Central European Studies

Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire

Annemarie Steidl

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781557539823
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

On Many Routes is about the history of human migration. With a focus on the Habsburg Empire, this innovative work presents an integrated and creative study of spatial mobilities: from short to long term, and intranational and inter-European to transatlantic. Migration was not just relegated to city folk, but likewise was the reality for rural dwellers, and we gain a better understanding of how sending and receiving states and shipping companies worked together to regulate migration and shape populations.

Bringing historical census data, governmental statistics, and ship manifests into conversation with centuries-old migration patterns of servants, agricultural workers, seasonal laborers, peddlers, and artisans—both male and female—this research argues that Central Europeans have long been mobile, that this mobility has been driven by diverse motivations, and that post-1850 transatlantic migration was an obvious extension of earlier spatial mobility patterns. Demonstrating the complexity of human mobility via an exploration of the links between overseas, continental, and internal migrations, On Many Routes shows that migrations to the United States, to the nearest coalfield, and to the urban capitals are embedded within complicated patterns of movement. There is no good reason to study internal apart from transnational moves, and combining these fields brings ample possibility to make migration research more relevant for the much broader field of social and economic history. This work poses an invaluable resource to the understudied area of Habsburg Empire migration studies, which it relocates within its wider European context and provides a major methodological contribution to the history of human migration more broadly. The ubiquity and functionality of human movement sheds light on the relationship between human nature and society, and challenges simplistic notions of human mobility then and now.

1

BACK-AND-FORTH WITHIN IMPERIAL AUSTRIA AND THE KINGDOM OF HUNGARY

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CENTRAL Europe, most people moved over relatively short distances. They might move to and from long-established urban areas, and to and from newly developing industrial centers, but they also moved between agrarian regions and rural communities. Although migration scholars have challenged the concept of a rural exodus, that idea still continues to dominate collective perceptions. Newly developing economic structures are believed to have destabilized the countryside, corrupted peasants, and “uprooted” the landless rural population, who in response fled to growing urban centers. Contrary to such a scenario, in his innovative study on the movements of the French population during the nineteenth century, historical demographer Paul-André Rosental convincingly demonstrates that most migration within France took place between villages, and that it was primarily individuals from small towns who moved to Paris.¹ He introduces the concept of micromobility “to characterize villagers who moved without affecting larger migratory trends because they did not move very far and essentially stayed in the rural world.”² Different data structures render it infeasible to replicate Rosental’s study of spatial mobility in the Habsburg Empire; however, it can be presumed that the majority of Austrian and Hungarian inhabitants also preferred to move short distances. Migrants were not necessarily longing for alien urban environments. Many moved within the same community, to a nearby place, or to a settlement with similar features farther afield. They left villages for other villages or for a nearby small town; they went back and forth between rural and urban areas. And it was not uncommon for any one of this great variety of movements to take migrants across district, provincial, or state borders.³

Modern migration research has revealed that the intensity of nineteenth-century internal mobility far exceeded that of overseas migration. As early as the first half of the century, average migration rates to selected German cities were twenty to twenty-five times higher than the rate of transatlantic moves, and after the turn of the twentieth century, internal regional mobility within the German Reich increased by about five hundred times.⁴ The popular assumption is that crossing the Atlantic was the dominant migration pattern from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of World War I;⁵ however, Gustav Thirring, a leading Hungarian statistician and demographer, showed just the opposite in his work on migration in the Hungarian Kingdom in as early as 1902. Based on Hungarian census records, he calculated that exactly 1,034,203 people had left their place of birth between 1881 and 1900, nearly two-thirds or 654,228 of which had migrated internally.⁶ About ninety years later, Heinz Faßmann concluded in his studies on various migration patterns in the Habsburg Empire that in this area internal migration was numerically far more important than international moves.⁷ Their work is based on census data, and since censuses almost never provide information on temporary seasonal migration, it is safe to presume that the preponderance of internal migration was, in fact, even higher.

Migrations within Central Europe over both short and longer distances had become common phenomena by the mid-nineteenth century, before the beginning of mass overseas traffic. There had always been a considerable amount of geographical mobility within Central Europe. All regions of the Habsburg Empire present a long tradition of various migration patterns. Large numbers of people were involved in regular and less visible everyday movements. Men and women had moved to find work in agriculture, either as servants or maids on larger farmsteads or as seasonal farm laborers to sow and harvest crops or to take care of livestock since the early modern period. Many left less productive regions for more fertile valleys, or moved up the hillsides to uncultivated backwoods. With an increasing intensity of cultivation and a growing demand for seasonal labor, the harvest migrations from the hills to the plains added to the mobility.⁸ Servant work in agriculture could be done by young, unmarried people, who changed their employment frequently in order to climb up the social hierarchy, but there also were rural areas where working as a servant could be a lifelong engagement.⁹ Farmhands and maidservants usually moved within smaller regions, rarely crossing administrative borders. By the beginning of the twentieth century, up to two-thirds of all young people from the Alpine provinces of the Habsburg Empire were engaged as agricultural servants for at least a portion of their lives.¹⁰

From the late Middle Ages onward, European agriculture was gradually transformed into capitalist modes of production. Regions specialized in the cultivation of specific crops, dairy products, or meat production for super-regional markets, and for the most part employed seasonally mobile agrarian labor forces.¹¹ Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, smallholders and cottagers from Switzerland, Tyrol, and Vorarlberg had migrated to the Bavarian and Swabian grain fields in order to work as mowers, harvesters, or fruit pickers.¹² Day laborers from Carniola moved seasonally to Vipavska dolina/Wippachtal/Valle del Vipacco for the wine grape harvest, to the region around Postojna/Adelsberg/Postumia for the wheat harvest, to Styria in the summer months in order to pick hops, and to the district of Tolmin/Tolmein/Tolmino for logging during the winter.¹³ Similarly, migrations of itinerant workers to do seasonal farmwork on the central Hungarian plains was a traditional part of the agricultural system there.¹⁴ Jan Lucassen has estimated that by around 1800 more than 300,000 Europeans were moving as seasonal agricultural laborers.¹⁵ In the nineteenth century, the cultivation of new cash crops, such as sugar beets, combined with the industrialization of agricultural techniques brought new rhythms into the workload. Seasonal migration patterns primarily comprised temporary labor migration for harvesting sugar beets, other roots, and wine grapes. More and more Central Europeans, especially women, began moving all over Europe in order to harvest sugar beets.¹⁶ Hundreds of thousands of labor migrants moved seasonally in search of work in agriculture. Peasant workers from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary incorporated seasonal migration into their regular cycle of activities that made up the agricultural year.

One of the oldest migration patterns that was still in existence in the nineteenth century was the so-called transhumance—the seasonal migration of herders with their livestock, mostly sheep but cows as well, to different meadows for winter and summer terms. This special mode of migration can be traced back to ancient societies in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea regions, and linked societies in the mountains with those in the flatlands via economic relations.¹⁷ From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, transhumance was practiced in southeastern Europe in areas close to the Mediterranean as well as in the western European Alps, and could involve mobility over hundreds of kilometers, with shepherds and cattle herders spending weeks moving in a (semi-)nomadic pattern with their cattle at least two times a year.¹⁸ A short-distance variation of transhumance was common in the Alpine regions: peasants had their residence in local villages and sent their cattle with a herder to pastures high up in the mountains during the summer months and to meadows in lower areas during the winter.¹⁹ As mentioned, it is primarily sheep that were driven in this way between South Tyrol and the Ötztal, and the practice continues to the present day.²⁰ Within the Kingdom of Hungary, the Transylvanian cattle-breeding society members who lived along the border regions to the Austrian province of Bukovina and the Kingdom of Romania represent another example of a traditional agrarian mobility pattern.²¹

From the early modern period up until to the first decades of the twentieth century, people from the Habsburg Empire developed migration strategies that linked them to specific labor markets in other regions and countries. More generally, a substantial number of people in different professions in the Alpine area made their livings as migrant laborers or as peddlers who traveled through vast parts of Central Europe. It is only recently that studies on such specialized and highly mobile groups have been integrated, albeit insufficiently, into mainstream migration history.²² The multifaceted routes taken by itinerant peddlers of various goods are just one pattern of labor mobility that has existed in Central Europe for ages.²³ The existence of mobile dealers was part of the local and village economy, and a response to the growing demand of the quickly expanding population for merchandise and special services. Mobile peddlers also connected local economies with transregional markets and therewith contributed to an early aspect of globalization. Perhaps most widely known is the population of peddlers from the Alpine regions at the border between Imperial Austria and areas of Italy, who could be found all over Central Europe and as far as the borders of the Ottoman Empire.²⁴ In the early nineteenth century, up to 80 percent of the male population of some villages in the Ticino/Tessin region was temporarily absent as a result of their work as traveling vendors or mobile laborers.²⁵ Another characteristic feature of Alpine peddling was that local valleys specialized in certain products or services, such as the mobile dealer in oil and herbs from the Zillertal.²⁶ Other examples of mobile activities or entertainment were musicians from Bohemia or Bosnians who performed with animals (Bärentreiber).²⁷ A more profitable case of mobile merchants were the glass dealers from Bohemia, who founded branches of their trade in all of the most important cities of preindustrial Europe.²⁸

From at least the mid-eighteenth century onward, seasonal migrations within Hungarian lands and to neighboring countries were widespread mobility patterns among Slovak speakers. While some moved permanently, others sought temporary work in industry and construction or as farm laborers. Especially in Upper Hungarian counties, temporary migrations had become part of their everyday life and vital to family economies. Tinkers (Drotári) from Trenčín/Trencsén/Trentschin County traveled throughout the Hungarian regions and repaired household items and farm implements. Masons from Liptó/Liptov/Liptau County found employment at Budapest’s construction sides; still others sold wares. Seasonal migration of farm laborers to work in the fields in the central Hungarian plains was a traditional and long-lasting part of the economic system as well.²⁹ The Hungarian-speaking Székelyek (Szekler) from Transylvania were well known among their contemporaries across Transylvania and Romania not only as peddlers in wooden products and mineral water, but as agricultural laborers as well.³⁰ Another group of mobile individuals from the Hungarian Kingdom were coppersmiths, who moved all over Europe and were traditionally termed Kalderasch or Gypsies.³¹ Preindustrial European roads were also frequented by beggars and other vagrants.³²

Tramping artisans were a common feature from the late Middle Ages until the beginning of the twentieth century; these skilled working men moved between settlements in search of suitable employment.³³ Despite some recent studies attempting to establish connections between traditional artisan migration and nineteenth-century mass migration, not enough work has been done in this area.³⁴ An extended period of wandering and migration had formed a standard part of artisan life since the sixteenth century. The economic logic of journeymen’s migration during the early modern period may be seen as a key mechanism in regulating the artisan labor market. Extant research on preindustrial Western and Central Europe has uncovered the existence of distinct migration circuits, whereby the direct hinterland was often the main supplier of apprentices, domestic servants, day laborers, and other relatively unspecialized labor, while specialized artisans and white-collar workers generally moved between different cities and over greater distances.³⁵ Artisan journeying constituted a period of circular mobility that lasted several years or more, and during which the time spent traveling was interrupted by longer or shorter intervals of employment in a town. It can certainly be presumed that searching for work was the main priority for most artisans, but we should not forget that there were also a number of other reasons for embarking on a journey.³⁶ The world of small enterprise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Back-and-Forth within Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary
• 2. Crossing Inter-European Borders
• 3. Transatlantic Migration Patterns
• 4. On Multiple Routes from, to, and within Central Europe
• Outlook and Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author