Migration as a Strategy of Accumulation: Social and Economic Change in Eighteenth‐Century Savoy

Abstract

A well-known characteristic of the mountain regions of southern Europe in the pre-industrial period was the regular movement of young migrants who left each winter to seek work in the lowlands and returned in spring as the snows melted. Seasonal migration became an established and lasting feature of the economies of upland areas as populations recovered from the Black Death. For most scholars the iconography of such movement helped to define the human ecology of mountain areas. In conditions closest to the margins of existence, the main function of such migration, it seems, was to ease the pressure on subsistence, though those returning might be expected to bring back a little capital to help pay taxes. 1 Recent demographic research reveals that this regular movement was significant enough to leave its mark on the periodicity of marriages and births, as young men left in the autumn and returned in the spring. In some circumstances it may also have regulated fertility. 2 It seems at least reasonable to infer, however, that such seasonal movements were no more than a minor brake on increasing population. When harvests were good these healthy mountain environments were isolated from the worst effects of the epidemics and plagues which affected lowland areas. There is evidence that they developed demographic regimes which were characterized by relatively high nuptiality, potentially high fertility, good life expectancy, and lower death rates. 3 While it is wise to remain cautious about this kind of generalization, these populations certainly had the potential to expand quite rapidly during periodic ameliorations of climate, 1 The author would like to thank Robert Woods, Chris Galley, and Laurence Fontaine for their helpful comments and advice on earlier drafts of this article. The literature includes: Dupâquier et al., Histoire de la population, pp. 99-

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