During the last 30 years or so, scholars have fundamentally changed our understanding of early modern Europe as an essentially sedentary society. They have shown how migration was a pervasive and economically and demographically significant element of European society in this period. Urban communities were particularly dependent on an influx of migrants to maintain and extend their population size, because of the surplus mortality recorded throughout this period. The historiography of early modern urban migration has primarily focused on patterns of migration with less focus dedicated to the processes through which established urban groups and authorities tried to influence and control the migratory movements, except when it comes to very distinct groups of migrants, who stood out because of their religion, wealth or occupational affiliation. This anthology is an attempt to break new ground in the field by moving beyond this ‘selective’ perspective and ‘venture into the multilayered and multidimensional reality of urban migration regulation from different local perspectives’ (p. 4).
The anthology consists of 10 case-studies enclosed by an introduction by the editors, a comparative perspective on past and present migration by Leo Lucassen and some concluding remarks by Leslie Page Moch. The case-studies are divided into three parts dealing with (a) the repertoires of inclusion and exclusion; (b) policies and policing of migration and (c) begging and poor relief.
A recurrent theme throughout the book is the notion that authorities, institutions and other actors within a particular city not only policed migration, but also produced the (most often fluid and shifting) distinction between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ migrants. This was tied to the continuous conflict between the city's need for new enterprises, employers’ need for manpower and the authorities’ attempt to prevent vagrants and unproductive migrants to settle and receive poor relief within the city walls. Jason P. Coy writes about the authorities’ role in his study of vagrant policies in sixteenth-century Ulm: ‘Through their regulatory activities, based on careful classification and selection, Ulm's magistrates did not so much identify vagabonds or differentiate between vagrants and migrant workers as “create” them. Through their verdicts and public punishment rituals, the council actually enacted dramatic changes in social status, transforming would-be migrants into either accepted residents or expelled vagrants’ (p. 173). Coy points to the arbitrary nature of the processes of exclusion and inclusion and their decisive social repercussions for the individual migrants. His case-study also testifies to the overwhelming task of policing migration in a sprawling city with only a limited number of officials.
Anne Winter and Tim Hitchcock follow Coy's lead, Winter by lifting the specificities observed in Ulm into a more general hypothesis on the relationship between poor relief and mobility in early modern cities. Taking her cue from Albert De Swaan's identification of the geographical free-rider problem inherent to the localized relief system of early modern society, she discusses how different policies were developed by early modern urban authorities to overcome this problem. Drawing on studies of Vilvoorde and Antwerp in eighteenth-century Brabrant, she identifies a spectrum of policies based on local as well as inter-urban negotiations of interests. She concludes that although national action was the only structural solution to the free-rider problem, early modern cities were not passive victims of the contradictions between a localized relief system and geographical mobility. Tim Hitchcock's study of vagrant lives in eighteenth-century England turns the lens onto the vagrants themselves, using autobiographical sources to investigate migrant strategies for dealing with increased surveillance after the Vagrancy Acts of 1744. He shows how vagrants successfully applied disguises and other techniques to avoid capture and punishment.
Jan de Meester investigates the regulation of labour supply through the guild system in Antwerp during the cities’ building boom in the sixteenth century; Ulrich Niggemann explores the clashes and compromises between guild members, city magistrates and newly arrived Huguenot migrants in English and German towns, while Yves Junot ventures into the difficult task of studying temporary migrants in sixteenth-century Flanders, Artois and Hainault. While temporary migration was a very common phenomenon in the early modern city, methodologically it is very hard to get hold of. Junot quite ingeniously uses judicial interogations and petitions for reconcilliation to uncover three main circuits in the practices and networks of the ‘floating population’ – war migrations, individual break-ups and textile workers.
Hanna Sonkajärvis’ study of eighteenth-century Strasbourg deals with the complex relationship between different modes of citizenship in this contested city, that shifted its status from being a Reichsstadt into being a free city under the rule of the French king in 1681. She portrays a city with a very unique system of citizenship that were gradually contested and undermined by different groups and individuals unwilling to recognize the legal authority of the magistrate. Eleonora Canepari undertakes a comparative study of migration policies and policing in Rome and Milan, concluding that the distinction in these policies was not between ‘foreigners’ and ‘natives’, but between ‘settled’ and ‘unsettled’ inhabitants. Aleksej Kalc investigates migration policy in Trieste during its transformation from a communal town to a maritime emporium in the eighteenth century. Kalc introduces the useful concepts of attraction and consolidation. These allow him to analyse the process of filtering out and expelling unwanted subjects from the waves of new inhabitants as well as the authorities’ targeting of groups and individuals that could ‘complement, differentiate and stabilize Trieste's socioeconomic layout’ (p. 133). Finally, Vincent Milliot discusses how the development of new forms of migration monitoring in the cities of eighteenth-century France played an important role in the transformation of the urban socio-political order.
Overall, this is an excellent anthology that succeeds in breaking new ground for the writing of early modern migration history. The contributors shed new light on the importance of migration in urban history and outline a number of new approaches, interpretations and methodologies. The articles are well founded in recent literature on migration and early modern history, but perhaps pay a little too much attention to the connections between local poor relief systems and migratory regulation, which is repeated in many of the articles. Furthermore, not all contributions are equally successful in moving beyond the ethnic or religious community as the frame of analysis. Finally, as with most comparative compilations, the book has a certain geographical bias. One is left wondering how urban migration and its regulation were implemented in Eastern Europe or in Scandinavia, although for the latter area I have found many similar patterns in my own work. These limitations cannot, however, take away the overall impression of an important pioneering piece of scholarship.
