European Migration Since 1500: Implications for World History

The spectacular population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in Europe and the Atlantic during the nineteenth century are often thought to have pushed migration rates to unprecedented levels. The fact that people moved in masses into cities and across the Atlantic is often given as the most important argument in support of the theory of mobility transition.. New research into cross-community migrations since 1500, however, reveals a more nuanced picture. This presentation distinguishes six types of migration and offers a differentiated a model that links mobility to larger processes of social, cultural, and economic change in a world-historical scope. Leo Lucassen is professor of history at the University of Leiden and is the author of The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850, chief editor of Paths of Integration: Migrants in Western Europe,1880–2004, and coeditor of Migration History in World History.