Throughout history, trade required people to leave home, willingly or under duress, as immigrants or sojourners, and make a new home elsewhere.
Migrants carried not only goods but also culture—new foods, new customs, and new ideas. Societies that welcomed immigrants and trade generally flourished. When the Egyptians sailed the Nile to Nubia, they carried their Egyptian customs and traditions with them; likewise, when merchants traveled the trade roads to Egypt, they brought their Asian customs and traditions. The exchange of ideas and goods—and sometimes people—held Egypt intact for two and half millennia.
In 800 B.C.E., the Phoenicians sailed the Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the British Isles to Argos and Assyria, a distance of 2,400 miles, spreading goods and ideas. Before the first century, Greeks and Arabs were sailing yearly to India and China, bringing back pearls, pepper, jewelry, perfume, as well as ideas. The Romans built roads, copied Phoenician styles of ships, and adapted long-distance mail from Egyptian and Persian models. Migration, on at least a small scale, occurred along these trade routes. Jews, forced to settle in widely scattered settlements after the Diaspora, established vital trading communities virtually everywhere they went over the centuries. As late as the mercantile era (and afterward), Jewish migration to the Netherlands and then to the Americas established a network of traders from San Francisco to Singapore, New York, Paris, and London. The Netherlands’ free commerce and trade boom came about because of the infusion of Jews, Huguenots, and others not tolerated elsewhere in the world.
Iberia’s decline began after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, the Inquisition, and the removal of the Moors between 1609 and 1614. In the ages of imperialism, vibrant growth in trade followed English immigration to the Western Hemisphere, Oceania, and South Africa. In the twenty-first century, trading cities are cities made up of immigrants.
Early Empires
The first civilization was that of the Sumerians, traders who intermingled with their neighbors and left with them more than just trade goods. They influenced Babylon, Egypt, and India. Similarly, the Hittites of Turkey changed Egypt, and the Minoans on Crete influenced their successors, the Mycenaeans. On the other side of the world, the Chinese exchanged goods and ideas with India and Southeast Asia.
When European society was still primitive, urbanized India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia interacted through trade and immigration. Trade attracted immigrants and changed the demography of the trading center. Merchants traveled long distances, vulnerable to bandits and other adversity. The trip carried many risks, so a secure destination with a guaranteed sale was desirable. Resident sojourner merchants drew immigrants—business partners, employees, and families—to foreign cities. These immigrants served as unofficial ambassadors for their place of origin. They kept communication open between the societies at each end of the trade route. The merchants became leaders of immigrant communities adjusting to a new culture. Trade tied the world together, and immigrants ran trade.
Egypt was stable for three millennia. Still, it conquered Nubia for its gold mines and the land routes to Kush and Punt; entered the Sinai for metal and gems and for trade routes to Arabia, the Horn of Africa, Persia, and India; and took Canaan and Syria as buffer zones and as a crossroads of trading routes. And Egyptian ventures in Libya controlled the trade between Africa and Europe. Egyptian trade became the preserve of Phoenician and Greek merchants who settled on the Nile Delta. Merchants from Egypt’s many trading partners commonly brought their families for extended stays in Palestine and Egypt. The Greeks founded Alexandria as a center of knowledge and trade for the Middle East.
Mediterranean trading civilization arose around 3000 B.C.E. The earliest Mediterranean traders were Cretan sailor merchants. They flourished for 2,000 years, and their culture influenced other great trading civilizations, including the Phoenicians, who distributed the goods of Babylonia and Egypt from ports such as Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage. Phoenicians were not military seafarers, and they fell successively under the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. By paying tribute, they kept their sea trade with the West and caravan trade with the East. Phoenicia traded with Arabia for gold, agate, onyx, incense, and myrrh; with India for pearls, spices, ivory, ebony, and ostrich plumes; with Mesopotamia for cotton and linen clothes; with Palestine and Egypt for grain, wheat, and barley; and with the regions of the Black Sea for horses, slaves, and copper. By sea, they traded with Syria, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Aegean Sea region, Spain, France, and England. Phoenicians colonized and mingled with the people of Cyprus, Egypt, Crete, Sicily, Africa, Malta, Sardinia, Spain, Asia Minor, and Greece. Phoenicia influenced all Mediterranean civilizations until it fell to Rome after the Punic Wars.
A typical Phoenician trading city was Ugarit. After the Hittites defeated the Egyptians in the thirteenth century B.C.E., the resultant peace brought prosperity to Ugarit as a terminus for trade with Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Egypt. Merchants traded for the king and themselves. Immigrants and sojourners who flocked to Ugarit included Hittites, Hurrians, Cretans, Cypriots, and Assyrians. Prosperity and cultural exchange lasted until the city lost its agricultural base. Then trade passed to the maritime cities, and Ugarit disappeared.
Greece and Rome
After the collapse of Mycenae, the Greek islands declined, but in the ninth to eighth centuries B.C.E., the Greek island culture expanded as a growing population and a lack of arable land forced a revival of the old cities and the old sea trade. The Greek culture was spread through trade and migration. Greek culture peaked in Athens during what is known as the “Golden Age” of Greece during the 400s B.C.E. With the rise and conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture and influence was spread throughout the Mediterranean world and east, into Persia. With the collapse of Alexander’s empire upon his death and the Roman conquest of Greece a few centuries later, Greek culture and presence was carried over to Rome, and bringing significant change to central and western Europe.
Rome’s 400,000-man army bestowed Roman citizenship on the peoples it conquered. Citizenship gave the conquered and occupied peoples a stake in the empire. After pacification in Britain and elsewhere, Rome retired whole units and established several thousand soldiers at a time in coloniae around their old fortifications. Rome involved the locals in government and the market economy. Former Roman soldiers, now immigrants to the far reaches of the empire, brought with them their goods and beliefs, changing the societies they joined and changing as they joined these societies. Rome’s military presence also provided a source of profit and access for local merchants to the vast Roman trade road system. Roman roads moved people and goods throughout the empire. The roads also featured post stations for the courier service as well as mansions where traders could stay—these mansions housed riders, drivers, conductors, blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, doctors, and animals.
Roman traders also dominated the Mare Nostrum—the Mediterranean. Merchant ships carried passengers and freight. Roman trade extended to Denmark, up the Amber Road, from the Danube to the Baltic, and across the sea to Sweden. From the far reaches, Italian traders brought furs and slaves. In Africa, Greek and Roman traders penetrated past Somaliland and Abyssinia. Trade covered Arabia Felix, India, and China. Each year, up to 120 vessels left Alexandria for the route through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to India and China. But the Roman empire crumbled because of the onslaughts of Huns, Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals; by the fifth century the empire had fallen.
Silk Road
The major trading route in Central Asia tied Mesopotamia and China to trading partners in Europe and Asia. The Silk Road was a network of routes around the rim of the dry, sandstorm-prone Taklimakan and Gobi Deserts and through the least inhospitable parts of high and icy mountains. Mesopotamia began trading along the Fertile Crescent. China, with its mountainous terrain, was much more difficult for traders to reach. Beginning in 138 B.C.E., Zhang Qian spent thirteen years trying to expand what was a small-scale trade, in the process learning of a new breed of horse and unknown peoples in the west. Subsequent expeditions for horses and objects of beauty opened the route significantly.
More than just silk was carried along the road. Metals, stones, ivory, and glass were brought to China, and ceramics, gunpowder, jade, bronzes, lacquer, and iron were brought to the west. Caravans of 100 to 1,000 camels, each carrying around 500 pounds, were easy targets for bandits, making security essential. The Chinese established forts and walls, but not until local government stabilized the Taklimakan did settlement occur. Settlers prospered from trade and incorporated both local cultures and the cultures of those who traded along the route. Buddhism and Islam traveled to China along this route, as did Christianity. At the Silk Road’s peak, Chang’an was a massive city of millions, with thousands of emigrants from the communities along the road as well as others including Malays, Koreans, and Japanese. After the thirteenth-century conquest by Genghis Khan and his Mongols, the Silk Road became a path of communication as well as a trade route. The Mongols kept the road open and safe, and the thirteenth century saw the beginnings of European travel to East Asia.
The road declined as the Chinese empire turned inward under Ming nationalist isolationism in the fourteenth century. Political and religious barriers proved more insurmountable than the deserts and mountains. Once the road closed, the traders shifted to sea routes. Europeans learned how to produce their own silk and otherwise get by without the East. Lessened maintenance, increased banditry, declining trade, and religious conflict meant the demise of the Silk Road.
During its life, the Silk Road was the most important of the trade routes that joined East and West, making possible the exchange of technology, art, and knowledge of the great civilizations. As were all trade routes, the road was a vital carrier of ideas, as shown by the transport of Buddhism from India to China by itinerant and immigrant monks (100–600 C.E.). The road itself shifted with time, climate, and drought—and the “road” also included sea travel on the Mediterranean. The Silk Road was more of a network of exchange using various routes, rather than a physical road.
The sea was neutral, an avenue for the exchange of information, goods, and human resources. The Japanese sailed to Korea and China, and by the sixth century Chinese and Korean immigrants were entering Japan, which in return sent students, monks and officials to China for training. The Sea of Japan and the Yellow and Eastern Seas were in effect an extension of the Silk Road and from the sixth century, Osaka, at the road’s end, was Japan’s portal to the West.
Europe
After Islam split the East from the West, trade and migration continued in the East. The West went into the shell of feudalism, shunting its immigrant merchants into the Jewish quarter and other ghettoes. European societies were not hospitable to trade and immigration anyway.
While the Eastern civilizations thrived, Europe was tribal, mostly a hunter-gatherer society. Emigrants from outside Europe introduced agriculture in the fifth millennium B.C.E., and the Minoan culture reinforced the cultural change when it entered mainland Greece in the first part of the second millennium B.C.E. By late in the third millennium B.C.E., Europeans practiced subsistence agriculture and cattle raising—and rustling. Agricultural surpluses were uncommon, unlike in the Eastern civilizations. This, in combination with the Europeans’ fondness for cattle raids against their neighbors and the Eastern immigrants, prevented the rise of urban centers and the associated culture that characterized Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow Valley of China.
There was an effect on European warrior civilizations from the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, whose civilizations had metalworkers without adequate supplies of raw materials, especially tin. The search for tin and other metals and amber led the great states to establish trade routes to Europe. The presence in Europe of more advanced Egyptians and Mesopotamians allowed Europe to enter the Bronze Age with greater speed and fewer false starts than were experienced by earlier world cultures. As far west as England and as far north as Scandinavia, third- and second-millennium B.C.E. Europeans were pushed into cultural growth in exchange for tin, amber, bronze, faience, gold luxury items, and copper. Even as trade and Eastern influence continued, central Europe became more entrenched as a warrior society, letting immigrants of other cultures handle trade. In place by 700 B.C.E., this pattern persisted through the Middle Ages.
In southern Europe, the Roman empire was primarily a Mediterranean empire, but it had frontiers in the woods of northern Europe and in the deserts of the Middle East and the Sahara. Syrians and Jews dominated Roman trade, which allowed the various regions of the empire to specialize. Under the empire, the Romans and the Germanic tribes influenced each other. On the other hand, Roman defeats in the east resulted in barriers to trade that were not negotiable. The fall of Rome to the Goths in 410 C.E. cut off the Mediterranean grain trade from Egypt and the importation of tin from Cornwall. Also slowing trade and immigration was the spread of Islam between the seventh and eleventh centuries across the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain.
As early as 500, Cushite and Bantu immigrants forced the Bushmen from coastal East Africa. As part of the expansion of Islam around 700, Arabs, Persians, and Indians migrated to the area. They were active traders with Arabia, Egypt, and Rome. Benefiting from the monsoon winds, traders came in dhows to barter with the coastal middlemen, preferring not to enter the dry zone inland, or encounter hostility and disease farther west. Cowrie shells sometimes served as currency in this trade that peaked between 1300 and 1500. Principal exports were gold, ivory, and slaves. Also exported were skins, rhinoceros horns, along with other raw materials. Imports included Chinese silk and porcelain, Maldive cowries, Persian rugs, Burmese jars and pots, and Arabian weapons and ironware.
In a time of unrest, Europe lost contact with the East for 700 years. Slowly, stability was reestablished, and from 1000, Europe began to recover. Helping the process were the Vikings. From their Scandinavian homelands, they traded Baltic amber and Russian slaves in Constantinople for silk and spices. They also traded furs, skins, and walrus-tusk ivory from Greenland and northern Europe with the trading towns of western Europe. They settled where they traded. Viking cities include Birka, Skiringsal, Ribe, and Hedeby in Scandinavia. York, England, and Dublin, Ireland, were also Viking trading cities. From Kievan Russia, Vikings kept trade with Byzantium open when the Mediterranean routes were closed or unsafe. They also brought to Europe Arab silver, Byzantine silk, and the rudiments of a still-viable civilization, perhaps even economic growth.
European trade was mostly local, with itinerant peddlers traveling from one place to another. Sometimes peddlers would settle, but cultural interchange was minimal. Another group of immigrant traders, dating from at least the mid-thirteenth century, the Hansa or Hanseatic League was a medieval combination of German cities trading in the Baltic Sea. The merchants commonly had special quarters in the cities with which they traded, leading to a natural association with the locals. In the absence of a strong central state, the Hansa combined for defense against pirates and built lighthouses for safety. At their peak, Hansa enclaves in Belgium, Norway, Russia, and England had the power to demand and receive special privileges, including monopolies. Hansa power peaked in the mid-fourteenth century when the league exceeded 100 cities, some of which were not German. The league’s army and navy defeated the Danes in 1386, but the world was changing, and merchants working through centralizing states were becoming more powerful than merchant cities and the traders in immigrant ghettoes.
In the twelfth century, the old roads came back into partial use, but they were risky and inconvenient. By the fifteenth century, Europe was awakening, consolidating, and looking for a way to trade without going through Asia Minor or the Magyar- and Saracen-controlled areas. Merchant-influenced governments were sending explorers, priests, and immigrants in search of trade, preferably a monopoly.
Mercantilism and European Migration
After unifying and funding Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492, Spain was present in the Philippines by 1565, Christianizing the natives, settling among them, and dominating the spice trade. Spain kept its Asian colonies for three centuries and its American ones into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spain’s immigrants altered world trade patterns in the East and West.
Spanish immigrant landowners extracted money and labor from the natives. Under government auspices, the Philippines controlled the trade between Mexico and China from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Mexican silver in Manila bought Chinese silk and porcelain. Heavily controlled by the Spanish government until the 1820s, the Philippines were opened to free trade by the Spanish Crown in 1834. Manila quickly became an international center for the United States and Europe looking to establish trade relations in Asia.
Not all immigrants had landholdings, or opportunities. As early as 1503, African slaves filled the Caribbean labor shortage as involuntary immigrants to Spanish Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. Ships and crews in the trade were Spanish, Genoese, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Flemish, and English.
Portuguese from Lisbon and Oporto sailed around Africa in search of the East Indies and established a lucrative trade in West Africa for gold, pepper, ivory, and slaves, and in the Atlantic islands for honey, timber, and other raw products. Having a population of only 1.25 million people at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Portugal failed to establish political control over its territories as Spain did. By the end of the sixteenth century, the overseas population was too great for the home population to support; Portugal compounded its population shortage when it expelled the Jews and Muslims, and suffered a disastrous plague.
The Dutch had their own republic, along with religious tolerance and liberal views toward innovation in trade and financial arrangements. These factors attracted educated and well-connected immigrant bankers and merchants from northern Italy and Jews and Huguenots, among others, from elsewhere in Europe. Amsterdam became the commercial center of the seventeenth century. Its stock market, the world’s first, was a venue for French, Venetians, Florentines, Genoese, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Spaniards, Russians, Turks, and Armenians. Educated, ambitious, and welcome, immigrants used Amsterdam as the center of their world trading networks. Dutch trade colonies existed from Batavia, Java, to New Amsterdam in the West. Immigrants founded the financial trade networks.
The English entered the world picture late, establishing colonies in a world where they had to establish their own cities first. The American colonial populations grew as a result of trade. Once they figured out that gold was not a realistic route to wealth, the middle and southern colonies traded tobacco and naval stores. English mercantilism gave New England a protected shipping industry. Protected trade promoted colonial growth through natural increase and through immigration. When the European homelands tightened colonial trade restrictions, immigrants in the colonies resorted to smuggling to continue trade.
Western colonists sent raw material to Europe, which sent back finished goods, sometimes brought from the East. Liverpool, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Cadiz, and other port cities prospered. One of the principal moneymakers was the involuntary immigrant: the slave. Slavers from England, Portugal, and the other mercantile states traded cheap finished goods on the coast of West Africa for slaves, who furnished the labor that produced the tobacco, cotton, and other crops that made more fortunate immigrants rich and independent.
Sometimes, immigrants took over the work of slaves. In the French territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe, planters imported contract workers from the Indian subcontinent after emancipation of the slaves in 1848.
Asia Under Imperialism
In Asia, European immigrants were not as able to eliminate the indigenous populations as they were elsewhere. They established trading companies such as the British and Dutch East India Companies, and they did influence governments, as when the British company held large segments of India as a virtual fiefdom. But the older Asian countries managed to resist, wanting nothing but European silver and gold, and they held the upper hand through most of the mercantile era. The cultural exchange centered on Manila, where the Chinese traders met the Spanish galleons filled with Mexico’s silver.
In the South China Sea, the Chinese traded silk and porcelain for rice, medicinal plants, aphrodisiacs, and birds’ nests, luxury items for Chinese consumption. This network also linked to other regional trade routes through Batavia and the Strait of Melaka (Malacca). Besides the South China Sea network, the Dutch East India Company in Batavia marginalized the Javanese traders, as it became the dominant organization from Aceh to the Moluccas. The company traded cloves, nutmeg, tin, and pepper. Although focused on Indonesia, the company had links to Asia and Africa, from the China Sea and the Indian Ocean to Cape Town, Arabia, Persia, India, Burma (Myanmar), Siam (now Thailand), Vietnam, Formosa (Taiwan), and Nagasaki.
The British East India Company sailed from South Asia to Burma, Siam, and Malaya up to Sumatra. This trade consisted of Indian cloth, rice, teak ships from Burma, pepper and tin from Malaysia, and spices from around the area of the Strait of Melaka. The company employed not only English, but also Gujaratis, Muslims, and Chulias from India, Persians, Arabs, and Syrians. Significantly, although the Europeans dominated these trade and cultural exchanges, the most important group remained the overseas Chinese.
China entered the overseas trade between 1405 and 1433. Fleets entered the Indian Ocean seven times, sailing as far as Africa. The largest junks in these fleets had nine masts and a length of 400 feet. Supply ships and patrol boats escorted trading vessels. Crews totaled nearly 30,000. But after this period, China withdrew from overseas commerce, its fleet wasted away, and its navigation charts were burned by the minister of war.
In the sixteenth century, overseas Chinese merchants became important as immigrant traders in the present-day Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. The most important of Chinese immigrant traders where the Hakkas, who migrated to central China then on to the rest of Asia. The Hakkas comprised a significant proportion of Chinese in Taiwan and elsewhere outside China.
By the eighteenth century, the overseas Chinese trading network tied Asia to the West. This network included Vietnam, Siam, and Malaya to the west and the Philippines and Indonesia to the east. The overseas Chinese in Siam had a fleet consisting of 136 junks, 82 of which sailed between China and Malaya, Java, and Vietnam. Others traded from South China to Vietnam.
Most of the 60 million overseas Chinese lived in Southeast Asia, being the majority in Singapore and making up significant minorities in Indonesia, Siam, and Malaya. Overseas Chinese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries migrated to North America, especially Canada and the United States, initially to work on the railroads and in the mines. Once this work ended or they were forced out, they established small shops and restaurants and an overseas trade with their home country. These immigrants concentrated in “Chinatowns” in the Western states, for example in San Francisco. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883 banned Chinese immigration. After the act was repealed in 1943, Taiwanese professionals immigrated on student visas. This influx discontinued after the Taiwanese economy improved in the 1970s, but mainland Chinese began immigrating after restrictions eased in 1977.
Overseas Chinese were vital in Sir Stanford Raffles’s colonial Singapore. Raffles developed an economic, legal, and social system open to all the diverse peoples of the port city. This openness led to emigration from Indonesia and China. Hong Kong and Taiwan were open as well and benefited from the arrival of Shanghai merchants and financiers, much as the Netherlands had benefited from skilled refugees from Iberia and Europe centuries before. The open cities of Asia were hubs of networks modeled after the historical use of Jews, Armenians, and Parsees, all the unwanted but not the untalented of the world.
Colonialism and After
In the late nineteenth century, the European nations engaged in vigorous colonialism that made much of Asia and Africa a provider of raw mate rials and slaves for the home nations. The degree of exploitation varied, as did willingness to accept emigrants from the colonies, but the presence of Asian and African colonials in the European countries led to some cultural exchange. After World War II, immigration occurred on a massive scale, and failure or success depended on how the immigrants were treated. Postcolonial France attempted to preserve the influence it had in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It had, after all, given citizenship (under certain conditions) to all members of its empire. As the dislocations of independence produced hardship, many emigrants from the former colonial areas entered France, as did the Europeans abandoning now hostile former territories. Still, trade had been established with the original immigration, and nothing in the new immigration shifted the trade priorities the immigrants had set.
Germany’s loss in World War I cost it the empire it had acquired earlier, but its final colonial venture came later in the twentieth century, when it forced millions of Germans to move to conquered territory and non-Germans to move from there. After World War II, the relocation of displaced persons was an immense undertaking. Between 1945 and 1961, 12 million immigrants, mostly skilled, entered Germany. Three-fourths were Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Others were refugees from East Germany. As a result, West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s had a higher ratio of workers to total population than other states: 50 percent versus 45 percent in France, 40 percent in the United Kingdom, 42 percent in the United States, and 36 percent in Canada. When the European influx slowed, new skilled workers flowed in, first from the Mediterranean states, then from the edge of Asia. But when the economy slowed in the late 1990s, there was pressure to deport immigrants.
In the United States, immigrants continued to flourish. Trading cities in early twenty-first-century United States shared the characteristic growth of earlier trading cities. Approximately three-fourths of the 10 million immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1980s settled in a few urban states. New York and California absorbed half the immigration. Eight of the ten most ethnically diverse counties were in New York, Los Angeles, or the San Francisco area. Southern California became attractive in the 1980s to new immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Los Angeles was especially attractive for those with business and financial skills.
Immigrants to the United States—like these on Ellis Island in 1930—have long served as a major source of cheap labor for manufacturers, giving U.S. industry a great competitive advantage in world trade through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Library of Congress)
Los Angeles once had a decaying warehouse/factory district east of downtown. A Hong Kong immigrant, Charlie Woo, revitalized the neighborhood and attracted more than 500 toy importers, warehouses, and distributors who employed 6,000 people in a $1 billion business. Most of the owners and workers emigrated from the Middle East, Asia, or Latin America. Most of the customers were immigrants as well, bringing the world’s toy buyers and consumers together. Similar successes occurred in the flower, fish, vegetable, trucking, and textile industries. Occupancy rates exceeded 95 percent in the once-decaying district.
Another success was New York’s trade in services—media, advertising, and finance. New York’s combined Latino and Asian populations in 2000 approached 3 million. New York immigrant-owned companies dealt throughout the world. New York’s immigrant base—including Russian Jews, Koreans, and Asians—gave the city’s companies a better grasp of foreign and domestic market demographics.
In Miami, the high crime and out-migration in the 1970s and 1980s gave way in the 1990s to a thriving Latino culture fueled by Miami’s 650,000 Cubans, 75,000 Nicaraguans, and 65,000 Colombians. In 1994, Miami had one-fourth of America’s South American trade, almost 40 percent of the export business, 40 percent of Caribbean trade, and nearly 60 percent of Central American trade. Miami was home to Univision and Telemundo, broadcasters to Spanish speakers in the United States and Latin America. Other southern cities from Jacksonville to Houston are seeking the same access to international markets using their immigrant populations.
Between 1870 and 1910, 60 million Europeans migrated, mostly from underdeveloped areas, to the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Additional migrations occurred between less-developed countries and from rural to urban areas of the same country. About 10 percent of the world population emigrated, and more than that migrated. But the migrations slowed as opportunity arose at home, and at the end of the millennium, only about 2 percent of the world’s population lived outside its country of citizenship.
At century’s end, trade became a potential route to globalization because trade policy affected employment, patterns of consumption, production, and distribution, cultural and social values, and the environment, all of which were global issues. Trade, especially in services, grew drastically in a world without borders. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of manufactured goods created by developing countries rose from 3 to 18 percent. In the 1990s, the economies of the thirteen largest poor countries grew an average of 7.3 percent a year. Women as well as men benefited from the worldwide growth of professional services (law, banking, and computing), tourism, and information services from offshore airline booking and credit card distribution to word processing for publishers and others regardless of geographical location.
After thousands of years, immigration peaked in the nineteenth century. Twenty-first-century globalization allows those who would have emigrated to trade at home. The trade-immigrant nexus is weaker than it has been because the would-be immigrant now travels the Web instead of the roads and seas.
John Barnhill
See also: Barter; British Empire; Chinese Dynasties; Crusades; Dutch; European Trade, Intracontinental; Food and Diet; French Empire; German Empires; Jews; Polo, Marco; Slavery; United States; Vikings; Warfare.
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