Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants

A Social History of Migration

Colin G. Pooley, Ian D. Whyte, Colin G. Pooley, Ian D. Whyte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000387520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Emigración e inmigración

Originally published in 1991, this book covers an usually long time – from the 17 th to the 20 th Century – and considers the impact of internal migration and immigration (primarily in Britain) as well as emigration to North America, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Population movements are now recognized to be an integral part of structural change within society and this book brings together a variety of approaches. Drawing on the findings of historians, geographers and sociologists, the essays highlight areas of concern and illustrate some of the directions research on migration was taking in the early 1990s.

1

Introduction

Approaches to the study of migration and social change

Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. Whyte

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172918-1

PERSPECTIVES ON MIGRATION

Migration, undertaken for many reasons, over varying distances and on a range of timescales, is a fundamental feature of human societies today. Aspects of migration are continually in the news: the plight of the Vietnamese Boat People, the desire of many of the inhabitants of Hong Kong to settle in Britain due to unease about the impending Chinese take-over, and the efforts of East Europeans to reach the West are topical themes. Less sensational but still of considerable concern are influences which inhibit mobility in a free market economy: examples from Britain include regional variations in house prices and the difficulties of moving within the local authority housing sector.

Migration was also important in the past and, as well as being an interesting phenomenon in its own right, it is also an important diagnostic feature of the social and economic structures of past societies. Population movements have long been a focus of interest and study. The unrestricted migration of labour has been seen as an essential element in the development of capitalism as evidenced by large-scale rural-urban movements of population within industrializing nations, emigration from Europe to North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the high degree of labour mobility within capitalist societies like those of the United States and Canada in more recént times. Any consideration of migration involves posing certain fundamental questions about the migrants and the nature of their movements: how many, who, where and why? These in turn lead to further questions probing the effects of migration on the socio-economic structures of both source areas and destinations.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESEARCH ON MIGRATION

Until the nineteenth century concern with migration was of a practical rather than an academic nature as societies and communities adjusted to inflows and outflows of people and authorities tried to impose controls on population movements which they considered undesirable for social or economic reasons.¹ Interest in the accurate measurement of migration and attempts to model the processes involved grew during the later nineteenth century with the development of better statistical sources, particularly population censuses, in different parts of Europe. In Britain this approach is exemplified by the work of Ravenstein, whose ‘laws’ of migration (more strictly hypotheses) were based on detailed empirical research and still provide a useful framework for analysis.²

There has been a growing body of research into migration in the modern world by geographers, economists, sociologists and other specialists and a variety of analytical techniques has been used, ranging from interviews and questionnaire analysis of individuals to sophisticated statistical analyses of large data bases derived from official censuses. Along with this there has been increasing interest in the nature and role of migration in past societies. Inevitably the study of migration is closely linked with demography and the development of more sophisticated approaches to the study of historical migration has been in part the result of important developments in historical demography in Britain, Western Europe and North America. In particular migration studies have benefited from the more rigorous evaluation of sources, the development of more sophisticated techniques of analysis and the formulation of new theoretical approaches by schools of historical demographers, notably the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Society.³

The work of early statistical researchers like Ravenstein and a wealth of readily available contemporary commentary on internal migration and patterns of emigration made it clear that migration was a pervasive element in European society during the era of industrialization in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. On the other hand knowing that migration had occurred on a large scale was only a start and, as some of the chapters in this book amply testify, we are still a long way from knowing in detail the scale, pattern, and nature of internal migration and emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries despite the apparent wealth of statistical information which is available for analysis.

Because of the range of spatial and temporal scales at which it occurs migration can be very difficult to measure and understand. Demographic events such as births and deaths are finite, having been recorded in England and Wales by the Registrar General since 1837 and before that as baptisms and burials in parish registers since the sixteenth century. Such events have at least short-term consequences which are reasonably predictable. In contrast migration is an imprecise event which can include anything from a short-distance move within a small community to emigration to the other side of the world, and from a move to a new location for only a few days before the migrant travels elsewhere to one that lasts a lifetime.

Partly because migration events are so ill-defined and sometimes transitory they are rarely recorded. Although some countries (notably in Scandinavia) keep central migration registers which go back to the nineteenth century, most information about migration comes from surrogate sources, all of which pose problems of interpretation. Migration is also an aspect of human behaviour which, to a much greater extent than other demographic factors, can occur for a variety of interrelated reasons and which can have many complex and unpredictable outcomes.

THE LIMITATIONS OF THE SOURCES

This combination of imprecise definition, poor recording and complex causes and effects creates particular problems for the historical study of migration. Inevitably research on migration in the past must begin with a careful evaluation of appropriate source material. A perennial problem with historical sources is that virtually none of them was designed with the specific intention of recording migration. They shed light on the process incidentally, incompletely and often obliquely. Rather than having access to a clearly defined data set with known parameters, such as records of births and deaths after 1837 or the detailed information about landholdings given on a tithe map in England and Wales, the historian of migration must often begin by constructing a data set gathered from many different sources. This may involve comparing evidence between sources, nominal record linkage of migrants from one time period to another, and the use of different evidence relating to various groups within the population. Inevitably the data set which is assembled will be incomplete and, as the total number of moves is not known, the researcher will not even know what is missing. At best the complete data set is only likely to give limited information about the moves undertaken and the characteristics of the migrants. From this limited evidence the historian must then begin to speculate about the reasons why a move was made and about the effects of migration on different members of a family. Research on migration is a little like trying to do an unfamiliar jigsaw in the dark!

The nature of the sources and the information that they contain determine the kinds of question which can be legitimately posed, the framework of analysis which can be used, and the kinds of result obtained. Similar kinds of source tend to occur throughout Britain and indeed are often closely comparable between different countries; for example registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, local population listings, settlement certificates, apprenticeship records, census schedules, emigration data. These often allow useful comparability of migration between different countries, a possibility which has been far from fully exploited.

Given these problems there is a surprisingly large volume of literature on migration⁴ but it is, perhaps, not surprising that much of what has been written tends to be superficial and/or inconclusive. Given the complexity of the migration process it is also not surprising that the level of theoretical generalization which takes place has progressed little since the work of Ravenstein in the 1880s.⁵ Research into migration has also often been more concerned with methodology than philosophy. Much of it has been overtly positivist in its approach, some of it more humanistic. A limited amount of research has tried to provide an alternative framework based on relating types of migratory movements to modes of production within a Marxist framework,⁶ but most research has simply dived into the empirical analysis of available sources.

PROBLEMS IN MIGRATION RESEARCH

There are five main ways in which existing migration research is defective. First, a good deal of published material, especially that written by geographers, reports the aggregate analysis of migration patterns.⁷ The development of increasingly sophisticated computer packages for statistical analysis has had an important influence on research. Geographers and economic historians have pioneered the application of statistical modelling and econometric analysis to the study of migration data.⁸ Heavily quantitative studies using large data sets tend to produce an impersonal, dehumanized approach in which flows replace individual people and the motives for migration are assumed rather than proven, often being interpreted in a simplistic and generalized way to a point where they have little meaning. Such aggregative work can stretch the credibility of available sources to their limit without giving any significant additional insights to the migration process. In the process of aggregating the data, individuals, with their hopes, fears and aspirations, become lost. Although such work provides valuable information, and can clearly demonstrate patterns of inter-regional and international migration (which is what it sets out to do), the macro-scale analysis of migration tells us little or nothing about the processes of population movement or the causes and effects of migration.⁹

Second, too much migration analysis is static in nature, providing a cross-section in time rather than a dynamic view of an evolving process. This is particularly true of research that is heavily dependent on a sinşle source such as the published censuses of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Census evidence simply gives place of birth and residence on census night, thus enabling something to be said about lifetime movement from birthplace to place of enumeration at a specific date. This, however, is not an accurate picture of migration experience, as it completely misses the sequence of events which fit together to make a lifetime move. Unfortunately many studies simply use such surrogate census evidence to describe migration.

Third, because the detailed study of migration requires the use of many sources and the linkage of individuals between records, such studies tend to focus on one fairly small community. Thus, through the work of local historians, we know something about migration into particular villages or small towns,¹¹ but we know much less about migration into and out of large towns and cities and very few studies have made a genuine attempt to compare different places and time periods. Very small-scale detailed studies with a humanistic bias, based on the evidence of the diaries and correspondence of migrants or on interviews, may inform us about the detailed experience of individuals or small groups but may not allow us to relate them to a wider canvas. Studies of this kind may be ‘parochial’ in the best tradition but they need to be set within a wider context for their full value to be realized.

Fourth, where there is explicit information about the motives for and effects of migration, this tends to be anecdotal and, possibly, unrepresentative of a wider community. Material from diaries and letters can shed considerable light on the individual motives involved in migration, as well as on the detailed processes operating. However, such evidence is limited...