Routes to cities and towns were numerically by far the most important migration directions of Europeans during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The combined industrial and agrarian revolutions, caused an unprecedented growth of the European population, and increased levels of urbanization. In her impressive monograph, Felizitas Schaub investigates these so called Stadtnomaden (city nomads) for Berlin, the capital of the German Empire, and Prague, the provincial capital of Bohemia in Imperial Austria, in an area of urbanization and industrialization. She focuses on people who moved repeatedly back and forth between urban and rural areas as well as between smaller and bigger towns and cities, mostly within national borders but in some cases also transnational. Until the end of the century, many urban labor markets offered mostly seasonal jobs, and therefore mobile laborers stayed in towns for only part of the year. Multiple changes of residence resulted in reorganizations of working and living conditions of mobile people as well as adjustments to new social and cultural environments.

Given the high spatial flexibility of laborers, artisans, and other towns people, Schaub investigates how city governments tried to administer these mobile crowds and attempted to keep order in an urban world where most of its inhabitants were constantly coming and going. While traditional historical research characterized urban out-migration as unimportant, abnormal, or even as a failure in data analysis, results of modern research debates on urban growth in nineteenth-century Europe make it clear that both directions must be considered for understanding overall migration processes. Schaub is interested in the agency of people who did not manage to permanently settle in Berlin or Prague; therefore, parts of the book are devoted to leaving the city, which was a normal part of everyday praxis for mobile citizens.

In the study, Schaub divides her findings into six parts, following a perspective from outside to inside or from top to bottom. Her second chapter presents a broad overview of the changing population of Berlin and Prague in the second half of the nineteenth century and shows the impact highly flexible inhabitants had on urban administrations. To analyze historical actors at the micro level, Schaub uses a broad variety of documents, however her main source materials are generated by municipal authorities, such as documents from municipal registration offices (Meldeämter) or from the police, which was responsible for occasional deportations of lower urban classes. Her next chapter is devoted to statistical attempts to capture and register the mobile population. In the fourth chapter she deals with the administration’s view on how to administer images of social order and its changes until World War I. While the majority of newcomers to cities were internal or local moves, within the German Empire or within Bohemia, in chapters five and six Schaub goes global and presents case studies on networks of Chinese merchants in Berlin, Italian speaking peddlers who sold small plaster figures on the streets (Gipsfigurenmacher), and on street vendors as popular subjects of government regulation. The constant surveillance of international merchants from the authorities resulted in a rich number of historical documents, which allow a closer look on the inner logic of international merchants.

Major urban agglomerations such as Berlin have always attracted historians’ attention because of their exceptional role as centers of imperial administration and government, while more local centers such as Prague receive less attention by migration historians. However, the comparison of Berlin and Prague is a bit misleading because in 1913 Berlin had about 4 million inhabitants, was the third largest European city, and was the capital of an empire, while Prague was a provincial capital with 225,000 citizens in 1910. By reading the different chapters of Schaub’s book, readers might get the impression that her first and main focus is Berlin’s mobile population and its administrative control, while Prague’s citizens and administration are an addition or just a comparative case. Most chapters start with Berlin, subchapters on Prague are mostly smaller and less detailed. Her study would have gained much by an additional chapter devoted to a summarized comparison of her two case studies.

However, Schaub’s analysis is a very meritorious work in which she tells a narrative of flexible mobile people with agency, and she challenges traditional approaches that characterize cities as spaces of anonymity and non-commitment and migrants as an uprooted and homeless mass of people. In Schaub’s understanding, urban areas are constitutive elements for people’s actions and at the same time a process-oriented phenomenon. I can recommend the book to anyone who is interested in rich urban histories, mobile populations, and attempts of city governments to administer high levels of mobility.