parties recognized crises as indictments of neoliberalism, rejected its calls for austerity. By responding to popular demands for help in difficult times, these parties deprived cultural conflicts of the oxygen needed for them to rage and avoided major upsurges of discontent.