Journal of Global History (2011) 6, pp.

321–325 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2011

doi:10.1017/S1740022811000295

From regional to global repertoires of

migration

Leslie Page Moch

Michigan State University
E-mail: leslie@msu.edu

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 Hoch-
stadt 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 west-
ern Europe, and Dirk Hoerder for the world.1 What this forum offers, then, is a considera-
tion 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.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’.3 There is great value in taking on this task
with bravado – indeed, it is admirable – because otherwise, literally, nothing is gained.

1 Klaus Bade, Migration in European history, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003; Nicholas Canny, Europeans
on the move: studies on European migration, 1500–1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994; Steve
Hochstadt, Mobility and modernity: migration in Germany, 1820–1989, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1999; Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in contact: world migrations in the second millennium,
Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Jan Lucassen, Migrant labour in Europe, 1600–1900,
London: Croom Helm, 1987; Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: migration in western Europe since
1650, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002.
2 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘The mobility transition in Europe revisited, 1500–1900: sources and
methods’, International Institute of Social History Research Paper 46, Amsterdam 2010, http://www.iisg.
nl/publications/respap46.pdf (consulted 9 April 2011).
3 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘The mobility transition revisited, 1500–1900: what the case of Europe
can offer to global history’, Journal of Global History, 4, 3, 2009, pp. 354, 357, 364.

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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 trans-
portation 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 unpreced-
ented population increases and thus strained family and village resources. Moreover, emigra-
tion 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 peo-
ple 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 dif-
fusion of innovations and other kinds of change. Admittedly, they write, ‘a uniform defini-
tion 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’.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.

4 Ibid., p. 351.
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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.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 differ-
ent circumstances of each. The Lucassens’ point about this comparison is well taken, how-
ever: 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 dis-
credited assumptions of modernization theory, as proposed by Zelinsky, and seeks to
explore the ‘Great Divergence’.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, character-
ized by a large percentage of proletarians, a free labour market, high levels of urban-
ization, 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 . . .7

Each of these statements is true about the Dutch Republic, but perhaps historians inter-
ested 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’ demon-
strates the great contradictions and difficulties of doing global history. This difficulty lies

5 Brian J. Boeck, ‘Containment vs. colonization: Muscovite approaches to settling in the steppe’, in
Nicholas B. Breyfogle et. al., eds., Peopling the Russian periphery: borderland colonization in Eurasian
history, London: Routledge, 2007, 41.
6 Wilbur Zelinsky, ‘The hypothesis of the mobility transition’, Geographical Review, 61, 2, 1971,
pp. 219–49.
7 Lucassen and Lucassen, ‘Mobility transition’, p. 371.
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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.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’.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 pol-
icies. 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 popu-
lations; 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 well-
spring 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 net-
works 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.10 It is possible to ascertain the ways in which regional itineraries affect
general migration patterns, and this is valuable information in global comparisons.

8 James Jackson Jr, Migration and urbanization in the Ruhr valley, 1821–1914, Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1997; Hochstadt, Mobility and modernity.
9 Lucassen and Lucassen, ‘Mobility transition’, p. 376. The choice to define soldiers as migrants is
debatable first for the reason given at the opening of this article – socially, soldiers do not necessarily
leave home – and second because soldiers can be understood (and indeed were categorized by French
censuses) as an institutionalized population. Third, the long-term trends in proportion of males aged
twenty to fourty-four in the military is affected by a host of state-related factors that may be unrelated to
migration; see Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1992, Oxford: Blackwell,
1992, pp. 122–3.
10 Daniel Brower and Susan Layton, ‘Liberation through captivity: Nikolai Shipov’s adventure in the
imperial borderlands’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 6, 2, 2005, pp. 259–79;
John McKay, Four Russian serf narratives, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, pp. 118–
96; Eleonora Fayzullaeva, ‘Labor migration in Central Asia: gender challenges’, in L. P. Racioppi and
K. O. See, eds., Gender politics in post-communist Eurasia, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University
Press, 2009, pp. 237–65.
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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 pat-
terns.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.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.

11 Donna Gabaccia, From the other side: women, gender and immigrant life in the U.S., 1820–1910,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994; Adam McKeown, ‘Chinese emigrants in global
context, 1850–1910’, Journal of Global History, 5, 1, 2010, pp. 95–124.
12 Most recently, the Gender Ratios Working Group, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, met in
June 2009; of interest is Donna Gabaccia and Elizabeth Zanoni, ‘Transitions in gender ratio among
international migrants, 1820–1930’, from that meeting, and Trent Alexander and Annemarie Steidl,
‘Gender and the ‘‘laws of migration’’: a reconsideration of nineteenth-century patterns’, unpublished
paper for the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Dallas, Texas, April 2010. See
also United Nations Population Fund, State of world population 2006: unleashing the power of urban
growth, New York: United Nations Press, 2006, http://www.unfpa.org/swp/ (consulted 9 April 2011);
W. Wilcox and I. Ferenczi, eds., International migrations, Publications of the National Bureau of
Economic Research 14, New York: Arno Press, 1929, reprinted 1970.