2026-06-27 –, Room 106 (Seats 105)
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.
Bin Yang, professor in the Department of Chinese and History, at City University of Hong Kong, is the author of Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan—Second Century BCE—Twentieth Century CE (Columbia University Press, 2008), Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019), and Discovered but Forgotten: the Maldives in Chinese History, c. 1100—1620 (Columbia University Press, 2024), in addition to more than ten Chinese monographs. He has published widely in prestigious journals such as American Historical Review, the China Quarterly, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Modern Asian Studies, Journals of World History and Journal of Women’s History. And he is one of the founding members of the Asian Association of World Historians, which, since 2008, has worked to promote world history teaching, research, and graduate training in and for Asia.