Annemarie Steidl's main purpose is to lay out the wide spectrum of migration options pursued by Central Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spanning local to transoceanic migration and getting at broad comparative dimensions throughout the region. She defines migration “in the widest sense, including all changes of residence, irrespective of distance moved or durations” (3). Administrative border crossings within Austria-Hungary matter, in this book, as much as farther intra- or intercontinental ones. This is a corrective to many migration studies that “tend to underestimate the importance of past international movements between neighboring European states” (11) or discount the impact of “short-distance everyday movements” on an area's economy, politics, and culture (9). As Steidl demonstrates, internal movements are entangled with ones farther afield.
Steidl undertakes the painstaking statistical and comparative work that so many historians are unable or unwilling to do. Throughout, she explains her quantitative approach in a methodologically instructive manner, making the book both a significant contribution to scholarship and a valuable teaching (or self-teaching) tool. Utilizing “a mix of stock and flow data” (16)—the former counts people in place, like censuses and population registries, while the latter counts instances of migration, like passenger manifests—she overturns several misconceptions propagated by an overreliance on a small number of past quantitative studies about migrations within and from the Habsburg Empire. Macro in scope, readers will not find an abundance of new first-hand accounts about individual migrations in this book, but will find no shortage of examples to illustrate larger trends.
The first chapter documents internal migration within Imperial Austria and the Hungarian Kingdom. Building on the work of other scholars, Steidl complicates simple narratives of urbanization, showing, through cartographic analysis, how migrations between and to rural areas in Austria-Hungary were significant as well. Steidl's second chapter turns to international migration within Europe, exploring ways that migrants from various corners of Austria-Hungary regularly crossed imperial borders for labor, working in today's Germany, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Italy. In Steidl's telling, such migrations were extremely common and often circular and temporary. This chapter pays particular attention to migrants in borderland regions, adjacent to international boundaries.
Steidl's third chapter explores transatlantic migration, focusing on the United States, and confirms the findings of earlier scholarship that the vast majority of transatlantic migrants, while agriculturalists themselves at home, pursued industrial labor opportunities in America. The analysis is especially strong in tracing the regional origins of U.S.-bound migrants and repeat migrants, offering satisfying discussions of regional specifics for local socioeconomic factors, target destinations, and mobility dynamics. Wherever possible, in this chapter as in the others, Steidl examines how migration patterns diverged for men and women. She adds specificity to rough estimates that nearly 40% of migrants from Austria-Hungary returned home.
In the fourth chapter, Steidl “pull[s] various migration paths into conversation” (163), using statistical analyses to explore the “entangled quality of mobility types” (21, 171). She deeply probes fascinating questions about the historiographically “neglected” relationship between internal and international migrations at various scales, eschewing often stale binary categories like legal and illegal migration, emigration and immigration, forced and voluntary migration (164, 215). Steidl concludes powerfully that the distances people migrated increased markedly over time, but that the majority of migrations continued to happen on the European continent; these did not cease to be important with the advent of mass transatlantic migration. She also documents a strong trend of back-and-forth movements, which, she argues, raises questions about the utility of concepts like sending states and receiving states. She finds that there was little overall correlation between language and migration, confirming that local economic conditions were more salient. All of these findings are tested and conclude by examining statistical relationships from the wide set of data she has amassed. This chapter, in particular, is essential reading for scholars working in Central European studies and migration studies globally. Migration scholars will be forced to think much harder about scope and justify omitting certain types of mobility from their studies, now that Steidl has shown how migrations at different scales are interrelated and regionally informed.
The series of figures at the center of the book and tables throughout deserve special attention. A multitude of tables throughout the volume illustrate Steidl's most significant source statistics and her own analyses. The center spread offers a carefully selected suite of figures that illustrate the book's main statistical sources from the early twentieth century, making the best information from them easily accessible (in color and in English) to a new generation; I will immediately be scanning them for lectures and imagine others will do the same.
