The burgeoning literature on immigrant transnationalism is one of the academic success stories of our times. Yet having reminded scholars that migrants, in leaving home for a new life abroad, inevitably tie place of origin and destination together, scholars of transnationalism have also insisted that today's cross-border connections are unprecedented. This collection of articles by sociologically minded historians and historically minded sociologists takes aim at that contention. Looking back over the past century and more, the book highlights both the long-term persistence and the continuing instability of home country connections.

Encompassing societies of origin and destination from around the world, A Century of Transnationalism shows that while population movements across states recurrently produce homeland ties, those connections have varied across contexts and from one historical period to another, changing in unpredictable ways. Any number of factors shape the linkages between home and destination, including conditions in the society of immigration, policies of the state of emigration, and geopolitics worldwide.

Internationally oriented and advancing arguments likely to stir scholarly controversy, A Century of Transnationalism offers scholars and students alike leading-edge works that illustrate--and complicate--the important questions driving today's study of migration.

Contributors: Houda Asal, Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Caroline Douki, David FitzGerald, Nancy L. Green, Madeline Y. Hsu, Thomas Lacroix, Tony Michels, Victor Pereira, Mônica Raisa Schpun, and Roger Waldinger

"In exploring migrants' cross-border connections over time, this collection of insightful and highly readable essays offers fresh perspectives and fascinating historical analysis on a topic central to the study of immigration. An indispensable guide to understanding the dynamics involved in transnational ties that will be a highly valued resource for students and scholars alike."--Nancy Foner, coauthor of Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe

"This volume, edited by two of the foremost scholars in the field, infuses migration studies with sorely needed historical perspective, conceptual clarity, and theoretical depth by treating the transnational not as a mantra but as actual social spaces/processes that can be understood empirically and historically."--José C. Moya, author of Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930

"Immigrant men and women shape and maintain transnational, often locally embedded linkages, and statesmen utilize or frame such connectivity. Both sides engage each other to achieve familial and statewide goals, economic, political, and emotional ones. The authors masterfully weave specific analyses into a longue-durée perspective of transcultural relations."--Dirk Hoerder, author of Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium