Family strategies concerning migration and occupations of children in a market-oriented agricultural economy

Abstract

This study focuses on family labor strategies in the 19th and early 20th centuries, using a database containing vital information on the lives of some 3000 persons born around 1830, 1850, and 1870 in the Groningen clay soil region-a predominantly agrarian area in the northern part of the Netherlands. Working-class families were moving from short-term survival strategies to long-term investment strategies in the last decades of the 19th century. Like other occupational groups, they tended to keep their children at home in larger numbers instead of finding them jobs as live-in workers-a change probably facilitated by improving real wages. Although such a change in family strategy implied lower earnings in the short run, children who stayed home experienced more upward social mobility in later life than those who left home early to become live-in servants. The increased preference for long-term investment strategies is also apparent in migratory patterns. Independent of the phases in the family cycle, working-class families became more inclined to migrate over longer distances, especially to America where unskilled laborers had better prospects. D

Inequalities in Transnational Families

“…During periods of great economic change, families may stretch in new ways to accommodate shifting personal and family goals. Although also evident in the past (see Bras 2003;Nakano Glenn 1983;Paping 2004;Ryan 2004), these family adaptations have become particularly salient as the influx of immigrants to the United States increased sharply at the end of the 20th century.…”

Rural crisis and rural exodus? Local migration dynamics during the crisis of the 1840s in Flanders (Belgium)

“…Without any access to land, wage-dependent households are likely to have been doubly hit by the combination of rising unemployment and rocketing food prices. Furthermore, we can expect landlessness to have facilitated migration, in the sense that landless households had no local investment in land and were therefore 'freer' to leave than landed families (Groote and Tassenaar, 2000;Dribe, 2003b;Paping, 2004). However, Kok (2004) found that even fully proletarian families could be reluctant to move because of the opportunity costs involved: certain assets remained tied to their place of residence, such as rights to poor relief, a network of personal contacts and the possibility for all family members of finding work.…”

“…Together with a sharp rise in land rents, this contributed to the dire straits in which many Flemish peasants found themselves on the eve of the crisis of the 1840s (Vanhaute, 2001). At the same time, ownership of land can be considered a stronger buffer against out-migration than rented land, as it implies a stronger connection to the soil (Paping, 2004). However, to the extent that it was tied up with long-standing relations of patronage and credit, leasehold could also act as a brake on migration at least as much as land ownership did (Scott, 1977).…”

The impact of land accumulation and consolidation on population trends in the pre-industrial period: two contrasting cases in the Low Countries

“…Despite the critical conditions of impoverishment experienced by many of the rural inhabitants of the Oldambt by the second half of the nineteenth century, very few of the emigrants from the northern Netherlands to the Americas came from the Oldambt – in fact, migration tended to be short distances between villages in search of work. While land consolidation and agricultural modernization led to high levels of labourer emigration from Zeeland and northern Groningen, Oldambt labourers did not leave. Evert Hofstee has also demonstrated that by the late nineteenth century, the Oldambt had one of the highest rates of fertility for a rural region in the whole of the Netherlands.…”