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Network strategies of nineteenth century Hesse-Cassel emigrants

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.hisfam.2008.08.002

1873-5398

Simone A. Wegge,

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

Abstract Between 1820 and 1930 over 5 million Germans emigrated to overseas destinations, most to the U.S. By the 1850s the number of German migrants living in the U.S. was large, a consequence partly of cumulative causation. I provide evidence for the dramatic increase in networks by using micro-level data for the German principality of Hesse-Cassel in the mid-nineteenth century. A conservative measurement of network relationships finds that after 25 years almost half of them were related to a previous family member from the same village. Migrants who used family networks tended to move in small units. Usually only a few years separated networked family members, but some links lasted over a decade. Women were unlikely to start a network but more likely than men to travel to the U.S. Within some families, migrants switched from continental destinations to the U.S., perhaps due to the failure of the 1848 March Revolution. Keywords: MigrationNetworksMigration behaviorInter-generational relationshipsSiblingsGenderCumulative causationStrong ties Acknowledgements Many thanks to participants at the 2006 International Economic History Association conference, and at a 2007 Rutgers University lecture and especially to Alice Kasakoff for useful observations. Two anonymous reviewers contributed many helpful comments. Notes 1 For figures on the growth of remittances, see Baines (Citation1985), p. 85. 2 Kamphoefner (Citation2005) draws attention to this particular quote. 3 For discussions on how networks are used, see for example Boyd (Citation1989) and Fawcett (Citation1989). 4 See for instance Baines (Citation1994), Erickson (Citation1972), Fitzpatrick (Citation1994), Kamphoefner et al. (Citation1991), and MacDonald (Citation1964), for letter collections and/or discussions of the usefulness of letters. 5 The U.S. passenger ship records contain various quantifiable demographic information on migrants, but nothing about the reasons individuals may have had for leaving. 6 Different from Ostergren (Citation1982), Dribe (Citation2003) and Kamphoefner (Citation2005) uses a broad definition of chain migration to examine 19th century settlement patterns of German Hanoverians within Indiana. 7 Many nineteenth century European migration time series are increasing over time and are highly positively correlated with most measures of past migration, the proxy for chain migration; thus cumulative migration (the migrant stock variable) is probably a non-stationary data series. 8 Taylor (Citation1987) is one example. Others are Curran and Rivero-Fuentes (Citation2003), and Massey (Citation1986, Citation1987), which have used data from the MMP, which is a project that employs household-level data from Mexican villages to study migration. 9 The main point of the Da Vanzo paper is that unemployed individuals are much more likely to move and move again. The effect is then an expansion of family networks. 10 Gurak and Caces (Citation1992) provide an interesting summary of several studies from the sociology literature. 11 Individuals were more likely to migrate on a temporary basis if a loss in household income had been experienced, and a move was more likely to be permanent in the case of landlessness or in the event of a crop loss. 12 There is now an extensive literature discussing how migrants differ across gender. The spring 2006 issue of International Migration Review is devoted to articles discussing such distinctions and covers perspectives from the fields of ethnography, geography, history, law, politics, sociology, etc. Curran and Saguy (Citation2003) provide a review of the literature from a sociological perspective related to gender and migration and social networks. 13 Some of these include Auerbach (Citation1987–88), Auerbach (Citation1993), Wegge (Citation1998, Citation2003). 14 The data do not provide gender, but they do give first names or descriptions like "Wife of …" or "Daughter of …" in lieu of an exact name. From the first name variable, I identified gender. 15 See Kamphoefner (Citation1987), where proxies for regional emigration rates are calculated. Only a small fraction of German regions, specifically other Hessian areas, other parts of Southwestern Germany and a few parts of Prussia had higher emigration rates than Hesse-Cassel. 16 Several studies document the economic backwardness of Hesse-Cassel. Frank (Citation1994), an empirical study of regional industrialization in Germany, classifies Hesse-Cassel as rural and backward in 1849. Kukowski (Citation1995, 6), an extensive and well-documented study of Hessian poverty in the first half of the nineteenth-century, stresses that Hesse-Cassel is a great region for studying poverty in nineteenth-century Germany, since it was very backward for both political and socio-economic reasons. 17 von Köllmann (Citation1995) documents this with detailed employment censuses for 1847 and 1852. 18 See Assion (Citation1991, 29), Cohn (Citation1987), Keeling (Citation1999). 19 See CitationGermany, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Bestand 16. Documents discussing total migration flows show that the number of migrants returning for the whole principality never numbered higher than 30 per year. This number is very possibly understated, however. It was nevertheless possible to return to one's home village and reclaim former privileges, which the Hesse-Cassel government decided was allowable in the late 1830s. Auerbach (Citation1993, 112), describes the return of impoverished Hessian migrants in 1838. The Hesse-Cassel government ruled that villages where these legal emigrants had held rights would have to take care of them. The release of them from their duties and rights as subjects of Hesse-Cassel was only lawful when the incorporation of emigrants in the destination country was successful. This ruling was made despite the large protests of fellow citizens, since such a return migration was a great burden on the coffers of the emigrants' home villages. 20 Dribe (Citation2003) also looks at four different Swedish villages (a different set than Ostergren's) using data generated from family reconstitution methods. Dribe's work, however, focuses more on who migrated and why and less so on the particular composition of migration networks and how migrants used them. 21 Statistics on the number of different names among each village's emigrants provide some meaning to these figures. 90% of the villages each had between 1 to 30 different family names among their respective emigrant populations, and 50% of the villages had at least 10 different family names among the emigrants. 22 Very few people took amounts above 1000 Thaler. To minimize the effect on the average, I have eliminated records for individuals and Groups that took more than 1000 Thaler. Those who reported taking no cash are also included. The same patterns hold up when I look at this same sample without zero values. Cash is reported as zero (or "missing") for many of the emigrants, and the multitude of zero values makes for large confidence intervals around the average cash values. For information on exchange rates, see the July 27, 1849 issue of the CitationAllgemeine Auswanderungszeitung, pp. 237–38. 23 This particular result reflects the Male–Male and the Male–Female patterns, because these two have greater sample sizes of 278 and 58 respectively. 24 Grigg (Citation1977) provides a useful summary of the Ravenstein laws. 25 See Cerrutti and Massey (Citation2001) for evidence on Mexican migrants: until recently legal migration to the U.S. was dominated by men; illegal migration to the U.S., on the other hand, is heavily dominated by men. See Tacoli (Citation1995) for discussions of Filipino migrants in Italy. 26 It is highly likely too, that emigrants were undercounted in 1848 and 1849 due to a breakdown in government services after the 1848 March Revolution. This may well have affected the emigrant data for Hesse-Cassel. 27 For a number of years, the Allgemeine Auswanderungszeitung, a newspaper for emigrants in Rudolstadt, Germany, published various tables that summarized the cheapest fares to overseas locations. The October 23, 1848 issues for instance, stated that the cheapest fare by sailing ship from Hamburg to New York was 30 Reichsthaler (Thaler), from Hamburg to New Orleans was 40 Thaler, from Hamburg to Brazil was 60 Thaler, and from Hamburg to Adelaide, Australia, was 80 Thaler. Here, distance traveled was highly correlated with the cost of passage. 28 It is curious however, that on average women were moving with very little cash and that very few of them engaged in internal migration. Potential immigrants having financial assets may have actually been important for some European communities. 29 This information is derived from a Hessian survey of villages in the 1850s. See CitationGermany, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Marburg. Bestand H3, vols. 1–80. 30 Arrizabalaga (Citation2005) studies gender differences in migration patterns of 19th century Basque individuals, and Egerbladh, Kasakoff and Adams (Citation2007) examines the gender differences in the dispersal of children in Sweden and the U.S. Gender differences I found do not agree with the patterns uncovered by Arrizabalaga (Citation2005), Egerbladh et al. Comparisons with this interesting work is difficult, since my data do not cover migration within the Hesse-Cassel principality and their data describe short-range migrations.