Ravenstein's Laws of Migration
Ravenstein's Laws of Migration are a set of principles formulated by Ernst Georg Ravenstein in the late 19th century to explain patterns of human migration. The laws highlight factors such as distance, age, gender, and economic opportunity as key determinants of migration. They also emphasize the idea that migration is a process influenced by push and pull factors, and that most migrants tend to move short distances.
6 Key excerpts on "Ravenstein's Laws of Migration"
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Population Geographies
Lives Across Space
- Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Such laws fit with empiricist and positivist accounts of human behavior (Chapter 1) that assume it is open to objective description and typically expressing generalizable regularities. Between 1876 and 1889, a German-born former cartographer for the British War Office named Ernst Georg Ravenstein published around eleven laws of migration, presented in Table 5.5. These express the methodological individualism of the individual as the central “unit of analysis” (Samers 2010: 54–55). Ravenstein derived his laws from nineteenth-century British census data, supplemented in his final paper by data from censuses in North America and mainland Europe. All his laws, excluding the fifth, were more or less accurate accounts of migration across the Global North at the time. Many remain true today and indicate “some persistent patterns and processes” (Samers 2010: 56). Consequently, Ravenstein’s laws have had lasting importance for Population Geography (Box 5.2). Nevertheless, they leave the key challenge of explaining why they are or have been true, since they lack explicit theoretical grounding (Woods 1982). To provide such grounding, and predating the Quantitative Revolution (1.3.3), academics attempted from the 1940s onwards to extend laws of Physics to the human sphere in the form of the gravity model (Boyle et al. 1998: 46–50)...
eBook - ePubMigration Theory
Talking across Disciplines
- Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield, Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Although he ignored the role of marriage in explaining female movements, he was prescient in acknowledging the gendered dimensions of migration. Although women may have been more migratory than men within the United Kingdom, Ravenstein did observe that men were the majority of international migrants. He prefaced the seven laws outlined in the 1885 paper by stating that “the call for labour in our centres of industry and commerce is the prime cause of those currents of migration” (1885: 198), which underscored labor demands as a major driver which fit into neoclassical economics of migration. Ravenstein’s Seven Laws of Migration (1885) The majority of migrants only move a short distance. Absorption processes are mostly from the inhabitants immediately surrounding a rapidly growing town, often in a step-by-step process. Gaps left in rural populations are filled by migrants from more remote districts. Dispersion processes are the inverse of absorption ones and exhibit similar features. Each main current of migration produces a compensating counter-current. Migrants proceeding long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centres of commerce or industry. The natives of towns are less migratory than those of the rural parts of the country. Females are more migratory than males. While each of these purported “laws” would require qualifications today, and some would be outright rejected, the categories created and the spatial framing used (at various scales from local, national and international) are still very much relevant. Russell King observed that “Ravenstein’s laws echo across more than a century and a quarter as migration theory’s foundational statement” (King 2012: 139). It should be noted that the paper was delivered at the height of the British Empire, and Ravenstein’s concluding remarks underscored the utility of this analysis in reference to colonization in tropical areas (1889: 288)...
eBook - ePub- Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Dirk Jacobs, Riva Kastoryano, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Dirk Jacobs, Riva Kastoryano(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Finally, the modern state system introduced relatively stable territorial borders and permanent populations over whom sovereigns claim to exercise direct rule. With the rise of nationalism since the French Revolution, subjects became nationals of states in whose name governments exercise their power. It is only in this latter context that the figure of the foreigner, which has been present in all recorded human history, becomes that of the migrant who has arrived from another state and is assumed to belong to another nation. This briefest possible summary of anthropological and historical determinants of human movement suggests already that any account that looks at it only as the physical movement of bodies in space must be severely deficient. Yet for a conceptual discussion of migration and mobility it is still useful to start with movement in abstract space and time. In its simplest formula, migration and mobility involve a human being moving between points that can be marked on a map. This geographical movement can be measured by registering the distance between these points and the time it takes to move between them. Measuring movements in this way and analyzing their patterns has been the preoccupation of statistical human geographers from Ernst Georg Ravenstein, the first scholar to postulate ‘laws of migration’ (Ravenstein, 1885), to Torsten Hägerstrand, who developed a statistical time-space geography for studying movements ranging from people’s daily commutes to long-distance migration (Hägerstrand, 1975). As long as we consider only the physical dimensions of time and space, migration and mobility appear reduced to mere movement and there does not seem any need to further examine their conceptual differences. However, even at this elementary level of analysis, the actual uses and therefore meaning and connotations of the two concepts differ somewhat...
eBook - ePubMigrants, Emigrants and Immigrants
A Social History of Migration
- Colin G. Pooley, Ian D. Whyte, Colin G. Pooley, Ian D. Whyte(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...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...
eBook - ePubPopulation Geography
A Systematic Exposition
- Mohammad Izhar Hassan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
...It has also been established that development and modernisation promote internal migration. Several studies have proved that migration is highly age-selective. However, doubts have been raised concerning some of the other generalisations. That migration occurs in different steps is rather difficult to be established. Similarly, though, the rural population in the less developed parts of the world is more mobile than its counterpart in the urban areas, and migration in the economically developed countries is more likely to be urban to rural than in the opposite direction. Gravity Model One of the most important contributions of geography in the field of migration analysis is with respect to the relationship between distance and migration. A clear and persistent inverse relationship between the two has been established in several studies (Woods, 1979:183). The Gravity Model based on Newton’s law of gravitation goes one step further and states that the volume of migration between any two interacting centres is the function of not only distance between them but also their population size. In other words, migration is directly proportional to the product of their population size and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. The model was initially proposed by the exponents of social physics in the 19th century and was later revived in the middle of the 20th century (Johnston et al., 1981:141). The index of migration between two centres according to this model can be expressed as follows: MI i j = P i P j d 2 i j * K (12.8) where MI ij is the volume of migration between the centres i and j, P i and P j are population size of the two centres, d ij is the distance between them. Finally, ‘K’ is a constant. Besides in the area of migration analysis, the model has been used to account for a wide variety of flow patterns in human geography like telephone traffic, passenger movements, commodity flows etc. It was W. J...
eBook - ePub- Kenneth W. Wachter(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...An influential approach goes back to a British civil servant Ernst Ravenstein, who in 1871 proposed a model for gross migration flows based on an analogy with Newton’s Law of Gravitation. In a modern version of such a gravity model, the flow F ij from location i to location j is given by a function Here, G is a constant, M i, the analogue of mass in Newton’s Law, is the population of the sending location, M j is the population of the receiving location, d (i, j) is the distance between them, and α, β, and γ are parameters called elasticities which adjust the strength of the influences. In Newton’s Law, γ = 2. The level of α registers the strength of “push factors”, while β registers the strength of “pull factors”. We shall not treat these models in detail here, but they have many applications and generalizations, not only to flows of people but to trade and influence. 11.3 Concentrations The uneven distribution of people across the planet, shaped over epochs by resource availability, access, and historical accident, has been amplified over the last century by rural-to-urban migration and the pace of population growth. In this section we take up methods for studying patterns of concentration, beginning with the concentration of people in large urban centers, and then extending these methods to other kinds of concentrations, like the concentration of wealth among a country’s citizens. In 1900 the world’s most populous metropolitan areas—London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Vienna, and Tokyo—were fairly well defined by their official administrative boundaries. Today, built-up areas of high density sprawl out into each other, making it hard to decide how to draw boundaries or define urban entities. The United Nations has a category called “urban agglomerations”. In 2010, the most populous were Tokyo, Delhi, Sao Paolo, Mumbai, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai, and Calcutta, all but two in the southern or eastern hemispheres...
