Chinese Diasporas

'Covering internal and international Chinese migration from EARLY modern history to contemporary and armed with rich texts, notes, graphs, maps and tables, Chinese Diasporas offers insightful analyses and deep knowledge of the global Chinese diasporas. Miles' book is excellent for both scholarly reference and classroom teaching.' Wei Li, Arizona State University 'Brilliant and accessible, this sits on top of a growing list of books on the Chinese diaspora because Miles is the first historian to examine both internal and external migration in one grand, global narrative on Chinese mobility over 500 years. Microhistories of migrants move the analytical scale from local to regional, national and transnational.' Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, Rhode Island 'Miles expertly distills a huge and complex literature on Chinese migration into a clear and persuasive narrative enlivened by unforgettable stories of individuals and families. Encompassing mobility past and present, internal and international, this is the best introduction to the history of Chinese diasporas available.' Michael Szonyi, Harvard University, Massachusetts 'This sweeping, half-millennia history grounds global Chinese migrations in illuminating family stories and historical documents, thereby foregrounding the agency of individual Chinese and their family and native-place networks in developing a tremendous diversity of diasporic flows over time and a range of distances and economic circumstances. Miles presents the long trajectories of how changing communications and political systems shaped such flows, while demonstrating that amid striking continuities in aspirations and organizational strategies, the adaptiveness of Chinese migrants and their descendants have produced countless variations of localized and differentiated ethnic identities and cultures.' Madeline Hsu, University of Texas 'Miles (Washington Univ.) provides readers with a thoughtful, well-researched, comprehensive study of the history of Chinese migration ... This book will interest readers from many fields well beyond, but including, China studies.' M. C. Brose, Choice 'Chinese Diasporas is an ambitious effort to recount 500 years of overseas migration, flitting from locales such as Depression Era Chicago to British Malaya from one paragraph to the next.' Selina J. Gao, Canadian Journal of History