Historians of migration have increasingly criticized the idea of a ‘mobility transition’, which assumed that pre-modern societies in Europe were geographically fairly immobile, and that people only started to move in unprecedented ways with the onset of modernization in the nineteenth century. In line with this critique, this article attempts to apply thorough quantitative tests to the available data. The focus is on ‘cross-community migration’, following Patrick Manning's argument that migrants moving over a cultural border are most likely to accelerate the rate of innovation. Six forms of migration are considered: emigration out of Europe, immigration from other continents, rural colonization of ‘empty spaces’, movements to large cities, seasonal migration, and the movement of sailors and soldiers. To illustrate regional variations, the examples of the Netherlands and Russia are contrasted. The reconstruction presented here is partial and preliminary, but it unequivocally shows that early modern Europe was much more mobile than modernization scholars allowed for. There was indeed a sharp increase in the level of migration after 1850, but it was due to improvements in transport rather than to modernization in a more general sense. This model has been elaborated for Europe but it can also be applied to other parts of the world and can hopefully contribute to the debate on the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia.

No abstract

This essay focuses on the emergence of an international labor market connecting Europe with southern Africa and south and southeast Asia, showing the intertwining of commercialization and proletarianization in the institution that created and coordinated perhaps the most important international labor market connecting Europe to the Far East.

This chapter explores the modes of the recruitment of seamen in European countries with changing economic positions from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. It discusses the four divisions of recruitment policies: mixed systems of free and unfree labour; national recruitment of free labour; national recruitment of unfree labour; and international and national recruitment of free labour, and analyses the influence of labour migration, war, imperialism and internationalisation.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract