Of Migration, Great Cities, and Markets: Global Systems of Development
Author(s)
Skeldon, Ronald
Abstract
The relevance of global history is that it brings a historical perspective to contemporary global issues (Mazlish 1993). It attempts to transcend the nation-state as a unit of analysis by focusing on those processes and those institutions that are creating the global community. This chapter has focused upon population movements in East Asia over the last fifty years to suggest that the most effective way to understand global patterns of migration is to envisage them within a unitary framework of the expansion of a capitalist system. Despite differences between the experiences of Europe and those of East Asia in their urban and industrial transformations, there are similarities of process that have been reflected in the general structures of demographic and mobility change. The functional economic differentiation of regions observed in this chapter and the associated patterns of population mobility are examples of the types of processes that are helping to create a global economy and global community. The approach adopted is offered as a framework for a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective on changing patterns of mobility within a global economy. It is clearly diffusionist, even if that diffusion is not necessarily regular in space or time and, as such, is a key element in the “web of connection” in the construction of global history (Grew 1993, p. 239).
