Mobility, Geographic

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MOBILITY, GEOGRAPHIC

MOBILITY, GEOGRAPHIC. The early modern period was marked by considerable population movements. Yet, compared with the medieval centuries or with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was a time of reduced mobility, particularly in France. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries there was no need for further rural development, which had been very intensive between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries, producing a well-rooted peasantry that was shaken only by the rural exodus after 1840–1850. Thus, mobility was primarily a matter of micromobility, deriving mainly from matrimonial exchanges. Young peasant girls rarely moved more than ten kilometers from their place of birth when they married; their husbands for the most part traveled less than twenty kilometers from their place of birth, and the majority of them less than ten kilometers. This model was accompanied by regional and chronological nuances and even exceptions. Nor did it exclude some major population movements.

RECRUITMENT AND MOTIVATION

In both town and country, there were in reality two types of behavior reflecting, as it were, two populations, one stable and rooted, the other highly mobile. In spite of micromobility related to matrimonial exchanges linked to boy-girl imbalances in families and the marrying of younger sons and daughters, rural areas saw family continuity and the maintenance of family patronyms within a zone rarely larger than, say, ten kilometers. This zone was roughly circular, but considerable geographical dissymmetry could be caused, for example, by bad relations with a neighboring parish or by geographical obstacles (a watercourse, mountain, etc.). In isolated mountain communities mobility was even more limited. Continuity of one part of the family over several generations was also common among urban middle and elite strata. This was much less frequently the case in working-class environments, partly because of very high mortality rates.

Cities, by contrast, show high mobility, both socially and geographically, for a variety of reasons. Except for small towns, cities in the early modern era were unable to renew their populations because of high mortality in urban environments. For cities to maintain their populations, there had to be very high immigration, and even higher if populations were to increase. Thus, the growth of London between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries absorbed half the surplus births for all of England (Wrigley). Given the considerable scale of urban growth in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the development of capitals and ports over the early modern era as a whole, there was necessarily a major movement toward cities, though its sources varied.

Recruitment was predominantly rural and reflected the size of the city. A considerable share, often a majority, of immigrants came from the nearby countryside, especially female immigrants, only a minority of whom came from farther afield. Larger cities drew immigrants not only from the smaller cities of the hinterland, but also from other major cities. The bigger the city, the more likely it was that immigration came from more remote areas. This long-distance immigration was varied and sometimes minimal.

Motivation for migration was sometimes occupation-related—trading colonies from the middle of the Middle Ages are an important example of this. Another type of migration involved groups of seasonal and temporary migrants, which we shall discuss later on. Thus, some populations moved a lot, sometimes because they could not take root: Rouen is an example of a city that could function both as a pressure pump and a suction pump, repelling and attracting migrants at the same time. Some segments of populations, such as the sailor populations of Amsterdam or Dunkirk, were constantly on the move. By contrast, the majority of seasonal and temporary migrants were much less mobile, making only one journey each year, or even every two or three years, the goal being to bring back as much money as possible to their home town or village.

Overall, the mobility of rural and urban populations may be entirely due to circumstances. For example, social difficulties, particularly the high cost of bread, were particularly hard on the lower strata of urban populations. Heaped with debt and more or less dispersed, families—or the remaining members thereof—abandoned not only their accommodation but also their city of residence and took to the roads, often in search of other cities. The poor in general were very mobile, as revealed by poorhouse admission records. The mobility of poverty sometimes intersected with criminalized or criminogeneous mobility; criminal populations traveled a lot in search of better possibilities or simply as a means of escaping judicial and police authorities. In sixteenth-century England—particularly at the end of the century—this led to the development of laws directly relating to the poor. On the Continent, poorhouses, bridewells, workhouses, and prisons were established; the last three were reserved for populations that were considered dangerous, as victims of venereal disease, beggars, or hardened or petty criminals.

MASS MIGRATION

Clearly, local and state authorities were concerned about some of the migrants as well as about some of the sedentary population because of their potential to create disorder. But states themselves were often the cause of major population movements, either as a result of wars, or deliberate expulsions, or because the political or religious decisions of governments sometimes induced segments of the population to emigrate. Wars caused populations to flee in search of shelter from the ravages of armies and armed rabbles in general. Although direct military mortality may not be very high, the same cannot be said for civilian losses, as witnessed by the devastation caused in part of Germany during the Thirty Years' War. Wars caused populations to retreat when their fields were ravaged, their livestock seized, and their very lives threatened. War forced them to seek refuge in nearby regions that had been spared by the conflict, or behind city walls. In those cities of refuge, the arrival of uprooted and undernourished people constituted a fertile soil for the development of formidable epidemics. After a war, agricultural and sometimes urban structures had to be renewed, and shattered landscapes reconstructed, all of which took time. Repopulation necessitated immigration staggered over several decades, as was the case for the plain of Hungary after the defeat and routing of the Turks in 1699 and again in 1718.

The greatest population movements resulted from political and religious decisions or contexts, which were intimately linked from the start of the Protestant Reformation. Population movements were not, however, limited to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. They were preceded by important examples of forced migration based on state decisions. France and England expelled their Jewish populations in the late Middle Ages, and other expulsions occurred elsewhere in Europe during the early modern period. Perhaps the best known expulsion is that of 1492, when the Jews of Spain were given the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving the country. Portugal issued a similar ultimatum in 1496.

Although estimates once ran to several hundred thousand for the number of Jews who left Iberia rather than convert, the best estimates now place their numbers in the neighborhood of fifty thousand. In 1609–1611 Spain also expelled its large population of converted Muslims, branding them notoriously as bad Christians and as a political threat as well. The best estimates currently place the number forced into exile at about 300,000, though an unknown number reportedly returned to the country thereafter. The Jewish diaspora led to the creation of colonies that played a leading economic role in European cities such as Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and London, as well as in the Turkish empire. Like other affinity groups with dispersed membership, the Jewish exiles established a very effective commercial and social network over long distances.

Thousands of other individuals and communities were also displaced by the religious and political strife that marked the early modern period. Perhaps the best known from the late seventeenth century are the French Protestants known as Huguenots and the English and Scottish supporters of the ousted Stuart dynasty, known as the Jacobites. Protestants in Catholic France had been under pressure since the early sixteenth century, but they had gained important privileges in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) revoked the edict in 1685, propelling 130,000 to 160,000 into exile: 30,000 to Switzerland, 30,000 to the states of the German Empire, 50,000 to the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and 50,000 to England. In all, some 200,000 Huguenots left France between the first third of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, helping to develop agriculture and industry in the Protestant countries where they settled, especially England and the German states of Hesse and Prussia. The Jacobite migration was less numerous—about 50,000 people—but it was a continuous movement from the end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries and resulted in the creation of an extended business network, out of which important personalities emerged. In other cases, as in Russia and central European countries in the eighteenth century, governments focused essentially on attracting colonists. Frederick II (ruled 1740–1786) of Prussia established in his states 300,000 immigrants, coming mostly from southern Germany. In Russia, Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796) planted more than 60,000 colonists from Lorraine and Germany, mostly in the region of the Volga, the Ukraine, and the Crimea, supplementing the Russian migrants already there. Other governments launched active relocation campaigns among their own residents. For example, after the Moriscos (Muslim converts to Catholicism) rebelled in Granada in 1568–1570, Spain dispersed them northward to Castile and provided incentives for Old Christians from the north to repopulate Granada. And in the mid-seventeeenth century, states in central Italy worked to attract new settlers to repopulate areas devastated by plague.

MOBILITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The mobility of the European population within Europe was therefore an essential element in economic development during the early modern era, as it was during the medieval period, although the significance of migration varied from place to place. The importance of European migration overseas was even more varied. In the case of Asia and Africa the figures are quite low. The Portuguese were never very numerous in Africa or India. The English and the French were present only in limited numbers in Asia in the early modern period. Even the Dutch colonies in Java and the Sunda Islands did not amount to very significant numbers, and it is estimated that only about 15,000 Dutch settlers migrated to South Africa. Nonetheless, Jan Lucassen has calculated that about 30,000 to 40,000 men were required overseas yearly in order to maintain Dutch positions. He estimates that 973,000 soldiers and sailors were employed by the VOC (Dutch East India Company), of whom 48 percent were foreign immigrants, and that a little more than half of them perished far from Holland. Although French emigration to Canada was quite modest—some 70,000 migrants, only 15,000 of whom settled and had descendents—French emigration to the West Indies was considerable, between 250,000 and 300,000.

However, it is clear that overseas departures consisted mainly of Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Portugal and Spain began extensive European overseas migration with the colonization of the Atlantic islands (Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries) in the fifteenth century. In spite of the large population difference between Spanish and Portuguese territories, the disparity was not so significant because Portuguese emigration increased greatly in the eighteenth century. In raw numbers, the evolution of Spanish emigration to America was as follows: 243,000 in the sixteenth century; nearly 200,000 in the first half of the seventeenth century, about 250,000 between 1650 and 1800. It is difficult to advance precise figures for the British Isles. Somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 moved in the seventeenth century and between 250,000 and 300,000 in the eighteenth century, with more Scots and Irish than English in this latter century. In the course of the eighteenth century there was also a considerable German contingent: about 70,000, although German movements were essentially inside Europe. This largely ignored German mobility amounted to about 500,000 people in the course of the eighteenth century.

Movements inside the European continent were distinctly more numerous than overseas departures, which were long interpreted as the product of individual choices. In fact, networks played an essential role in an individual's decision to migrate, and many migrants were recruited by contract in Europe in order to clear or farm the land, or to respond to artisanal and domestic needs, which was also the case for slave trading. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of British Isles immigrants to the West Indies and North America were therefore contract workers or "indentured servants."

All this underlines the fact that, in spite of the historic and emotional importance attached to religious migration, European mobility in the early modern era stemmed first and foremost from social and economic causes corresponding to micromobility and partially to urban attraction. Displacements were most often work-related and can be explained mainly by the availability of work and by salary differences. This is certainly the case for seasonal and temporary migration. Seasonal migration involved short-term displacements—harvesters or vineyard laborers being the most obvious example. Such short-term displacements could last several months: many stonemasons from the French province of Limousin went to work—except for the winter months—in the building industry in Paris, Lyon, and Bordeaux, and returned annually. Temporary migrations involved longer stays: for example, the French migrant workers from the Pyrenees or the Massif Central who went to work in Spain returned only every three or four years. Temporary migrations might last for the whole of a person's working life, the return to the homeland only taking place, if at all, in retirement. This "lifelong" migration occurred often among French migrants in Spain. Lifelong migration also occurred in the West Indies, and the Americas in general, although a limited number of emigrants who found great success overseas might return sooner. The wealthy Spanish indianosand peruleros of the sixteenth century and the even wealthier French planters in the West Indies in the eighteenth century are cases in point.

There were also considerable manpower movements in Europe during the early modern era. The most sizeable were located in Italy (more than 100,000 people per year) and in France (a similar figure). One of the most interesting is what Jan Lucassen has called the "North Sea system," which from the seventeenth century onward involved some 30,000 migrants annually from the German states, mostly into the United Provinces. Other movements of migratory workers, such as harvesters in the east of England, also involved regular and regulated movements, as was also the case for peddlers, or migrants with a similar lifestyle, such as tinsmiths from the Auvergne region or sawyers from the Limousin and Forez regions of France. They followed the same traditional routes every year and often—as in the case of the tinsmiths—served as cultural intermediaries who transmitted news as they moved from place to place.

CONCLUSION

The population movements in the early modern era did not present a serious threat to an essentially rural rootedness characterized by strong regional attachments. For example, although there was high mobility of young adults in England, involving frequent changes of residence, the majority of movements were less than fifteen kilometers, the average being four to five kilometers. Most of all, once married, people hardly moved at all. And rarely did people move randomly. Instead, migrants followed veritable migration routes, either as part of highly organized departures, as was the case for indentured servants and seasonal or temporary migrants, or alternatively as part of traditional family or parish links (for example, apprenticeships or marriages), or the ongoing attraction of the nearest city. Sometimes they were led to move by information available locally or through occupational contacts, letters from earlier migrants, or kinship links. Even religious migrations show a migratory context that is similar to that of work-related movements. It is now well established that migrants maintained strong links to their homeland, thanks in particular to an active interchange of letters between migrants and family and friends back home.

Generally speaking, mobility was not chosen, although there was a minority of adventuresome spirits. People moved because they could no longer stay in their place of birth or because the living conditions there had become unacceptable (forced migration). People moved to find work or a better salary. But the idea of returning home was always very strong—and was even part of the system in the case of seasonal and temporary migration—and adaptation to other places and other societies was far from being always successful, particularly in places with a tropical climate, such as parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, which severely tested the health of European migrants. Migration and increased mortality often went hand in hand, and it took many overseas migrants to create successful colonies; many overseas migrants gave up and returned home, just as many urban migrants in Europe abandoned cities and returned home. Many died far from their families and homeland without ever managing to establish roots in their new country.

Migration involved some very real risks, sometimes because of insalubrious conditions in city tenements or overseas colonies, or alternatively because the life of sailors or soldiers was dangerous in itself. Soldiers did in fact constitute a part of European mobility, not only because regiments moved about but also because the armies of various European countries recruited mercenary soldiers; Switzerland, Scotland, and Ireland became famous as suppliers of mercenary soldiers. In the first half of the seventeenth century, there were 100,000 Scotsmen recruited as soldiers in other countries or who had become subject to military service after settling abroad. This type of mercenary, which always existed, took on new proportions from the middle of the thirteenth century. The Scots and the Swiss occupied a special place in this form of mobility, with the Irish also migrating in very large numbers in the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. The Swiss enjoyed a high reputation as mercenaries, but the Irish and Scots were scattered more widely all over Europe, including Spain, the Scandinavian states, and Russia. The Spanish monarchy alone moved some 500,000 soldiers for military reasons in the first half of the seventeenth century. An estimated one million Swiss served abroad during the early modern era—the equivalent of the entire Swiss population at the start of the seventeenth century. Somewhere between 10 and 31 percent of the Swiss male population over the age of sixteen were in foreign service in the seventeenth century and between 5 and 20 percent in the eighteenth century.

Finally, while seasonal and temporary migrants such as tinsmiths, and marginal types such as criminals, moved about a lot, this was also the case for students in the early modern centuries. And it has always been the case for gypsies, for whom migration—geographic mobility—was an important part of life.

See also Atlantic Ocean ; Cities and Urban Life ; Class, Status, and Order ; Colonialism ; Communication and Transportation ; Conversos ; Economic Crises ; Family ; Huguenots ; Jacobitism ; Jews, Expulsion of (Spain ; Portugal) ; Mercenaries ; Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain) ; Persecution ; Refugees, Exiles, and Émigrés ; Roma (Gypsies) ; Servants ; Slavery and the Slave Trade ; Spanish Colonies ; Vagrants and Beggars .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bardet, Jean-Pierre. Rouen aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Les mutations d'un espace social. Paris, 1983. The only study that measures migrations out of cities.

Canny, Nicholas. ed. Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800. Oxford, 1994.

Choquette, Leslie. De Français à Paysans: Modernité et tradition dans le peuplement du Canada français. Sillery, Quebec, and Paris, 2001.

Cressy, David. Crossing Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.

Galenson, David W. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. Cambridge, U.K., 1981.

Gutton, Jean Pierre. La société et les pauvres en Europe, XVIème–XVIIIème siècles. Paris, 1974.

Lucassen, Jan. Dutch Long Distance Migration: A Concise History, 1600–1900. Amsterdam, 1991.

——. Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea. Translated by Donald A. Bloch. London, 1987.

Moch, Leslie Page. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650. Bloomington, Ind., 1992.

Poitrineau, Abel. Remues d'hommes: Essai sur les migrations montagnardes en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris, 1983. The best reference on seasonal migrations.

Pooley, Colin G., and Ian D. Whyte, eds. Migrants, Emigrants, and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration. London, 1991.

Poussou, Jean-Pierre. Bordeaux et le Sud-Ouest au XVIIIème siècle: Croissance économique et attraction urbaine. Paris, 1983.

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——. "Migrations et mobilité de la population en Europe à l'époque moderne." In L'histoire des populations européennes, vol. 1: Des origines aux prémices de la révolution démographique, edited by Jean-Pierre Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier, pp. 262–288. Paris, 1997.