This chapter approaches global history by looking at spatial relationships between people who live far apart, those who stay at home, and those who have moved away from their homes to foreign lands; more specifically, I look at the historical conditions under which people have migrated over great distances. Historians have always been concerned with the study of people over time, but the idea of global history requires that greater attention be paid to the linkages between the spaces people occupy. Thus, what is particularly relevant to our understanding of global history is migration in its external rather than internal form, notably in its concern with what people who move out of their countries do to the spaces they leave behind and to the spaces they come to occupy. The impact of individuals in shaping global history is increased (1) when more people are able to link the discrete and distant spaces they occupy and (2) when these spaces are more distant and different from one another.
