This book connects the 19th- and 20th-century labor migrations and migration systems in global transcultural perspective. It emphasizes macro-regional internal continuities or discontinuities and interactions between and within macro-regions. The essays look at migrant workers experiences in constraining frames and the options they seize or constraints they circumvent. It traces the development from 19th-century proletarian migrations to industries and plantations across the globe to 20th- and 21st-century domestics and caregiver migrations. It integrates male and female migration and shows how women have always been present in mass migrations. Studies on historical development over time are supplemented by case studies on present migrations in Asia and from Asia. A systems approach is combined with human agency perspectives.

Research on labour migration up to the 1980s focused primarily on emigration of Europeans to the New World, corresponding with nineteenth-century industrialization, and on Asian indentured migration to colonial plantation and mining economies. In both sectors, scholars assumed, jobs were for men and thus migration was "a men's thing". In the frame of this assumption, a feminization of migration has been identified since the 1990s with the near collapse of industrial production in Europe and North America and the shift to service economies in western advanced countries with fast aging populations. The demand for domestic workers, nurses, and caregivers suddenly began to be highlighted and thus migration became "a women's thing". In the curiously gendered academic world, most male researchers continue to work on male proletarians of the past, while women scholars analyze female working migrants of the present. Thus, two parallel research agendas and discourses co-exist with porous, but not often crossed, borders between fields. In addition to the problem a majority of researchers had with gender, most also uncritically used the free versus forced dichotomy of labour and labour migrations. They treated slaves and indentured workers of colour (i.e.other than white) separately from European, white and "free" migrants. However, the "free" migrants were 'forced' to leave unacceptable living conditions and those labelled 'coolies' were, according to the data, mostly free or, more cautiously, 'self-willed' migrants. Only some 10 per cent of the Indian Ocean migrants were indentured servants.