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When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Drawing on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanising areas in China, this paper analyses rural migrants' intention for permanent urban settlement. We focus on one sizeable but often overlooked group of rural migrants, that is, the self-employed. Our hypothesis is that the self-employed migrants tend to have stronger intention for permanent urban settlement since they are usually more ingrained in urban economy and society. The empirical evidence supports our hypothesis. Moreover, the social and economic choices made by the self-employed migrants are consistent with their expressed intentions: they are more likely to migrate with spouses and to live with their family members, more likely to have a plan for house purchase in cities; they are also more integrated into urban society in terms of learning local dialects and making friends with local permanent residents.

In the international context, considerable attention has been paid to majorities’ attitudes towards immigrants, emphasising the critical role such social context plays in shaping the lives and well-being of immigrants. However, these research perspectives have been particularly neglected in studies on domestic migrants, even though internal migrants in developing countries like India and China encounter severe discrimination in their destinations. Specifically, the effect of natives’ attitudes on out-groups’ migration/settlement has been underexamined. Based on the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this article tackles the two research gaps. It studies how local-hukou residents’ hostility and acceptance of migrants affect the intention of permanent settlement among rural-to-urban migrants. Moreover, it tests how the effect of attitudes varies within different contexts and among various groups of rural-to-urban migrants. Last, the study reveals that place attachment and place identity are pathways through which the acceptance from local-hukou residents affect the settlement intentions of rural-to-urban migrants. The study adds knowledge to the effects of inter-group relationships on the settlement decisions of migrants in the Chinese context, emphasising the distinctive roles of hostility and acceptance in shaping the plans to settle in destination cities among rural-to-urban migrants.

The location choice and livelihoods of rural-urban migrants are critical to the sustainable development of cities. By using data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) in 2017, this paper extant the Rosen–Roback’s model by adding factors of urban social network and air pollution to the function of the individual utility of migrants. Both the Probit Model and IV estimates imply evidence of an inverse U-shaped pattern of city size and migrants’ permanent settlement in urban China. This view proves that Chinese migrants like to settle permanently in large cities, but not mega-cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai. The internal mechanism is explained by the agglomeration economies and the crowing effect brought by city size. In mega-cities, the attractiveness of the city caused by wage premium cannot offset the combined repulsive force caused by the high housing price, bad urban social network, air pollution, and health deterioration. It is worth noting that air pollution has a significant negative impact on the settlement intention of migrants, such as health conditions and precipitation. Besides, there is heterogeneity among high-skilled migrants and low-skilled migrants in different city sizes. Our findings enhance the understanding of “Escape from megacities” in China and have implications for the reform of the housing security system and the exploration of the urbanization path.

This study focuses on the role of natural amenity in spurring the permanent settlement of elderly migrants in China, in the period from 2009 to 2017. Based on a combination of NASA’s Global Annual PM2.5 Grid data, and a nationwide China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) dataset, a binary logit model was used to investigate the settlement intention of migrants over 60 years old, across 291 cities in China. The empirical results revealed that there was a significant inverted U-shape between the annual temperature and permanent settlement, and prefectures with warmer winters and higher air quality were more attractive to elderly migrants when controlling for the urban endowment and economic conditions. In addition, the coefficient of the interaction term of air quality and precipitation was negative, indicating that the hindrance of precipitation on permanent settlement intention decreased with the enhancement in better air quality. Furthermore, there was significant group heterogeneity in the elderly’s migration reasons. The group of active movers cared more about environmental quality, whereas for the passive group, air quality had no effect on their permanent settlement.

The British colonial rule in Bengal had a very ominous impact on the people of the region as a whole. The introduction of a new land tenure system, known as the Permanent Settlement, and the creation of an all-powerful zamindar class particularly affected the interests of the peasants of Bengal. Under the new system, the government demand on the zamindars was fixed in perpetuity, but there was no legal restriction on the zamindars to enhance their share from the peasants. The peasants, consequently, became vulnerable to irregular rent increases and oppressions by the zamindars. The Faraizi movement, organized initially in the nineteenth century to reform the Muslim society, soon assumed the character of agrarian movement. In order to protect the poor peasants, the Faraizis soon became radical and challenged the zamindars. As majority of the peasants of the region, where this movement was launched, were Muslims and their zamindars mostly Hindus, the Faraizis used Islamic symbols to mobilize the Muslim masses. Thus, religion and economy intertwined in shaping such a protest movement in pre-industrial Bengal.  

In the last decade, return migration has taken on new dimensions as a consequence of the economic and health contexts, at the European and global levels. The return migration of Romanians is, in most cases, a component part of the initial migration project, the whole migration experience of Romanians being marked by strong ties with the country of origin and family. This study uses data collected through an online survey and a focus group, which targeted return migrants from Suceava County - one of the counties with the highest emigration rate in Romania. The use of these research tools aimed to identify aspects related to the motivation of remigration and the challenges of reintegration of migrants into Romanian society. The results of the survey indicate that return migration is mainly driven by non-economic reasons and corresponds, in most cases, to the initial migration project - to return permanently to the country of origin. The decrease in living standards, unemployment and restrictive local policies expose Romanians returning from abroad to a situation of high vulnerability, making their reintegration difficult, sometimes even impossible. Returning migrants represent a channel for the transmission of knowledge, professional experience, and financial capital; thus, they can be considered a potential source of growth in Romania. The difficulties of reintegration into society contribute to an increase in the degree of economic and psychosocial dissatisfaction of returning migrants, which increases their propensity to re-emigrate and considerably reduces the possibility of permanent settlement in the country of origin.

Previous investigations of the settlement intentions of China’s floating population have been undermined by an oversimplification of the concepts and measurements related to settlement intentions. More attention should be paid to influencing factors from the theoretical framework of “place utility” in new periods. Based on this framework, we use a multinormal logistic regression model to explore the impact of economic, human capital, and social factors on migration intentions and housing purchase actions of the floating population in the Pearl River Delta. The results revealed that the floating population’s purchasing ability is generally lower than its willingness to settle down, and this population experiences an incomplete citizenization problem. Among the economic and human capital factors, family economic factors have become an important basis for the housing purchase actions of the floating population and may even be more important than their own economic income and education level. After the State Council implemented the “Notice of Further Promoting the Reform of the Hukou System”, the decision of whether to pass restrictions of urban hukou (household registration) acquisition threshold has played an important role in the settlement decisions of the floating population. The government should formulate settlement policies according to the characteristics of the floating population.

This paper aims to introduce simple empirical models to describe the nonlinear behavior of shallow foundations under rocking vibration. The model is developed based on parametric numerical investigations of rectangular surface footings on homogenous dense dry sand, taking advantage of a nonlinear macro-element model verified based on a set of experimental results. The proposed empirical expressions include the moment-rotation backbone curve, stiffness degradation and equivalent damping ratio as well as the correlation of the foundation settlements with cumulated rotations. These expressions are provided mainly as a function of the rotation, static factor of safety and aspect ratio of foundation. Similar to previous researches, the uplift reference rotation was introduced as a normalization parameter for the new closed-form expressions to be expressed in a non-dimensional form, whenever possible. The proposed approach aimed to be simple, in order to minimize the dependence on the variable parameters, and to provide physically sound selections for engineering applications.

The 2014 hukou reform introduced by the Chinese central government was a turning point in China’s policies towards migration. Different from the previous hukou policies, which were largely exclusionary, the reformed policy encouraged migrants to permanently settle in their destination cities and make use of the public services available there. However, the actual results and consequences of this policy seem to vary between cities. This is due to the fact that Chinese municipal governments still have their own discretionary power when it comes to defining the criteria for accessing a local hukou. This raises the question of what the real impact of the hukou policy reform has been. This paper attempts to answer this question. It starts with a hukou access policy analysis of 20 different cities in the Yangtze River delta urban region. This analysis shows that the strictness of the local hukou access policy is related to city specific factors such as economic strength, share of migrant population, and population size. In the second part of the paper, we examine the impact of local hukou access policies on the intentions of migrants. Based on two logistic regression models, we find that the stricter the local hukou access policy is, the more willing migrants are to convert their current hukou into a local hukou. Furthermore, we observed that the settlement intention of migrants has a V-shaped rather than a linear relation with the strictness of local hukou access policies. Cities with relatively loose and cities with relatively strict hukou access policies are more desired as permanent settlement location than cities with moderately strict hukou access policies.