摘要
Today one of the most polarising problems across the developed world,the first world,is the movement of apparently uncontrollable millions of people over borders.The fears that these torrents of people induce are profound and now invade virtually all political agendas in Europe,America and beyond.The movement of relatively poor people towards the affluent countries is a universal phenomenon,the source of anxiety and radical policies to stop up the borders.International migration is not new一the long history of Europe is one of the waves of invading populations,partly colonising,partly conquering,partly displacing― ver many centuries.This was mainly intra-continental migration though some of it echoed later variants.In the early nineteenth century,there was a vital change in scale,reach and velocity of this migratory tendency.Oceanic migration out of Western Europe rose rapidly after 1820 and became mass international migration.It was a prototype of modem mass migration,and it originated in the British Isles,the source and dynamic of the socalled Anglosphere.The process then appeared to replicate across Europe in the following 80 years.It was also the model for the same process across the world during the next century and its present day aftermath.This paper explores some of the origins of mass international migration and its repercussions.
