Legal responses to mass migration: from the Nineteenth Century to World War II

The volume explores the legal history of migration and the role played by legal theories, case law, practices, customary laws, and legislations in shaping and governing mobility between the 19th and 20th centuries. Based on different methodological approaches and sources (archival documents, special courts’ decisions, diplomatic materials, legal journals and books, international treaties), the chapters are focused on countries of departure and destination both in Western and Eastern regions. Confronted with mass migration, Western legal science was forced to rethink concepts and institutions such as borders, citizenship and the principle of territoriality, undesirable immigrant, illegal and criminal alien; special courts and administrative bodies were created to govern and control this new complex social phenomenon. The volume, related to the national research project Legal History and Mass Migration: Integration, Exclusion, and Criminalization of Migrants in the 19th and 20th Century project (Prin 2017), contributes to investigate the historical tensions between individual freedom of mobility and state sovereignty over borders control.