The Lucassens’ 2009 article has, at its heart, a familiar argument. This is not the first time that high levels of pre-industrial mobility have been under discussion. Indeed, Steve Hochstadt presents such mobility with great clarity in his study of migration in Germany, as does Jan Lucassen for the North Sea system, and Nicolas Canny, Klaus Bade, and I for western Europe, and Dirk Hoerder for the world.Footnote 1 What this forum offers, then, is a consideration of this argument with new data.
The Lucassens offer a considerable innovation in the article, with their measurement of mobility throughout early modern Europe. Steve Hochstadt and Jan Lucassen showed the way but their findings could not be generalized. For this article, the authors have carried out significant tasks. They articulate eminently useful distinctions between emigration and colonization, and survey seasonal labourers, refugees, cityward migrants, soldiers, and sailors. Unlike many scholars, they include European Russia and the Balkans. They have mined sources on emigration from Portugal, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and what they summarize as ‘the rest of Europe’, and colonization in and from Russia, Prussia, Ireland, the Balkans, Scandinavia, and Spain. At the same time, they have found a way to calculate the probability of migration in most instances, as well as to articulate how this was done in a lucid fashion, and they offer an additional working paper on their sources and methods online.Footnote 2 This is an enormous feat that required a great deal of ingenuity.
It also required a great deal of chutzpah, of bravado. After all, gathering such data and creating such data sets requires riding roughshod over certain peculiarities of numerical collections, while ignoring undeniable lacunae. To their credit, Jan and Leo Lucassen admit to this at several points, referring, for example, to the ‘crudeness of such a migration rate’ at one point, and a ‘conservative educated guess’ at another, and their entry into an area of data that is a ‘statistical minefield’.Footnote 3 There is great value in taking on this task with bravado – indeed, it is admirable – because otherwise, literally, nothing is gained. One has to start somewhere, even if one risks some caricatures, and the data may not improve with the passage of time. If we want a history of migration in the world, in short, we want information that can put Europe in context.
Their article also contrasts early modern human mobility with migration in the age of industrialization. It demonstrates how, continent-wide, mobility really did ratchet up in the nineteenth century, especially after 1850. And so their finding is subtle – migration in the early modern period was higher than once thought, but it still paled beside what was to come.
I offer three questions about this article that do not debate its primary findings. First, the authors assert that the expansion of transoceanic emigration was primarily due to transportation innovations, particularly cheap steamship rates. Surely ease of travel and relatively low costs accounted for much volume, but this was only part of a much broader story of migration. Moving was facilitated and inspired by a perceived lack of a future at home, and aided by the workings of networks of contact, friendship, and kin. Behind this lay years of high fertility, accompanied by lower infant and child mortality, which produced unprecedented population increases and thus strained family and village resources. Moreover, emigration signalled in some cases a real shift in mentality. There was a belief that one could have a better life, or change one’s destiny at home, by leaving to earn money and then return, in combination with continued familial, gustatory, and religious practices at one’s destination. In short, European demographics and the social organization of migration practices are also at work. I agree with the Lucassens that one cannot easily make such a loose concept as ‘modernization’ responsible for wholesale emigration, but relatively low ticket prices are no substitute, particularly because they did not seem so very negligible to the millions of people who departed Europe between 1850 and 1940. Although the focus here is to measure mobility, I think that discussions of causes can be expanded in future comparative work.
Second, the Lucassens have a more refined notion in mind: Patrick Manning’s idea of ‘cross-community migration’, outside one’s own culture or linguistic group. For Manning and the Lucassens, this is where and how innovation occurs, and so this is the migration that is meaningful globally, because cross-community human mobility engenders the diffusion of innovations and other kinds of change. Admittedly, they write, ‘a uniform definition of cultural borders over a span of 400 years may seem somewhat ahistorical, but we believe that the level of aggregation for our six forms of migration justifies this choice’.Footnote 4
Nonetheless, it is hard know what migrations do take people out of their communities, that is, when ‘cross-community migration’ really occurs: colonial settlements recreate their home societies; emigrants form ethnic communities at their destination; country people do the same in cities; seasonal migrants return home, often having stuck close together at their destination in order to save money; soldiers’ best friends are compatriots like themselves. Each of these groups can experience another culture, but it is impossible to generalize about how much. Although I would not and do not dispute the significance of migration outside one’s culture, I think that Manning’s idea of ‘cross-community migration’ does not sit easily with the Lucassens’ model. The level of aggregation does not tell us enough.
This is particularly troublesome in the contrast constructed between the two extreme cases in this article, the Netherlands and Russia. European Russia extended over nearly 4 million square kilometres (including today’s Belarus and Ukraine), in contrast to the 40,000 square kilometres for the Netherlands; by some counts, European Russia was 40% of the continent’s landmass. It was massive and heterogeneous, not only because the rich black-earth steppes provided such a contrast in every sense to the forest regions but also because the Tatars of the northern Black Sea steppes retained a powerful presence past the seventeenth century.Footnote 5 Russia was as different as could be from the early modern Netherlands, so to compare the two begs for more knowledge about the profoundly different circumstances of each. The Lucassens’ point about this comparison is well taken, however: that a great range of different migrations coexisted within Europe.
In Europe, language certainly identified some groups and set them apart from others. For this reason, we would like very much to have better information about cross-community migrations. The Celts of today’s Wales, Ireland, and Brittany offer a case in point, as well as the Basques on both sides of the Franco-Spanish border, to say nothing of the German-, French-, and Dutch-speakers who crossed national borders to face another language and culture. This would give us a reading of migrations in European history that would highlight its historical cultural diversity and effectively tie European history to global history. A history of a continent accounting for its linguistic and cultural diversity would provide a more articulate link with the rest of the world.
Third, this is Dutch scholarship, and it is appropriate to highlight the Dutch mobility of the Golden Age, but it seems that the Lucassens yielded to the temptations of modernization theory here, by interpreting early modern Dutch mobility as a model for the future. I am sure that they did not really want to do this in an article that contradicts the easy and discredited assumptions of modernization theory, as proposed by Zelinsky, and seeks to explore the ‘Great Divergence’.Footnote 6 They write that
We may consider the situation in the Dutch Republic as an early precursor of more general European mobility patterns that emerged more than a century later, characterized by a large percentage of proletarians, a free labour market, high levels of urbanization, and excellent transportation networks. In other words, this was a situation that would extend over the industrialized parts of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century …Footnote 7
Each of these statements is true about the Dutch Republic, but perhaps historians interested in global comparisons can avoid this kind of implication and give more attention instead to the conditions that produced this migration pattern.
In its reach and creation of hard-won data, ‘The mobility transition revisited’ demonstrates the great contradictions and difficulties of doing global history. This difficulty lies in the contrast between what we want to know and what we can know. Data on any general scale that we can gather on migration are notoriously poor at reflecting the realities of human mobility, for rare is the material such as the Prussian local migration statistics mined by James Jackson and Steve Hochstadt.Footnote 8 We have data for states and for nations, but not for regions or language groups, which are conceptually the most important to understanding patterns of human mobility. And so it is natural that, in reflecting upon their findings, the Lucassens confirm ‘the importance of state formation and the mobilizing role of armies’.Footnote 9 This is unsurprising because many of their measurements (such as those of colonization and the numbers of sailors and soldiers) reflect state mercantilist, military, and colonial policies. It is also unsurprising because the state is the source of the data and unit of analysis. The larger conundrum, then, to which this fine article points, is that we often express an interest in cultures and regions of migration, but what we get are states. It is no wonder that state policy appears as important as it does.
As we move forward toward global comparisons of human mobility, I suggest a number of considerations that may be feasible, in addition to this study’s focus on migration rates. The first of these is the organization of migration – what might be thought of as the regimes and repertoires of migration. Regimes are legal, state, and economic systems that shape migration patterns. To cite examples from Russian history: legal systems bound serf populations; the Soviet state relocated millions of citizens; and market forces attract post-Soviet Russians and workers from the ‘near abroad’ to Moscow. Although it is not possible to trace closely migration regimes worldwide, it is possible to characterize the kinds of major forces that influence mobility.
Likewise, it is possible to categorize the repertoires of migration in a general way, which would be useful in international comparisons. Repertoires are the practices and customs of human mobility. Families, regional practices, and confessional cultures provide the wellspring and the mediator of these repertoires, shaping every kind of movement, no matter how heavy-handed the regime. Serfs on the run, for example, relied on relatives and networks composed of other fugitives as they sought a safe haven; gender and family position are especially crucial in determining who can leave home to look for work in post-Soviet Muslim Tajikistan.Footnote 10 It is possible to ascertain the ways in which regional itineraries affect general migration patterns, and this is valuable information in global comparisons.
One of these elements is sufficiently crucial to serve as a second arena of consideration: the gender ratio of migrant groups. This is significant because the gender composition of migrating groups varies dramatically by ethnicity, confession, and type of migration, and it is measurable and comparable. The historical gender ratios among various nationalities traveling to the US, and of emigrants from China, for example, demonstrate distinct patterns.Footnote 11 Moreover, scholarly meetings and a number of standard indices have been devoted to ascertaining the gender ratios of mobile people, developing this kind of data.Footnote 12 In fact, gender ratios offer a particularly useful, comparable measure of migrations worldwide.
If it is possible to add general information on the organization of migration to the migration rate information presented by Jan and Leo Lucassen, and to ascertain gender ratio patterns among mobile peoples, the future for global comparative work will be bright indeed.
