The Wrong Side of the River: a Cantonese Emigrant Community in the Nineteenth-Century Mobility Transition

Abstract

This focused study of one emigrant community in southern China explores linkages between internal and overseas migration during the nineteenth century, emphasizing both the diversity of lived experience and the contingent nature of categories that have informed the historiography of overseas Chinese migrants. Building on comparative studies that present an aggregate picture of changing migration patterns during the “mobility transition,” this microhistory shows how both preexisting and novel patterns of internal migration (urbanization, frontier migration, and military migration) shaped new strategies of overseas migration. For this particular emigrant community, new dynamics of migration in the mid-nineteenth century influenced the reputation of its emigrants, bringing about a transition from respectability to notoriety. Whereas earlier patterns of internal migration had linked this community to its neighbor on the opposite bank of the West River, new dynamics of migration in the nineteenth century bolstered the river’s role as a boundary. This community’s liminal place highlights the contingent nature of nineteenth-century tropes and current categories of overseas Chinese migrants.