Page 27 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

846 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
• Yogi Berra (b. 1925)

smaller than Italy, was at least 9.6 per 1,000 in the peak prominent over the twentieth century.The dissolution of
years of the 1920s. Hebei and Shandong provinces the Ottoman empire and wars with Russia led to an
(sources of migration to Manchuria) had a rate of 10 per exchange of 4 to 6 million people, with Muslims moving
1,000 during that same decade. south from the Balkans, Greece, and Russia into Turkey,
and Christians moving in the other direction. Around a
Short-Distance Migration million Armenians were expelled from Turkey to points
Before World War II around the world, and nearly 400,000 Jews moved to
The three long-distance systems described above account Palestine in the early twentieth century. The massive
for only a portion of global migration. Many migrants movement of refugees would extend to other parts of
also moved through Africa and western Asia, and within Europe in the wake of World War I and the Russian rev-
the main sending and receiving regions.The majority of olution, including the movement of 3 million Russians,
global migration was probably to nearby cities, towns, Poles, and Germans out of the Soviet Union.
and agricultural areas, often on a temporary basis. This Migration also took place within the receiving regions
migration is more difficult to count, but general patterns of the long-distance systems.The transatlantic migrations
can be identified. could be extended to include over 10 million people
Africa experienced net immigration, but in much who moved to the western frontiers of North America.
smaller numbers than other main destinations and from This process also spurred the relocation of great numbers
a wider variety of origins.The immigrants included over of Native Americans, and the migration of over 2.5 million
3 million French and Italians into north Africa and up to Mexicans to the agricultural areas of the southwestern
a million other Europeans, Syrians, Lebanese, Arabs, United States in the early twentieth century. The indus-
Indians, and Chinese throughout the continent.The end trial centers of the northeastern U.S. also attracted over
of the transatlantic slave trade led to increased movement 2.5 million Canadians, and then over a million African
of slaves into the western Sudan, Middle East, and areas Americans and Mexicans in the early twentieth century.
bordering the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth cen- In other parts of the Americas, great numbers of Andean
tury. Labor migration to plantations and mines in south- peoples moved to coastal plantations and cities, and over
ern and central Africa increased through the late 300,000 Caribbean people migrated to plantations in
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as did movement to Central America and Cuba, to the Panama Canal Zone,
agricultural areas and coastal cities in western and east- and the United States. In Southeast Asia and the South
ern Africa. Millions of people took part in these move- Pacific, up to 500,000 Javanese traveled to plantations in
ments, some of whom were coerced and many of whom Sumatra and the Southeast Asian mainland, and over
went to work for European enterprises, but many of 400,000 Melanesians and Micronesians worked on plan-
whom also found independent occupations. Projects tations and as seamen throughout the region.
such as the Suez Canal and development of an infra- In Europe, migrants from Ireland traveled to England
structure for cotton cultivation in Egypt attracted large for work, and those from eastern and southern Europe to
amounts of local migration, while Lebanon and Syria industrial areas in northern Europe, especially France
experienced some of the highest overseas emigration and Germany. In Russia, migrants moved into the grow-
rates in the world. In a different type of migration, over ing cities and southern agricultural areas. Within India
3 million people took part in the pilgrimage to Mecca they moved to tea plantations in the south and northeast,
from 1879 to 1938. to the mines and textile-producing regions of Bengal, and
Western Asia and eastern Europe were areas of mas- to newly irrigated lands and urban areas throughout the
sive migration caused by violence and politics, a harbinger subcontinent. In China, they migrated to growing coastal
of the kinds of migration that would become increasingly cities, to areas of the Chang (Yangzi) basin left under-