Cultures in Contact

A landmark work on human migration around the globe, Cultures in Contact provides a history of the world told through the movements of its people. It is a broad, pioneering interpretation of the scope, patterns, and consequences of human migrations over the past ten centuries. In this magnum opus thirty years in the making, Dirk Hoerder reconceptualizes the history of migration and immigration, establishing that societal transformation cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of migrations and, indeed, that mobility is more characteristic of human behavior than is stasis. Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.

“We have long known that the world’s peoples have been in constant movement for a very long time. Now we have an encyclopedic overview of who has moved where and why for the last thousand years, based on impressively wide reading. This overview will shake up a lot of preconceptions.”—Immanuel Wallerstein, author of The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century, ”This book is breathtaking in its scope and detail. Hoerder has done world history a great service, speaking to multiculturalism while providing the nuts and bolts of migration history over time and space.”—Nancy Green, author of Ready-To-Wear and Ready-To-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York, “A formidable piece of work. It is of particular importance because Hoerder shows in great detail that it is necessary to move from a focus on the Atlantic migration system in order to give due weight to migration flows in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific world. . . . Hoerder’s cast is a fascinating one, with particular attention to peoples, such as Armenians and Jews, that have had high rates of migration, but also with due attention to others that are generally neglected, such as Central Asian peoples.”, "Cultures in Contact reflects immense learning deployed over vast swaths of the globe. It breaks out of the Atlantic-centered perspective that has blinkered most European and Euro-American studies of migration, and for the period since 1500 it strives to bring Asian, African, and Pacific migrations into a larger world-system history of migration. . . . Hoerder's study of migration systems . . . does an outstanding job of synthesizing a vast library of scholarship on human migrations while also contributing to the growing body of global historical analysis. Cultures in Contact offers not only a survey of world migrations over the past millennium but also a synopsis of global history viewed from the perspective of migratory processes.", "[A] truly significant book which derives its authority from cross-cultural primary research, as well as secondary reading, on a scale that few previous authors have attempted. . . . [H]e has designed the book to ensure that readers interested in but one aspect of his story will be able to follow it intelligently, and his advancing argument is clarified by a sequence of original maps that will also serve as a vital teaching aid to all students of historical migration."

Dirk Hoerder is Professor of History at the Universität Bremen in Germany. He has written and edited numerous books. He is coeditor of European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives; The Settling of North America: The Atlas of the Great Migrations into North America from the Ice Age to the Present; People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1930; Roots of the Transplanted; and Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience, 1840–1930.