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Between 1600 and 1950, the vast majority of mobile subjects (what some might now call ‘economic migrants’) originated in Europe and sought their fortunes on other continents. An estimated 62 million people – settlers, labourers, colonials, imperialists, invaders – moved around European empires in the period 1800–1950 (Miège 1993). Indeed, colonialism was characterized by conquest, exploitation and domination through migration. From the massive forced migrations of the triangular slave trade and circuits of indenture to the almost unfettered mobility of many (but not all) white Europeans within their various empires, from the large-scale population displacements which the turbulence of decolonization gave rise to to the migration of people from the former colonies to the former metropoles in the mid- to late twentieth century, the history of migration globally is very much entangled with colonialism. It should be unsurprising to us, then, that patterns of mobility and immobility today follow these colonial-era logics in what Steffen Mau and colleagues call ‘the global mobility divide’ (Mau et al 2015). Or that border regimes effectively amount to ‘multilateral projects for the regional containment of Third World persons beyond the First World’ (Achiume 2019: 1515). And yet, when consulting the indexes of a selection of key texts of migration studies today, it is very rare to find any mention of colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization. If the absence of empire as a relevant context to migration studies is a surprise, so too is the general lack of interest in the legacies and continuities of colonialism for contemporary migration governance and the experiences of ‘migrants’ and ‘hosts’ today.

This book starts from the premise that colonial histories should be central to migration studies. We argue that colonialism is so fundamental to contemporary migrations, mobilities, immobilities, receptions and social dynamics that it is certainly not something that should only be of concern to scholars of colour, indigenous scholars and/or those working in formerly colonized countries. Our overarching aim is to explore what it would mean (acknowledging that it will not in fact mean one thing but many) to take seriously the centring of colonialism in researching migration, not through forging new theories but through learning from, and being inspired by, the wealth of literature that already exists in the world to engage with this task.

Migration studies is of course a diverse multidisciplinary field. Yet even critical migration studies has tended, according to Tudor (2018: 1065), ‘to forget about postcolonial racism and racialization and instead promoted an understanding of migration that is disconnected from postcolonial analysis’. Gayatri Spivak (1999) calls this type of silencing ‘sanctioned ignorance’. Sanctioned ignorance is not necessarily an issue of individual malice but is an institutionalized way of thinking about the world which operates to foreclose particular types of analysis or considerations from entering into the debate. One of the enabling factors of this type of silencing is the real urgency of contemporary issues and ‘crises’ relating to migration. Certainly, presentism is engendered within the field as every year brings new crises, displacements and patterns of migration and new politicians and laws seeking to control it. The present is, it seems, always new.

This underlying framework of ‘the unprecedented present’ within migration studies and migration policy making does not lend itself to a deep engagement with history. Nevertheless, a sense of history does quietly frame most analyses of the present. We see this in claims to ‘unprecedentedness’ itself – the common assumption that because a phenomenon is highly visible, contested and difficult to administratively manage, nothing like this has happened before. Because the world’s population is growing all the time, even if the percentage of people that migrate always stays the same, each year will see unprecedented numbers of migrants crossing borders. But that isn’t quite the same as ‘nothing like this has ever happened before’. More explicit nods to history appear in the context sections of books or articles which briefly explain how rights emerged, or how things have changed since previous periods, before moving on to the topic at hand. Sometimes these contexts mention colonialism but most often not.

We think that sanctioned ignorance of histories of colonialism, and of the wide-ranging debates around the legacies of colonialism in the present, within migration studies is a problem. First, because ignoring vast swathes of human history leaves us with theories which are inadequate to the task of making sense of the present. Second, because without acknowledging these histories, the common usage of dehumanizing phrases associated with racial science such as the animalistic ‘migrant stocks’ and the disaster-like migrant ‘flows’, ‘mass influxes’ and ‘waves’ can appear objective rather than historically and culturally emergent. Third, it facilitates the denial of ongoing colonialisms in the present, and in doing so silences struggles for justice.

While, at the time of writing this book, it is common to attend a migration studies conference and fail to find a single paper that mentions colonialism (or indeed ‘race’), questions of mobility and ‘migration’ have been taken up by those working beyond the field of migration studies, in postcolonial, decolonial and related intellectual projects. From the start, postcolonialism, decoloniality, indigenous studies, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and many other projects have been interested in migrations, diasporas, conquests and hybrid transnational identities, and the power relations that they gave rise to on multiple spatial scales. This means that there already exists a substantial body of work which presents concepts and frameworks for analysing migration in the (post/neo-)colonial present. Much of this work in postcolonial studies has been in the arts and humanities but it is ripe for application to social scientific phenomena. Other areas of scholarship such as decoloniality and TWAIL have more directly engaged with social scientific questions. Indeed, there are numerous bodies of work across the social sciences internationally which both address migration and place colonialism at the centre of their analyses. Yet the core of migration studies, which is highly influential in international policy-making circles, appears to remain largely unaffected by this work.

This book responds to this disconnect. Its purpose is not to spend endless pages critiquing migration studies as it is articulated in hegemonic journals, conferences, policy fora and textbooks in the Global North. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate what paying attention to colonialism through using the tools offered by postcolonial, decolonial and related scholarship can offer those studying international migration today. We do not present a new grand theory or claim that every single thing that people want to research can be explained with reference to colonialism. What we do offer is a range of inspiring and challenging perspectives on migration that are less often seen in influential migration studies research centres in Europe and North America, not least because students are so often asking us for reading lists along these lines. We also, by extension, suggest that in raising the colonial question, those engaging in research on migration may then need to consider the politics of knowledge production – the underlying assumptions, categories and concepts – which they rely on within this academic field.

While literatures already exist which should make ignoring colonialism seem like a bizarre and naive omission, these literatures seem still to be inaccessible, or unimportant, to many. This book seeks to showcase some of this work for people who research migration and yet never encounter such perspectives. If you are well versed in these debates, the issues that we discuss will doubtless seem obvious. Indeed, we are ‘white’ academics working in British higher education institutions and for this reason our perspectives are of course particular and limited, and undoubtedly readers will spot omissions and parochialisms throughout the book. Whilst we have sought to frame our discussion of the literature and examples in a global manner, we still broadly rely upon the legacy of intellectual projects from the Americas (North and South), with engagements from scholars from Asian and African traditions. For those not familiar with these literatures, we hope that this book will raise questions such as how broadly postcolonial and decolonial perspectives might change the kinds of research questions that we ask in migration studies, as well as the ways in which we analyse our data. Do such perspectives allow us to frame our research in terms that accord with the interests of policy makers? No. Are such perspectives policy friendly in the current terms of debate on migration? Rarely. If, and how, these perspectives can therefore be used in challenging migration policy, as most critical work hopes to do, is a topic for contemplation in the coming years. This volume, we hope, will spark discussion as part of what some have termed the ‘postcolonial turn’ in migration studies (Koh 2015; Tudor 2018). Our aim is not that you cite this book, but that in the future you cite some of the scholars discussed within it.