The history of migration as a chapter in the history of the European rural family: An overview

Abstract

For a long time, migration has been neglected both in population and family history. This article briefly explains this absence and shows how, for the past 20–25 years, the concepts of migration and family systems have been elaborated and partly linked. At present, most researchers probably agree that highly diverse configurations existed, such diversity being a consequence of the many factors acting and interacting to determine migration as a part of family and population dynamics. The concept of system, often used but rarely defined, and the notions of ecotypes and sociotypes are discussed in an attempt to go beyond confusion and particularity, to manage complexity, and to articulate macro- and microlevels. Several illustrations of systems observed in preindustrial Europe are also provided. Since the concept of system explicitly stresses continuity and long-term reproduction, the way rural societies have been able to cope with change in industrializing Europe through various compromises between resistance and adaptation is also examined.

Keywords:

• Migration
• Population
• European rural family

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Martin Dribe, whose corrections and comments substantially improved this text, to Thomas Spooremberg from the Department of Economic History in Geneva, who found some of the definitions cited in Section 4.1, and to Jan Kok from the International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam) for exciting thoughts.

Notes

1 See also the citations from his book in Hochstadt (1999, pp. 36–37) or Rosental (1999, p. 8).

2 Cf. Laslett (1965) and Le Roy Ladurie (1974). See also Hochstadt (1999), especially p. 21 where he has provided several examples, and Rosental (1999, pp. 7–8).

3 To avoid an artificial inflation of bibliographic references, I encourage interested readers to consult the internet site of the International Bibliography of Historical Demography (http://www.ulg.ac.be/hiecosoc/bidh/), where publications of the following scholars and others can be searched: A. Chatelain, J. Poussou, A. Poitrineau, J. Pitié, R. Bonnain, L. Moch, D. Courgeau, J. Lucassen, P. Rosental, R. Duroux, G. Brunet and A. Bideau, M. Prost, M. Arrizabalaga, and L. Fontaine.

4 The seven were centered in East Anglia and London, the North Sea coast, the Paris basin, the Po Valley, central Italy, Castile, and the Mediterranean littoral of southern France. Cf. Lucassen (1987) and Moch (1992, 1995).

5 For details about this progress, see the more recent syntheses of Bade (2002, Chap. 1) and Poussou (1997, especially pp. 274–279). They complement each other since their examples are taken from different areas of western Europe, Poussou mostly in the southwest and Bade mostly in the northwest.

6 See Johansson's (2000) point about the preindustrial disease environments, ranging from remote villages to the capital city (London), with e ₀ (expectation of life at birth) of ages 30–35 years in the villages and 20–25 years in London for poor people, ranging from 40–45 to 30–35 years, respectively, for the elite.

7 The same explanation is used to interpret the temporary halt in mortality decline in eastern Belgium during the second third of the nineteenth century (cf. Oris & Alter, 2002).

8 This point is commonly mentioned but quite rarely demonstrated. Perrenoud (1993) followed three generations born in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the rural Protestant parish of Jussy. Among the first generation, 34% of those who survived until age 15 emigrated, the majority (60%) to the town of Geneva. Those who stayed in the village had an average age at first marriage of 26.4 years compared to 29 for the emigrants; final celibacy reached the levels of 18.6% and 29.2%, respectively (cf. Perrenoud, 1993, p. 455).

9 In 1870, husbands were absent from the households of 18% of the fertile married women; 44% of the men aged 20–34 had moved out of their family homes; among those aged 15 and older, the sex ratio was totally skewed, reaching 146 women for 100 men. Thus, the female age at marriage was quite low but many stayed single (more than 30% at ages 45–49). Cf. Head-König (1994, pp. 240–241), Lorenzetti (1999), Perrenoud (1994, pp. 494–496), and Van de Walle (1975).

10 There were many regimes but only five models (central, Iberian, eastern, Bétique, and northern) and a general differential between central Spain with high-pressure demography and peripheries with low-pressure regimes (Eiras-Roel, 1993). Generally, low pressure was everywhere but different arrangements existed in different cultural/national areas: Italian, Austrian, Swiss (Viazzo, 1989). Eight regions had distinctive demographic patterns, four models or systems (Anderson, 1994, especially pp. 147–157).

11 “An ideology is a deep rooted system of attitudes; it is related to the unconscious” (Todd, 1999, p. 96).

12 Moreover, this dimension is not totally absent in economic and demographic research. Anderson and Morse (1993) explicitly attributed the higher rates of out-migration in Scotland than in England to the peculiarities of the Scottish poor law. Snell (1985, p. 326) pointed out the impact of the 1834 changes in the English poor law on the pattern of leaving home, especially for boys. A more in-depth discussion of the integration of institutional and cultural aspects in demographic and socioeconomic history can be found in Lundh's (1999a, pp. 235–236) work, where he takes inspiration from Nobel Prize winner Douglas North.

13 For a critical overview on ages at leaving home in the historical literature, see Capron and Oris (2000, pp. 254–55) and Dribe (2000, pp. 8–13).

14 See Lundh (1999b, pp. 73–76), for initial evidence about the social mobility of servants according to the social status of their family of origin.

15 Derouet (1994), Lorenzetti (2001), Sabean (1990), and Ségalen (1985) have explored this question in depth.

16 The Hervian case has been investigated by many researchers whose works are summarized in Neven (2000, Chap. 2)—Leboutte, Gutmann, and Servais, among others.

17 See Czap's (1983) work as well as the research of Plakans and Wetherell (especially their 1992 paper) on the intermediate areas formed by the Baltic States (or provinces). In addition, the Web site of the International Bibliography of Historical Demography contains information about some 20 papers in Russian directly related to migration and family.

18 Strangely, the only point that has started to be well established is located in the fragile field of psychological history and is explained by family memoirs, the long-term continuity of migratory fields, often observed in spite of drastic changes. I believe Gribaudi (1987) was the first to observe this pattern when questioning older workers in Torino, whose migration patterns had largely depended on the history of their families. For the city of Liège in 1901, rural migrants working in a given branch were disproportionately recruited in regions where this branch had a proto-industrial past. In 1901, 60 or 70 years after proto-industry collapsed, the memory of these links remained in the rural population. Just recently, in a presentation at the Economic History Congress in Buenos Aires (July 2002), Lee made a similar observation about Bremen domestics in the nineteenth century, and Dubert (2001, p. 163) has written about specialized migratory fields in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Galicia.

19 Such rates are based on calculations from the total population, but since it was almost always adult males who moved, the majority of the male labor force was engaged. Austria, Germany, and Switzerland were the main destinations. Among other projects, the construction of large tunnels and other communication infrastructure in the Alps required many workers.

20 A similar pattern has been observed in the eastern lowlands of Scotland during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Young women from the highlands and islands worked as life-cycle servants on short-term contracts to replace the local girls lured away by domestic service in the capital or west-central belt (Anderson, 1994, p. 157).