This paper centres life story and biographical methods as a means to illuminate mobility and assess its impact on global and transnational history. Stemming from a research project on the lived experience of South Africans in exile in Sweden during the struggle against apartheid (1960-1994), the experiences of these exiles function as case studies for how the movement of people might allow us to understand how ideas, philosophies and political strategies also move and are mobilised across borders.The paper is inspired by Isabel Hofmeyer’s argument that “historical processes” are “constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions”. Hofmeyer also argues that transnational history “opens up broader analytical possibilities for understanding the complex linkages, networks, and actors in the global South.”[1] As such, the paper examines not just exile life in Sweden but also the onward migration from Sweden – often back to South Africa following the fall of the apartheid regime in 1994. It also attempts to understand how place and mobility are connected through these exiles’ biographies. Furthermore, the paper follows Tara Zahra’s recent call to conceptualise “‘mobility’ in part because it captures the multi-directionality of movement” and to take “the journey itself seriously, rather than simply treating it as ‘empty time’ between here and there”.[2] Thus, the paper explores lived experiences and the emotional impact of mobility and cross-border lives, connecting the Global North to the Global South in multiple ways.[1] Isabel Hofmeyer in ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’ The American Historical Review, 111:5 (2006), p.  1444.[2] Tara Zahra, ‘Migration, Mobility and the Making of a Global Europe’, Contemporary European History, 31:1 (2022), p. 144.

The development of the field of Global History has offered new perspectives on our knowledge about different regions of the world. In what concerns to Africa, there have been new viewpoints on the interconnection of diasporic African histories with world histories, a welcome move towards the place of African ideas and agencies in the New World, and a less national approach to imperial history. Yet nevertheless, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and Eurocentrism remain some of the characteristics of the supposedly “global turn”. Global history cannot ignore local perspectives and the specificities that define different communities. Following the proposals of Ghobrial and other authors in a recent issue of Past and Present (Supplement 14, 2019), this paper will combine global and microhistory to better understand the role of African men and women in shaping global cultures. Focusing in particular on religious beliefs and practices, I will show that despite the violence that characterised slave societies, from Lisbon to the hinterlands of Brazil, passing through Luanda and the Caribbeans, Africans were active agents of cultural creativity.

This paper focusses on the experiences of Pak Hoin, a Korean local yangban (scholarly elite) who was taken to Tosadomain in Japan during the East Asian War of 1592–8. Hoin was one of thousands of Koreans transported to Japan during the conflict and who were forced to find their way in their new environment. Whilst the experiences of Korean captives have often been confined to globally important export industries, especially porcelain, their impact was far more widespread. Indeed, their impact at the local level, so often overlooked amongst preoccupations with global flows, left lasting impacts and shaped local economies, society, and imagination. By tracing the story of the Hoin and his descendants, and their impact on the tofu industry in Tosa, this paper will place it next to that of other Korean migrants and demonstrate that their experiences were highly varied and dependent on multiple contingent factors from individual skill to social status, cultural capital, family dynamics, local social networks, and local politics. By identifying such factors, it becomes possible to unearth individual migrant experience showing the importance of close relations between local domains and migrants, and the implementation and adaptation of skills and knowledge.

World War II triggered a massive wave of human mobility and migration globally, making it a key case for analysing war-induced international migration. However, global histories of WWII often focus disproportionately on Western experiences of war induced international migration and mobility, neglecting those in non-Western regions. This presentation aims to address this imbalance by examining war-induced migration in the Asia-Pacific, specifically the forced labour migration of comfort women. Approximately 200,000 women, primarily Korean and other Asian nationals, were forcibly mobilised across the Asia-Pacific, including to locations like New Guinea, to serve Japanese soldiers. The sheer number and the scale of geographic reach of their international mobility demand an analysis of the mechanisms that enabled and governed these wartime migrations. By viewing comfort women as subjects of forced labour migration, this presentation reconstructs the system that managed their movements using a migration infrastructure framework. Given the contentious nature of this topic and debates surrounding oral testimonies, the analysis is based exclusively on archived and published military documents of the Japanese Imperial Army. A methodological contribution of this work is its multi-scale analysis—local, national, and international—offering a more robust approach than the commonly used concepts of transnational and transimperial. This multi-scale framework allows for the examination of not only cross-border but also diagonal connections that cut across different scales.