Migration began with our origin as the human species and continues today. Each chapter of world history features distinct types of migration. The earliest migrations spread humans across the globe. Over the centuries, as our cultures, societies, and technologies evolved in different material environments, migrants conflicted, merged, and cohabited with each other, creating, entering, and leaving various city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations. During the early modern period, migrations reconnected the continents, including through colonization and forced migrations of subject peoples, while political concepts like "citizen" and "alien" developed. In recent history, migrations changed their character as nation-states and transnational unions sought in new ways to control the peoples who migrated across their borders. This volume will explore the process of migration chronologically and also at several levels, from the illuminating example of the migration of a individual community, to larger patterns of the collective movements of major ethnic groups, to the more abstract study of the processes of emigration, migration, and immigration. This book will concentrate on substantial migrations covering long distances and involving large numbers of people. It will intentionally balance evidence from the now diverse people's of the world, for example, by highlighting an exemplary migration for each of the six chapters that highlights different trajectories and by keeping issues of gender and socio-economic class salient wherever appropriate. Further, as a major theme, the volume will consider how technology, the environment, and various polities have historically shaped human migration. Exciting new scholarship in the several fields inherent in this topic make it a particularly valuable and timely project. Each chapter will contain short individual examples, maps, illustrations, and brief quotations from diverse types of primary documents, all integrated with each other and analyzed engagingly in the text.

People from India have been coming to Britain - risking their lives in voyages across the 'Kala Pani' (Black waters) - since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Their story has both grand historical sweep and the intimate drama of individual lives. They came as sailors, servants, wives, merchants, ambassadors and scholars, sometimes for betterment or profit, sometimes for adventure, and sometimes for justice. Occasionally, they became famous, like the Bengali Muslim calling himself 'John Morgan', a renowned animal trainer, or Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851), 'shampooing surgeon' to the Royal Family. Often they remained anonymous. After the 'Indian Mutiny' of 1857, the South Asian presence in Britain, more visible than before, was also more sharply defined. 'Brown Victorians', now to be found in the docks and factories, universities and theatres, law courts and hospitals - and eventually Parliament - played an increasingly important role in British life. Through two world wars and the independence of India (and Pakistan), their importance grew further. From the 1950s, increased immigration swelled the numbers of South Asians in Britain, who experienced both racism and economic hardship as they strove to express their entrepreneurial spirit and assert their religious identity. More recently still, growing radicalism among British-Asian youth has led to new interest in the South-Asian community, its spirit, heritage and achievements. The narrative is chronologically structured, beginning in 1600 and coming up to the present day. After an introduction outlining the major themes and setting them in context, eight chapters examine key periods in detail: 1) 'Earliest Asian Visitors andSettlers during the Pre-colonial Period, c. 1600-1750s', 2) 'Asian Arrivals during Early Colonialism, 1750s-1790s', 3) 'Widening and Deepening of the South Asian Presence in Britain, 1790s-1830s', 4) 'South Asian Settlers and Transient Networks and Communities in Britain, 1830s-1857' (all Michael Fisher), 5) 'Brown Victorians, 1857-1901', 6) 'From Empire to Decolonisation, 1901-1947' (Shompa Lahiri), 7) 'Migrating to the Mother Country: South Asian Settlement and the Post-war boom 1947-80' and 8) 'Riding the storm of Thatcherism and Re-inventing Lives and Aspirations' (Shinder Thandi).

The descendant of German and French Catholic mercenaries, a Scots Presbyterian subaltern, and their secluded Indian wives, David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre defied all classification in the North Indian principality where he was raised. Add to these influences an adoptive mother who began as a Muslim courtesan and rose to become the Catholic ruler of a strategically-placed, cosmopolitan little kingdom, which her foster son was destined to inherit, and you have the origins of a fascinating life that reflects many of the Romantic, political, and colonial trends of a century. As heir to the throne, Sombre took great advantage of the sensuous pleasures of privilege, but he lost his kingdom to the British and went into exile in London with his very considerable fortune. Despite being Indian and Catholic, Sombre married the daughter of an English Protestant Viscount, who was a prominent defender of slavery. Sombre bought himself election as a British MP but then was expelled for corruption. His treatment of his aristocratic wife led to his arrest and confinement as a Chancery lunatic. Fleeing to France, Sombre spent years trying to reclaim his sanity and his fortune from those among the British establishment who had done him down. In this thrilling biography, Michael H. Fisher recovers Sombre's strange story and the echoes of his case for modern conceptions of race, privilege and empire.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh contain one-fifth of humanity, are home to many biodiversity hotspots, and are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and implications of the Indian subcontinent's current conditions. This accessible new survey begins roughly 100 million years ago, when continental drift moved India from the South Pole and across the Indian Ocean, forming the Himalayan Mountains and creating monsoons. Coverage continues to the twenty-first century, taking readers beyond independence from colonial rule. The new nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have produced rising populations and have stretched natural resources, even as they have become increasingly engaged with climate change. To understand the region's current and future pressing issues, Michael H. Fisher argues that we must engage with the long and complex history of interactions among its people, land, climate, flora, and fauna.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh contain one-fifth of humanity, are home to many biodiversity hotspots, and are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and implications of the Indian subcontinent's current conditions. This accessible new survey begins roughly 100 million years ago, when continental drift moved India from the South Pole and across the Indian Ocean, forming the Himalayan Mountains and creating monsoons. Coverage continues to the twenty-first century, taking readers beyond independence from colonial rule. The new nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have produced rising populations and have stretched natural resources, even as they have become increasingly engaged with climate change. To understand the region's current and future pressing issues, Michael H. Fisher argues that we must engage with the long and complex history of interactions among its people, land, climate, flora, and fauna.