Flight from the land? Migration flows of the rural population of the Netherlands, 1850-1940

Abstract

In this article, we aim to analyze the residential options of the rural population of the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from the perspective of push factors operating at different levels: the household, the municipality and the region. We contrast the decision to stay with moving in several ways: within the municipality or its immediate surroundings, within the region, to a different region, to a city or abroad. The backgrounds of these differences in migration paths are found in 1) individual characteristics like age and previous migrations, in 2) household background like the socio-economic status of the head, the composition of the membership, its religious affiliation, and in 3) local and regional contextual variables, such as population density, type of agriculture, inheritance practices and non-agricultural employment. We make use of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, a large database with detailed information on more than 34000 families living in the Dutch countryside between 1850 and 1940 and propose a competing risks survival analysis model to understand the balance between individual and contextual factors in migration decisions of the rural population.