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.

In this chapter, I claim that the central question of global justice in education is which – if any – educational inequalities between citizens and non-citizens in a democratic state are morally legitimate, and which inequalities between them contradict the normative foundations of democratic education. By trying to find a convincing answer to this question, I first briefly recapitulate the controversy between the cosmopolitan and the state-nationalist approaches to it. Then I elaborate on the question, whether special obligations to a privileged treatment of cocitizens over noncitizens apply to institutionalized education. I make the claim that the answer to that question depends on how we understand education – whether we spell it out as a traditionalist-authoritarian, or as democratic social practice. I argue that democratic education necessarily implies moral universalism. It requires not only the recognition of the equal moral status of all students, but also the inclusion of their individual experiences, worldviews, and ideals, regardless of their nationalities, or ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in an open and “diversity-friendly” ethical discourse that should be established in every classroom. I conclude that since democratic education is necessarily cosmopolitan in its essence, democratic educational institutions should be supranationally orientated.

Rabindranath Tagore was a progressive educational philosopher whose ideas were far ahead of his time but are most relevant to the contemporary challenges of today. The first Asian Nobel Laureate, his cosmopolitan, democratic ideas, and experiments in education were pioneering. But he was primarily known as a literary genius, and his image as a mystical poet from the East obscured his educational vision and philosophy in the West. The purpose of education was to him the development of critical consciousness and of freedom not only from poverty and oppression, but of the mind from ignorance and prejudice. Strongly against British colonial rule he, nevertheless, loved English literature and music and admired Western science and technological developments. Although proud of India’s glorious past, he was strongly opposed to chauvinistic nationalism and imagined a world of unity of all peoples, a synthesis of the East and West. He built a university which would represent his international liberalism.

The question is raised of whether the EU is acting with the goal to raise rights protection standards for the global community in its exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the data protection sphere. The research conceives of the EU’s exercise of jurisdiction as falling somewhere into three categories along a spectrum: pure rule diffusion (third States enacting laws to trade with the EU), consequential norm diffusion (third States striving for strong data protection having internalised these laws), or full norm export (the EU actively spreading a high data protection standard globally). First, the EU has used its market leverage to influence third State law. Second, the EU’s actions could incidentally ratchet up global data protection standards and start to take on more of a normative character; it could be consequential norm diffusion. Third, although initially appearing parochial, the EU increasingly sells its data protection regulation worldwide as the gold standard. Consequential norm diffusion, as opposed to self-proclaimed norm export, is the most effective way of spreading values in practice, but the EU also has responsibilities not to exercise jurisdictional overreach in viewing its role solely as an exporter of a strict data protection norm.

This chapter juxtaposes This Too a Philosophy of History with Herder’s treatises On the Origin of Language and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul to specify the specific targets and the theoretical foundations of his radical criticisms directed at European societies and morality in the 1770s. It also explores his alternative account of moral psychology and modern moral virtue. A fundamental continuity exists between Herder’s writings of the 1760s and the Treatise as far as Herder’s views on human nature, morality, and sociability are concerned. The significant changes include Herder’s embrace of Ferguson’s account of the unsocial sociability of tribal groups, and his claim that Providence had foreseen that mankind would be reunified at a higher mental level thanks to the process of Bildung. Herder’s ridicule of modern liberty, ‘love of mankind’ and linear moral progress in This Too should not be seen as a full-scale rejection of these values; rather, he cautioned against modern self-complacency and ethical and political blind spots. In This Too, Herder emphatically drew attention to historical forms of human sociability, whilst he in On the Cognition highlighted human freedom and self-determination as the core of Christian virtue.

The chapter delves into the transnational dimension of the global TV system. Transnational media have evolved, and this chapter contends that a new generation has emerged. The first, which developed in the later part of the twentieth century, consists of cross-border TV networks and formats. The second is the rise of streaming platforms. During the first generation, the transnational remained a professional practice out of viewers reach. With the arrival of the second generation, the transnational has become an everyday mode of media consumption and interaction. The chapter’s second purpose is to examine the key organisational characteristics of the transnational media firm. It compares four types of organisational configuration (multinational, global, international, and transnational), and analyses the latter in depth. It connects organisational theory to the GVC framework, demonstrating how the nature of a firm’s activities and position in the value chain play a determining role in the type of organisational structure it is most likely to adopt.

Chapter 5 discusses how in the context of Germanys historically religion-friendly settlement of benevolent neutrality, the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and its references to religion have represented a political and religious watershed moment. Specifically, Chapter 5 focuses on how the emergence of a new identity cleavage in German society has created the socio-demographic conditions and incentives for the AfD’s rise and the latter’s transformation from an anti-Euro ‘professors’ party’ into an identitarian right-wing populist party. It also explores how the AfDs re-politicisation of religion in the context of its right-wing populist identity politics has put into question Germany’s traditional settlement of benevolent neutrality.

The complicated reciprocities between self and world, roots and routes, local and global that galvanize theorists and advocates of cosmopolitanism have been career-long preoccupations of Rushdie. Opposed to exclusionary identity politics, cosmopolitan inclusiveness values commonalities of belonging, mixed identities, and respect for others’ lives, values, and cultures. The novel as a genre promotes such principles, and a typical Rushdie novel, with its panoramic and kinetic narrative, large cast of characters, temporal and spatial expansiveness, exuberant fusion of realism and magic, otherworldly forays, and dizzying range of references and allusions, seems to aspire to such inclusiveness in its form and style. Midnight’s Children thematizes an inclusive vision of India (and Bombay as its microcosm) that becomes attenuated and threatened in later novels. Migrant characters and overseas cities dominate The Satanic Verses and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, but as Rushdie the privileged middle-class Indian migrant author becomes Rushdie the controversial celebrity and member of global elites, cosmopolitanism as an ideal comes under pressure both within his books and in critical discourses surrounding them. This chapter argues that cosmopolitanism, whether achieved or merely aspired to, whether associated with celebratory or limiting visions of rootlessness, remains tenacious in its hold on his and his characters’ imaginations.

The modern cosmopolitan ideal is often associated to the Enlightenment, but it is important to understand it early modern genealogy, because it defines many of its intellectual possibilities and contradictions, and there was no simple intellectual thread from the Stoic ideal of world citizenship to Kant. The Renaissance cosmopolitan tradition was historically conditioned by the consolidation of political and religious divisions within Europe and by growing colonial rivalries, notwithstanding the existence of a common cultural horizon – humanist and Christian - that supported the pursuit of peace. This cultural horizon compensated for those divisions and rivalries in two ways: with a transnational ideal of travel and learning within Europe, and through an ideal of global commerce that assumed the moral unity of mankind. The chapter emphasizes the impact of travel writing in shaping perceptions of cultural diversity and argues that the definition of human nature through empirical diversity is distinctive of European cosmopolitanism, despite some scepticism about the capacity of human reason to reach a universal moral understanding in all circumstances. However, this focus on describing and explaining empirical diversity opened a paradox never fully resolved: whether the "universal spirit" of the cosmopolitan ethos was not inevitably tied to a particular notion of civilization, or even, at a deeper level, to some particular language and cultural system at the expense of others. In this respect, early modern cosmopolitanism was inevitably hierarchical: internally biased towards urban elites with the kind of education and experience that allowed them to participate in the Republic of Letters, and externally associated with a new idea of polite civilization whose values and institutions were often culturally specific. In this process, the role of non-European cultures as partakers of universal values was increasingly (and perhaps unnecessarily) marginalized.

Writing his contributions to Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes, Diderot developed a peculiar perspective on how to rethink human society according to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The histories of the European conquest of the world unveiled a cultural energy that displayed the contradictory impulses of cruel desire for domination and benevolence. Ferocity and humanity sprang from the same physical constitution of mankind. However human history, like natural history, was not uniform. Monstrous anomalies could not, and were not, ignored, but had to be interpreted through the philosophical language of reason and historical experience. The European colonial conquests in fact showed four types of social monstrosity in action. The first tree, familiar from the example of the Spanish empire, were cruelty, greed and religion. Despotism was the fourth and most insidious category of monstrosity, because both the despots and their subjects lost their humanity. Philosophical history, nonetheless, also offered a glimpse of what a rational society could be like, by revealing the true roots of the natural, civil and religious codes. The cosmopolitan ideal corresponded to a natural code that offered the principles of pity and natural right through which a free society might be founded, one where the mutual relationship between morals and politics could be re-established on more rational grounds.

Most contemporary students and proponents of cosmopolitanism would identify it as a philosophy of peace, based on mutual tolerance, recognition, dialogue and commitment to global justice. This chapter argues that, though true, this account of cosmopolitanism is historically incomplete and conceptually truncated. It shows how such a pacific conception of cosmopolitanism had to be positively argued for in the Enlightenment against currents of cosmopolitanism reaching back to the Stoics that presented it as conflictual and conflicted. In particular, it argues that there has been a long and complex relationship between conceptions of cosmopolitanism and ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to our own age of “Global Civil War.” It presents the darker side of cosmopolitanism as a philosophy of conflict as well as compromise, of war as well as peace and of civil war as well as of civilisation and civility.

Recent theorizing about cosmopolitanism has emphasized the need to embrace diversity as a constituent element informing the shared value of cosmopolitanism. This development suggests the need for an alternative genealogy from received accounts which typically trace cosmopolitanism from the Stoics through Kant, on the premise of moral continuities and consensus. My chapter explores the work of John Locke and his engagement with scepticism as a different way of encountering diversity with implications for a reimagined cosmopolitanism. But Locke’s inheritance is not straightforward and presents as many dilemmas as solutions to the challenge of reconciling difference with universal commitments. His acceptance, at some level, of diversity is not the prelude to an expression of human solidarity, framed around a nascent cosmopolitan ideal. Locke’s ultimate pessimism on these matters is a reminder of the difficulties involved in the contemporary project of accommodating divergent philosophical forces.

Chapter 5 locates Montesquieu in an intellectual context he fashioned through his own choice of interlocutors in The Spirit of the Laws – his world of ancient political writers and lawgivers. Montesquieu turns to the classical world in search not of models for imitation but knowledge of the science of politics. This chapter considers the relationship between Montesquieu’s critique of the substantive ideals of classical politics and his significant debts to the Aristotelian mode of regime analysis.

This chapter clarifies the philosophic dimension of Montesquieu’s essay on Rome, which comes to sight when, in chapter 18, Montesquieu makes explicit that he is presenting here a preeminent case study vindicating the contention that “it is not Fortune that dominates the World”; there are “general causes, some moral, some physical, which operate,” and “all the accidents are subject to these causes.” This foreshadows the claim with which Montesquieu opens his Spirit of the Laws: “I have posed the principles, and I have seen the particular cases unfold therefrom as if by themselves; the histories of all the nations are nothing but the consequences.” These statements signal the emergence of the modern philosophy of history, as a major component of Enlightenment rationalism’s most ambitious project and hope: to show that human reason can provide a system of universal causal explanation that will leave no room for plausible evidence of governance by supra- and contra-rational providential and legislative divinity (which is profoundly opposed not only to revealed religion but to ancient political rationalism.)

Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.

How did Montesquieu, born into a noble family in rural Bourdeaux, become a world-historical figure? In what particulars was he a man of his own times? That he lived when he did and where he did is obvious. How he managed to escape the limitations imposed upon him by time and place is not. The volume opens with a chapter introducing the reader to the development of Montesquieu’s thought throughout his literary and philosophical career. The essay will situate this account within the relevant biographical and historical context. It will consider the relationship between the major works and pursue insights into Montesquieu’s intellectual development derived from the study of minor works such as his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and Pensées.

The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is often considered one of the founding works of political liberalism. Yet more recently, a series of interpreters have thrown doubt on this dominant reading. In order to revisit and assess this debate, this contribution delineates Montesquieu’s definition of political liberty as distinct from so-called “philosophical” liberty. It considers his “solution” to the threat despotism poses to all forms of government, namely, the distribution of state powers and the division of social forces, while evaluating the status of the “English model.” Finally, it probes the original distinction between political and civil liberty, while showing that Montesquieu’s political theory cannot be integrated into the tradition of republicanism conceived as a theory of participatory self-rule. In The Spirit of the Laws, the understanding of liberty fits neither a standard liberal view nor a civic republican one; it includes elements that reach beyond both, such as a political culture grounded on honor as much as on the love of liberty.