By the numbers, the 12 million Africans uprooted by the slave trade, the 18 million people rerouted by the division of India and Pakistan, and the 20 million rearranged on Europe’s chessboard in the years following World War II were history’s three biggest forced relocations. Each was propelled by a familiar driver: economics (and depersonalization), religion, and politics, respectively. Each reshuffled the world. Yet their combined impact will soon be dwarfed by a new exodus, the first to be triggered solely by technology.
