Inscribed Greek verse epitaphs were produced in relatively high numbers in the city of Rome under the Principate. Although many were made for slaves and freedmen, their use was not confined to them. The individuals who opted to use them made a deliberate choice to emphasize their Greek cultural identity. They may have had several motives, but often the deceased or their (grand)parents had migrated from the eastern parts of the Roman empire to Rome, voluntarily or involuntarily. By presenting themselves as Greek in their language and use of mythological exempla, they claimed the paideia (‘education’) and culture associated with the Greek literary past. Yet despite the heavy emphasis on Greekness, the epigrams also display an awareness of the Roman context in which they were set up. Greek epigrams formed excellent vehicles to navigate the cultural ambiguities of ‘being Greek’ in Rome, and this explains why Rome became a major production centre of Greek funerary epigram.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

By the end of the fourteenth-century AD, Native peoples throughout the midwestern and southeastern regions of North America had withdrawn from major monumental and political centers established in prior centuries. In this article, I present the results of a community-level examination of settlement transformations on the Georgia Coast that I argue are the outcome of this large-scale movement of Mississippian peoples. Specifically, I examine the consequences of the depopulation of the Savannah River Valley, a case of a rapid, historically contingent Mississippian emigration beginning in the fourteenth century AD. My results establish how a large-scale immigration event affected community spatial and political organization and demonstrate that migrants and coastal locals engaged in the collective cultural construction of new identities and lifeways in response to the challenges of negotiating the use of common pool resources, such as fisheries and suitable farmland. Reconstructing the spatial organization of communities can help explain the demographic, economic, and political processes that undergird the cultural materialization of space. Although much remains to be learned about intra-settlement organization at post-Archaic, precolonial sites along the Georgia Coast, this investigation provides new information about the local, community-level spatial response to the fourteenth-century immigration event.

Long-term projections are the bedrock of any analysis looking at the sustainability of public finances. This paper computes the changes in economic growth in individual European Union countries needed for government debt-to-GDP ratios to stay on their baseline trajectories (taken from the European Commission’s Debt Sustainability Monitor 2023) under high life expectancy, low-fertility, low-migration, and high-migration scenarios. These scenarios are provided in the Commission’s Ageing Report (2024). We find that deviations of migration from the baseline entail the largest effect on the required rate of economic growth. The effects of the low-fertility scenario are most pronounced in the very long run and sometimes exceed those of low migration. Our findings inform policymakers about the potential role of higher productivity growth in alleviating the public finance consequences of demographic shocks. The importance of higher productivity growth is increased by the fact that in some countries demographic projections tend to be optimistic.

This article explores the intersection of Cold War geopolitics, cultural psychiatry, and migration in Taiwan from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. Building on recent scholarship in cultural psychiatry and Cold War science, it examines how geopolitical tensions shaped psychiatric knowledge production in East Asia. Focusing on the psychological and social impact of the 1949 mass migration, when over a million Chinese immigrants arrived in Taiwan, alongside the clinical and academic work of Taiwanese psychiatrists, the study highlights how migration and societal upheaval became central research concerns. Operating under the authoritarian Kuomintang regime and within the constraints and opportunities of international politics, Taiwanese psychiatrists – most of whom were native-born with colonial backgrounds – drew on intellectual traditions from imperial Japan, fascist Germany, and the Cold War Western bloc. Navigating both global psychiatric discourses and local concerns, they positioned themselves as key contributors to the international development of psychiatric research. While their portrayals of Chinese character structure and family dynamics sometimes reflected essentialist views, their work also demonstrated a nuanced awareness of historical change and contemporary realities during a period of intense political repression and uncertainty. By analysing archival sources and medical texts, this article illuminates the complex interplay between geopolitics and psychiatric knowledge production in Cold War Taiwan.

As global migration continues to intensify, legislatures in liberal democracies increasingly feature policymakers with direct experiences with immigration. Concurrently, scholars often argue that electoral accountability creates incentives to appeal to public opinion, which in the context of immigration policymaking favors restrictions over admission. In this paper, we study these competing dynamics among these immigrant legislators. We theorize that political institutions—particularly political parties—impede the sincere expression of legislative preferences among legislators that come from immigrant backgrounds. To begin, we present stylized facts about legislative behavior drawing on roll-call votes from the Canadian, British, and American legislatures. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with representatives, we find strong evidence that the threat of political party sanction and individual concerns about legislators’ own parties affects legislative decision-making. These findings contribute to our understanding of legislative accountability and highlight how the trend of increasing immigration to democratic polities does not directly translate to political representation.

This paper examines the complex political-economic processes that shape contemporary forced displacement from Guatemala to the U.S. The study was driven by the following research question: How does capitalism and the historical context of forced migration in Guatemala relate to the creation and development of migrant-led organizations in the U.S. and the various types of leadership and political participation? Examining the political economy of Guatemalan migration to the Greater Los Angeles region and the activities of migrants and community organizations, I argue that neoliberal capitalism not only provokes the displacement of Guatemalan migrants as a social class of people from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, but it has also contributed to the emergence of distinct political Guatemalan diaspora organizations in the U.S. at the community, national, and transnational level. Furthermore, due to historical social relations in Guatemala, organizations have emerged in Southern California along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. Moreover, activism emerges within destination countries because exploitation and exclusion take on distinct forms beyond the specific economic and political forces that generate displacement in migrants’ origin countries. As such, these organizations have made significant contributions by safeguarding the human rights of Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. and have emerged based on the differences and inequalities faced by indigenous communities compared to non-indigenous (mestizo/ladino) groups as they and their organizations endure processes of “exclusionary inclusion” in the U.S.

This article poses a synthetic analytical approach to casing migratory projects that set out to effectuate a redistribution of power and resources: migration as contentious politics. Contentious migration is presented as an attempt by a collective to mobilize adequate political leverage to advance claims in the location of immigration through spatial relocation and demographic change. To demonstrate the analytical leverage of this approach, this article then conducts a case study of the under-examined Hechalutz settlement movement active in North America between 1905 and 1953, which facilitated the settler migration of American youth to rural agricultural colonies on the colonial frontiers of late-Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine. It draws on extensive, original findings in colony and national archives, examining official movement publications, correspondences, emissary notes, meeting minutes and daily records from the training farms across North America, diaries, and obituaries. Through eventful analysis, the article explicates three salient mechanisms of the mobilization for contentious migration: (1) environmental (attributing political opportunity and threat); (2) relational (forging networks, as a proxy for diffusion and organizational cohesion); and (3) cognitive (devising resonant diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framings).

Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, can reveal powerful insights into kinship and the movement of individuals in (pre)history. Here, the authors report on the identification of two individuals with genetic profiles consistent with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, both of whom were buried in early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain. Focusing primarily on a sub-adult female from Updown in Kent, the authors explore the societal and cultural contexts in which these individuals lived and died, and the widening geographic links indicated by their presence, pointing back to the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa in AD 533–534.

This article focuses on a case study of one Japanese prefectural association and its monthly magazine to reassess the importance of prefectural associations (kenjinkai) beyond the diaspora communities in North America on which Anglophone scholarly focus has remained until now. It also returns an overlooked imperial dimension to Japanese language histories of domestic prefectural associations and discourse over the ‘hometown’. Arguing that the expansive ideas of the hometown, created through the networks of prefectural associations and the pages of their publications, gave rise to ideas of borderless empire and frictionless mobility, this article demonstrates how histories of prefectural associations and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin present a new, regional perspective on both empire and the idea of the hometown in pre-war Japan. Associationalism in and beyond Japan’s empire was not unique, and this article puts the history of kenjinkai in conversation with other such regional settler networks around the globe that were happening at the same time. The article then looks at the transwar continuities and ruptures felt by overseas associations in both North America and among former Japanese colonists, before contextualizing the rise of a ‘third wave’ of domestic migration and hometown discourse in the 1960s.

This article follows the history of migration from the mountain villages of the Jebel Nafusa in Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb (in today’s northwestern Libya) to the southern Tunisian island of Djerba in the early 20th century. It situates this local history of migration within the broader framework of Maghribi migration both before and during the colonial era in Libya (1911–43), while tracing the histories of two categories of migrants, in particular, manual laborers and Qur’an teachers (m’addibs). The article makes three claims: (1) Nafusi migration was as much the result of local historical circumstances as it was a response to colonialism; (2) the historical experience of migration of Nafusis differed according to social class; and (3) local circumstances shaped the dynamics of migrant integration in the Maghrib. In doing so, I demonstrate how Nafusi migration to Djerba both conforms to and diverges from the larger history of late Ottoman and colonial-era migration in Tunisia. By shifting the focus away from the colonial moment, I make the case for foregrounding longer-term regional connections and migrations that linked different spaces across the Maghrib and also attend to local histories and what they offer in the way of caveats and exceptions.

The objective of this article is to explore the significance of labour-related laws and regulations, taking account of the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) and the Chinese government, particularly concerning labour, unemployment, and reform challenges. The analysis demonstrates that stringent labour laws are associated with lower unemployment rates due to increased job security and protection for workers. The study indicates that the CPP significantly shapes and influences labour-related policies and regulations, and so economic growth.