1 This article was originally published in French as “Migrations et tournant global de l’histoire européenne,” Annales HSS 76, no. 4 (2021): 729–50.

Seminal contributions focusing on contemporary conditions (some also encompassing a historical perspective) include Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992); Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610; Steven Vertovec, “Transnationalism and Identity,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 4 (2001): 573–82; and Nancy L. Green, “The Trials of Transnationalism: It’s Not as Easy as It Looks,” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 4 (2017): 851–74.

2 Nicholas De Genova, ed., The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Leo Lucassen, “Peeling an Onion: The ‘Refugee Crisis’ from a Historical Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 3 (2018): 383–410; Adrian Favell, Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe (Malden: Blackwell, 2008); Kathy Burrell et al., “Brexit, Race and Migration,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37, no. 1 (2019): 3–40.

3 Donna R. Gabaccia, Dirk Hoerder, and Adam Walaszek, “Emigration and Nation Building during the Mass Migrations from Europe,” in Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, ed. Nancy L. Green and François Weil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 63–90, here p. 63.

4 Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).

5 Essential overarching studies that have emerged since the 1990s include Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History [2001], trans. Allison Brown (Malden: Blackwell, 2003); Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Leo Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005)—not to mention countless articles written by Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen, among others, and invaluable reference books like Klaus J. Bade et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia, What Is Migration History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Many contributions to the two volumes comprising Donna Gabaccia, gen. ed., The Cambridge History of Global Migrations (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023), will demonstrate how the field continues to evolve.

6 Romain Bertrand and Guillaume Calafat, eds., “Micro-analyse et histoire globale,” thematic dossier, Annales HSS 73, no. 1 (2018); and John-Paul Ghobrial, ed., “Global History and Microhistory,” Past & Present, supplement 14 (2019), offer recent overviews of global microhistory. Among the leading book-length studies centered on individuals, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe [1999], trans. Martin Beagles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London: Penguin, 2017). Isabella Löhr, “Lives beyond Borders, or: How to Trace Global Biographies, 1880–1950,” Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 23, no. 6 (2013): 7–21, provides a valuable discussion focused on more modern examples.

7 Zahra, The Great Departure.

8 Many of Riis’s photographs form part of the Jacob A. Riis Collection of the Museum of the City of New York (see https://collections.mcny.org/Explore/Highlights/Jacob-A--Riis), while a selection of Bloncourt’s thousands of images can be viewed via https://www.bloncourt.net. For a suggestive piece on the use of photographs as a historical source, see Derek Sayer, “The Photograph: The Still Image,” in History beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Sarah Barber and Corinna Peniston-Bird (London: Routledge, 2009), 49–71 (which refers to Jacob Riis on pp. 50 and 55).

9 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890).

10 The later edition used here—Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, ed. Sam Bass Warner Jr. (1890; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)—first appeared in 1970, replacing many of the engraved images with Riis’s original photographs. Though the secondary literature is extensive, particularly useful discussions of Riis and his photographs can be found in Alan Trachtenberg’s introduction to the aforementioned edition as well as Edward T. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis,” The Public Historian 26, no. 3 (2004): 7–26; Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Tom Buk-Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America [2005], trans. Annette Buk-Swienty (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

11 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 116 and 118; see also p. 130. On garment industry workers in comparative perspective, see especially Nancy L. Green, Ready-To-Wear and Ready-To-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

12 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 48–49.

13 Ibid., 54.

14 Ibid., 101.

15 Ibid., 93–94 and 142–43.

16 Among the many essential studies (including more by the authors noted here), see David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White; The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (2005; New York: Basic Books, 2018); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Zahra, The Great Departure; Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

17 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 22.

18 Ibid., 28.

19 Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (1901; New York: Macmillan, 1922), 37, 57, 111, 245, 265, and 274–76. This work was translated into French a few years later: Riis, Comment je suis devenu américain, trans. Léon Bazalgette (Paris: L. Michaud, 1908).

20 Riis, The Making of an American, 5, 267, 274, and 283–84.

21 Erika K. Jackson, Scandinavians in Chicago: The Origins of White Privilege in Modern America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Jørn Brøndal, “‘The Fairest among the So-Called White Races’: Portrayals of Scandinavian Americans in the Filiopietistic and Nativist Literature of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of American Ethnic History 33, no. 3 (2014): 5–36; Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

22 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 100 and 138.

23 Ibid., 149.

24 Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2001; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See also the references given in notes 16 and 21 above.

25 Dirk Hoerder notes that approximately one-third of those who arrived in the United States around 1900 returned to Europe; see Hoerder, “European Migrations,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. Ronald H. Bayor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 34–52, here p. 42. In addition to extensive work by the authors named in this paragraph, see also Green and Weil, Citizenship and Those Who Leave.

26 Caroline B. Brettell, Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Brettell, Gender and Migration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); José C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

27 Michael Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos, and Gallegos: The Assimilation of Italian and Spanish Immigrants in the Making of Modern Uruguay 1880–1930,” Past & Present 208 (2010): 191–229; Yuval Tal, “The ‘Latin’ Melting Pot: Ethnorepublican Thinking and Immigrant Assimilation in and through Colonial Algeria,” French Historical Studies 44, no. 1 (2021): 85–118.

28 Settler colonialism and related themes have received innovative academic treatment in many monographs and edited collections. Outstanding examples include James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lorenzo Veracini, The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea (London: Verso, 2021); Robert A. Bickers, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel, eds., Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014); and Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2016).

29 Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), part 2; Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2019).

30 Leo Lucassen et al., “Cross-Cultural Migration in Western Europe 1901–2000: A Preliminary Estimate,” IISH research paper 52, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/777930/researchpaper_52_lucassen_lucassen_et.al_versie_voor_web140801.pdf, pp. 35 and 47.

31 Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch, eds., Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis? (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel, “From Socialist Assistance to National Self-Interest: Vietnamese Labor Migration into CMEA Countries,” in Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, ed. James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 100–24; Felipe Arocena, “From Emigrant Spain to Immigrant Spain,” Race and Class 53, no. 1 (2011): 89–99; Pamela Ballinger, The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020); Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern Frontier of Europe,” Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 4 (2015): 367–83; Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom, eds., Italian Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2016); Elizabeth Buettner, “Europeanising Migration in Multicultural Spain and Portugal during and after the Decolonisation Era,” Itinerario 44, no. 1 (2020): 159–77.

32 Bloncourt’s memoir, published in 2004, provides much of the biographical information that follows: Gérald Bloncourt, Le regard engagé. Mémoires d’un franc-tireur de l’image (Paris: Bourin, 2004), here 70 and 91. His other books concern Haiti in 1946—including Journal d’un révolutionnaire (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2013)—and after the fall of its dictatorship in the 1980s, as well as Haitian art and culture.

33 Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity [1988], trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers. L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration 1938–1991 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991); Ahmed Boubeker and Abdellali Hajjat, eds., Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales. France, 1920–2008 (Paris: Éd. Amsterdam, 2008); Benjamin Stora and Émile Temime, eds., Immigrances. L’immigration en France au xxe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 2007).

34 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Among many outstanding treatments in English, see Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009); Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall, eds., Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

35 Steven Vertovec, “Super-diversity and Its Implications,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6 (2007): 1024–54.

36 Marie Poinsot and Anne Volery, “Gérald Bloncourt par lui-même. Hommage,” interview with Gérald Bloncourt conducted in April 2013, Hommes & Migrations 1325 (2019): 137–44, here p. 144.

37 Bloncourt, Le regard engagé, 81.

38 Ibid., 201.

39 Gérald Bloncourt and Johann Petitjean, “L’œil, le monde et la colère : Gérald Bloncourt et ses images,” Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique 132 (2016): 157–84, here § 34 of the online edition, https://doi.org/10.4000/chrhc.5420.

40 Bloncourt, Le regard engagé, 137–38.

41 Nuno Ferreira de Carvalho, ed., Por uma vida melhor. O olhar de Gérald Bloncourt/Pour une vie meilleure. Le regard de Gérald Bloncourt, trans. A. J. Silva Onoma (Lisbon/Lyon: Fondation Berardo/Fage, 2008); Jennifer Marc, “Pictures Tell the Story of the Portuguese in France,” New York Times, May 24, 2013, https://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/pictures-tell-the-story-of-portuguese-in-france/.

42 Marie Poinsot and Anne Volery, “Entretien: Gérald Bloncourt, Les Portugais,” Hommes & Migrations 1302 (2013): 152–53; Bloncourt and Petitjean, “L’œil, le monde et la colère,” § 32–35; Bloncourt, Le regard engagé, 188–89 and 209–15.

43 Bloncourt, Le regard engagé, 158–59.

44 Victor Pereira, La dictature de Salazar face à l’émigration. L’État portugais et ses migrants en France (1957–1974) (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2012); Marie-Christine Volovitch-Tavares, Portugais à Champigny. Le temps des baraques (Paris: Autrement, 1995). Charting Portuguese migration histories involving France also moves beyond empire-centered histories of Portuguese mobility; see Cristiana Bastos, “Intersections of Empire, Post-Empire, and Diaspora: De-Imperializing Lusophone Studies,” Journal of Lusophone Studies 5, no. 2 (2020): 27–54; and Pedro Góis and José Carlos Marques, “Portugal as a Semi-peripheral Country in the Global Migration System,” in “Migration in the Lusophone World,” special issue, International Migration 47, no. 3 (2009): 21–50.

45 Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient d’Algérie. L’immigration algérienne en France, 1912–1992 (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant [1999], trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

46 Victor Pereira, “Portuguese Migrants and Portugal: Elite Discourse and Transnational Practices,” in A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and Their Homeland Connections, ed. Nancy L. Green and Roger D. Waldinger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 56–83, here pp. 69 and 77.

47 Katharine M. Donato and Donna R. Gabaccia, eds., Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), constitutes one recent wide-ranging analysis.

48 Hoerder, “European Migrations”; Green, “The Trials of Transnationalism,” 851.

49 Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Buettner, “Postcolonial Migrations to Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, ed. Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 601–20; Buettner, “What—and Who—Is ‘European’ in the Postcolonial EU? Inclusions and Exclusions in the European Parliament’s House of European History,” BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 133, no. 4 (2018): 132–48.

50 Wimmer and Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism.”

51 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 259–62.

52 Ibid., 260. See also Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 35–36, and 104–108.

53 Italy as it shifted from being a society mainly of emigration towards one in which immigration predominated stands out as a particularly vibrant area of study that extends not only across the Atlantic and through Europe but also involves trans-Adriatic and trans-Mediterranean mobilities. Alongside Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’,” Ben-Ghiat and Hom, eds., Italian Mobilities, and Ballinger, The World Refugees Made, see Pamela Ballinger, “A Sea of Difference, a History of Gaps: Migrations between Italy and Albania, 1939–1992,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 1 (2018): 90–118, together with key collections that focus on gender issues: Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Loretta Baldassar and Donna R. Gabaccia, eds., Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).

54 Adrian Favell, “Immigration, Migration, and Free Movement in the Making of Europe,” in European Identity, ed. Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 167–89, here pp. 188–89.

55 Ibid., 172. On related themes, see also De Genova, The Borders of “Europe”; and Gabriele Proglio, “Is the Mediterranean a White Italian-European Sea? The Multiplication of Borders in the Production of Historical Subjectivity,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 3 (2018): 406–27.

56 Cited in József Böröcz and Mahua Sarkar, “The Unbearable Whiteness of the Polish Plumber and the Hungarian Peacock Dance around ‘Race’,” Slavic Review 76, no. 2 (2017): 307–14, here pp. 312–13.

57 Ibid. On Hungary and the history of migrations, see also Nora Berend, “Les récits de la migration dans la Hongrie médiévale,” Annales HSS 76, no. 3 (2021): 457–88.

58 Jon E. Fox, “The Uses of Racism: Whitewashing New Europeans in the UK,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 11 (2013): 1871–89, here pp. 1881–82.