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.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.

This chapter shows that the sixteenth century was not dominated by European actors but rather by three post-Timurid empires in west Asia, that expanded the reach of the Chinggisid sovereign norm and world ordering into new territories. These empires were the Ottoman, the Mughals and the Safavid, and together they ruled over a third of the world's population and controlled much of the world's resources. They also developed their own version of the Chinggisid sovereignty model, inflected by Timurid influences and varying according to local cultural repertoires. This was the notion of 'millennial sovereignty' as captured by the concept of sahibkıran, essential a ruler marked by conjunction astrology for great distinction. Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal rulers competed with each other (and Charles V) for the title of sahibkıran. Their world order was connected through intellectual network of astrologers and other occult scientists who legitimised universal empire projects. This chapters develops a comparative narrative of these three empires and their rulers' universal empire dreams in the sixteenth century.

This chapter traces Chinggisid influences throughout the globalising world order of the sixteenth century. It shows that the European timeline – so foundational to IR – cannot be thought of as free from influences from Asia. As this chapter clearly demonstrates, Charles V and the Habsburgs were very much shaped by their competition with the Ottomans. The chapter then moves to the north and discusses the influences of Chinggisid sovereignty model on Muscovy, specifically on Ivan IV. It also catches up with sixteenth-century developments in Inner Asia and Ming China. The sixteenth-century order, with its centre of gravity in the post-Timurid empires of west Asia, fragmented in the seventeenth century, during the long period of 'general crisis' (often associated with climate change) which frayed both the material and ideational connections across Eurasia. Though some Asian polities were relatively unaffected by this period of crisis and others bounced back economically, no world ordering projects were successfully launched out of the East after this period. This was a major contributor to the perception of Eastern decline.

Intricate relations between people, animals, and plants were the basis of the entire imperial Chinese order no matter what dynasty was ostensibly in charge. Such relations were environmental in the sense that they formed interdependencies between species under diverse ecological conditions of climate and topography. The most significant environmental historical result of these relations for the eight centuries under study here was agriculture, the main source of China’s human-induced (or “anthropogenic”) ecological change. An extended, instructive example of the intricacies of farming’s requisite resource management comes from the Ming (1368–1644) town of Pingwang in the Yangzi delta, likely the most developed area of contemporary imperial agrarian practice.

In late fall 1730, a coastal flood hit the Dutch island Walcheren. Inside the broken wooden revetments strewn across its beaches, dike authorities noticed peculiar, tiny holes. These holes contained shipworms (Teredo navalis), a marine mollusk that bored into the wooden infrastructure that protected coastal dikes. This discovery prompted the most significant redevelopment and rebuilding of coastal flood defenses in the early-modern period. This chapter investigates the origins, interpretation, and response to the ‘shipworm epidemic’ of the 1730s. It argues that the perception of shipworm novelty influenced this dramatic change. In contrast to epizootics or coastal floods, the cultural memory of disaster presented no ready solutions for shipworms. Shipworms’ perceived novelty catalyzed new natural historical investigations of the species as well as innovative new dike designs. Shipworms also produced new connections to decline. Pietist ministers and enlightened spectatorial journalists united in their condemnation of the moral decay of the Dutch Republic by linking shipworms to an ongoing wave of sodomy trials. The biological novelty of the shipworms translated to an unprecedented period of persecution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, river flooding seemed to be increasingly numerous and severe. To later observers, the 1740–41 river floods, which affected numerous parts of the Rhine–Meuse River System, were an important inflection point. This chapter evaluates the origins, interpretations, and consequences of the 1740–41 river floods. Victims interpreted these floods in the context of recent years of dearth and disaster. The historically bitter winter of 1739–40 had catalyzed a disaster cascade in the hardest-hit areas of the riverlands that amplified the impacts of inundation and expanded its consequences. At the same time, Dutch surveyors and hydraulic engineers, ministers, and state authorities promoted a discourse of increasing moral and geographic risk of inundation. In contrast to the Christmas Flood, where technocrats grounded dike innovations in the cultural memory of prior inundations, river floods forced observers to consider problematic futures. Surveyors and cartographers mapped flood risk in the Dutch riverlands and warned of potential consequences should the state ignore their new river management strategies. The floods of 1740–41 and narratives of increasing risk added to distress and anxiety about decline, but they also prompted the first proto-national flood relief efforts and increased emphasis on the systemic, interprovincial nature of Dutch river challenges.

The Netherlands emerged from the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) a weakened state, and anxieties about the decline of Republic expanded as a result. That same year, an outbreak of cattle plague emerged in the Republic. Originating in the eastern European steppes, this panzootic spread slowly across Europe following networks of war and trade. Centuries of landscape transformation in the Netherlands set the stage for this disaster, and weather associated with a changing climate conditioned its severity. The disease killed hundreds of thousands of cattle in the Republic, impacting Dutch urban and rural livelihoods. Between 1713 and 1720, state authorities, moralists, and farmers struggled to understand and manage the disease. This chapter investigates the social and environmental origins of cattle plague, as well as cultural and state response. State authorities based their strategies in environmentalist and contagionist theories of diseases transmission that varied across scale. Its impacts were far from uniform, but moralists framed cattle plague as a problem that affected the entire country, which reinforced narratives of Dutch decline. This chapter argues that causal stories explaining the origins and meaning of the disease both reinforced pessimistic decline narratives and prompted a universalist approach to medical responses.

The return of rinderpest to the Netherlands in 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth-century era of disaster. Hardly a generation removed from the first outbreak, cattle plague returned to the Republic with far greater intensity. It lasted over twice as long and resulted in over a million cattle deaths. Chapter 6 compares the second outbreak of cattle plague to the first, assessing changing response. Like the first outbreak, cattle plague emerged in the context of conflict and extreme weather. Unlike the previous episode, it interacted with an ongoing disaster cascade that amplified and prolonged its consequences. Popular and state response showed remarkable continuity. Rinderpest was not novel, and prior experience proved beneficial as provinces tapped the cultural memory of the previous outbreak. Provincial decrees quickly reinstituted bans on cattle importation, enacted quarantines, and issued certificates of health. Pamphlet literature again highlighted the human tragedy of the animal disease and bemoaned its moral implications. The extensive scope and duration of this outbreak attracted new attention from an international network of medical practitioners. Its increased severity prompted novel medical responses, including the first inoculation trials. These trials reveal the diffusion of declensionist fears into the economic and social program of the Dutch Enlightenment.

The Christmas Flood of 1717 was likely the deadliest coastal flood in North Sea history. The storm impacted the entire southern coast of the North Sea basin, but the majority of its more than 13,000 victims lived in marginalized communities in the northern Netherlands and coastal Germany. This chapter investigates the origins, impact, and response to the Christmas Flood on the province of Groningen. The Netherlands had a long history of coping with coastal flooding, and moralists, state officials, and dike authorities exploited the cultural memory of previous floods to advocate solutions. The city of Groningen and its rural hinterlands wielded the past to divergent ends in their efforts to reframe financial responsibility for reconstruction. Provincial technocrats balanced tradition with the rhetoric of improvement to build support for new and improved seawalls. Moralists emphasized the unprecedented severity of the flood to scale up its significance and embed it in broader decline narratives. It argues that the Christmas Flood revealed the diverse ways that the past could be wielded to promote and resist change following natural disasters.

The ability of the nobility to shore up its position in the face of demographic decline reached its limits in the seventeenth century. Xochimilco’s ongoing financial troubles, which had their twin origins in population loss and the dislocations brought by climate extremes of the Little Ice Age, further destabilized relations across class lines, as did the criminality of a ruling class that had become estranged from the old collective bonds of the community. examines labor drafts and town finances and presents a microhistory of crime and political violence to explain political change. The upheavals were part of a wider, global crisis of the seventeenth century. With the passing of the old dynastic rulers, an alternative basis for authority came into being. By the century’s end, a new cohort of officeholders came to dominate local government whose authority came to rest on good stewardship of the city’s finances and resources. Lineage and esteemed ancestry ceased to be key factors in local politics as non-native peoples began to assume positions of power at a time increasing ethnic and racial complexity.

In Chapter 1, I identify the range of economic, religious, and social values attached to landscape in Middle English romances. This analysis begins by examining how romances’ descriptions of landscape often concentrate on economically significant topographical features, especially natural resources, and the laborers who manage and harvest them. For example, I examine the hilly iron mines and accompanying settlements of smiths in Sir Isumbras, the working of stone quarries in William of Palerne, and sea harvests in Havelok the Dane. The chapter then builds on these arguments to explain how descriptions of abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in Sir Degrevant and the Tale of Gamelyn betray the anxieties of an increasingly “bourgeois-gentry” readership about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the bubonicplague, and the Little Ice Age.

My introduction situates the study by defining “landscape” within the genre of Middle English popular romance, examines the current critical conversation regarding medieval conceptions of the environment, and places late medieval romances in the context of the burgeoning Little Ice Age. It concludes with a précis of the following study.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.