Pre-World War II immigration in the British empire

The British empire seems to be a test case in many respects for all the arguments of market liberalisation that the discipline of economics presents, such as freedom of immigration. This book looks like only a military history, but it is actually a panoramic social history of the pre-World War II British Empire in Southeast Asia too:

Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945 (2004)
by Christopher Bayly,Tim Harper.

This book is a near perfect history book. It is well written in an engaging style that has made it popular. The book is built upon original primary archival sources such as memoirs which make it original, not just another rehash of secondary sources. It combines multiple perspectives from the high level governor or viceroy to the coolies at the waterfront. It gives you a better idea of the impact of war on society as a whole than any other book that I've read.

This book is also a sobering story of free flowing immigration in the British Empire on the eve of of World War II. It shows some of the chaos that this freedom for all to immigrate led to. Massive Indian immigration into Burma overwhelmed the local population, displacing them with cheap labor. In the agricultural sector money lenders foreclosed and seized land, the Japanese invaded, the Indians fled, and a dependence on Burmese rice to the tune of 15% in Bengal contributed to a famine, 3 million people died, who had specialized in jute production before the war. Can one fully predict exogenous shocks? The pre-empire social formations were probably more resilient to them.