Gated Communities?

Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities

Anne Winter, Bert De Munck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409431299
• eBook ISBN: 9781317130925
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Contrary to earlier views of preindustrial Europe as an essentially sedentary society, research over the past decades has amply demonstrated that migration was a pervasive characteristic of early modern Europe. In this volume, the theme of urban migration is explored through a series of historical contexts, journeying from sixteenth-century Antwerp, Ulm, Lille and Valenciennes, through seventeenth-century Berlin, Milan and Rome, to eighteenth-century Strasbourg, Trieste, Paris and London. Each chapter demonstrates how the presence of diverse and often temporary groups of migrants was a core feature of everyday urban life, which left important marks on the demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural characteristics of individual cities. The collection focuses on the interventions by urban authorities and institutions in a wide-ranging set of domains, as they sought to stimulate, channel and control the newcomers' movements and activities within the cities and across the cities' borders. While striving for a broad geographical and chronological coverage in a comparative perspective, the volume aims to enhance our insight into the different factors that shaped urban migration policies in different European settings west of the Elbe. By laying bare the complex interactions of actors, interests, conflicts, and negotiations involved in the regulation of migration, the case studies shed light on the interrelations between burghership, guilds, relief arrangements, and police in the incorporation of newcomers and in shaping the shifting boundaries between wanted and unwanted migrants. By relating to a common analytical framework, presented in the introductory chapter, they engage in a comparative discussion that allows for the formulation of general insights and the identification of long term transformations that transcend the time and place specificities of the case studies in question. The introduction and final chapters connect insights derived from the individual case-study chapters to present wide ranging conclusions that resonate with both historical and present-day debates on migration.

Chapter 1
Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities: An Introduction

Bert De Munck and Anne Winter

Contrary to earlier views of early modern Europe as an essentially sedentary society, research over the past decades has amply demonstrated that migration was a pervasive characteristic of European society in the early modern period. Many people moved, over various distances, to different destinations, for different reasons and for different periods of time.¹ Only a fraction of all mobility was directed towards towns, but these migrations were of great importance for urban economic and demographic development in the early modern period.² Because early modern cities as a rule recorded more deaths than births, most cities relied on a permanent influx of newcomers in order to maintain their population size, let alone grow.³ In a fast-growing town the majority of the population was likely to have been born outside the city limits, while the proportion of immigrants could easily amount to more than 30 per cent in a relatively stable population.⁴ As most migration was temporary, the total volume of urban immigration and emigration was much higher than the number of urban immigrants at any given moment might suggest, and the total proportion of persons engaged in urban migration patterns at some point of their lives was substantial throughout the early modern period.⁵

While the precise demographic contribution of urban migrants remains subject to debate, even critics of the model of urban natural decrease do not question the magnitude of urban migration in the early modern period, or its importance as ‘the linchpin of the urban economy’.⁶ The constant flow back and forth of labourers, domestic servants, tradesmen and artisans played a key role in the development of early modern labour and commodity markets and in the diffusion of technology, and was essential to the working of the urban economy.⁷ Early modern European cities were therefore characterized by permanent flows of migrants in and out of the city, guided by as varied motivations as finding jobs, schooling, patronage, business opportunities, shelter, alms, health care or marriage partners. The existence of a diverse and often temporary group of migrants – both short-distance and long-distance – was an essential element of everyday city life which left an important mark on the demographic, economic, social, political and cultural characteristics of individual cities.

Yet whereas actual patterns of migration to early modern cities have by now received a good deal of attention, the ways in which urban groups and authorities attempted to influence and control these movements have only recently started to be treated as a subject of historical research, reflection and discussion. Most studies dealing with urban migration policies have so far tended to concentrate either on distinct migrant groups or on specific institutional mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Studies of the first type tend to favour migrant communities with distinct ethnic, religious, occupational or wealth characteristics, such as merchant nations, Jews, Moriscos, Huguenots and the compagnonnages.⁸ While these studies have yielded major insights, urban policies directed towards the large majority of migrants who did not belong to any such recognizable (minority) group have received considerably less attention, yielding the unjust impression that regulation was directed mainly at conspicuously ‘different’ newcomers. Studies of the second type have been more attentive to the ways in which the presence of newcomers of all types was related to a wide range of local mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion – which were connected, in turn, to a wide range of urban institutions. Collective institutions such as urban citizenship,⁹ guilds,¹⁰ associational life¹¹ and public and private poor relief systems¹² were all characterized by certain legal, social, cultural and/or financial barriers to prospective members, while differential treatment by institutions of control and repression – from policing to tribunals – reinforced distinctions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.¹³ Yet while many case studies have enhanced our insight into the functioning of these various institutions, they often only obliquely address their relation to the constant coming and going of migrants, and seldom address the interactions between these different institutional mechanisms at the urban level.

To be sure, the observation that urban authorities often sought to attract ‘wanted’ and repel ‘unwanted’ migrants is a familiar topos in late medieval and early modern urban historiography.¹⁴ Yet the contentious, malleable and multilayered nature of the distinction between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ migrants has so far been insufficiently explored. While rich merchants and invalid beggars were obviously on opposite sides of the distinction, the boundaries between wanted and unwanted migrants were never clear-cut and remained subject to many different interpretations. Institutions such as burghership, guild membership or relief systems all mobilized different repertoires of inclusion and exclusion whose intentions and effects could vary widely through space and time. On close inspection, there has in fact been very little systematic research into the actors, interests and power relations that determined the shifting boundaries between those considered wanted or unwanted, and a comprehensive view of the wide range of institutional mechanisms that governed inclusion and exclusion in early modern towns remains underdeveloped.

The aim of this book is to move beyond the ‘selective’ perspectives of studies focusing on specific immigrant groups or particular institutions, and to venture into the multilayered and multidimensional reality of urban migration regulation from different local perspectives in order to lay bare the complex interactions of interests, conflicts, actors and negotiations involved in the regulation of migration in different urban contexts of early modern Europe. Because local categories formed the prime organizing principle of social, political and economic regulation, all immigration from across the city boundaries is considered part of the research focus, both regional and long-distance, temporary and permanent. And while we use the terms ‘policies’ and ‘regulation’ throughout the book, this does not imply that urban authorities necessarily pursued anything like a conscious or coherent policy with regard to migration. Rather, regulations impinging on migration were often a by-product of interventions in the labour market, housing, policing or welfare arrangements, shaped by the pressures of different urban interest groups and producing a varied and sometimes incongruous range of institutional mechanisms. The main research focus therefore lies with uncovering the interactions between the variety of institutional mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, and on the interests, conflicts and power relationships that shaped the shifting boundaries between wanted and unwanted migrants.

* * *

This book brings together a range of case studies on the regulation of early modern urban migration in different spatial and historical contexts in order to flesh out the institutional arenas, conflicts and actors in which repertoires of inclusion and exclusion were moulded. The collection is the result of an international workshop on the theme organized in Brussels on 4–5 September 2009, which was a follow-up to a session organized at the IXth International Conference on Urban History in Lyon, 27–30 August 2008. The different chapters address a wide range of historical contexts, and take us from sixteenth-century Antwerp, Ulm, Lille and Valenciennes, over seventeenth-century Berlin, Milan and Rome, to eighteenth-century Strasbourg, Trieste, Paris, London and Antwerp, with comparisons up to the present day.

With each of the chapters addressing the central theme in different ways in distinct urban contexts, together they sketch a varied and lively image of the many ways in which urban authorities and other institutions intervened in the movements of people entering, leaving and inhabiting their city. They bring to the fore how the intricate mix of coercion and conciliation that shaped the local government structure of early modern cities also made room for a certain degree of permanent negotiation and bargaining over the different interests involved. While local elites were themselves not homogeneous groups, they interacted with guilds, relief administrations, central governments, other local authorities, church communities, workers’ coalitions, public protesters and other interest groups when devising and bringing into practice local migration policies. At the same time, the studies highlight how policy concerns over migration tended to be concentrated in a number of specific domains which can loosely be grouped under the headings of markets, communal resources and social stability. In their analysis of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of interventions in these domains, the case studies both confirm some existing insights and add up to a number of important new insights which together provide a coherent and stimulating framework for future research.

Markets

It is a familiar observation from existing studies that early modern town authorities often sought to attract wealthy merchants, skilled artisans and other newcomers with resources deemed particularly valuable, and tried to prevent the arrival and settlement of less resourceful migrants whose presence was not considered useful – aspirations which we could translate as attempts to intervene in the markets and circulation of labour, capital and goods in order to ensure adequate supplies of all three in situ. Privileged access to burghership or guilds, tax exemptions, grants and other privileges functioned as typical instruments of attraction, while financial requirements or other means of exclusion from corporative structures and social provisions, together with expulsions, were mobilized against the settlement of the unwanted poor.¹⁵

Most chapters in this book bear out that the regulation of markets represented an important consideration in urban migration policies. Given that migration played a crucial role in the circulation and allocation of labour, goods and capital in early modern cities, attempts by local (and central) authorities to regulate these markets were directly related to opportunities and restrictions for movement and settlement. The chapters by De Meester, Kalc, Niggemann and Winter testify that migration policies were intimately tied up with questions of labour market regulation: while migration restrictions could lead to labour shortages, measures tolerating or even attracting migrant workers were often part of policies designed to augment the local labour supply and/or to import specific skills and technical knowledge. Likewise, Canepari, Niggemann and Kalc remind us how attempts to enlarge or diversify local production and commercial activity to shore up cities’ shares in international markets of goods and capital went hand in hand with active recruitment policies towards resourceful merchants, bankers and specialized manufacturers, be it in sixteenth-century Rome, seventeenth-century Potsdam or eighteenth-century Trieste. The latter case is in itself a powerful example of the crucial role of migration policies in attempts to influence early modern markets: policies aimed at attracting merchants, manufacturers and workers, and at facilitating the flows of goods, capital and people, indeed played a key role in the Habsburgs’ voluntarist scheme to transform Trieste from a small town into a maritime emporium in the eighteenth century.

At the same time, the different case studies warn against treating the distinction between wanted and unwanted migrants in this respect as self-evident, by providing insight into the dynamics of conflict and processes of negotiation that were bound up with the distinction. Given the instability of urban labour markets and the vulnerability of wage-dependent existence, periods of unemployment could often transform ‘useful’ workers into ‘burdensome’ poor and vice versa, even in relatively specialized branches of sixteenth-century textile production (Junot). Moreover, newcomers could be considered ‘wanted’ by some and ‘unwanted’ by others. A most obvious conflict of interest in this respect was that between workers and employers: as labour shortages were likely to strengthen the bargaining position of local workers – at least in the short run – and increases in labour supplies tended to push down wages, workers often opposed the influx of additional manpower which was welcomed or stimulated by employers, as exemplified in the chapters by De Meester, Niggemann and Kalc. In a similar vein, while mercantilist interests sought the attraction of wealthy merchants or craftsmen-entrepreneurs, the latter were often received with considerably less enthusiasm by established commercial or artisan communities.

Several chapters stress how guilds often played a crucial role in the articulation of conflicts and negotiations over local migration policies, both because of their economic role in the regulation of labour and product markets, and of their political role in local government. While guilds in an older historiography have often been portrayed as essentially homogenous and protectionist institutes which strove to exclude immigrants,¹⁶ recent research has yielded a more complex picture. Masters sometimes appear to have closed ranks when socio-economic pressures jeopardized their status and well-being, as was the case in Nantes and Lyon in the eighteenth century. Conversely, stable guild systems and the absence of modernization could result in greater openness and higher social mobility for new entrants – if only because of greater career prospects for masters’ sons outside the guilds.¹⁷ Even declining guilds could be relatively open as a result of masters’ sons not following in their fathers’ footsteps.¹⁸

In addition, guild entry policies were also influenced by internal divisions and power relations within the guilds. Merchants coordinating guild-based Verlag systems, for instance, were in theory likely to favour the influx of masters (who provided them with finished products), while large artisan-entrepreneurs rather stood to gain from the influx of journeymen. Small masters, from their part, could be opposed to both in an attempt to preserve a certain equality among masters.¹⁹ Depending on their numbers and degree of organization, journeymen could at times enforce a right of preference by which masters were prevented from hiring outsiders (‘unfree’ journeymen) when ‘free’ journeymen (who had finished an apprenticeship term and sometimes a journeymen’s trial as well) were available.²⁰

The case studies developed here confirm that guilds were not a priori against or in favour of immigration, but rather constituted arenas of tension between small-scale manufacturers, large-scale entrepreneurs, journeymen, workers and apprentices who had different interests and concerns with regard to the immi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities: An Introduction
• PART I REPERTOIRES OF INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION: GUILDS AND CITIZENSHIP
• PART II INSTRUMENTS OF REGULATION: POLICIES AND POLICING
• PART III CROSSING THE LINES: BEGGING AND POOR RELIEF
• PART IV COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS
• Bibliography
• Index