Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Migration can be defined as a residential change of a permanent or semi-permanent nature operating at a variety of scales ranging from movement within an urban street to transatlantic emigration. In this chapter migration is also taken to include seasonal movements of labour such as those of harvest workers and farm servants. Of the three basic demographic variables – fertility, mortality and migration – it is the hardest to measure as it was not a finite event and is often poorly documented. In nineteenth-century Britain, as today, migration was an important demographic, social, economic and cultural process linking communities, regions and nations. Migration had profound impacts on the lives of individuals, affecting everyone, regardless of whether they were movers or stayers, by helping to influence the social and demographic structures of the communities in which they lived through the addition or subtraction of people. This was particularly evident where the net flow of migrants was strongly outwards or inwards, and when the cultural characteristics of those who moved were different from those of the populations of the areas to which they moved, as with rural, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders or Irish moving to British industrial cities. Every community was affected by migration and modest net inward or outward movements could conceal large gross flows of people. Migration influenced ... log in or subscribe to read full text