Melancholy Borders: Mobility, Migration, and Exclusion in Global History (Columbia Studies in International and Global History)

A major contribution to the burgeoning field of global migration history, this book explores the historical clash between transnational networks of migrant mobility with state attempts to control them. Showcasing the latest research in the field, Melancholy Borders brings together a wide range of scholarship that illuminates the crucial role played by migration and migration regulation in the creation of the modern world.

Taking inspiration from the scholarship of historian Adam McKeown (1965–2017), contributors push migration history beyond its long-standing focus on the North Atlantic by spotlighting transnational networks across the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. At the same time, they demonstrate that consequent efforts to arrest the movement of people were foundational for the rise of the modern global order, international law, and the standardization of the nation-state. Nationalist efforts to restrict migration became a global phenomenon. Melancholy Borders presents case studies that offer different approaches to studying migration and its regulation, featuring conceptual richness as well as geographical and temporal diversity. This book at once marks the advances in the field of global migration history, takes stock of new directions, and opens up new trajectories for future research.

Andrew B. Liu is associate professor of history at Villanova University. He is the author of Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (2020).

Owen Miller is assistant professor of history at Bilkent University. He is the author of The Conquest of the Mountains: State Violence, Technology, and Authoritarianism in the Ottoman East (2025).

Meha Priyadarshini is senior lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade (2018).