Sometimes a book appears at just the right moment to have an impact and find a readership well beyond its particular academic specialism. A decade after they published The age of mass migration, Hatton and Williamson return to the same topic but with much more emphasis on recent (post-First World War) history and with a wider geographic focus. Today, as we are coming to grips with the impact of a new, more global, recession on migration, the analysis in this book contains a rich source for ideas on how it might unfold. Likewise, in terms of policy, the authors tackle lucidly the vexed question of why the OECD countries have developed policies restricting migration when the economic benefits are clearly so significant. This is undoubtedly the most significant economic history of global migration to date, containing a wealth of information and penetrating analysis. It is also entirely readable, in itself a major feat in my opinion.

It is hard to do justice to such a wide-ranging and complex analysis in a short review. The historical focus is a welcome antidote to ‘presentist’ accounts of migration as something particular to the late twentieth century. The authors also focus on how the earlier nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns of mass migration are limited compared to the way in which, today, even the most remote Third World village is within reach of some OECD country or another. The widening economic gap between rich and poor countries only exacerbates the pressure on those who are able to seek work elsewhere. The argument builds up from what drove European mass emigration from the mid nineteenth century to the First World War and the impact of that emigration on inequity in the rich countries and on the poor periphery. The demise of mass migration in the following period is followed closely and related to economic trends. Then the authors turn to the impressive rise in world migration after the 1960s as part of the ‘golden age’ of modern capitalism. What is most noticeable is that this second wave of mass migration took place in the context of an unremittingly hostile policy environment. As the authors remark, ‘imagine how much bigger those migrations would be today were we still living in the age of unrestricted migration that characterized the first global century before 1941’ (p. 3).

One theme that comes across strongly in Global migration and the world economy is the potential gain to be made in terms of global income if migration controls and restrictions were to be freed up. For the first global century, prior to the First World War, Hatton and Williamson argue that ‘World mass migration was much more important in contributing to income convergence than were booming world trade and booming world capital markets’ (p. 3). Today this is less the case because, while migration flows are as high in absolute terms, in relative terms they are not. Nevertheless the material in this book feeds in a much-needed historical perspective to current debates on migration and development. The gains that could be made from higher levels of global free-market liberalism have refused to recognize that the arguments for free trade are the same as those for free migration. The inward-looking period between the two global centuries described by Hatton and Williamson saw a backlash against free movement of people. It is as yet unclear how serious the backlash will be in the OECD countries now, as the global slowdown takes a grip.

The long view of migration compares mass migrations before the First World War and those since the Second World War. In both phases, what we now call globalization promoted the movement of people (through cheaper travel costs, for example) but also increased the development gap between sending and receiving countries. The main difference between the two periods of world history lies in the basically favourable attitude towards people movement in the first compared to the restrictions on immigration characteristic of the more recent period. So today, as globalization in its neo-liberal guise comes to a halt (or at least seriously slows down), what will be the impact on migration. Already we are witnessing a massive return of migrants to their countries of origin. In previous depressions there was always somewhere else to go, but not this time. If, as the International Labour Organization predicts, some 20 million jobs will be lost worldwide in 2009, then we can surely expect restrictions on migration to increase. Migrants will suffer, development will suffer as migrant remittances drop dramatically, and global development though increased labour mobility will be set back for a whole historical period. Global migration and the world economy is a must-read for any scholar, activist, or policy-maker who is interested in what history has to tell us about globalization and migration.