Migrants and Urban Change: Newcomers to Antwerp, 1760-1860

Recent historiography has dismissed the once powerful image of nineteenth-century European urbanization as a one-off transfer of impoverished villagers to overcrowded cities. Instead, it stresses the complex nature of migration patterns, the strong degree of continuity with earlier migration traditions, and the relative success of urban migrants. However illuminating these revisions may be in many respects, it remains difficult to reconcile their emphasis on continuity and success with the speed and intensity of societal disruption that was taking place in Europe's long nineteenth century.

Of paramount importance in this study is the identification of what constitutes continuity and what embodies change, for disentangling the dynamics of migratory patterns demands an understanding of migration as a multi-layered phenomenon, bound up with material conditions, social relations and individual aspirations. Taking the Belgian city of Antwerp as her case-study, Anne Winter argues that the direction of nineteenth-century societal change was such as to make some migrant groups better suited to reap the benefits of new urban opportunities than local people. Between 1760 and 1860 the city underwent a profound transformation from a middle-sized regional textile centre into a booming international port town of more than 120,000 inhabitants, making Antwerp an ideal case from which to track the dynamics of migration and its consequences. Winter uses this to formulate more general insights on the relationship between migration and urban transformation in the transition from preindustrial to industrial society.

ISBN:978-1-85196-646-2

Publication year:2009

Keywords:Urban History, Migration History