Climate of migration? How climate triggered migration from southwest Germany to North America during the 19th century

Abstract

Abstract. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the extent to which climate and climatic change can have a negative impact on societies by triggering migration, or even contribute to conflict. It summarizes results from the transdisciplinary project "Climate of migration" (funded 2010-2014), whose innovative title was created by Franz Mauelshagen and Uwe Lübken. The overall goal of this project was to analyze the relation between climatic and socioeconomic parameters and major migration waves from southwest Germany to North America during the 19th century. The article assesses the extent to which climatic conditions triggered these migration waves. The century investigated was in general characterized by the Little Ice Age with three distinct cooling periods, causing major glacier advances in the alpine regions and numerous climatic extremes such as major floods, droughts and severe winter. Societal changes were tremendous, marked by the warfare during the Napoleonic era (until 1815), the abolition of serfdom (1817), the bourgeois revolution (1847/48), economic freedom (1862), the beginning of industrialization accompanied by large-scale rural-urban migration resulting in urban poverty, and finally by the foundation of the German Empire in 1871.The presented study is based on quantitative data and a qualitative, information-based discourse analysis. It considers climatic conditions as well as socioeconomic and political issues, leading to the hypothesis of a chain of effects ranging from unfavorable climatic conditions to a decrease in crop yields to rising cereal prices and finally to emigration. These circumstances were investigated extensively for the peak emigration years identified with each migration wave. Furthermore, the long-term relations between emigration and the prevailing climatic conditions, crop yields and cereal prices were statistically evaluated with a sequence of linear models which were significant with explanatory power between 22 and 38 %.

Changing impacts and societal responses to drought in southwestern Germany since 1800

“…for Czech Republic (1805-2012) (Brázdil et al 2013), the Alpine regions (~1800-2012) van der Schrier et al 2007;Haslinger et al 2018) and for Ireland (1765-2015) (Noone et al 2017). Furthermore, Glaser et al (2017) showed that the heat and the harvest failure of 1865, which resulted in increased prices during the subsequent years, lead to a migration peak from the German Southwest to Northern America.…”

Reconstructions of droughts in Germany since 1500 – combining hermeneutic information and instrumental records in historical and modern perspectives

“…Structurally, they correspond to today's drought definitions and classifications. The descriptions of impacts and consequences and the derived pathways of historical events are in most cases comparable to recent events (Erfurt et al, 2019;Blauhut et al, 2016;Glaser et al, 2016Glaser et al, , 2017Glaser et al, , 2018Brazdil et al, 2016or Nash et al, 2019. Therefore, a parallelization is possible.…”

“…The analysis is based on two main comprehensive data sets. The first data set -available from the virtual research environment Tambora (tambora.org, 2018;Riemann et al, 2016;Glaser et al, 2018) -consists of written documents related to weather, climate, and the impacts on and consequences for the environment and society of Central Europe. The second, modern data set comprises official precipitation data for Germany from 1881 onward and is provided by the German Weather Service (DWD, 2019b).…”

“…If the drought persists, the conditions described become more acute. In the historical context, especially after famine crises and epidemics, there are social excesses such as looting, robbery, persecution of minorities and excluded groups, and migration movements (Glaser et al, 2017. Fortunately, these are lacking in the modern context in Europe after 1950.…”

“…Numerous studies on droughts with an explicitly historical perspective have been presented in recent years, for example by Nash and Grab (2010), Gil-Guirado et al (2016), Brazdil et al (2018, and Erfurt et al (2019), implementing a wide range of content and methodological aspects. The spectrum ranges from analyses of outstanding individual years (Wetter et al, 2014) and the derivation of regional time series in different climatic zones (Noone et al, 2017;Kiss, 2017;Dobrovolný et al, 2018;Nash et al, 2019) to a focus on drought effects (Glaser et al, 2017).…”