Europeans on the Move

The United States became the home of so many European migrants that it is easy to forget that they settled in other countries as well. For example, foreign-born residents in Canada form a greater proportion of its total population than in the U.S. As in the United States, immigration to Canada—and to its commonwealth partner, Australia—became increasingly diverse after World War II, when refugees from communism, Italians, natives of the Caribbean, and immigrants from different parts of Asia were on the move. South America also received many Europeans: Spanish migrations dominated the colonial phase, but Italians and Germans as well as Asian workers joined in during the age of mass immigration, 1840 to 1920.

The movement of peoples from Europe is not simply one of crossing oceans to find new homes, however. Although many Irish headed for Canada and the United States, thousands sought a better life in England. On the continent of Europe, Poles moved west to Germany to find work while Jews from Eastern Europe established new communities in either London or Paris rather than continue to the New World. And of course millions of Europeans moved to urban areas within their own countries during and even before the age of mass migration.

Scholars examining European patterns of migration have noted that they are part of national, regional, and world systems. The editors of European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, are among those historians who have been instrumental in presenting migration in a much broader context. They have brought together essays about a number of these movements, and provide a useful bibliography as well.

Such collections of scholarly articles invariably pose problems. First, what is the purpose of the essays: to identify and present significant research and materials, or to simply pull together readable articles and make them readily available? Second, do the essays form a coherent whole, or do they stand alone, with no apparent relationship to one another? Third, are the pieces uniformly of high quality, or are they uneven, thus detracting from the book’s merit? European Migrants, while dealing with large themes, is not totally successful in providing a positive answer to these questions.

Most of the ten essays in this collection are recent, but three have appeared before: Samuel Baily’s in a 1983 issue of the American Historical Review; Leslie Mock and James Jackson, Jr.’s and Ewa Morawska’s in academic journals in 1989. Although solid pieces, they do not blend precisely with the other essays.

Leslie Moch’s introduction states that the essays center on the mass migrations between Europe and the Americas, circa 1840 to 1914. But in fact they cover a broader time period and most of the material focuses on movements within Europe rather than on the mass migration to the Americas. In explaining the latter emphasis Moch writes that it is necessary to place migration within Europe itself and within individual nations of Europeans as part of an emerging world system. Indeed, the title indicates that “migration” is preferred over “immigration” to denote the complexities of moving Europeans.

This ambitious volume is divided into several parts: a general treatment of migration systems, the process of leaving home, and finally a comparative approach to acculturation. The choice of ten selections makes for a rather limited treatment of each theme. Some of the essays are broad in scope and attempt to give the reader a wide view; others are focused narrowly on one particular group, leaving the reader to wonder just how important the examples are. In attempting to cover so much, European Migrants has to be very selective, perhaps too much so. The ambition is there, but additional space would be needed to make the arguments more convincing.

Migration is conceived of as an emerging world system, but because the book is heavily weighted toward the study of Europeans moving within Europe or, to...