Diaspora

Timeline

• 1815A second wave was driven by British recruitment of mercenary soldiers beginning around 1815 and resettlement after retirement in the British Isles and Southeast Asia.
• 1860Until the 1860s (and, in Mountainous areas and Southern Italy, well into the 1950s), most of Italy was a rural society, with many small towns and cities.
• 1880The first diaspora began around 1880, two decades after the Unification of Italy, and ended in the 1920s, with the rise of Fascist Italy.
• 1900Brubaker used the WorldCat database to show that 17 out of the 18 books on diaspora published between 1900 and 1910 were on the Jewish diaspora.
• 1910From the late 19th century, and formally from 1910, Japan made Korea a Japanese colony.

Read

• Jamaican DiasporaJanice Maxwell · 2015Book
• African DiasporaIngrid Monson · 2000Book
• DiasporaGreg Egan · 1997Book
• Global DiasporasCohen, Robin · 2002Book

Listen

• DiasporaJewish Voice for PeacePodcast
• Imagination & Diaspora: Best of 2019Ottoman History PodcastPodcast
• Diseño y DiásporaMariana SalgadoPodcast
• Diaspora UnitedDiaspora UnitedPodcast

Voices to follow

• Amarnath Amarasingam@AmarAmarasingam · XCanadian extremism researcher
• Sasha Turner@drsashaturner · XJamaican-American historian
• Sumita Mukherjee@smukherjee_hist · XHistorian

By the numbers

• 8.2BWorld population — global, 2025 (World Bank)
• 57.8Urban (% of people) — global, 2025 (World Bank)

Debates

• Does the concept of 'diaspora' apply to all migrant groups?One view: Yes, it offers a useful framework for understanding shared identity and connection to a homeland among diverse migrant populations. · Another: No, it should be reserved for groups with specific historical experiences of forced displacement and collective memory.Open question
• Do digital technologies strengthen or weaken diasporic ties?One view: They strengthen ties by enabling constant communication, cultural exchange, and political engagement across borders. · Another: They can weaken ties by creating fragmented online communities that replace deeper, in-person connections and local integration.Open question

Glossary

• DiasporaA population dispersed from its original homeland, often maintaining cultural and social ties to it.
• TransnationalismSocial processes where migrants maintain multiple ties to both their origin and host countries simultaneously.
• HomelandThe country or region of origin for a diasporic group, often a source of cultural identity.
• HostlandThe country or region where a diasporic group settles and establishes new lives.
• RemittancesMoney sent by migrants to family or communities in their home country, often a crucial economic link.
• Cultural HybridityThe blending of cultural elements from different societies, creating new forms of identity within a diasporic community.

Careers

Roles this can lead toward

Threads 4

Where this connects to other fields — and why it's worth knowing.

• Growth, Scaling, and Going Global Business

  When a company expands into a new country, it often lands where its own people already emigrated. Those expat communities offer ready-made trust and contacts, which makes breaking into a foreign market cheaper and safer. That's why trade tends to follow the migrants, not the migrants following the trade.

• Language Evolution Literature

  When a family moves countries, their language usually dies on a three-generation clock. Grandma speaks the old tongue, mom is bilingual, and the grandkid only speaks the new country's language. A whole heritage fades out on a schedule so predictable you could almost set a timer to it.

• Modelling & Simulation Mathematics

  How many people move between two cities follows a formula copied straight from Newton's gravity. More people in each city pulls harder, and more distance between them pushes flow way down. So crowds of humans drift toward each other almost like planets tugged by gravity, big masses pulling, distance weakening the pull.

• Genetics & DNA Science

  When a small group of people breaks off, settles somewhere isolated, and multiplies, whatever rare genes those few founders happened to carry become weirdly common in their descendants. That's the founder effect. It's why certain inherited diseases cluster in groups like Ashkenazi Jews, Afrikaners, and island peoples, not bad luck or a curse, just the math of starting a population from a handful of people.