This edited collection demonstrates how, from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, European states treated their populations as a resource to be managed and, where this was thought to be necessary, rearranged. The collection brings together chapters on planned settlement and the removal of "undesirable" populations and demonstrates that the two were intrinsically linked. Democratic, autocratic, imperial and national regimes alike, all pursued social engineering directed at national minorities and economic classes. The collection complicates the assumption that strong interventionist states or radical ideologies were solely responsible for forced migration and its human costs. As some of the case studies reveal, settlement and expulsion often occurred spontaneously and reactive, grand schemes failed, and agency rested with local actors, including those operating independently of the state, or experts from non-governmental or international organisations.

The volume centers on regions that rarely anchor the field: eastern and south-eastern Europe, Turkey, Soviet Ukraine and the Eurasian colonisation belt. Alongside deportation and settlement, it also examines how states sought to turn emigrants into national assets abroad. This is an interdisciplinary collection that brings together research on migration, population, politics, and economics in modern European history.

Tim Buchen is Associate Professor for Jewish history at the Taube Department for Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław. His main research deals with nineteenth and twentieth-century Central and Eastern European history, in particular the history of minorities, imperialism and violence.

Gerhard Wolf is Associate Professor in the History Department of the University of Sussex, in the UK. He is a Historian of modern European and international History with a focus on population policies, (forced) migration, ethnic cleansing and genocide.