Zuwanderung nach Basel

The 2017 volume of the Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde is devoted to newer approaches to migration history. In recent years, it has developed from a subfield of social history into an independent, innovative field of research. Influences from cultural history and global history have been formative and are reflected in three basic assumptions: First, migration is now understood as part of the human condition. Migration has not been a marginal phenomenon in human history, but is part of the global mobility that has decisively shaped the history of the last two hundred years. Second, today there is a greater emphasis on the position of migrants between different cultures. Third, recent research has highlighted the complex and multi-layered entanglements between migration and territorialization in the European nation-states of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The contributions to the thematic focus take up these newer approaches to migration research and illustrate their potential for a Basel and Swiss social history.