Exchanges

Summary

The idea that in the pre-industrial world people hardly moved and that most of them died where they were born, has already been refuted for a long time. As Table 5-1 and Table 5-2 show, Europeans were on the move quite often, although undeniably the nineteenth century marked the beginning of migration of unprecedented dimensions. In these tables migration is defined as cross-community migration in which a distinction is made between moving from Europe to other continents (‘emigration’); migration from other continents to Europe (‘immigration’); settlement in ‘empty’ or ‘sparsely’ populated spaces within Europe (‘colonisation’); movements to cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants, predominantly from the countryside (‘migration to cities’); seasonal migration (‘migratory labour’); and migration of sailors and soldiers (‘labour migration’).

China was for long virtually untouched by intercontinental migration. But that of course need not and indeed did not mean that it was an immobile society. Its internal migration - and here again one has to realise that Qing China came to be substantially larger than the whole of Europe west of the Urals and had more inhabitants than that continent - was massive. Millions of Chinese migrated from the core regions of the country to its outer provinces and to regions outside China Proper like Taiwan and Manchuria, even though officially they were not, as a rule, allowed to stay there. From the 1680s to the 1850s, at least twelve million people moved to frontier regions at the edges of the Chinese empire. For the period from 1650 to 1900, there is an estimate that their number would have been as high as seventeen million. Here too migration was not always voluntary. Prisoners and soldiers, for example, were often ordered to move elsewhere. In Tokugawa Japan it was officially all but prohibited to migrate, but actually migration must have been quite substantial here too, as the high level of urbanisation suggests. Eighteenthcentury Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto together may have had close to two million inhabitants. It has been estimated that some 400,000 to 600,000 of them had been born elsewhere. Graph 5-1 puts the total migration rates of Europe (excluding Russia), China and Japan in perspective.