Migration, households, and agrarian reform in the Baltic provinces of Russia: 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

Earlier research has shown that migration flows affect household size and that these measures in turn are affected by local and regional legal systems that seek to regulate migration. This article explores these connections in those areas of the 19th century Russian Baltic provinces of Livland and Kurland that in the 20th century became the country of Latvia. Different data bases are used to link variables during the decades after the agrarian reforms of the 1816–1819 period, in the decades after the 1860s reforms that made possible the purchase of farmland by peasants, and in the decades after 1920 when the new country of Latvia nationalized land heretofore owned by estates and redistributed it to landless peasants and small farmers. The findings are tentative because the data sources differ substantially from period to period, but the present analysis suggests strong enough connections between agrarian reform, migration, and household size and structure to require a more thorough project.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo, Norway, August 6–13, 2000. The author is profoundly grateful to Charles Wetherell for his contribution to the research in the present article, and for his part in the long-term collaborative investigations of Pinkenhof estate.

Notes

1 Geographers and demographers routinely distinguish between migration and mobility. Conceptually, they base that distinction on the distance people move and on the social impact of that movement. Changing residence constitutes mobility if work, for example, remains close enough not to disrupt other social activities; it constitutes migration if work is not close enough to avoid disruption. Practically, however, the distinction often translates into movement across administrative boundaries, which can pose enormous strategic problems for historians forced to deal with records from separate secular or ecclesiastical divisions.

2 At the same time, the neighboring estate of Bebberbeck and others in the adjoining province of Kurland, which were the sources half (44 of 84) of all immigrants and half (38 of 74) of all emigrants (excluding 36 conscripted males), were so geographically close to Pinkenhof that any hard and fast distinction between migration and mobility may blur the historical reality. The crude external migration rate, CMRe, and the corresponding crude internal migration rate, CMR, are calculated as: Age-specific rates, indicated as CMRe, for example, are equivalent to age specfic birth or death rates. Rogers and Castro (1986) employ a similar age-specific, although less intuitive, measure.