Why People Moved
Demographic pressure at both ends
- Migration in many cases was influenced by changes in demographics in both industrialised and unindustrialised societies that presented challenges to existing patterns of living.
- The CED puts both kinds of society in the same clause — pressure existed at the sending end and the receiving end.
- Challenges to existing patterns of living is the mechanism: when a place can no longer support the way people lived there, some of them leave.
The CED says demographic change drove migration in...
Pressure existed at the sending end and the receiving end.
Transport changed the destination
- Because of the nature of new modes of transportation, both internal and external migrants increasingly relocated to cities.
- This pattern contributed to the significant global urbanisation of the 19th century.
- So 5.5's railways and steamships are a cause here — they made a city reachable from a countryside that had never been connected to one.
Select all the coerced or semicoerced migrations the CED names.
British engineers are among those who chose freely.
And made return possible
- The new methods of transportation also allowed for many migrants to return, periodically or permanently, to their home societies.
- The CED's examples: Japanese agricultural workers in the Pacific, Lebanese merchants in the Americas, Italian industrial workers in Argentina.
- A migration that can be reversed is a different decision from one that cannot — which is why return migration is its own historical fact.
Environmental cause, economic cause, or a transport effect?
Sort each factor in nineteenth-century migration.
New transport methods allowed many migrants to return home.
Which changed what kind of decision migrating was.
Coerced migration was not a leftover. The CED says the new global capitalist economy continued to rely on coerced and semicoerced labour migration — enslavement, Chinese and Indian indentured servitude, convict labour. Treating nineteenth-century migration as essentially voluntary contradicts the clause.
Migrants increasingly relocated to ____, contributing to 19th-century global urbanisation.
Railways and steamships made a city reachable from a countryside never connected to one.
Free choice, and its opposite
- Many individuals chose freely to relocate, often in search of work — the CED names the Irish to the United States and British engineers and geologists to South Asia and Africa.
- The new global capitalist economy continued to rely on coerced and semicoerced labour migration, including enslavement, Chinese and Indian indentured servitude, and convict labour.
- The word continued matters: coercion is not a survival from an earlier era but a working part of the nineteenth-century economy.
Match each migrant group to what it illustrates.
Three different kinds of movement in one century.
Environmental and economic factors
- This subtopic has two objectives, one environmental and one economic, and they want different evidence.
- Environmental: demographic change, land pressure, and what transport made reachable.
- Economic: the search for work, and an economy that relied on coerced and semicoerced labour.
An Italian worker takes a steamship to Argentina for a harvest season and comes home. Fifty years earlier the journey would have been a one-way decision for life. Transport did not only move more people — it changed what kind of decision migrating was.
Demographic change in both industrialised and unindustrialised societies challenged existing patterns of living and drove migration. New transport sent migrants increasingly to cities, contributing to 19th-century global urbanisation, and allowed many to return. Many chose freely, in search of work, while the economy continued to rely on coerced and semicoerced labour migration.