New Spain’s integration into the Pacific Basin played an important role in the viceroyalty’s political and social history. Interactions between the two become visible in descriptions of Spain’s distributive struggles. The conclusion argues that diverging notions of a deserving self and undeserving other produced by such disputes were strategic responses to a changing world in which the increasing mobility of people and goods created both opportunities and fierce competition over limited benefits and resources. Consideration of the ways in which these men and women engaged with the logic of assessment has resulted in a more variegated understanding of their views of the world, as well as their places within it, that acknowledges not only individual agendas but their divergent relationships to collectives as well. While Pacific and transpacific exchanges continued to have an impact on distributive struggles after 1640, the importance of the hierarchy of beneméritos, as it developed in the wake of the diminished conquest, once again altered discussions about worthiness and unworthiness and the ways in which people identified themselves and others.

The chapter explores how the activities of Spanish officials and men-at-arms impacted identity-making processes against the background of debates over the significance of the movement toward defining the benemérito category and the hierarchy of the meritorious. The chapter argues that, beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, imperial agents faced the challenge of fashioning notions of a deserving self or undeserving other while balancing two opposing metrics of merit: rootedness and mobility. It first examines the unwillingness of conquistadores and first settlers, and their descendants, to serve in the Philippines and the ways such unwillingness reinforced development of negative stereotypes associated with these privileged social categories. Subsequently, it explores the efforts of Melchor López de Legazpi, Pedro de Robles, Diego García de Palacio, and Rodrigo de Vivero to use their Pacific service as a basis for fashioning themselves as meritorious subjects. Finally, it considers how debates over the hierarchy of the meritorious shaped ideas about New Spain’s transpacific connections and the region’s position between Europe and Asia.

With the expansion of Spanish activities into the Pacific Basin, New Spain increasingly became a global point of intersection for imperial, commercial, and religious networks. The mobility of persons and goods affected external perceptions of New Spain’s place in a globalizing world, as well as its residents’ self-perception. The Introduction observes that these transformations have typically been studied through the lens of a historiographic narrative about creolization. After reviewing debates about the use of the creole paradigm for the study of Spanish identities in the Indies, the chapter introduces the notion of the deserving self, which had emerged in the context of late medieval struggles over the distribution of royal favor, as an alternative framework for studying the interrelationship between movement and processes of identity-making and identification at this crossroad of transoceanic networks. Finally, it explains the link between various conceptualizations of a deserving self and the stories people recounted about the world and the desirability of global integration.

In this chapter, the effects of the clergy’s movement along the Asia-bound religious itinerary on disputes over royal patronage in New Spain are examined. The chapter first explores how the route between Spain and Southeast Asia turned into a standardized itinerary. Attention is then shifted to disputes caused by the clergy’s movements along this route and the meaning the category of criollo acquired in them. Delving further into the uses of the logic of assessment, the chapter explores how the qualities of New Spain and its creole inhabitants were celebrated by clergymen with varying agendas. The chapter argues that the positive assessment of both from someone like the Spanish Augustinian Rodrigo Aganduru Moriz were the result of his efforts to defend the role of creole friars during the evangelization in Asia. Although Moriz’s celebrations mirrored those of creole clergymen, his aim of attracting friars to Asia actually collided with the interests of a considerable segment of the local clergy. Finally, the chapter uses the celebrations of Felipe de Jesús, one of the Nagasaki martyrs, to reconsider how the criollo identity was operationalized in struggles over the distribution of privileges and honors.

This chapter identifies scenes of aural recognition in a number of nineteenth century texts from the 1810s and 1820s: recurrent scenes which involve a character, a narrator, or an autobiographical witness hearing something (a song, a melody, a sequence of words) which they believe they have heard at least once before. Although seemingly unimportant scenes, they are often ones which are pivotal to the plot, the development of character, or the instigation of a regime of feeling. Analysing examples of this scene in Scott’s Guy Mannering, a stage adaptation by Daniel Terry, short stories by John Galt, and a travel narrative by Reginald Heber, the chapter tracks the various ways in which hearing accrues significance as a mobile sense in the context of a newly mobile world of extreme travel and colonization.

Chapter 4 gives an account of the role of repertoire and travel in German public theatre and how the Theater an der Ruhr works against national understandings of canonised theatrical repertoires. It examines why German repertoire theatres do not discard plays after a season but reperform them for years, even decades, and what consequences this has for actors and their self-cultivation, as well as for the building of an ethico-aesthetic tradition in an institution. This system goes hand in hand with the closely knit notion of the ensemble in German theatre. This chapter explores these notions through a case study of the transnational repertoire of the Theater an der Ruhr and their long-term collaborations with international theatre-makers from precarious parts of the world, known as the ‘international theaterlandscapes project’. I accompanied the Theater’s journey to Algeria and witnessed first-hand their cooperation with Algerian and Tunisian artists after the ‘Arab spring’, focusing on the way in which theatre develops forms of transnational diplomacy and troubles national narratives of cultural heritage.

The chapter sets out the material conditions and social structure of the hunter-gatherer era, emphasising the role of kinship, mobility, egalitarianism and trade. It sees the material and social structures as relatively stable then looks at the long transition between the hunter-gatherer era and the era of congolmerate, agrarian/pastoralist empires, emphasising climate change as the key to population growth, settlement, technological change, and the shift to agriculture. It notes the shift from biological to social evolution, and the link between settlement and a move away from egalitarian relations. Agriculture reinforces settlement rather than causing it.

Cities that rose up around trade differed significantly from those built as political and ceremonial centers, as the earliest cities in China were. Cities that grew as centers of trade showcased the expansion of commerce and the maritime connections that helped to fuel the Song economic revolution. Commerce drove urbanization during the Northern Song as both domestic and foreign trade increased dramatically. The population of the Northern Song capital, Kaifeng, grew to around a million, and port cities such as Quanzhou along the southeast coast made room for communities of foreign merchants along with their native residents. Both literary accounts such as Memories of the Eastern Capital and the unique visual representation of city life in Spring Festival along the River richly portray diverse aspects of Song urban life: order and disorder, festivals and entertainment, access to goods and services, food supply and distribution, intermingling of different social classes and genders. The Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin also established multiple capital cities as they formed centralized states and empires. In part these were modeled on Chinese cities, but archaeological and other evidence has shown that cities often served quite different purposes for nomadic pastoral peoples.

Chapter 3, Figures of Risk: Memoirs of a Chinese South African and a Cameroonian in China, features two memoirs of diaspora – from a South African of Chinese descent and a Cameroonian student in the PRC. Both represent the vicissitudes of diasporic mobility in Africa–China relations. They conceptualize mobility through the complex interplay between racial identity, government bureaucracy, threat of imprisonment, personal risk, and economic gain. This chapter shifts the focus to figures of risk, embodied by the gambler and the trickster. As memoirs, these narratives foreground how an individual positions their cultural identity (Hall), complicating and even subverting the official narratives of Africa–China relations through an explicit claim to lived experience. By focusing on these autobiographical writings, I expand the concept of the alluvial to mean the accretions and erosions of everyday life, whether material or metaphysical, acquired through interactions with Others. The texts exemplify cultural creolizations that play (or gamble) with the alluvium of diasporic experience.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

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.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.