Dutch international migration statistics, 1820-1880: an analysis of linked multinational nominal files

"International migration statistics in the nineteenth century are acknowledged to be deficient and biased, but there are few source-critical studies to determine the extent of underreporting and omissions. This article provides a critical analysis of the statistics of Dutch emigration to North America in the period 1835-1880, based on the method of nominal record-linkage of computer files derived from Netherlands emigration lists and U.S. ship passenger manifests. Published and unpublished official records in the Netherlands, U.S.A. and Canada are used to determine the extent of underreporting, the structural biases in the migration data and the 'true' annual Dutch immigration rate to the United States."     

Sailing through Suez from the South: The Emergence of an Indies‐Dutch Migration Circuit, 1815–19401

This paper shows the importance of colonial garrisons and colonial migratory circuits in the history of European migration. During the nineteenth century the overwhelming majority of European‐born migrants to the Dutch East Indies were military personnel. Rapidly decreasing mortality rates and a large influx of European military personnel in the decades of colonial wars were responsible for the remarkable growth of the European colonial population throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. As a consequence an extensive colonial‐metropole migration circuit emerged. Contrary to expectations, neither the opening of the Suez Canal nor imperialist expansion resulted in a significant increase of white civilian emigration to colonial Indonesia in the late nineteenth century. Instead, sailings through Suez went north as frequently as south. It was only at a much later stage, following the end of World War I, that the tobacco and rubber plantations as well as the oil industry of the Outer Regions of the Indies archipelago generated an unprecedented demand for expatriate labor.     

Land of hope and dreams: slavery and abolition in the Dutch Leeward islands, 1825–1865

The asymmetry of laws concerning the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves in the Atlantic world in the early-to-mid nineteenth century led to a range of responses on the part of inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin. These ranged from activism, adaptation, accommodation to, as this article highlights, maritime marronage on the part of the enslaved population of these islands. The Dutch Leeward islands have been understudied in the historiography of abolition and emancipation but, as this article will argue, they should be included into the larger story of how abolition was experienced on the local, regional, Atlantic, and international stages.     

Bottom-up Nation-building: National Censuses and Local Administration in Nineteenth-Century Spain

It is customary to consider population censuses (and statistics in general) as exclusive to the modern State, appearing in the second half of the eighteenth century but being developed and spreading in the West during the nineteenth century. Indeed, censuses help to strengthen and legitimize such states. However, in Spain, just as in Europe and the United States, the first population censuses considered modern were the result of, on the one hand, the directives and general and provincial coordination provided by the new state statistical institutions, such as the Statistics Commission or the Institute of Geography and, on the other, municipal personnel and the previous knowledge of local conditions held by the councils and other agents, such as the clergy, intellectuals, and notables. The media were also availed of for the cause. Let us recall that the municipalities were an explicit part of the state apparatus, therefore their relevance in carrying out censuses is not an indication of failure or weakness on the part of the Spanish State regarding the process of “bottom-up nation-building”, but rather a way to imagine the nation through which collective involvement would build the nation from the locality.     

The Mass Emigration Context of Lithuania: Patterns and Policy Options

Lithuania represents one of the rare cases in which a state with relatively high standards for maintaining population statistics is experiencing mass emigration. In light of the policy initiatives undertaken by the Lithuanian government to address the issue of emigration, this study aims to improve our understanding of how, in this mass emigration context, emigration events are connected to specific socio‐economic characteristics of individuals and variation in local socio‐economic conditions. We analyse census and vital registration data covering the whole working‐age population of Lithuania during the period 2011‐2012. Our findings indicate that when assessing the likelihood of emigration events, individual‐level characteristics such as employment status, educational attainment, and prior migration experience are highly relevant. However, the importance of these characteristics differs by gender. We also detect considerable spatial variation in emigration rates across Lithuanian municipalities. Our outcomes provide new insights for the development of cohesive migration policies in Lithuania.     

"A future not of riches but of comfort": the emigration of pauper children from Bristol to Canada, 1870-1915

This article examines the emigration of orphan and deserted children from Bristol to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This emigration was organised and financed by the local Boards of Guardians and, as such, raises important questions about the way in which state agencies cared for dependent children. The emigration of Poor Law children is explored in relation to debates about childcare, poverty, racial degeneration and imperialism. Of particular interest is the role played by women in promoting child emigration and the article considers the women's contribution to discourse and practice, both locally and nationally. The dynamics of emigration are analysed by using both British and Canadian sources and the tensions associated with pauper emigration are examined in some detail.     

‘A future not of riches but of comfort’: The emigration of pauper children from Bristol to Canada, 1870–1915

This article examines the emigration of orphan and deserted children from Bristol to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This emigration was organised and financed by the local Boards of Guardians and, as such, raises important questions about the way in which state agencies cared for dependent children. The emigration of Poor Law children is explored in relation to debates about childcare, poverty, racial degeneration and imperialism. Of particular interest is the role played by women in promoting child emigration and the article considers the women's contribution to discourse and practice, both locally and nationally. The dynamics of emigration are analysed by using both British and Canadian sources and the tensions associated with pauper emigration are examined in some detail.     

THE ECONOMICS OF TENANT RIGHTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY IRISH AGRICULTURE

The Land Act of 1870, which introduced "tenant rights" to most of Ireland, was the prototype of the modern land reform. This paper develops an alternative to the conventional view that the Land Act was instituted to redistribute wealth. It is suggested that tenant rights became economically valuable as a result of massive emigration from Ireland in the nineteenth century. Data on land rents and landlord investment are consistent with this "efficiency" hypothesis, and tend to refute the "redistribution" hypothesis.     

Relating European emigration and marriage patterns

This article discusses a number of the ways in which marriage and migration interacted in European sending areas for migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also speculates as to some of the ramifications of those changes in marriage and migration patterns. In particular, it uses sources from the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to illustrate a few patterns, some quantitative ones already well known to scholars of demography and some qualitative ones which have received less attention, and poses some hypotheses which other researchers can pursue for other emigration regions and periods. Unlike international migrants from many sending regions, where single men dominated the migration of this period, those from the Netherlands at the turn of the century tended more often to move in family units. In discussing these issues, this article demonstrates the degree to which marriage in the sending country was affected by migration, offering a variety of insights into the way in which these changes were of a gendered nature.     

From partisan war to the ethnography of European Turkey: the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, 1790–1880

The Balkan entanglements of the Great Powers have long interested historians of war, diplomacy, and nation-building in South-Eastern Europe. Although tsarist officers played a central role in Russian policies in the region, historians have rarely treated their writings as expressions of specifically military concerns and preoccupations. The present article seeks to fill this gap by reconstructing the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, a Russian officer, partisan leader, and self-styled expert on the European part of the Ottoman Empire during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The article traces Liprandi’s effort to turn his direct experience of partisan warfare into knowledge and place that knowledge at the disposal of the Russian military command. Liprandi’s remarkable Balkan career testifies to the growing interest of the Imperial Russian military in the ethno-confessional profile and political attitudes of the local population as factors contributing to victory or defeat. Liprandi’s statistical and ethnographic writings on the Balkans are also indicative of the nexus between the military and civilian forms of knowledge that emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.     

Migrant workers: a passage from India to the Middle East. Demographic and social-psychological implications and policy consideration

The author first gives an overview of labor emigration from India since the nineteenth century, noting particularly the trends in Indian migration to Middle Eastern and North African countries. The demand for expatriate labor in West Asia for the years 1985-1990 is projected, and consideration is given to differential labor migration according to skill category. Focusing on Indian emigrants currently working in the Gulf States, the author discusses conceptual problems in examining international migration as well as the social-psychological consequences and the societal impact of migration.     

“A stone wall out of the earth that thundering cannon cannot destroy"? Bastion and Moat at the Castle,Cape Town

Although the urgency with which the Dutch East India Company administration at the Cape built defensive works was a direct result of their fear of attack from both land and sea, there was an additional imperative, for the Castle at Cape Town stood as a symbol of Dutch colonial aspirations. In this paper, we compare written and material texts of one part of the Castle's architecture to show firstly, how the discordances between such sources can reveal an underside of early colonization and secondly, how the Castle moat, in the seventeenth century a stamp of aspirant power, was by the mid‐nineteenth century a dump and a public nuisance.     

“Gone to work to America”: Irish step-migration through south Wales in the 1860s and 1870s

Why did the Irish-born population of Wales decline so sharply in the decade 1861–1870? This paper argues that during the 1850s and 1860s, large numbers of Irish men and women travelled to south Wales in order to finance emigration to the USA. Using the US Federal Census, this paper shows how Irish step-migration through Wales led principally to the Pennsylvania coalfields. This type of migration is termed the Knight’s-move: a sideways move from agriculture into heavy industry, in order to advance forward across the Atlantic. The Knight’s-move challenges previous assumptions about immigration into the south Wales coalfield during the nineteenth century.     

Moral Economy or Political Economy? Property and Credit Markets in 19th Century Rural Portugal

Peasants are often represented as a distinctive rural type with a reverent attitude toward the land, a disdain for commerce, and a set of institutions that sustain homogeneity and community. An alternative to this "moral economy" approach is a differentiation or political economy perspective that emphasizes articulation and integration within a broader regional, national and institutional framework, as well as individual and household strategies. Focusing on the rural population of nineteenth and twentieth century northwestern Portugal, this article addresses these two approaches through an analysis of peasant engagement with the property and finance capital markets. It explores the motives that pull peasants into these markets, how these transactions not only link rural and urban populations into a single regional economic system, but also connect individuals to the international market of labor through emigration, and finally how these transactions are embedded in village institutions including family, neighborship, and religious brotherhoods.     

Gothic fascism

This article explores the place of fear in fascism ‐ the fear experienced by fascism, as found throughout Hitler’s writings and speeches, and the fear fascism fabricates in order to sustain itself. The article suggests that this fear overlaps and intersects with a shift in the culture of the Gothic in the late‐nineteenth century, such that fascism’s enemy comes to be interpellated as a truly monstrous figure. An exploration of the shifting place of the vampire in late‐nineteenth century Gothic culture creates the possibility of exploring the Gothic opening through which fascism came to both articulate its own fear and to generate a more widespread political fear and social insecurity.     

Research on international migration and census data co-operation in Latin America

Population censuses in Latin America have generally recorded the place of birth of all persons enumerated. The use of those data for the study of international migration has been less common because international movements were judged to be a relatively weak factor determining demographic change in the majority of Latin American countries and because the data gathered were generally not tabulated with sufficient detail. During the 1970s, the UN Latin American Demographic Center (CELADE) realized that international migration was not necessarily a minor factor in their evolution and launched a program to improve the quality and availability of census information on the foreign-born population enumerated by each country. The program on International Migration in Latin America (IMILA) has therefore been in operation for more than 10 years and has been successful in eliciting the in-depth tabulation and exploitation of census information in the majority of Latin American countries and in the 2 main receivers in the Americas: Canada and the US. As part of the IMILA project, CELADE has become the depository of magnetic tapes with census information on the foreign-born population, thus gaining greater flexibility in the exploitation of the data available. On the basis of the information gathered, CELADE has published twice in the past decade a compilation of tabulations of the foreign-born population by country of enumeration, country of birth, age, and sex. Although census data on place of birth are not free from problems, particularly in countries where illegal migrants may not be adequately enumerated by a census, they are a valuable source of reasonably comparable information on the overall impact of migration in receiving countries and are often the only source of information on emigration from the sending countries.     

Evidence,Experience and Conjecture: Reading the Interior through Benjamin and Bloch

This article looks at the resonances between Walter Benjamin's writing on the bourgeois domestic interior, and Ernst Bloch's investigation of the detective novel. These resonances hinge on the evidence that the interior registers through traces, and how these traces relate to the conjectural knowledge of detection. Explored via Carlo Ginzburg, conjectural knowledge raises the question of experience in modernity, a question crucial to understanding the role of literary narrative in the nineteenth century, as well as the historical emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior at this time.     

International migration data: their problems and usefulness in Venezuela

During the 1940s and 1950s Venezuela was an important destination for migrants from Southern Europe, a flow that disappeared almost entirely during the 1960s, to be replaced by border movements and the largely illegal migration of Colombians. The oil boom of the 1970s saw an increase of the latter, which may have subsided during the 1980s due to the more difficult economic conditions that have also led to significant emigration levels of Venezuelans and former immigrants. Methods of data collection systems that provide information on migrants include the National Population and Housing Census, the National Household Survey, migration surveys, arrival and departure statistics, registration systems operated by the Direccion General Sectorial de identificacion y Control de Extranjeros, the 1980 regularization drive, statistics gathered by the Ministry of Labor, and vital and civil registration statistics. The lack of effective coordination among the different government agencies gathering information and the administrative nature of the data collected give rise to problems of comparability. Mechanisms to publish and disseminate the data available are not well developed, so that researchers often have no access to potentially useful sources of information. Problems of timeliness in the publication of the most widely used information are also present, as is the large gap existing in data pertaining to emigration, be it of Venezuelan nationals or of immigrants leaving the country.     

State‐istics and statistics: exclusion categories in the population census (Belgium, 1846–1930)

During most of the nineteenth century, the etymology of the term ‘statistics’ was still much alive: statistics was state‐istics, the empirical study of the state. It has been argued that the nineteenth‐century avalanche of printed numbers gave rise to a new discourse about society. Not only was society conceived of as a population; the corps social (Quetelet) was also conceptualized as a subject of statistics. An important contribution of this state‐istics was to conceive a new sort of object, which could be both the target of research and of policy interventions. On the basis of a case‐study of all the Belgian population censuses taken before the Second World War, we attempt to articulate the complex interactions between science, government, and society in the modern era. We thereby direct our attention to the range of exclusions and exclusion places that appeared in these censuses. Our analysis highlights the intimate relationship between population and territory in the ‘search engines’ of the statisticians. The discursive constitution of territorial exclusions allows us to analyse the articulation of inclusion ideals – in the period before such ideals became firmly institutionalized in the so‐called welfare state of the postwar period.     

From Sickly Survival to the Realisation of Potential: Child Health as a Social Project in Twentieth Century England

SUMMARY: During the last century the improvement of child health has become an important matter of public concern, reflecting preoccupations with the quality of the future adult population as well as with the current welfare of children. This paper traces some of the changing ideas and practices associated with this social project, from the late nineteenth century to the postwar years of the twentieth. From a period when survival beyond birth and infancy was the critical area of social concern to one when psychological adjustment and behaviour emerged as the essential indices of children's present and future health status.