Plenary: Moving Labor, Making Worlds: Migration, Empire, and Diaspora
Bin Yang, Reena Goldthree, Zou Kunyi, Pedro Machado, Ryuto Shimada, Sheng Fei, Ming Zhu
How did mobile workers shape the modern world order? This plenary asks historians to explain the intertwined histories of labor migration and diaspora across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, highlighting how workers moved through imperial systems, commercial circuits, and diasporic communities and how labor migration stimulated new social formations, political movements, and transregional connections that reshaped the modern world.