In ‘The mobility transition revisited’, Jan and Leo Lucassen invite us to compare. They
already provide a strong temporal comparison between European mobility before and after
the Industrial Revolution. They also provide excellent tools for further comparison with
other parts of the world. The crux of their comparative method is to break up migration
into an array of mobilities that includes emigration, immigration, colonization, urbanization,
seasonal, and labour (soldiers and sailors), and to develop methods of quantification
for these categories that can be readily adapted to other contexts. Most importantly, these
categories create the possibility of nuanced comparisons between different structures of
mobility, rather than just crude comparisons between societies that are more or less ‘mobile’
or ‘modernized’.