| Summary: | Since the late nineteenth century, the "problem" of long-distance migration has made migrants, their social networks, and institutions which promote or constrain mobility subjects of fact-finding missions and social science theorization. More recently, perceived disconnects between the "global" and the "local" in world history and between "macro" and "micro" level explanations of population movements in migration studies have led these two discourses to a similar conceptual position: "mesolevel" theories identifying social structures which connect parts of the world by channeling information, people, capital, and policy-making styles among them. Yet such calls for meso-level analysis have obscured the fact that a desire to investigate the relationship between migrants and transimperial, transoceanic, or transnational social institutions that may shape their possibilities, is not a new phenomenon. Using migrant travel narratives, shipping company promotional literature, immigration inspectors reports, colonial labor board archives, and early twentieth-century studies of the "problems" caused by international migrations, this dissertation illustrates how the complex interactions of migrants, non-migrants, former migrants, and possible future migrants have shaped directions and conditions of emigration and return across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins.
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