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 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.

This chapter explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. The first section argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section explores the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section discusses scholarship on long-distance trading networks and trust, and suggests that the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest. The final section identifies four areas stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce.

This chapter delves more deeply into some issues already explored to explain how the existence of the Confederacy complicated judicial decision-making. Judges considered how the exigencies of war shaped personal disputes, rendered verdicts on contracts executed during the war, and examined the use of Confederate currency in those agreements. In doing so, they intervened in the longstanding debate over the right of secession, considered the lingering effects of the Confederacy’s existence, and contributed to political discussions about who had the legal authority to enact Reconstruction policy and what shape it could take.

Two early essays from the year 1765 set the scene for Herder’s lifelong engagement with the topic of patriotism. Both are focused on the question of modern patriotism. Reading them side-by-side one is nevertheless struck by their contrasting tenor. An earlier unfinished essay, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People, is highly critical of modern society and politics, while Do We Still Have the Public and Fatherland of the Ancients celebrates modern developments, including luxury and modern freedom. In an effort to explain these differences, this chapter argues that these essays represent an important intersection between two kinds of debates on Rousseau’s moral and political thought in German-speaking countries. Herder entered the debate as a self-avowed ‘Rousseauian’, while he soon also became aware of economic and political debates that were originally shaped by Montesquieu. In these debates, Rousseau had come to be seen as a defender of austere democratic republicanism modelled on early Greek societies. This was not the Rousseau Herder wished to associate himself with. The second essay is thus replete with implicit references to Abbt, Hume and Hamann. The same orientation was shared by the local elites in Riga.

In 1769, on his voyage to Holland and France, Herder kept a philosophical journal and drafted some notes in which he expressed critical views of modern European monarchies as well as of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Herder’s relationship to Montesquieu has previously been viewed through the prism of his supposed methodological divergence from Montesquieu. However, as this chapter shows, Herder’s criticisms of Montesquieu were filtered through his critical view of Catherine II of Russia’s Nakaz, or Grand Instructions, which claimed to follow Montesquieu. Herder suggested that there was a need for a ‘second Montesquieu’ which would explore in depth peoples’ distinctive ways of thought and mores. At the same time, Montesquieu’s example was to be followed in tracing the ‘civil history’ of laws, i.e. the ways in which different civil and political laws have evolved and influenced each other. The ‘relations’ in which laws stood with economic activities and social relationships were also to be specified. As Montesquieu had suggested, commerce played an increasingly important role in the modern era, whereas not every kind of commerce suited every kind of state. Herder sought to apply these principles when reflecting about the potential for reforms in Riga, Livland and Russia.

Chapter 2 explains how the neoliberal logic of open borders (re)produces liminal identities in the Bangladesh–India borderlands where such neoliberal ideas confront and contend with national security and the nationalist desire for closed borders. The border participates in both fashioning a Bangladeshi Other to be strategically targeted as criminal, and its porosity helps maintain kinship ties and friendships across the border. The attention given to the border makes it clear that in contrast to the mainland, borderlands are fluid spaces with fluid identities with a more nuanced, even humane, sense of belonging and de facto citizenship. Using a qualitative approach, this chapter highlights the lived experiences of borderlanders near land ports and in the chhitmahal areas to show how people have to perform a variety of identities in order to access even the most basic necessities because of uneven neoliberal development. The changing nature of border trade and increased formalization amidst “enhancements” to support a militarized border creates a curious inversion of neoliberalism in the borderlands; although seemingly contradictory, the desire for open borders and mobility sits alongside the necessity of a closed border to gain from petty trade.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

Global domination – including imperial oppression and commercial exploitation across borders and, especially, across continents – was a key concern for many modern thinkers, and among its roots and its remedies were often thought to be the various forms of antagonism and resistance that fundamentally characterize humans’ social practices and interactions. Unsocially sociable individuals, in this view, are characterized by a seemingly contradictory array of impulses that both draw them together in a spirit of humane association and yet pull them apart, as they seek to resist others either to forestall being dominated themselves or to indulge their prideful and hierarchical sense of superiority. Among the many treatments of what one could call "cosmopolitan unsocial sociability" are the incisive – and complementary – theoretical writings of the 1780s and 1790s respectively by the Afro-British political thinker Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant and Cugoano together exemplify an intriguing and complex strand of Enlightenment thought that viewed global connections as both corrosive to our shared humanity and yet essential for resisting the domination that afflicted both European and non-European peoples.

Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

Chapter 4 explores reactions to the Provençal plague in Spain with a focus on the port city of Cádiz. It examines the centralization of disaster management during the reign of Philip V, as well as the 1720 plague’s long-term influence on Spain’s public health policy. What emerges in this chapter is an understanding of how Spanish authorities exploited the epidemic by ignoring the terms of treaties and tightening control over its borders, people, and commercial activities. Ultimately, they hoped to reap the advantages of excluding their primary competitors, France and Great Britain, from the hypercompetitive arena of Atlantic commerce. When official news of the plague in Marseilles reached Madrid, the Spanish Crown introduced regulations and supervisory committees that sought to extend the state’s control over commercial activities, both domestic and international, and that meant to exclude its greatest competitors from its commercial market. In the end, much of the new centralized system for disease prevention in Spain followed from reactions to the plague in Provence and remained into the following century, resulting in major changes in the management of both public health and customs inspections.

Chapter 5 examines how the Great Plague Scare unfolded in the entangled colonial empires of France and Spain. Despite their intertwined histories in the early-eighteenth-century Atlantic, few works in the English language have focused on Franco-Spanish colonial relations. The chapter describes the orders coming from the metropoles for dealing with the threat of plague and analyzes how those on the ground ultimately responded. In the end, it answers the question, what was different in the colonies? It opens in Fort Royal, Martinique, where a major scandal unfolded when a French vessel arrived from the Languedocien port of Sète. What I call the “Sète affair” offers the opportunity to examine the “spirit of sedition” that endured in the French Antilles well before the Age of Revolution. The chapter then transitions to plague-time violence and Franco-Spanish relations in the Caribbean and demonstrates that the demands of the metropole were not always in line with the needs or wants of the people in the overseas colonies. On the surface, disaster centralism during the Plague of Provence seemed to extend from Europe to the colonies, but on the ground, local needs and economic concerns often outweighed the demands of a far-flung ruler.

Chapter 2 explores reactions to the Plague of Provence in Italy with a focus on the port city of Genoa, considered by some to be “l’état le plus exposé,” or “the most exposed” to the threat of plague by its proximity to Marseilles. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to Genoa’s rich history of quarantine and public health. It then examines how a campaign of misinformation perpetuated by officials in Marseilles affected the reception of news about the plague outside of France. Claims that the disease was merely a malignant fever, or that the outbreak had ended (when it had not) caused confusion in the first months of the outbreak. Nevertheless, the inevitable truth that plague was in France began to arrive in cities across Europe via envoys, ambassadors, and especially via consuls, who reported back to their respective states from Provence. From there, word traveled rapidly as these accounts were copied in letters and printed in newspapers across Europe and the colonies, creating what I term an “invisible commonwealth” based in contemporary communication networks. The chapter then examines responses to the Provençal plague in Genoa and how they influenced, or were influenced by, Italian trade and diplomacy.

Drawing on archival material, interviews with editors and collaborators, and available publication history, this essay will situate Wallace’s writing within the publishing environment of his lifetime. The essay will be structured in three sections. The first will survey the material contexts of Wallace’s published output, tracing how his work entered the literary marketplace as well as the changes in that marketplace during the consolidation of what has been called the “Conglomerate Era” of US publishing. The second will consider the ways in which the author integrated these changes into his own writing – from his anxieties about the threats to literary culture from television in the 1980s, his development of these fears in the spectacle of weaponized entertainment within Infinite Jest, to his sustained act of Information Age media archaeology in The Pale King in response to the corporate-dominated “Total Noise” of the twenty-first century. The final section will survey Wallace’s posthumous publications, considering the ways in which his legacy is continued and contested in publications across physical and digital media.

Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by addressing the emergence of plague in the port city of Marseilles and its spread into southeastern France. It tells the story of the Grand Saint-Antoine, the infamous vessel that allegedly transported the plague to France from the Levant in 1720. It then situates this traditional narrative within the context of recent genetic studies that call its accuracy into question. Although the science has not yet been able to disprove the accepted historical explanation for the outbreak – which is to say, that the pathogen arrived on the ill-fated vessel – it has offered a valuable opportunity to revisit traditional understandings of disease as a product of the “orient,” and to examine and appreciate the influence of new technologies – in this case, genomic DNA analysis – on historical research and our interpretations of archival documents. The chapter moves on to discuss civil and religious responses to the epidemic and what I argue was the implementation of disaster centralism in France, as authorities in Paris stepped in to mitigate the threat of infection from Provence before it spread any further.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

In 1996, the year Infinite Jest was published, the Federal Drug Administration approved Oxycontin as a prescription drug, a move that would have dire repercussions for Americans’ relationship to opiates. Indeed, Wallace’s novel appeared at a pivotal moment in what is now considered the opiate crisis. Drug use, of course, appears throughout Wallace’s fiction, including the pot-smoking LaVache of The Broom of the System, the numerous addicts in Infinite Jest, and the amphetamine-popping Chris Fogle in The Pale King. Wallace’s work fits into a long tradition of drug use and recovery in fiction, a genre that reaches back to Homer, Thomas De Quincey, William Burroughs and many more. This chapter will argue that Wallace’s fiction marks a sociopolitical shift in this genre: the commercialization of addiction under late capitalism. This approach to Wallace’s work will, like the recent Cambridge Companion and Marshall Boswell’s latest monograph, further thicken our understanding of Wallace’s literary and sociocultural context.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

Chapter 3 looks at the port city of London, where the Plague of Provence caused waves of fear, opposition, and intellectual inquiry. Taking place against the backdrop of the recent South Sea Bubble, the epidemic became a major topic of discussion among politicians, journalists, scholars, physicians, grocers, and merchants as they protested perceived infringements on their civil liberties, or debated the nature of contagion and the usefulness of quarantine. In 1720, just as plague cases emerged in the south of France, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble unleashed a wave of anxiety and suspicion. Passionate attacks against the perceived injustices of the Crown as it attempted to enact quarantines and impede illicit commerce were filled with accusations that government authorities and “South Sea scheme men” meant to take away the inviolable rights of the people under the pretext of a foreign plague. Meanwhile, debates between contagionists and anti-contagionists about the transmission of infectious disease also erupted with special force in the wake of the 1720 plague. This chapter explores these reactions within the larger historical context of early-eighteenth-century politics and diplomacy and considers the various factors that came into play as England designed its new public health policy.