Measuring and quantifying ethnic identities, let alone mixed identities, is a complex and politicized endeavour. The growing prominence and historical importance of mixed ethnic and racial identities, on personal and political levels, amplifies these complexities. This volume is positioned between the literature on ethnic classifications and census taking around the world, and the growing work on mixed racial/mixed ethnic identities—what we refer to more generally as ‘mixedness’, to include ancestral, cultural, and ethnic identifications. We seek to explore the measurement of mixedness on a global scale, highlighting the differences and similarities between countries and within regions, and looking closely at what measuring mixed identities means from an international perspective.

This project and the volume reporting its findings is a child of these times. Simon et al. (2015, p. 2) have noted a ‘resurgence or extension of the salience of ethnicity in most of the societies around the world’ since the 1960s. This could be equally said about mixed race or mixedness. A number of different statistical indices show a marked upward trend in this interest. According to Google Trends, for example, ‘mixed race’ as a search term worldwide shows a marked rise from 2008 to early 2015 with subsequent plateauing. Google Ngrams (covering a longer period) show a dramatic increase in the use of the terms ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiracial’ in books published in English over the period 1960–2000 and, especially, since the late 1980s. This interest is also evident in the scholarly literature, including ‘mixed race’ as a dissertation topic and the holding of international conferences on the subject. The US-based mixedracestudies.org website now contains 11,000 posts, including links to over 7000 articles, more than 1500 books, and nearly 600 dissertations, papers, and reports. While the provenance of the posts is still dominated by the USA (as recorded in the ‘category counts’), all the major world regions have numbers running into the hundreds or thousands. This scholarly interest is matched by a surge in popular representations (Aspinall 2015) and in public discourse.

What has accounted for this upsurge in interest? International migration—as part of globalization—has undoubtedly played a role. This has contributed to increased population diversity in many countries. Further, as the prevalence of mixing and interethnic union formation generally varies with respect to the degree of ethnic/racial heterogeneity, being lowest where one minority ethnic group predominates (Feng et al. 2010), this increased transnational migration has contributed to an increase in the size and diversity of the mixed group(s). Population mixing and mixedness have always existed but international migration has changed by an order of magnitude in recent decades. The presence of a growing mixed population may have been a factor amongst others in catalysing census agencies to introduce ‘mixed’ categorizations, thereby making the ‘mixed’ population more visible. However, other facets of globalization have also been of equal importance.

Worldwide interconnectedness has grown substantially in recent years alongside the increased movements of people across geographical lines. Europe and Asia hosted around 75 million migrants each in 2015, amounting to 62% of the total global international migrant stock combined (International Organization for Migration 2017). Ranking third was North America, with 54 million international migrants in 2015 or 22% of the global migrant stock, followed by Africa at 9%, Latin America and the Caribbean at 4%, and Oceania at 3%. In focusing on the impact of international migration on the potential for population mixing and the formation of interracial and interethnic unions, it is more useful to look at international migration in the context of regions’ overall population size. When compared with the size of the population in each region, shares of international migrants in 2015 were highest in Oceania, North America, and Europe, where they represented, respectively, 21%, 15%, and 10% of the total population. By comparison, the share of international migrants is relatively small in Asia and Africa (1.7% each) and Latin America (1.5%). However, Asia is distinctive as the region where growth in the resident migrant population over the years 2000–2015 was most marked, at over 50% (around 25 million people, in absolute numbers). The sheer volume of these numbers and the border crossings inherent in these increased migration flows are closely related to the prevalence and perceptions of mixing around the globe, and the complex task of measuring identities across multiple timelines of indigenous settler and historical/contemporary migrant populations (Ali 2012).

As censuses are usually taken every ten years, we may not yet know what the consequences are of some of these major population shifts on the prevalence and patterns of mixing and mixedness. This may be particularly true of migration and displacement arising from conflict in such countries as Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Burundi, accounting for 13.5 million refugees under the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR’s) mandate at the end of 2016. In 2016, for the third consecutive year, Turkey was the largest host country in the world, with 2.9 million refugees, mainly Syrians (2.8 million). Two other bordering countries—Jordan and Lebanon—also featured among the top ten. The number of Syrians in Germany was estimated at around 600,000 people at the end of that year, consisting mainly of refugees from the Syrian conflict. Most census questionnaires that capture race/ethnicity are not designed to enumerate emerging and new types of mixedness. In a similar vein, we only have scant information on the impact on population mixing and interethnic/racial union formation of the substantial and growing Chinese ‘entrepreneurial’ diaspora, especially in Africa. The numbers of Chinese migrants in Africa is estimated to have risen sevenfold in the last two decades and now exceeds 1.1 million. It is unlikely that African countries’ censuses will capture this population in the foreseeable future, and currently our only sources of evidence on the mixing of this population are press reports and information on social media and other websites.

This volume brings together 185 census forms and 35 detailed case studies from around the world, which when put together, provide a global state of play on the topic, serving as a key reference or reader on the classification of mixed race/ethnicity around the world. We look directly at the classification of mixedness (or lack thereof) across these thirty-five countries, divided into four broad regions, exploring the histories and consequences of measuring mixed identities. This project builds on the literature on ethnic enumeration on larger scales (see Kukutai and Broman 2016; Kukutai and Thompson 2015; Morning 2008), the detailed studies based around single countries or small comparative groups (such as Hirschman 1987; Kertzer and Arel 2002b; Nobles 2000) and the developing field of critical mixed race studies (see, for example, Root 1996; Parker and Song 2001; Ifekwunigwe 2004; Morning and Saperstein 2018). While mixed racial and ethnic identities are growing in popularity as topics of study, there has been little work addressing the classification of mixing on an international scale. We thus seek to position the personal aspects of mixedness within the highly political realm of measurement and enumeration, broadening our theoretical underpinnings by considering what being mixed means in different contexts around the world.

Across the world, classificatory systems have developed to measure race and ethnicity in different ways, from the national census and birth/death records to identity cards and household surveys (Aspinall 2010, 2012; Morning 2008). Over the past century, such classification has been primarily based around the idea that individuals could be classified in single, mutually exclusive categories (Aspinall 2018). However, as discussed, populations have grown, diversified, and become increasingly transnational and mobile, and such singularity struggles to adequately capture the complexity of identities and heritages in multicultural societies. This has particularly affected populations of mixed race and/or ethnicity, whose heritages and identities do not easily align with singular categories or traditional tools of measurement.

The national census is the key focus for measurement in many national contexts, and this is reflected in the case studies in this book. As described by Kertzer and Arel (2002a), the census is the most visible and well-known way in which identities and populations are measured by the state, which ‘does much more than simply reflect social reality—rather, it plays a key role in the construction of that reality’ (2002a, p. 2). The classification of race and ethnicity by the state, often in the census, is a common way to organize and make sense of populations in many countries, with particular impacts for how mixed race and/or ethnicity have been included or overlooked over time. The construction and methodologies behind each national census are influenced by many things: political interests, international pressure, local interest groups, and the historical context of measurement (Anderson 1991; Nobles 2000; Kertzer and Arel 2002a, b). Kukutai and Thompson’s (2015) study looked at the domestic conditions that systematically encourage or suppress state recognition of ethnic differences, and the key role of the census in this process. They suggest that to build on the many well-researched single country studies on measuring ethnicity within states, these processes need to be studied at a global level, enriching theorizing in a more nuanced way, on an international scale.

The various country histories provided by this volume highlight how the categorization of identities can have far-reaching consequences, both in terms of recognition, exclusion, identity-making, and discrimination, and in some cases, state-sponsored violence and genocide. The positioning of mixedness within contemporary national censuses is complicated, with some instances of inclusion and acknowledgement, some of essentialization or re-racialization into distinct categories, and some of avoiding the issue entirely. Following Ali (2012), we aim to better engage with diverse and shifting understandings of mixedness by engaging with the varied politics of belonging in different societies, looking at the construction and consequences of measurement, of what it means to be mixed, and of the measurement of mixedness itself.