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The History of Migration in Europe

The History of Migration in Europe belies several myths by arguing, for

example, that immobility has not been the “normal” condition of people before
the modern era. Migration (far from being an income-maximizing choice taken
by lone individuals) is often a household strategy, and local wages benefit from
migration. This book shows how successes arise when governments liberalize
and accompany the international movements of people with appropriate legisla-
tion, while failures take place when the legislation enacted is insufficient, belated
or ill shaped.
Part I of this book addresses mainly methodological issues. Past and present
migration is basically defined as a cross-cultural movement; cultural boundaries
need prolonged residence and active integrationist policies to allow the cross-
fertilization of cultures among migrants and non-migrants. Part II collects chap-
ters that examine the role of public bodies with reference to migratory
movements, depicting a series of successes and failures in the migration policies
through examples drawn from the European Union or single countries. Part III
deals with the challenges that immigrants face once they have settled in their
new countries: Do immigrants seek “integration” in their host culture? Through
which channels is such integration achieved, and what roles are played by cit-
izenship and political participation? What is the “identity” of migrants and their
children born in the host countries?
This text’s originality stems from the fact that it explains the complex nature
of migratory movements by incorporating a variety of perspectives and using a
multi-disciplinary approach, including economic, political and sociological
contributions.

Francesca Fauri is Assistant Professor and Jean Monnet Chair in Economic and
Migration History at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research centres on
Italian and European economic history, with a specific interest in the economic
causes and impact of migration movements. In 2013 she won a Basic Research
University Funding award to broaden her studies to the use of remittances and
the history of immigrant business in Europe. She has co-edited Novel Outlooks
on the Marshall Plan (Lang, 2011).
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The History of Migration in
Europe
Prospectives from economics, politics
and sociology

Edited by Francesca Fauri

First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 selection and editorial matter, Francesca Fauri; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The history of migration in Europe: perspectives from economics, politics
and sociology / edited by Francesca Angela Fauri.
1. Europe–Emigration and immigration–History. 2. Migration, Internal–
Ireland–History. 3. Europe–Emigration and immigration–Social aspects.
4. Europe–Emigration and immigration–Economic aspects. I. Fauri,
Francesca.
JV7590.H59 2014
304.8094–dc23 2014017617
ISBN: 978-1-138-77783-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-77240-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

List of plates and figures xi

List of tables xiii
Notes on contributors xiv
Preface xviii
FRANCESCA FAURI
List of abbreviations xx

Introduction 1
VERA ZAMAGNI

PART I
Who are the migrants and what is their impact? 11

1 Quantifying and qualifying cross-cultural migrations in

Europe since 1500: a plea for a broader view 13
LEO LUCASSEN AND JAN LUCASSEN

2 Migration as a historical issue 39

PAOLA CORTI

3 Maritime history and history of migration: combined

perspectives 51
M. ELISABETTA TONIZZI

4 “We are all transnationals now”: the relevance of

transnationality for understanding social inequalities 69
THOMAS FAIST

5 Immigration, diversity and the labour market outcomes of

native workers: some recent developments 88
GIANMARCO I. P. OTTAVIANO
x Contents
PART II
Migrations and politics 101

6 European migrants after the Second World War 103

FRANCESCA FAURI

7 Migrants and European institutions: a study on the attempts

to address the economic and social challenges of
immigration in EU member states 126
CRISTINA BLANCO SíO-LóPEZ AND PAOLO TEDESCHI

8 Irish immigration then and now 154

CORMAC ó GRáDA

9 Italian illegal emigration after the Second World War and

illegal immigrants in Italy today: similarities and differences 173
SANDRO RINAURO

10 A new Italian migration toward Australia? Evidences from

the last decades and associations with the recent economic
crisis 194
DONATELLA STRANGIO AND ALESSANDRA DE ROSE

PART III
Migrations and citizenship 215

11 From economic integration to active political participation

of immigrants: the Belgium experience from Paris to the
Maastricht Treaty (1950–1993) 217
PIERRE TILLY

12 Living on the edge: migration, citizenship and the

renegotiation of social contracts in European border regions 230
HARLAN KOFF AND GLORIA NARANJO GIRALDO

13 Who am I? Italian and foreign youth in search of their

national identity 251
DEBORA MANTOVANI

Index 272
Plates and figures

Plates
11.1 Trade unions played an important role in the formulation of
policies relating to immigration and the migrant workers 224
11.2 Bulletin of the Christian Trade Union (CSC), 31 October 1971 225

Figures
1.1 Cross-cultural migration rate (CCMR) method for a given
territory and time period 24
1.2 Total net CCMRs per category for Europe without Russia,
including internal migrations 26
1.3 Total net CCMRs per category for Europe without Russia,
excluding internal migrations 28
1.4 Total net CCMRs per category for Europe without Russia,
excluding migrations to cities within nation states and
excluding temporal multi-annual migrations 29
4.1 Transnational social spaces 77
4.2 Transnationality and capital 79
5.1 The effects of immigration when natives and immigrants are
identical 90
5.2 The effects of immigration when natives and immigrants are
different 91
5.3 Identification problems when natives relocate 93
5.4 Identification strategy when natives relocate 94
6.1 Italian migration and ICEM 111
8.1 Immigration per 1,000 population, 2002–2011 160
8.2a ATTIM 2002–2012 163
8.2b Z, 2002–2012 164
10.1a Expatriated 1861–1950: row periods 199
10.1b Expatriated 1926–1950: yearly details 199
10.2a Repatriated 1901–1950: row periods 200
10.2b Repatriated 1926–1950: yearly details 200
10.3a Expatriated 1951–1975 201
xii Plates and figures
10.3b Repatriated 1951–1975 201
10.4 Emigration flows from Italy: main destinations, 1970–2005 202
10.5 Permanent additions in Australia, 1996–2013 204
10.6 Permanent additions of Italians in Australia, 1996–2013 207
Tables

1.1 Conventional binary oppositions between migrants and

movers 15
1.2 Migration to cities in Europe (without Russia), 1901–2000 27
6.1 ICEM assisted movements in 1952 107
6.2 The ICEM budget in 1952 and 1964 109
6.3 Italian emigration and main destination countries 117
6.4 The ICLE budget 1951–1954 118
8.1 Irish attitudes to immigration in the 2000s 162
8.2 Replies to statement: “immigration enriches (our country)
economically and culturally” 162
8.3 Employment status of immigrants by nationality in 2006, ages
15+ only 167
8.4 Employment status of immigrants by nationality in 2011 167
10.1 The principal destination of Italian immigrants in Australia
(2005–2012) 207
11.1 Number of Italians within the three Belgian regions and in
Belgium 220
13.1 Italians and children of immigrants by gender, age, parents’
level of education, social class, length of stay in Italy,
geographic area of origin, family composition and language
spoken at home 255
13.2 Self-identity among Italians and children of immigrants 257
13.3 Foreigners’ geographic area of origin and self-reported
pan-national identity 258
13.4 Foreigners’ self-reported national identity by main
socio-demographic and cultural variables 260
13.5 Multinomial logistic regression analyses (model 1 and model 2)
for variables describing foreigners’ patterns of national identity 264
Contributors

Paola Corti is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin.

She has contributed to and collaborated with various Italian and foreign jour-
nals and cultural institutions. She is the author of many books and articles on
contemporary society and Italian and international migration history. Her
more recent publications include: Storia d’Italia: Annali 24.Migrazioni,
Torino, Einaudi, 2009 (edited with M. Sanfilippo); Emigranti e immigrati
nelle rappresentazioni di fotografi e fotogiornalisti, Foligno, Editoriale
umbra, 2010; Storia delle migrazioni internazionali, Bari-Roma, Laterza
2010; L’Italia e le migrazioni, Bari-Roma, Laterza, 2012 (with M. San-
filippo); Temi e problemi di storia delle migrazioni, Viterbo, Sette città, 2013.
Alessandra De Rose is Professor of Demography with courses in the PhD
school in Demography. She is the Director of the Department of Methods and
Models for Economics, Territory and Finance at the University La Sapienza
in Rome and President of the Italian Association for Population Studies. Her
main research interests are in the fields of family demography, marriage and
union dissolution, gender studies, analysis of the relationship between popu-
lation dynamics and social and economic trends.
Thomas Faist is Professor for the Sociology of Transnationalization, Develop-
ment and Migration at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Dean
of the Faculty and Deputy Director of the Collaborative Research Centre 882
“From Heterogeneities to Inequalities”. His fields of interest are transnational
relations, citizenship, social policy, development and migration. He held
visiting professorships at Malmö University and the University of Toronto.
Thomas Faist is a member of the editorial boards of Ethnic and Racial
Studies, South Asian Diaspora, Social Inclusion, Migration and Development
and the Pakistan Journal of Social Issues. Books he recently co-published
include Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Social Science Research Meth-
odologies in Transition (2012), Transnational Migration (2013) and Disen-
tangling Migration and Climate Change (2013). His current research focuses
on the transnational social question.
Francesca Fauri is Assistant Professor of Economic History at the University
of Bologna, where she teaches Economic History at the School of Economics
 Contributors xv
in Bologna and European Economic History at the School of Political
Science in Forlì. She has published extensively on Italian and European eco-
nomic history. She is vice-president of Forlì’s Europe Direct Centre which
in 2014 was nominated by the European Commission “Jean Monnet Centre
of Excellence”. She has won a Jean Monnet Chair in 2011 and Basic
Research University Funding (FARB) in 2013, thanks to which she has con-
centrated her current main research interests on Italian and European emigra-
tion history, the use of remittances and the history of immigrant business in
Europe.
Harlan Koff is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg.
He is the President of the Consortium for Comparative Research on Regional
Integration and Social Cohesion (RISC) as well as co-editor of the journal
Regions and Cohesion (Berghahn Journals). His research focuses on migra-
tion, border politics and international development.
Jan Lucassen is Emeritus Professor of Social History of the Free University in
Amsterdam, and research fellow attached to the International Institute of Social
History. His research focuses on labour migration and the history of work.
Leo Lucassen is Director of Research of the International Institute of Social
History (IISH) in Amsterdam and Professor of Global Migration and Labour
History at the Institute for History in Leiden.
Debora Mantovani is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of
Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna. Her main research
interests are in the fields of immigration and educational inequalities.
Gloria Naranjo Giraldo is Associate Professor at the University of Antioquia,
Colombia with teaching experience in the fields of political science and
anthropology. Her emphases on research are: migration, borders, citizenship
and public policy. She is currently a PhD student co-supervised at the Univer-
sity of Granada, Spain and the University of Luxembourg.
Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus, School of Economics, University
College Dublin. His earliest publications were on the economic history of
Ireland. His books on Ireland include Ireland: A New Economic History
1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), Black ‘47 and Beyond (Princeton, 1999) and
Jewish Ireland since the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton,
2006). More recently he has focused on the global history of famines, and he
is the author of Famine: A Short History (Princeton, 2009). In 2011 he was
awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Irish Academy for his work.
Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano is Professor of Economics at the London School of
Economics and Political Science and at the University of Bologna; Director
of the Globalisation Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance,
London; Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research,
London; Research Fellow of the Center for Financial Studies, Frankfurt; and
xvi Contributors
Non-resident Senior Fellow of Bruegel, Brussels. He is the co-author of many
works in international trade, urban economics and economic geography. His
recent publications focus on the competitiveness of European firms in the
global economy as well as the economic effects of immigration and offshor-
ing on employment and wages.
Sandro Rinauro is Assistant Professor at the Department of International,
Legal, Historical and Political Studies, University of Milan, where he teaches
Political and Economic Geography. His publications and research interests
focus on Italy’s emigration and immigration movements since the Second
World War, on Italy’s illegal emigration and on the history of social and sta-
tistical research since the nineteenth century.
Cristina Blanco Sío-López has earned a PhD in EU History and Policies at the
European University Institute (EUI) and is currently a researcher at CVCE –
Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe – in Luxembourg. Her
research interests focus on the history of European integration and European
institutions, with particular attention to the European Parliament. She is cur-
rently in charge of two projects: “Spain and the construction of Europe” and
the Action Jean Monnet project entitled “Initiative and constraint in the
mapping of evolving European borders”.
Donatella Strangio is Associate Professor of Economic History in the
Department of Methods and Models for Economics, Territory and Finance at
University La Sapienza in Rome, with courses in European Integration
Policies – Master EuroSapienza European and International Policies and
Crisis Management. Her main research interests focus on Italian migration,
finance history, the economics of European Integration and Italian colonial
history.
Paolo Tedeschi is Assistant Professor of Economic History at the University of
Milan-Bicocca DEMS, where he teaches Economic History and European
Integration History. He is also Assistant Professor at the University of Lux-
embourg, where he teaches European Integration History. His recent research
and publications concern, in particular: the history of European integration,
the economic history of Lombardy (eighteenth–twentieth centuries), and the
history of Lombard business organizations, trade unions and friendly
societies.
Pierre Tilly is Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Université catholique of
Louvain, where he chairs the Centre for the Study of Contemporary European
History. His fields of research are namely the economic and social history of
the European integration, the colonial history and the dynamics of frontiers.
M. Elisabetta Tonizzi teaches contemporary history at the School of Social
Science of the University of Genoa. Her research interests include the economic
and social aspects of maritime history. She is a member of the editorial board of
the International Journal of Maritime History and Italia Contemporanea.
 Contributors xvii
Vera Zamagni is Professor of Economic History at the University of Bologna.
She has published more than 20 books and 80 articles in Italian, English and
Spanish on Italy’s economic development since unification. Her research
interests focus on regional disequilibria, income distribution and standard of
living, and on business history themes such as the role of state intervention in
the economy and the development of the cooperative movement.
Preface
Francesca Fauri

When, in 2011, I was awarded an EU Jean Monnet Chair with a project on

Italian and European migratory movements, my research on the subject had just
begun. As my effort went deeper I realized that a full understanding of past and
contemporary migratory processes cannot be achieved by relying on the tools of
one discipline alone or by focusing on single-level analyses: we need to broaden
the investigation and rely on a multi-disciplinary approach. That’s why I concep-
tualized this book, which embodies the contributions of top level authors in dif-
ferent disciplines and using different perspectives.
As an economic historian I can say that the theoretical approach to immigra-
tion that has prevailed for the past 50 years among economists does not come to
terms with the complexities of the current reality nor, for that matter, with the
migration flows of the past. It is quite clear that migrants do not merely respond
to economic disparities between countries. Although migration is clearly related
to differentials in wages and employment, economic disparities alone are not
enough to explain international movements. Traditional explanations need to be
modified to give more weight to non-pecuniary factors: when, for instance, the
costs of leaving one’s home country are high, they may predominate over
expected gains from immigration. Similarly, migration cannot be considered an
income-maximizing choice taken by an individual alone, but, as historians
underline, it is often a household strategy, a decision taken within the family
context to support and improve life conditions at home. Remittances may thus
be considered as one of the most fundamental objectives of the decision to
migrate, a choice which is made collectively for the well-being of the entire
family group. Thus, the relationship with the family in the home country repres-
ents the core element of many migratory processes.
The complex nature of migratory movements requires a sophisticated theory
that incorporates a variety of perspectives and a multidisciplinary approach. This
is what this book aims at: to focus on the history of migration past and the
present impact on Europe, through a multi-disciplinary approach that includes
economic, political and sociological contributions.
I would like to bear witness to the great interest to which this cross-cultural
multi-disciplinary adventure gave rise and that has made this book not only intel-
lectually rewarding but also extremely fertile for stimulating intellectual
 Preface xix
confrontation and developing mutual understanding among an international com-
munity of scholars. A large part of the contributions included here originated, to
some degree, in a conference on “Emigration from and to Europe: A Multidisci-
plinary Long-term View”, held in Forlì, Italy in December 2013; in that venue
some of the texts, in a preliminary version, were presented and discussed by
their authors. The fertility of the perspectives and the findings of those papers
suggested the opportunity to develop those works for this volume.
Finally, I should like to thank the members of the scientific committee –
Paolo Tedeschi, Elisabetta Tonizzi and Vera Zamagni – as well as Fabio Casini
and the Forlì Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, for their assistance throughout
the project. Without the funding of the above-mentioned EU Jean Monnet Chair
my research and the gathering of such a prestigious group of scholars would not
have been possible.
Abbreviations

AIRE Registry of Italians Living Abroad

CCMR Cross-cultural migration rate
CDLR Committee on Local and Regional Democracy
CGE Commissariato Generale per l’Emigrazione
CLOTI Comité de liaison des organisations des travailleurs immigrés
EC European Council
ECSC European Coal and Steel Community
EDC European Defence Community
EEC European Economic Community
EIB European Investment Bank
ESC Economic and Social Committee
ESF European Social Fund
ESS European Social Survey
HAEU Historical Archives of the EU
HDI Human Development Index
ICEM Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
ICLE Istituto per il credito del lavoro italiano all’estero
ILO International Labour Organization
INES Irish National Election Study
IOM International Organization for Migration
IRO International Refugee Organisation
OEEC Organisation for European Economic Co-operation
PICMME Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of
Migrants from Europe
PRO Public Record Office
UN United Nations
Introduction
Vera Zamagni

This book can claim a special originality, because it defeats several myths,
among which are the following: (1) that sedentariness has been the “normal”
way of life of people before the modern era; (2) that migrations only started in
modern times and have constantly increased their numbers; (3) that the migrants
are people who individually decide to improve their lives by migrating; (4) that
politics has only a negative role in migrations, keeping certain areas backward or
closing borders. None of these themes can be exhausted here, but each of the
chapters raises questions and provides answers that often defeat conventional
wisdom.
I would like to start a brief overview of the book chapters with a discussion of
the idea of sedentariness, which was considered the normal way of living since
the agrarian age, started some ten millennia ago. In the preceding forest-pastoral
age, people were continuously mobile, wandering about to collect food, chase
animals and find better places in which to spend their short lives. As Fisher has
rightly stated: “We are all descendants of migrants.”1 Such migrations were
generally collective and not individual, for reasons of defence and generation.
When the agricultural age started independently in some parts of the world, not
all people were involved in the new civilization and many remained nomadic.
This gave rise for many millennia to a clash between nomadic and settled com-
munities, which mixed up people and altered societies. Nomadic communities
were in general better equipped of strong and cruel warriors than settled com-
munities, which had to rely on farming and had a large population of peasants
and slaves (or serfs) devoted to cultivation, the domestication of animals and the
building and maintenance of larger and larger cities. Settled communities were
in general richer and better organized, but fragile in their large land areas that
were difficult to protect.
Nomadic communities were often capable of winning major agrarian empires,
sometimes displacing them entirely for a long period, at other times substituting
the local elites with their own, while adopting their culture and their civilization.
The most well-known example of the former case is the defeat of the Roman
Empire, which had been able for many centuries to protect itself, though not
easily, from the “barbarian” attacks, but ultimately collapsed. An example of the
latter case is the fall of the Ming dynasty in China. In spite of having tried to
2 V. Zamagni
constrict central Asian nomadic raiders by settling military and farming colonies
on their borders and by rebuilding and extending the Great Wall over 13,000
miles, the Ming dynasty could not resist the Manchu people, who by the middle
of the seventeenth century invaded China and conquered power, ruling for many
centuries. We can conclude therefore that not even in the agrarian age sedentari-
ness prevailed, as a result of the many migrations produced by wars of conquest,
colonization and defence. The prevailing motivations of the aggressions by
nomadic people were generically economic – to get hold of the wealth of
farming communities – but the conquest was achieved not by economic, but by
military means.
Around ad 600, other types of migrations were added to the existing ones,
mostly within the Mediterranean area: “holy” wars of conquest by Muslims and
Christians, as well as pilgrimages towards the “holy” places. To these move-
ments of people, a new class of merchants added the first important individual
economic motive for migrating: opening up markets and enlarging the size of
their business. The enlargement of commercial cities induced migrations from
the countryside, which became more substantial when industrialization started in
the eighteenth century and more cities came into existence. The vast geograph-
ical explorations that took place since the middle of the fifteenth century by the
Europeans were led by the merchants and their large commercial companies and
were supported by the European states, giving rise to migration waves of all
types: forced migrations (mostly slaves, but also displaced people), settlement of
nearly empty areas (North America, Australia), colonization of the least organ-
ized people around the world (central and South America, India, Africa). The
motivations of these migrations were again economic and the means employed
were partly economic, but largely supported by military power. The largest
empire that ever existed in the world, the British Empire, was conquered by mer-
chants, privateers and companies, and only later defended and governed by state
power.
The age of the industrial revolution largely activated migrations from the
countryside to the cities, but cities could well be outside the “nation” of resid-
ence. All along the nineteenth century the nation state strengthened its diffusion
with a number of processes of “unification” in Europe and elsewhere and the
migratory movements within the boundaries of nations were no longer con-
sidered of interest, so that the definition of “migrant” was reserved to those who
chose to settle in another nation. Statistics were then collected to highlight this
“inter-national” phenomenon, which started to be considered as a relatively
recent one, while recent in true fact it was not.
This book starts here, with five chapters that address mainly methodological
issues. The first chapter by Leo and Jan Lucassen aims at identifying a broader
definition of migration than the one commonly used of inter-national migration,
at the same time avoiding the trap of including all types of mobility. After con-
sidering the many definitions of migrants produced by the literature, the authors
build their own, based on a sociocultural paradigm: migration can be basically
defined as a cross-cultural movement. What the migrant crosses is a cultural
 Introduction 3
boundary, encompassing important differences in values, technologies, religions,
political systems and social rules; only in some cases this entails a crossing of
political borders and the coverage of long geographical distances. A prolonged
residence, that does not necessarily encompass the entire life of migrants, is
needed to allow the cross-fertilization of cultures between migrants and non-
migrants. Leo and Jan Lucassen have then to come to terms with statistical prob-
lems and they include in their definition movements of people that one way or
the other can be measured: immigration and emigration as they are usually
defined, plus movements of people to cities or the inverse movement to colonize
the countryside, plus seasonal movements and temporal multiannual movements
(soldiers, sailors, artisans and possibly other categories like domestics and
journeymen).
Their extensive collection of data for Europe (European Russia included)
starts as far back as the sixteenth century and reaches the twentieth century.
There is much to be learned from these results. First, that the temporal multi-
annual migrants and the migrants to cities were by far the most important com-
ponents of the migration aggregate. Second, that emigration out of Europe was
of massive importance between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of
the twentieth centuries, but did not constitute the majority of migrants even in
this century. Third, that immigration into Europe started as an important phe-
nomenon only in the second half of the twentieth century. Fourth, percentage-
wise on the adjusted population there wasn’t much change in the impact of
migrations until the end of the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth century there
was a substantial increase, but the real exploit was in the first half of the twenti-
eth century, when as much as two-thirds of the European population was made
up of migrants. Also rather surprizing is the diminished rate in the second half of
the twentieth century, the reason being the important decrease of the temporary
multiannual migration and of emigration.
The chapter by Leo and Jan Lucassen ends with two additional points: (a) a
possible alternative in the use of data, i.e. the exclusion of migrants to cities
within European states, on the grounds that such movements do not really cross
cultures. This produces lower levels of migrations, but much the same pattern
over time; (b) the extension of this work to cover Asia, something that the
authors of the chapter are engaged in doing and that appears from preliminary
results to lend support to the definition of migrations proposed by them.
The second chapter, by Paola Corti, deals with similar methodological issues
from a sociological point of view, discussing the prevailing approach of consid-
ering migrations only a recent phenomenon. She reminds us that mobility was
already employed by the household as a “normal” way of earning a living in the
Ancien Régime (early modern times), by sending some of the members else-
where to learn a craft, to serve in aristocratic milieus, to build churches and
palaces, to paint portraits and decorate public and private buildings, to attend
universities, to serve in armies, and to practice the “profession” of pedlar. Moun-
tainous areas would send most of their people away for considerable spans of
their lives. What this author specifically stresses are two aspects of this
4 V. Zamagni
phenomenon: (a) migrations start and are more widespread in more developed
areas (the Italian case being a good example of this); (b) it is the family that
decides the migratory strategy and not the single individual. The chapter also
addresses the issue of continuity or breaks in the migratory processes. The author
is of the view that the big spurt in emigration achieved across the nineteenth and
the twentieth century was produced by much the same old patterns within a new
environment. Indeed, from Lucassen’s data it appears that there is no break in
the “quality” of migration patterns until the second half of the twentieth century,
while there is certainly a break in quantities of migrations in the first half of the
twentieth century.
The work by the economic historian Maria Elisabetta Tonizzi that is reported
in Chapter 3 deals with the main reason for the explosion of migrations in
Europe in the first half of the twentieth century: better and more rapid means of
transport. She concentrates on steam ships, which allowed the transoceanic flows
of migrations to grow as never before. The description she offers of the “age of
sail” is appalling, with people amassed on old and unsafe ships, lack of food and
water, the diffusion of all sorts of diseases, so that those ships were labelled
“floating hells” or “coffin-ships”. In the age of steam and steel, ships were
enlarged and improved, the time needed to cross the Atlantic was shortened and
regularly operated services were introduced. It was a true revolution in sea trans-
portation, but a similar revolution took place in land transportation through the
introduction of the steam locomotive. The chapter by Tonizzi continues by ana-
lysing the role of steamship companies, which became major businesses and
deployed important organizational skills.
The fourth chapter, by the sociologist Thomas Faist, addresses another meth-
odological question: if migration is mostly connected to the need of persons and
families to improve their material conditions, does transnationality help in this?
The author first tries to define transnationality as including all the cross-border
transactions (financial, political, social, cultural). The meaning of border is
defined generally as a physical border between nations, but the author agrees that
this could be an unnecessary limitation of the concept. Next, he focuses on
inequalities as a measure useful to judge the impact of migrations, and for the
purpose of analysing this impact he proposes the building up of a transnational
social space encompassing more than one state, so as to capture the effects of
migrations on the sending and receiving countries. When this is done, it is pos-
sible to build a graph with two variables: transnationality (horizontal axis) and
capital (including all forms of convertible resources, vertical axis). All four
fields of the graph are to be used to locate people with reference to inequality,
each space representing a continuum that can accommodate various degrees of
the presence of the two variables, namely a heterogeneity of endowments and a
propensity to move. If this approach can allow a more realistic analysis of the
impact of migration, which can benefit some more than others and can even be a
failure, one problem left is the definition of inequality selected for comparison,
which tends to be differently defined in various societies. The author claims that
his approach necessitates the analysis of the concept of inequality used, by at
 Introduction 5
least comparing the different perceptions of inequality in existence. Whatever
the equity concept employed, the answer to the question raised on whether tran-
snationality helps in improving material conditions cannot be univocal. Inequal-
ities between countries might be increased rather than diminished if migrations
entail the movement of skilled workers, but inequalities within countries too
might be increased by migrations if the unskilled workers received by an
advanced country are not helped in integrating and enlarge the lower classes of
that country.
The first section of the book ends with another methodological chapter, this
time by the economist Gianmarco Ottaviano, who discusses the possible expla-
nations of an empirical phenomenon that goes against the conventional wisdom
of orthodox economic models, namely the observed improvement of wages and
employment opportunities for native workers after immigration in at least a
number of cases. He supports the view that orthodox models forecast that native
workers will see their wages decrease, because they assume that the quality of
native workers and immigrants is the same. If the quality is not equal, then the
impact of immigration on the wages of the locals can be positive, as indeed it
has been found in some empirical works. He also supports the view that it is
indeed highly probable that the quality of native and immigrant workers is dif-
ferent, as a result of different education and experience. So, to identify the
impact of immigration, there are more variables that need to be taken into con-
sideration beside wages: employment and other “instrumental” variables that
help in deciding the direction of causation.
In the light of the five chapters of Part I, we can say that the migratory move-
ments encompass more components than simple inter-national flows, are often
the result of collective choices (not always of individual ones), do not present
major breaks in quality up until the second half of the twentieth century, while
quantities are boosted in the second half of the nineteenth century by more rapid
means of transport, and have impacts that are often different from what has been
maintained until recently in terms of inequalities and the behaviour of native
wages.
Part II of the book collects chapters that address one way or another the role
of public bodies with reference to migratory movements, producing examples
applied to single countries that mostly cover the latter half of the twentieth
century. The chapter by the economic historian Francesca Fauri is concerned
with the reactivation in Europe of the emigration flows that had been dying out
in the 1930s as a result of the 1929 crisis. On top of the voluntary emigration of
those who wanted to improve their lot, there were also flows of displaced people
and refugees. An international agency connected with the UN started to lend
legal protection to the refugees, while Europe only succeeded in putting in place
an agency in 1952 with the aim of supplying transport and other services to those
who wished to emigrate. The agency was also active in facilitating emigration.
The author has gathered new archival materials to reconstruct the activity of the
European agency from its foundation to the 1980s. She then moves to highlight
what the Italian government did in the field of emigration immediately after the
6 V. Zamagni
end of the Second World War, a relevant issue, given that most of the European
emigrants at the time were Italians. When the steps towards European economic
integration commenced, Italy supported the proposal of free movement of
workers inside the community and in the end she was successful, though the
complete liberalization of the labour market inside the EEC was achieved only
in 1969.
But soon the European Union (EU) had to face the reverse flow, that of immi-
gration from countries outside the Union. This, as noted before, is a real break
with the past. Immigration into Europe by non-Europeans had always been a
marginal phenomenon, after the invasions by Muslims and Ottomans. The data
gathered by Lucassen and Lucassen too show that this immigration represents an
absolute novelty. The chapter by Cristina Blanco Sío-López and Paolo Tedeschi
gives an account first of the steps taken by the EU in the field of provisions for
migrants and unemployed people, with the birth of the European Social Fund
(ESF ) mostly devoted to European Migrants. When Greece, Spain and Portugal
entered the Union, the migrants from these countries too were considered
“internal” migrants, but soon the immigration of people from outside the Union
started. The chapter mostly deals with this new issue in relation with Spain, but
it does quote EU decisions that apply generally. Among these, the 1985 Schen-
gen agreement for free circulation of EU citizens is important, as well as the
establishment of Frontex in 2006, to patrol the EU borders. Also the 2008 Euro-
pean Pact on Immigration and Asylum is of interest, although it actually legis-
lated asylum, not general immigration. The well-known fact is that the present
situation of the EU immigration policies is still very unsatisfactory, as the
Lampedusa’s events have repeatedly shown.
The next chapter is an interesting story of Irish immigration and legislation.
The author, Cormac Ó Gráda, is well known as a historian of Irish emigration,
and this time he wanted to deal with a little known chapter of the Irish history of
immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century, before dealing with the
present day issues of immigration into Ireland. The episode analysed tells of an
alleged discrimination of foreigners in Ireland following the 1905 British Aliens
Act. The author documents the “accidentality” of the tiny immigration of Jews
and Italians before the First World War and their petty or strange activities that
attracted negative reactions by the natives, although nothing that prevented the
immigrants from continuing to live there. Then he moves on to the last decade,
giving illustration of the anti-immigration feelings of the Irish, who pressed for a
more restrictive immigration policy, particularly in the years of the very rapid
inflow of immigrants, rising from 15 per cent of the population in 2002 to 25 per
cent in 2005. Last, he touches upon the hot problem of the links between immi-
gration and the welfare state, focusing on the story of “citizenship tourism”,
namely the habit of having a child in Ireland as an illegal immigrant, because the
legislation allowed both the child and his/her mother to become Irish citizens, a
practice dismissed by the 2004 referendum.
The next chapter, by Sandro Rinauro, deals with the widespread phenomenon
of illegal immigration, which is so difficult to document. He sets out to sketch it
 Introduction 7
for the Italian case, in a comprehensive and original way, by covering first Italian
illegal emigration since the nineteenth century and next illegal immigration into
Italy, a much more recent phenomenon. It is interesting to read in his chapter
that illegal emigration was banned before the First World War by the Italian
legislation and not by the legislation of the countries of destination, which were
quite liberal. From the 1920s, the countries of immigration progressively enacted
restrictive legislation, with the result of increasing the percentage of illegal
immigrants, within totals that were much smaller. His example of Italian emigra-
tion into France between 1920 and 1933 is paradigmatic: illegal flows reached
two-thirds of the total. After the Second World War, illegal flows of Italian
migrants peaked again, the estimate being that illegal migrants doubled legal
ones. Often this illegality was accepted, if not encouraged, by the receiving
countries for a host of reasons. The decisions about free mobility of labour
within the Common Market discontinued this flow of illegal Italian migrants, but
promoted similar flows from other nations, like Portugal and Spain. The conclu-
sion of the author are twofold: on the one side, official statistics underplay the
actual migration flows, while present day illegal immigration from Africa into
the EU is not a new phenomenon, although the conditions that bring migrants
into Italy are worse even with reference to those prevailing at the time of sail
ships. Rinauro shows that the extent of the Italian underground economy is the
main cause of this illegality, pretty much as it was for the Italian illegal emig-
rants in many European nations after the Second World War. Legislation
remains the main factor responsible in shaping the modes of migrations.
On another issue, which has become relevant above all after the Second
World War – that of the so called “brain-drain” – we have Italy as an example.
Donatella Strangio and Alessandra De Rose provide an illustration of this issue
in the case of Italian emigration into Australia. This recent phenomenon is
placed in the contest of the long term flows of Italian migrants to Australia, that
reveals an important post-Second World War peak, then a remarkable slowdown
in the period of general decrease of Italian emigration, followed by an unex-
pected increase in the first decade of the twenty-first century, which can be
explained precisely in terms of skilled migration. This type of migration peaks
when the crisis in the sending countries like Italy deepens and is a sign of the
failure by the public authorities of the sending countries to develop appropriate
incentives to employ skilled labour at home.
On the whole, Part II of the book depicts a series of successes and failures in
migration policies. Successes arise when governments liberalize and accompany
the international movements of people with appropriate legislation, while fail-
ures take place when the legislation enacted is insufficient, belated or ill shaped.
But what clearly emerges is also that the movements of people can sometime
overwhelm any legislation, when they are too large and temporally concentrated.
Part III of this book addresses some of the problems immigrants have to face
not in the process of migrating, but once they have settled. This field of research
is huge and has so far attracted mostly the interest of sociologists and political
scientists, but it might be an interesting topic for historians of the future as well.
8 V. Zamagni
Do the immigrants want to “integrate” into the culture of the host countries?
Which are the channels of integration – citizenship, political participation?
Which is the “identity” of migrants and of their children born in the host coun-
tries? The chapter by Pierre Tilly gives an account of the belated opening of
Belgium to voting in local elections by immigrants who are citizens of other EU
countries (and later also to citizens of third countries) after the pronunciation of
the EU in 1998. He puts this in a historical context, reminding us that the initial
forms of participation by immigrants were in voluntary associations and trade
unions and in local work and consultative councils, while it was only in the last
decade that the step forward was made, with the EU having to send an “ulti-
matum” before the Belgian constitution would be amended. The author con-
cludes that the acquisition of nationality remains the most important channel to
acquire full political rights.
The chapter by Harlan Koff and Gloria Naranjo Giraldo discusses the posi-
tion of EU areas that border with “non-European” areas and experience at the
same time political division and efforts at cooperation, with places that only
stress the former and other places that open up to the latter. The chapter pro-
duces two examples: Melilla–Nador and Bari–Durres. Melilla is a Spanish
enclave in Moroccan territory and is surrounded by walls, but informally eco-
nomic, social and cultural relations are entertained with the neighbouring town
of Nador. This border has been a focal point of migration into Europe, with very
active local NGOs, but it remains incapable of forging a really inclusive strategy.
Bari too has been an important migration transit first for Albanians and later for
nationals of other countries, mostly arriving through Albania. Bari stands out as
a place where civil society cooperation has been important, often overcoming
informality and building up official programmes to increase cross-border trade
and investments, with the help of the EU. In their conclusions, the authors con-
trast the two examples and conclude that cross-border relations could be inter-
preted in a positive and constructive sense.
The final chapter, by the sociologist Debora Mantovani, reports the results of
an extensive survey conducted in 15 secondary schools of Bologna among stu-
dents, some of whom were foreigners or children of mixed nationality couples.
The purpose was that of ascertaining the concept of “identity” these students
declared to have with reference to the “communities” to which they reported
being members of. The results are very interesting, both for Italians and non-
Italians, because they reveal a widespread tendency to open up the concept of
“citizenship” to encompass more than one nation, combining cultural elements
and producing “multifaceted national identities”. These complex identities some-
time produce individual or family conflicts, but most of the time are seen as
capable of reaching a superior synthesis.
In general, the final part of this book shows how outdated are the policies that
today face, in Europe, the challenges of migrants coming from areas that do not
share the basic cultural pillars of Western societies. The migrants themselves are
engaged in finding practical solutions to bridge the differences, but open con-
flicts do exist.
 Introduction 9
There is one final contribution that the book as a whole makes. Migrations
have predominantly been considered by the political, economic and sociological
literature as a special topic, of interest to those directly concerned, but irrelevant
for the general issues dealt with by those disciplines. This book shows that such
a vision is totally inadequate, because it prevents a more appropriate analysis of
social phenomena, in which migrations are intertwined with the other social
factors. The relevance of migrations for the shaping of societies is an old story,
but today more so than ever. If in fact we employ Leo and Jan Lucassen’s defini-
tion of migration as a cross-cultural movement, we can easily admit that the
more distant the cultures that come into contact are, the more impressive the
impact of migrations on societies will be. In the past, there are numerous exam-
ples of migrations that entail a great “distance” of cultures, the insertion of
African slaves into America being perhaps the most prominent one, but in
general most migrants belonged to the same basic European culture, although
interpreted in a variety of ways. Today, as a result of the fact that most migrants
come from outside Europe, the “distance” among cultures of origin and cultures
of destination is quite generalized, and the impact of migrations therefore much
more substantial. It is time for the social scientists to face this new challenge.

Note
1 M. H. Fisher, Migration. A World History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014,
p. xii.
This page intentionally left blank
Part I

Who are the migrants and

what is their impact?
This page intentionally left blank
1 Quantifying and qualifying
cross-cultural migrations in
Europe since 1500
A plea for a broader view1
Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen

Introduction
Although migration is the talk of the town, both in the public sphere and in
academia, so far historians and social scientists have failed to come up with
generally accepted definitions and typologies to measure and qualify migration
in the long run. Whereas some (e.g. national statistical agencies) concentrate on
people who cross international borders, others – guided by the concerns of poli-
ticians and policy makers – limit themselves to ‘problematic’ groups, either
socially, culturally or a mix of both. In Europe this has led to a myopic view that
privileges migrants from Muslim countries, whereas in the United States Hispan-
ics attract the most attention (Zolberg and Woon, 1999). That conspicuous
migrants need not always come from afar is shown by the problematization of
Zimbabwean workers in South Africa (Wentzel et al., 2006; Crush and Tavera,
2010), or internal migrants who have flocked in great numbers to large cities
within large empires such as Russia and China (Siegelbaum and Moch, 2014;
Whyte, 2010; Shen, 2014).
These diverging and partial definitions of what migration is make structured
comparisons through space and time extremely difficult, if not impossible. We
therefore have great trouble in assessing the rate of migration in different soci-
eties and time periods. As a consequence, questions as to whether some societies
are more mobile than others, or whether in the current world we have indeed
reached the zenith of spatial mobility, as many assume, cannot be answered
satisfactorily. Scholars are even divided about such fundamental questions as to
what constitutes a migratory step, let alone what impact such steps have on both
migrants and the societies where they settle. As a result there is no agreement on
key questions such as whether early modern societies were indeed less mobile
than modern ones; whether we can compare current illegal African migrants in
Spain to Bretons moving to Paris in the nineteenth century; and whether the
mass migrations to Manchuria after 1860 are principally different from the
Atlantic mass migrations to North America (Moch, 2012; McKeown, 2004. For
North America, see Taylor, 2002).
This messy state of affairs, at least in analytical terms, explains partially why
migration does not play a key role in larger debates on the long term
14 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
determinants of economic growth, labour relations, inequality and social and
cultural changes of human societies (Van Zanden, 2009; Morris, 2013; Putter-
man and Weil, 2010; Manning, 2013). Instead the phenomenon is largely
reduced to a “problem” of low skilled and culturally alien newcomers who have
to be assimilated or integrated by nation states. This leaves out the high skilled,
temporary organizational migrants (those working for internationally operating
organizations such as churches, states, NGOs and companies) and internal
migrants. It is this myopic migration-as-a-problem framework produced by
states and societies that dominates migration studies and severely limits our
possibilities to study and understand the causes and effects of human migrations.
Although many students have suggested definitions, typologies and methods,
historians and social scientists cherish their own idiosyncrasies and approaches
or simply reproduce prevailing policy categories. This is partly explained by dif-
ferent research agendas and questions,2 levels of analysis, and various forms of
methodological nationalism and presentism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003),
but it is also nourished by an unwillingness and an understandable but unjusti-
fied fear regarding too broad generalizations. These objections, however, have
not restrained migration historians from publishing all kinds of wide-ranging and
even global overviews, with mostly implicit (but mutually inconsistent) defini-
tions of migration.
We think that many of the fears of, and aversion to, a uniform definition of
migration are unwarranted and that they need not necessarily lead to reduction-
ism and meaningless levels of aggregation. Instead of harking back to a naive
and outdated form of structuralism, following Nancy Green we propose a ‘post-
structural structuralism’ (Green, 1997), which combines explicit research designs
and definitions with nuanced, layered, contextual, and culturally embedded
historical research.
In this chapter we propose a method and typology that uses a much broader
definition of human mobility and that helps us to make sense of the varied histor-
ical experience by allowing us to compare migrations on a global and historical
scale. The model has been developed on the basis of migrations in Europe
between 1500 and 2000, but is also applicable on a global scale (Lucassen and
Lucassen, 2014b). The aim of this approach is not only to contribute to discus-
sions about levels of migration and mobility in different parts of the world before
and after the industrial revolution, but more importantly to better understand the
effect different forms of migration have on social, cultural, and economic
change.

Migration and mobility: definitions and concepts

The main reason for the wide range of migration definitions is the reliance on
sources produced by states, which stem from their interest in certain types of
migration. Thus France in the early nineteenth century created an administrative
system that enabled bureaucrats to follow the residential moves of draftees until
their mid-forties, so that they could be mobilized if necessary (Farcy and Faure,
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 15
2003; Lucassen, 1987). Empires like Russia (before and after 1917), Tokugawa
Japan, and Maoist China or apartheid South Africa, also monitored internal
migrations, for both economic and political reasons.3 With the rise of the nation
state, crossing national boundaries and the wish to distinguish between citizens
and aliens became by far the most dominant criteria relating to migration
(Torpey, 2000; Caplan and Torpey, 2001; Fahrmeir, 2007; McKeown, 2008).
The idea that one’s own citizens should enjoy preferential social, economic and
political rights, but also that citizens abroad should be protected against unfair
treatment (Gabaccia, 2012; Green and Weil, 2007), explains the rise of what
Gerard Noiriel so succinctly called “la tyrannie du national” (Noiriel, 1991).
The gaze of the state has proved hugely influential in the way scholars have
studied migration and this has privileged some definitions over others. States
defined “migration”, subsequently counted “migrants”, and the resulting statisti-
cal data have determined the categories used by historians and social scientists.
At the same time scholars were lured away from basic questions regarding the
distance travelled, the type of borders people crossed, the intention of the move,
and the time spent away from home. Because state definitions loom heavily,
“real” migration is often juxtaposed to “only” spatial mobility, assuming that
“real” migrants travel over long distances, cross international (or even intercon-
tinental) boundaries, and have the aim to take root at destination, or at least stay
away for many years, leading to standard distinctions as shown in Table 1.1.
Although within the field of migration history there is no communis opinio
about these binary oppositions, most scholars abide by the conventional defini-
tion of “real migrants”. When it comes to distance, for example, most migration

Table 1.1 Conventional binary oppositions between migrants and movers

Real migrants (migration) Other movers (mobility)

Distance (geographical) Long Short

Border crossing International/intercontinental Internal (municipal, regional,
provincial, federal state)
Intention Final stay at destination Return to origin in short or long
run (sojourners)
Time Long term Short term (seasonal, multi-
annual labour migrants)
New social ties High (at least in the long run) Low (social and cultural
isolation in gated communities)
Class Low High (e.g. expats) and low (e.g.
Gypsies)
Power Migrants who join and follow Migrants who come as invaders
the rules and set the rules
Agency Free Coerced (slaves) or prescribed
(expats)

Source: Lucassen et al., 2014a.

16 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
scholars prefer national (or even continental) boundaries over local ones. And
this explains the neglect of most internal migrations, both in Europe and Asia, as
is demonstrated by the invisibility of tens of millions of intra-Asian migrants in
studies on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (McKeown, 2004). Second,
little attention is paid to temporary movements, such as seasonal labour, the
migration of domestics from villages to cities, or that of tramping artisans
(Lucassen, 1987; Moch, 1992, 2007; Ehmer, 2011). Consequently, in most main-
stream overviews of migration, temporary and small-scale moves are conspicu-
ously lacking and often left to geographers and (historical) demographers (Lee,
1966; Lawton, 1968; Zelinsky, 1971; Grigg, 1977; Oshiro, 1984; Chang, 1996;
Fan and Huang, 1998; Pooley and Turnbull, 1998; Rosental, 1999; Van Poppel
et al., 2004; Kok, 2007). The underlying assumption is that “real” migrants
move with the aim to settle somewhere else for good, preferably in a faraway
country. Such assumptions are in line with the nation state paradigm that
assumes a fixed membership and views migration as an exemption to the
sedentary rule. In the case that people do move, this would involve a painful
process of uprooting and subsequently rerooting.4
The often implicit assumption seems to be that migration, in contrast to
mobility, has a much larger cultural impact on both the migrants and the soci-
eties in which they settle, leading to conflicts, integration problems, or, more
positively, to social and cultural change. This explains why nowadays in Western
Europe, many scholars study the migration and settlement process of Moroccans,
Turks, Algerians and other postcolonial migrants, but ignore people coming
from neighbouring countries or with high skills (such as Japanese) (see, e.g. Crul
and Mollenkopf, 2012). Germans in the Netherlands or French in the United
Kingdom in our current era are normally not considered as “real” migrants,
because their culture is assumed to be more or less similar to that of the natives.
Added to these considerations are policy definitions that tend to privilege lower
class migrants who would cause social problems over highly educated ones,
defined as “expats” (Hanerz, 1990; Sassen, 1991; Salt, 1992; Smith and Favell,
2006; Favell, 2008; Green, 2009; Bickers, 2010; Blower, 2011; Bade et al.,
2011; Fechter and Walsh, 2012; Van Bochove, 2012).
Next, there is a strong tendency to overlook involuntary migrations, which
has resulted in the exclusion of the forced shipment of 12 million African slaves
across the New World from the mainstream Atlantic migration story.5 Further-
more, Asian migrants – if noticed at all – (in the past as well as in the present)
are often assumed to move in some form of bondage, whether as labourers or
through trafficking. The same is true for prisoners of war and inmates of concen-
tration camps. There is an implicit assumption that migrants have less power
than the people they join and therefore have to adapt or assimilate. This explains
why Europeans who ventured into Asia and Africa from the fifteenth century
onwards, or the Spaniards who conquered Latin America, are often not con-
sidered as migrants.
Finally, it is remarkable that migrants who display extremely mobile
behaviour, not with the aim of staying but as a consequence of their profession,
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 17
such as travelling artisans, seasonal workers, sailors and soldiers, are also
frequently excluded from migration histories, as they do not fit the “from A to B
and then stay” format. However, their geographical mobility often had a great
impact on the migrants themselves, those they (temporarily) joined and those to
whom they eventually returned (Sanborn, 2005; Zürcher, 2013). Take the
example of John Smith from Lincolnshire. Born at the end of the sixteenth
century, he first fought in the Netherlands, after which he joined the Austrian
forces fighting in Hungary against the armies of the Ottoman Empire. When he
was taken prisoner in Romania he made it to Austria, after which he left for Vir-
ginia in the autumn of 1607 (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, p. 21). However,
few historians, including those from whom we borrowed this petite histoire,
would class John Smith as a migrant. This mix of state preoccupations and other
culturally and ideologically determined associations with the term “migrant” has
divided and fragmented the field dramatically and stands in the way of a more
fundamental understanding of human migrations.
The opposition between “real” migration and mobility is the result of highly
stylized post hoc and teleological constructions of much more intricate human
spatial and social behaviour. Two major difficulties stand out. First, the differ-
ence between intention and result: migrants may have the intention to leave for
good, but for all kinds of reasons return after shorter or longer periods. The
opposite is also true; some move multiple times and finally return after decades
(Brettell, 1986; Cinel, 1991; Morawska, 1991; Wyman, 1993, 2001; Reeder,
2003; Alexander, 2005). And in the case of sojourners it may even take genera-
tions.6 A good example of the often considerable disparity between intention and
result is that of migrants who moved within colonial circuits, such as the Dutch
or English empires (Bosma, 2007a, 2007b; Feldman, 2007; Harper and Constan-
tine, 2010; Bickers, 2010), but also informal empires such as the American since
the late nineteenth and the Japanese empire in the first half of the twentieth
century (Gabaccia, 2012; Young, 1998; Uchida, 2011; see also Lucassen, Osamu
and Shimada, 2014). Migrants in colonial circuits travelled thousands of miles,
but mostly with the ultimate aim to return home. While many died en route, and
others stayed away for good, a substantial number did indeed return, but only
after having been exposed to very different cultures and ways of life. Europeans
who stayed in the colonies often married indigenous partners, whereas their
descendants at some point in time returned from the (ex-) colonies to their
“fatherland”. Although these “retornados” exercised a considerable economic,
social, cultural and political impact on the communities they returned to, this has
attracted only limited attention (Smith, 2003; Bosma et al., 2012).
Second, with respect to geographical distance, it is important to note that
short distance moves may also bring migrants into culturally and socially very
distinct worlds, and force them to build new social ties. As Leslie Page Moch
and others have convincingly argued (Moch, 1992, 2012), the temporary move
of young French girls in the nineteenth century to a nearby town or city where
they found employment as domestics in bourgeois family houses, would
probably have had more influence on their lives than travelling from one expat
18 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
community to another had on a highly skilled migrant. Or, as the geographer
Wilbur Zelinsky put it:

Genuine migration obviously means a perceptible and simultaneous shift in

both spatial and social locus, so that the student cannot realistically measure
one kind of movement while he ignores the other. Which family is more
migratory, the one transferred 3,000 miles across the continent by an
employer to be plugged into a suburb almost duplicating its former neigh-
bourhood, or the black family that moves a city block into a previously
white district? Ideally, we should observe shifts in both varieties of space in
tandem, but given the dearth of techniques and data for handling purely
social movement, we are forced to rely almost solely on territorial move-
ments as a clumsy surrogate for total mobility.
(Zelinsky, 1971, p. 224)

This means that three conceptual units of analysis that are basic to migration
history have to be questioned seriously before we can start making meaningful
comparisons between different parts of Eurasia: the state, the household and cul-
tural units.

(Nation) states and their subsections

Since the nineteenth century national states have produced a wealth of statistics
on “immigration” and “emigration”.7 As a result, most historians, for both prac-
tical and substantive reasons, define migration as a permanent move over
national boundaries, notwithstanding the arbitrariness of such a choice. It means,
for example, that Belgians in the French-speaking southern provinces who
choose to settle on the other side of the border in France, moving 10–20 km, are
considered international migrants, whereas the pre-revolutionary Russian trader
who left Vladivostok to build a new life in Kiev, travelling almost 7,000 km, is
considered an internal migrant. Within the nation state paradigm he will remain
below the radar of the mainstream migration historian.
Another well-known example is the often temporary and circulatory migra-
tion of skilled British workers who crossed the Atlantic from the 1870s onward
to earn higher wages on the east coast of the United States. Through such urban
to urban moves an integrated North Atlantic migration field emerged in which a
move from Birmingham to Liverpool was not fundamentally different from an
ocean crossing to Pittsburgh (Berthoff, 1953; Thomas, 1954; Baines, 1985;
Blewett, 2011). Nevertheless most studies ignore the Birmingham–Liverpool
type labour migrations and cherish the Liverpool–Pittsburgh variant and thus
stick to a fundamental distinction between internal and international migrations.
Our myopic view on migration is not only explained by implicit ideas on
what constitutes a “real” spatial move, but also by the available national sources,
which fail to register most local and temporary migrations. Such limitations,
however, need not be an insoluble problem. Alongside the nation state
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 19
paradigm, demographers already in the late nineteenth century developed soph-
isticated methods to measure and map local and internal migrations by using
local registers and genealogical data.8 At the aggregate level, national censuses
often provide information about international as well as internal migrations that
have been used to detect patterns and regularities. The most famous contribution
in this respect was made by Ernst Georg Ravenstein, a German-born fellow of
the Royal Geographical Society in London,9 who in 1885 published his “Laws of
migration”, based on the British 1871 and 1881 censuses, with additional
information about the birthplaces of those counted (Ravenstein, 1876, 1885,
1889; see also Grigg, 1977). This enabled him to measure flows at the county
level in the British Isles (including Ireland) on the basis of which he formulated
seven “laws” of migration. The most important of these were that short distance
migrations were much more common than long distance moves, that each current
of migration produces a compensating counter-current, and that women are more
migratory than men (Tobler, 1995).

Individuals and households

Many scholars, including Ravenstein, who have studied migration through the
lens of censuses, paid little attention to the social embededness of individual
migrants and either analysed migration in terms of anonymous “push” and “pull”
forces, or implicitly assumed migrants to be heroic males who dared to break
away from tradition and ventured into an unknown promised land (Handlin,
1951). With the rise of social and economic history in the 1960s, influenced by
new trends in anthropology and sociology, this methodological (and gendered)
individualism has been abandoned by most scholars. Their focus on individuals
as members of larger social units (families and households) made visible a pleth-
ora of moves that had considerable consequences for people’s lives, and showed
how family strategies had an important influence on who was to move and how.
When we look at how family members decided who was to leave and who
was to stay, we can go beyond abstract macro push and pull models and under-
stand much better the reasons behind human migrations at the micro (individual)
and meso (household) level. This approach has generated a wealth of detailed
studies that show how mobile people have been long before the Industrial
Revolution (Lucassen, 1987; Lourens and Lucassen, 1999; Kok, 2010). But it
also opened new windows of opportunity with respect to structured (and often
unexpected) comparisons over time. A good example are the Italian seasonal
migrants from the Apennines and the Abruzzi mountains. From the early modern
period onward they worked year in, year out in large numbers in the central
Italian coastal plains to harvest grain (Lucassen, 1987, pp. 117–118). From the
mid-nineteenth century onward, with the introduction of steamships, many of
them decided to trade the Campagna Romana for the Argentine Pampas, which
from a nation state perspective immediately made them not only international
but even intercontinental labour migrants (Frid de Silberstein, 2001). Notwith-
standing the spectacular increase in the distance travelled, however, the primary
20 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
reason for moving, and the function of their migrations for the family economy,
did not fundamentally change. In both cases men left their wives and children
behind on the small (peasant) family plot with the aim of earning high wages,
overseas or (until the mid-nineteenth century) in the plains in central Italy. In
both instances they hoped to prevent the forced sale of their land and thereby
full-scale proletarianization (Lucassen, 1987). From this and many other exam-
ples we can conclude that migration can be studied more fruitfully from the per-
spective of household members who cross temporary or permanent borders,
irrespective of whether they are national, regional, or local. At the least, this is
the case when we want to understand the impact of migration on labour markets
and economic development, as well as on household dynamics and individual
life cycle developments.
Another most instructive example that shows both similarities and differences
in the migration mechanisms of household members is that between internal
migrants in European states in the nineteenth century and present day (West)
African young (often) male migrants who take huge risks to enter Europe. At
first sight the differences appear stark. Young men from Senegal or Mali, for
example, pay considerable sums to traffickers who promise to take them to Italy
or other destinations within the EU. The ultimate aim is to find work as an illegal
worker and then transfer money to the family members who stayed behind and
who invested in his adventure. If we compare this with the internal moves of
male and female Europeans in the nineteenth century (or earlier), it is clear that
the risks have increased considerably over time. In contrast with the earlier
migrations, the determination of states to protect national (or supranational)
borders against unwanted migrants from outside its territory has created a profit-
able market for traffickers and smugglers who often reap huge profits. The very
visible and spectacular attempts to reach European soil and the sometimes dra-
matic and lethal consequences of such migrations, and not in the least the sensa-
tionalist press coverage, have obscured the systemic similarities with earlier
intra-European migrations. Just like French or German internal migrants before
the First World War, African migrants who try to enter Europe are primarily
motivated to contribute to the household economy and their agency should be
primarily seen in the light of household economics. Such comparisons between
two apparently very different historical contexts, using the household as the unit
of analysis, show the great advantage of moving beyond the conceptual and
ideological straitjacket of nation states.
Studying migration from a household perspective means a great leap forward
in historical migration research, but it also has its disadvantages because it
focuses predominantly on free migrations. Forced migrations, by the state or
other third parties, and therefore not primarily resulting from family strategies,
are almost always ignored. This is unjustified, however, because coerced forms
of migration can also be determined by family decisions, at least to some extent.
Think for example of households (in debt) that sold children or other family
members to outsiders in order to survive, as was the case during the Ming
dynasty in China in the sixteenth century (Hofmeester and Moll-Murata, 2011),
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 21
or Christian families in the Ottoman Empire who had to hand over one of their
(young) sons to be enlisted in the (elite) Janissary corps (Ágoston, 2005). Fur-
thermore, there are other readily available examples involving indentured labour
and selective refugee migrations (often primarily young men, much more so than
the elderly or children) (Jordan and Walsh, 2007; Morgan, 2001).
The freedom that families have to decide who is to move, however, is reduced
to near insignificance in the case of slave migrations, forced removals of entire
populations, and genocidal forms of replacement to sites of mass murder, as in
the case of Jews and kulaks (and other ‘enemies’ of the Soviet state) in Europe
between 1933 and 1945, especially in Poland and the Ukraine (Snyder, 2010), or
the Armenians in Turkey. But even in these atrocious cases, agency was not
entirely lacking. Some families anticipated persecutions and left, or sent certain
family members (e.g. children) ahead. Others, who had this option, could decide
to hide, or choose some of their members, again often children, to go into hiding.

Cross-cultural boundaries
A major advantage of the household approach is the framework it offers to
compare permanent and temporal, local, international and intercontinental
migrants over time and space. However, it tells us little about the nature of the
boundaries that migrants cross and thereby about the social, political and cul-
tural effects of their moves, both on themselves and on the society they enter.
Some may travel far, but stay within a well-known ambience, linguistically and
culturally, whereas others travel over short distances, but nevertheless plunge
into a new world with different values, technologies, religions and political
systems or rules about social behaviour.
To overcome the manifold unproductive binary oppositions between migra-
tion and mobility (Table 1.1), we propose a paradigm – inspired by Patrick
Manning – that in principle includes all moves, but that distinguishes between
migrations within a similar cultural space (“home community migration”) and
migrations that cross a cultural boundary (Manning, 2005, 2013). The core
assumption behind this sociocultural paradigm is that, unlike people moving
within their relatively culturally homogeneous “community” (which may be a
language group, a region, but also a state), “cross-community migrations” have
different and more far-reaching transformative effects, for better or worse.10 The
peaceful or violent confrontation of people with different cultural baggage has
the potential for cultural and social change, at the personal, organizational, and
societal level. As migrants and non-migrants learn from each other, this may
generate new ideas, which in turn can lead to all kinds of innovation. In cases
where migrants are invaders (Vikings, colonial expansion, Chinese troops in
Tibet), it obviously may also culminate in massive violence and the wiping out
or marginalization of the “natives”, as the aboriginal population of the Americas
and Oceania experienced from the sixteenth century onward. But even in these
cases of extreme asymmetric power relations there are ample indications that
cultural encounters, violent and one-sided as they often were, not only had an
22 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
impact on the receiving society, but also changed the migrants themselves.
Moreover, we should realize that in most cases cross-cultural migrations were
less destructive and resulted in more peaceful and extensive sociocultural
changes (Hoerder, 2002).
The transformative power of cross-cultural migrations is a good starting point
for a new and global method that enables us to measure and compare in a rigor-
ous and systematic way the rate (and different manifestations) of cross-cultural
migrations within a given territory. The added value of such a standardized
method is not only that it produces standardized benchmarks for the extent of
migrations, but also for their impact, both on the sending and receiving areas,
and of course on the migrants themselves. Differences in the share of cross-
cultural migrants in the total population (the migration rate) between areas raises
important questions about the vitality and dynamics of a society and its potential
for economic growth.

The CCMR method

These considerations have led us to develop the cross-cultural migration rate
(CCMR) method, which calculates the chance an individual has of experiencing
at least one cross-cultural migration in his or her life, and which can be
expressed as the share of the population in a certain territory (which can be a
city, a region, a nation state, an empire or a continent). Because this model
should be applicable to different time periods and parts of the world, we have
moved beyond conventional boundaries, such as nationality, religion or race.
Instead we have chosen cultural boundaries that are common to most human
societies in at least the last millennium and which transcend political boundaries.
The first is people who move from rural settings to cities. Until very recently,
cities required other cultural skills and other types of human capital than those
available in the countryside. Without completely reproducing the Weberian
modernization language of ascription-achievement and collective-individualism,
city air had a number of specific features that were lacking or less developed in
villages. Strong (family) ties were less pervasive, public institutions and civil
society initiatives more widespread, cultural subcultures more viable, labour
markets more diverse, possibilities for upward social mobility and the develop-
ment of human capital more accessible and commercial stimuli stronger. This
made the stay in cities, for long or short periods, for country folk a significant
experience and forced them to adapt to different cultural and social norms and
codes. With the homogenization of nation states, in terms of language, skills,
identity, education and communication, the cultural boundary between the coun-
tryside and cities largely evaporated, especially in Western Europe after the First
World War, but in large parts of the world until this very day, think of Russia,
China, India or sub-Sahara Africa, the migration to cities should still be con-
sidered a major cross-cultural migration.
Less numerous, at least in Europe, but involving considerable numbers in
empires such as China and Russia, are migrants who change one ecological
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 23
setting for another and who move within the countryside to new frontiers. There
they encounter not only different climatological conditions, but also people with
different languages, religions and cultural practices. We therefore decided to dis-
tinguish this second type of cross-cultural migration and labelled it “coloniza-
tion”, because such moves are often stimulated by (imperial) states with the
explicit aim of colonizing scarcely populated marginal territories at the frontiers.
A third type of cross-cultural migration is that of seasonal workers who
combine their own small family plot in semi-autarchic regions, often mountain-
ous areas, with wage labour in highly commercialized regions with large scale
farms that produce for external markets. This type of migration is, in contrast to
the first two, largely male dominated (although not exclusively), brings migrants
into contact with a much more monetized economy with different labour rela-
tions and often leads to the formation of organized work teams with appointed
leaders and systems of internal remuneration. Moreover, the money earned by
wage labour in ‘farmer’ regions is often ploughed back into the home com-
munity, which transforms existing status differences, consumption patterns and
worldviews.
Whereas seasonal migrants normally return within a year, the fourth category
we have distinguished are temporary migrants who stay away longer, and –
depending on their luck and agency – may never return. The bulk of these tem-
poral multi-annual labour migrants voluntarily join organizations that force them
to serve at least a few years in order to make the investment in training worth-
while or simply because the work cycle is longer than one year. By far the most
important labour market for these cross-cultural migrants is the military, espe-
cially before the advent of national (draft) armies, followed at great distance by
the maritime labour market for sailors. A third category are tramping artisans
and migrating domestics. As in the case of seasonal migrants, this segment was
heavily male dominated and until the twentieth century almost exclusively male
(domestics being the most important exception). The cultural boundary was not
only, or primarily, constituted by the predominance of wage labour, but by the
norms and values of the organization they entered: discipline, mutual (male)
solidarity, work ethic, which together produced an in-group feeling that drew a
firm line with the outside world. Moreover, these micro societies (a regiment, a
ship) consisted often of people with different linguistic and religious back-
grounds, which also led to cross-cultural encounters. As with seasonal migrants
the transformative effects of temporal multi-annual migrations are not only felt
by the migrants themselves, but also by the people they encounter (in violent or
peaceful exchanges) and the people they return to, infusing them with new ideas
from far away countries and the institutions they were part of. A good example
are the African-American GIs who served two years on German bases in the
1950s where they discovered, for the first time, that racial segregation was not
the normal state of affairs and which upon their return played an important role
in the American Civil Rights Movement (Höhn and Klimke, 2010).
To these four basic categories we added two other ones, which are neces-
sary to arrive at a complete quantitative picture of the total number of
24 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
individuals who experienced at least one cross-cultural migration in their
lives: people who entered and left a given territory, defined as “Immigration”
and “Emigration”. For a full understanding of the nature of the cross-cultural
moves these two categories have to be unpacked and subsumed in the four
basic variants we distinguish in our typology. Only then do we know how
many of the immigrants or emigrants went to (or came from) cities or rural
areas, and moved as soldiers, sailors, or seasonal workers. These considera-
tions lead to the following six categories that encompass all cross-cultural
movements within a given territory (T) (irrespective of scale), measured in
50-year periods (Lucassen and Lucassen, 2009):

1 Immigration (people moving into T);

2 Emigration (people moving out of T);
3 To cities (generally from rural areas, within T);
4 Colonization (moving to rural areas often with a different ecological charac-
ter, within T);
5 Seasonal (generally between peasant and farmer regions, within T);
6 Temporal multi-annual (soldiers, sailors and artisans, within T).

The relationships between the six categories is visualized in Figure 1.1:

Immigration

A B
Permanent

– To cities
– Colonization (to land)

A B

Temporal

– Temporal multi-annual (>1 year)

– Seasonal (<1 year)

Emigration

Figure 1.1 Cross-cultural migration rate (CCMR) method for a given ter-
ritory and time period.
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 25
In relation to the population size of a given territory in a given time period,
the total impact of geographical migration may be expressed in the following
formula: (Lucassen and Lucassen, 2009)

Σp(Miperm + Mimult + Miseas + Miimm + Miemi) , _____

Ei( p)
Pi( p) = _______________________________
Ni( p) Lp

Note: Pi(p) denotes the probability of a person living in period p and geographical
unit i migrating in a lifetime. Miperm, Mimult, and Miseas denote permanent (to cities
and to rural areas), multi-annual (labour migration), and seasonal cross-
community, often long-distance, movements inside unit i, respectively. Miimm is the
number of immigrants to unit i from outside, and Miemi the number of emigrants
from unit i to elsewhere. The notation Σp indicates that these migration numbers are
summed over period p. Ni(p) is the average population in geographical unit i in
period p. To compensate for over counting in the migration numbers, the expres-
sion needs to be corrected by the second factor, in which Ei(p) denotes the average
life expectancy in period p and Lp is the length of the period.

A different picture: applying the CCMR method to Europe

since 1500
Most mainstream overviews of migrations stress the unprecedented levels of
migration in our own time. The twentieth century, and especially the latter half,
is considered “The age of migration”, to reiterate the title of the widely cited ref-
erence work by Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller (2003). Defining migration
as international movements, they state that never before have so many people
migrated. In their own words:

Migrations have been part of human history from the earliest times.
However, international migration has grown in volume and significance
since 1945 and most particularly since the mid-1980s. Migration ranks as
one of the most important factors in global change.
(Castles and Miller, 2003, p. 4)

Adam McKeown and others have shown, however, that Castles and Miller
ignored large scale labour migrations between Asian countries, but due to their
limitation to international migrations also overlooked large-scale cross-cultural
and often long distance migrations within states such as China, India, Indonesia
and Russia since the mid-nineteenth century (McKeown, 2004; Bosma, 2009).
Finally, Gozzini (2006) argued that even when we stick to the nation state defini-
tion of migration, the share of international migrations at the end of the nine-
teenth century (1870–1914) was probably higher than a century later
(1965–2000).11 In other words, the implicit assumption that migration is directly
linked to the process of modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
leading to a linear increase in international migrations, should be rejected.
26 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
When we apply the CCMR method to Europe (without Russia) since 1500 the
“modernization paradigm” that supposedly gave way to a “mobility transition”
with very low levels of migration before 1800 and very high levels thereafter,
becomes even more doubtful (Figure 1.2). Instead, our results show that although
the CCMR rose significantly after 1750, levels were already substantive from the
sixteenth century onward.12 Moreover, an important increase is visible already in
the first half of the nineteenth century – before the advent of railways and steam-
ships. Furthermore our calculations for the twentieth century show a remarkable
and unexpected result: an all-time high in the first half of the century and a
considerable decrease after the Second World War.
Although the migration rate in the post-war period is considerably higher than
a century earlier, the difference is caused not so much by immigrants from other
continents (for example, Turks, Moroccans, Algerians, refugees from the Middle
East and colonial migrants from the Americas, Africa and Asia), but by the con-
tinuing (partly internal) drift to cities. The dominant idea that we now live in an
unprecedented migratory age should therefore not only be nuanced, but also
qualified.
For the first half of the twentieth century, apart from millions of internal and
intra-European city dwellers, the all-time high was to a large extent caused by
the two world wars that generated an unprecedented number of cross-cultural
migrations by soldiers, predominantly within Europe but also from other conti-
nents (troops from America, Canada, Australia and furthermore from French and
British colonies). Apart from soldiers, the wars caused enormous flows of
refugees, such as the 14 million Germans who were resettled immediately after
the armistice in 1945, constituting, according to R. M. Douglas (2012, p. 1), the
“largest forced population transfer – and perhaps the greatest single movement

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Emigration Immigration Colonization To cities Seasonal TMA

Figure 1.2 Total net CCMRs per category for Europe without Russia, including internal
migrations, 1501–2000 (%).
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 27
of peoples – in human history”.13 Most of them had initially moved to the new
‘Lebensraum’ in the East (especially Poland) from 1939 onward, whereas others
had lived for generations in various countries such as Hungary and Czechoslova-
kia, Yugoslavia and Romania. In the CCMR method, most of them are counted
as people moving “to cities”, in the same trend that saw many other war-induced
refugees remaining in Europe.14 Other refugees left the old continent as emig-
rants for overseas destinations, including Israel. Among these emigrants were
also 10,000 Nazis, for example Adolf Eichmann, who took refuge in countries
such as Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile (Cesarini, 2006).
In the second half of the twentieth century, army-related migrations decreased
considerably but remained an important phenomenon. This is explained first of
all by the huge numbers of American (15 million) and Russian (10 million) sol-
diers and their families who were stationed at bases in West and East Germany
during the Cold War (Müller, 2012; Höhn, 2002; Höhne and Moon, 2010). Fur-
thermore, there were smaller numbers of Europeans fighting colonial wars in
Indonesia (Dutch), Vietnam (French), Algeria (French),15 and various African
countries (Portuguese, French and Belgians). These soldiers, however, did not
counterbalance the unprecedented mobilization of armies in the period
1940–1945, which largely explains the decline in the overall migration rate.
After the Second World War, people moving to cities (both internally and
intra-European) remained by far the most important form of cross-community
migration and eclipsed “immigration”, which is often privileged in standard
migration overviews (Castles and Miller, 2003; Goldin et al., 2011). The share
of migrants from other continents, guest workers from Northern Africa and
Turkey, intercontinental refugees, or former colonial subjects, did indeed soar,
but on the whole constituted at 11 per cent only a small part of the total CCMR.16
The bulk of the cross-cultural migrations, as in the first half of the century, are
the result of the ongoing urbanization process that drew people to large cities, as
Table 1.2 shows.

Table 1.2 Migration to cities in Europe (without Russia), 1901–2000 (millions)

1901–1950 1951–2000

Increase urban population 108 281

X 2/3 (1901–1950) and X 1/2 (1951–2000) 65 140
Minus intercontinental immigrants 3.1 24.7
Total European rural migrants to cities 61.9 115.3
Average population Europe 395 512
Migration ratio (%) 15.7 22.5

Source: Lucassen et al., 2014 (from table 148).

Note
We applied the same method as in our calculations for the period 1501–1900, taking urban growth as
point of departure. The only difference being that we estimated that in the first half of the twentieth
century two-thirds, and in the second half only 50 percent, of the increase was caused by migrants.
Finally we subtracted immigrants from other continents in order to avoid double counting.
28 L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen
At this point some readers might object to the decision to continue to regard
people who move from the countryside to cities within Europe as cross-cultural
migrants. As we argued in the beginning of this chapter, given the increasing
(national) homogenization of states in the twentieth century, one could argue
that since 1850, or at least since 1900, internal migrants in national states by
definition no longer crossed cultural boundaries. This is in contrast to internal
migrants in (former) multicultural and vast empires, such as Russia and China.
On the other hand, also in (new) nation states the evolution of peasants into
national citizens was far from uniform and straightforward, as the example of
Italy shows. More importantly, however, is that including internal migrants in
the twentieth century allows us to make structural comparisons through time
(and space) of cityward migrations. Finally, it highlights how national borders
have monopolized public, political and academic debates on what migration
means. Nevertheless, suppose we would exclude internal moves to cities,
and revise our results in line with conventional ways of measuring migration,
the picture remains basically the same until 1950. The era of world wars
resulted in a record high percentage CCMR of almost 50 per cent of the popu-
lation; however, the picture in that case shows a much sharper decrease
after 1950.
Figure 1.3 illustrates very well the most significant difference between con-
ventional (international, or even intercontinental) definitions of migration and
the CCMR method. Whereas the intercontinental part of the former highlights
our “Immigration” category, the CCM rate considers people from other conti-
nents who settle in Europe as only one of six possible expressions of cross-
cultural experiences and thus offers a very different picture.17

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Emigration Immigration Colonization To cities Seasonal TMA

Figure 1.3 Total net CCMRs per category for Europe without Russia, excluding internal
migrations, 1501–2000 (%) (source: Lucassen et al., 2014).
 Cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500 29
Those who, for whatever reason, are not convinced by our argument that sol-
diers who fight in other countries should be considered as migrants at an equal
level with the other cross-cultural migrants, can simply leave them out. And these
same goes for Europeans who migrated to cities within nation states (see Figure
1.4). But even if both categories are excluded, our conclusion that migration rates
in the first half of the twentieth century reached an all-time high still holds.

Conclusion
After implementing the proposed methodology to quantify and qualify cross-
cultural migrations, as presented in this chapter, and thus diverging fundament-
ally from the (nation) state driven obsession with international and socially and
culturally “problematic” migrants, a lot of questions still remain to be answered.
To start with, what relative weight should we assign to the different kinds of
cross-cultural migration in relation to their causal effect on social and cultural
changes, in societies of origin and destination? By “weight” we mean the pro-
pensity of migrants to interact with inhabitants of the region of destination and
vice versa, as well as the chance this offers for cross-cultural (ex)change. One
could, for example, assume that migration to cities has a much greater trans-
formative effect than migration to the countryside (colonization), because of the
much greater social and spatial density and intensity of interpersonal contacts.
And on the other hand one could argue that the impact of migrants very much
depends on the specific historical context. The cross-cultural influence of sailors,
for example, who remained most of the time aboard their ships and in foreign
harbours only visited bars and prostitutes, was limited. To the contrary, soldiers,

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Emigration Immigration Colonization To cities Seasonal

Figure 1.4 Total net CCMRs per category for Europe without Russia, excluding migrations
to cities within nation states and excluding temporal multi-annual migrations,
1501–2000 (%).
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