The Transformation of the World (33 page)

The refugee flows in Southeast Europe reached a peak during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The massacres and ethnic cleansing of those years already presaged what lay ahead in the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s. Population movements on such a scale had not been seen for centuries within such a small area of Europe. Muslims of every description (Turks and other Turkic peoples, Albanians, Islamized Bulgarians, etc.) fled from all the former Ottoman territories now occupied by Balkan states. Greeks abandoned the newly enlarged Serbia, the expanded Bulgaria, Thrace, and also Asia Minor (where many ethnic Greeks spoke only Turkish). Salonica—Ottoman since the fifteenth century, with a long history as a peaceful ethnic mosaic—turned into a Greek city in which Turks, Jews, and Bulgarians had to recognize the primacy of the Greek conquerors; by 1925 the Muslim population had abandoned the native city of Kemal Atatürk.
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According to estimates made at the time by the British authorities, approximately 740,000 civilians were uprooted between 1912 and the outbreak of the First World War just in the rectangular area formed by Macedonia, western Thrace, eastern Thrace, and Turkey.
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After the First World War and the Greek-Turkish war of 1919–1922, ethnic “unmixing” continued in the eastern Mediterranean and again led to the problem associated with all expulsions: the need to integrate people arriving in a new society. After 1919 the attempts of the League of Nations, particularly its Refugee Settlement Commission, to establish a modicum of order amid the chaos represented a small step forward.

The actual or threatened violence that lay behind these population movements did not stem simply from a religious clash between Christians and Muslims. The frontlines were more complex, and the Second Balkan War saw Christian states fight one another. Muslims too knew how to differentiate. Until relations between Greeks and Turks took a further turn for the worse, they could expect slightly less appalling treatment from Greeks than from the Slav peasantry who filled the Bulgarian and Serb armies. New, often hastily improvised visions of nation-states established the criterion for inclusion and exclusion. The authorities generally tolerated, sometimes even promoted, the refugee flows; the
emigration was matched by immigration of the new citizens they wanted. To be sure, most governments refrained from encouraging too large an influx—after all, irredentist minorities in other countries might one day buttress annexation claims and perform useful services for a nationalist foreign policy.

Jewish Flight and Emigration

A new and especially important source of politically inspired cross-border emigration was the new anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire and elsewhere in eastern Europe.
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Between the early 1880s and 1914, some 2.5 million Jews left eastern Europe and headed west. Care must be taken not to treat this exodus—probably the largest population movement in postbiblical Jewish history—as just another politically driven flow of refugees. The Jews in question formed part of a broader movement of people who wanted to improve their lives by emigrating to the economically more advanced West, but they also had to deal with rising official hostility in the countries of their birth. In the 1870s approximately 5.6 million Jews were living east of the German Reich: four million under the tsar in a special “Pale of Settlement,” 750,000 in the Habsburg lands of Galicia and Bukovina, almost 700,000 in Hungary, and 200,000 in Romania. In the Russian Empire, after Alexander II's accession to the throne in 1855, the hope had arisen that the authorities would encourage the integration of Jews into society. But the reverse occurred after the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863; only a few discriminatory laws were repealed. The final years of Alexander's rule—he was assassinated in March 1881—were marked by a further autocratic clampdown and a growing accommodation with conservative Russian nationalists, who saw their main adversary in the Jews. Nevertheless, although in the 1870s large sections of once-liberal public opinion also shunned the cause of Jewish emancipation, emigration did not for the moment reach dramatic proportions.

The picture changed with the first series of pogroms in that same year of 1881.
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The involvement of a terrorist of Jewish origin in the tsar's assassination became the pretext for large-scale anti-Jewish violence, first in Ukraine, then also in Warsaw. To what extent the authorities unleashed the pogroms and to what extent they were “spontaneous” outbreaks among the mainly urban lower classes is still being debated. In any event, in addition to general poverty, a high number of children per family, a lack of job prospects, and a growing vulnerability to street violence, the Jewish population now had to face an official policy that denied it a place in the country's national life. In the 1890s nearly all Jewish craftsmen and merchants were brutally driven westward from Moscow into the Pale of Settlement, while the state placed great obstacles in the way of Jews (and others) wishing to emigrate. For many it thus became an illegal adventure to flee the empire, often by bribing corrupt officials, border guards, and policemen. The figures for Jewish emigration can be reconstructed with some degree of accuracy only from statistics in the destination countries. Whereas in the 1880s an average of 20,000 Jews a year left the Tsarist Empire for the United States (by far the
first choice), the corresponding figure for the years between 1906 and 1910 was 82,000. The increase was due partly to the palpable attractiveness of the new life overseas and partly to competition among the shipping companies that had considerably reduced the cost of a transatlantic passage around the turn of the century. The fact that persecution was not the only factor fueling Jewish emigration is borne out by the not-insignificant numbers who
re
migrated to eastern Europe—perhaps as many as 15 to 20 percent in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Jewish emigration from Habsburg Galicia around this time was driven mainly by extreme poverty. After the legal emancipation in 1867, Galician Jews enjoyed full civil liberties and made certain advances in social integration, although the lack of social-economic opportunities meant that these did not lead to much. In Galicia, too, there were anti-Jewish stirrings in the 1890s, but the Habsburg government never officially engaged in action against the Jews. In Romania, which the Congress of Berlin recognized as an independent state in 1878, widespread poverty combined with an early and intense anti-Semitism. The state defined the Jewish minority as antinational, made its economic life as difficult as possible, and did not protect it from “spontaneous” violence. The Western Great Powers tried but failed to make the authorities in Bucharest comply with the clauses in the Treaty of Berlin that had provided for Jewish civil rights. It is therefore unsurprising that no other region of eastern Europe saw such a high proportion emigrate. Between 1871 and 1914 Romania lost a third of its Jewish population.
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Eastern European Jews were the first new-style refugees that people in Western Europe could identify as such. Most of them spoke Yiddish, wore traditional Jewish dress, and cut a wretched figure at ports and railroad stations and in city centers. Jews already living in the West viewed them with mixed feelings, as both “brothers” and “strangers” who, though deserving support, threatened the success of their own precarious integration. Most of the new arrivals saw Western Europe only as a stopover on the road to the New World. Craftsmen were more likely to stay on, but it was not made easy for them. In Germany, government policy created obstacles (though not so many as to spoil good business for the shipping companies that brought them there), and the public mood was unfavorable to their presence. Nevertheless, by 1910 a good tenth of German Jews were of eastern European origin.
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6 Internal Migration and the Changing Slave Trade

Although the nineteenth century was not yet the “century of the refugee,” it was an age of labor migration across continents on a greater scale than anything seen before in history. This was not always entirely voluntary—though quite apart from the slave trade while that still existed—but on the whole it did involve a life choice that individuals made voluntarily. Its prerequisites were population growth, improved transportation, new job opportunities resulting from
industrialization and the opening of frontier lands for agriculture, and postmercantilist government policies in both source and destination countries.

Transnational Migration in Europe and East Asia

A “new topography of cross-border migration” thus emerged on all continents.
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Historical research has afforded a fairly precise picture of this in the case of Europe but less so for other parts of the world. In central Europe the “Dutch” or “North Sea system,” the only one of the early modern transnational migration systems still functioning in 1800, had given way by mid-century to the partly overlapping “Ruhr system.”
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Instead of Dutch trading and colonial activity, the industrial development of mining regions now became the chief magnet for prospective migrants. The high spatial mobility of the early modern period increased still further and began to fall back again only in the course of the twentieth century. But it is clear that no other European country reached British or German levels of industrially driven mobility, and that in some it played scarcely any role. Areas in southern, southeastern, and eastern Europe (Italy, Russian-ruled central Poland, Habsburg Galicia) and to a lesser extent Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden were especially important sources in the new cross-border topography of migration, while the most attractive destination countries were Germany, France, Denmark, and Switzerland. In this complex pattern, the movement of Poles to the Ruhr and of Italians to France were of special importance, occurring on a large scale from the early 1870s on. Those between two central host areas may be termed “secondary flows”: for example, the migration to Paris of economically active Germans, ranging from subproletarian to petit bourgeois. In 1850 approximately 100,000 Germans were living in the French capital, some of them under wretched conditions. This “colony,” as the French mistrustfully referred to it, began to disperse after the Franco-German war of 1870–71 and vanished entirely amid the economic crisis of the eighties.
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In Asia and Africa, the new migrations of the nineteenth century differed both from the chaotic mobility of crisis periods and from older patterns of seasonal labor movement. Europeans long cultivated the myth of Asia's sedentary small-plot farmers and overlooked the mobility that could be triggered by wars and natural calamities. In Java during the war of 1825–1830
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and in many Chinese provinces during the turmoil of the Taiping Revolution, a quarter of the population found itself uprooted and homeless. Farmers everywhere remain “rooted” only so long as the fruits of their labor, or what they manage to retain of them, provide a livelihood—otherwise they look for different ways to make a living. Growing peasant communities also send young people who are unneeded in the fields off to distant parts. In the nineteenth century this gave rise to clear patterns whenever labor-intensive sectors such as mining or new agrarian development created a steadily increasing need demand for manpower.

China saw the continuation of a tendency in farming that had started to develop in the eighteenth century—that is, the move up from the lowlands into
hill and mountain country. The Qing state encouraged this with direct initiatives, tax relief, and military support for new settlers against hostile tribal populations. It did not bring traditional rice and wheat crops up from the plains but introduced plants that had first been imported from the Americas in the Ming period: above all, corn and potatoes. These were less demanding, allowed for slash-and-burn clearing, and required less attention to soil management, fertilizers, and irrigation.
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The nineteenth century also opened new avenues for migration, as the Qing government permitted Han Chinese to conduct trade and own land in Mongolia. In 1858 it even became possible for both seasonal laborers and permanent emigrants to cross the frontier into far eastern Russia. By the end of the century some 200,000 Chinese had availed themselves of these opportunities. When Russian settlers after 1860 increasingly pushed north of the Amur River, they often found Chinese farmers already there. Over the following years the Chinese took to planting rye, wheat, and poppy, while traders used the free-trade zones on either side of the border and carried on all manner of business in the cities. From 1886 onward the Russian authorities took their own fear of the “Yellow Peril” more seriously and repeatedly took action against the Chinese in eastern Siberia, as well as the Koreans who, though somewhat less numerous, were for that very reason more inclined to assimilation. The significance of the Asian “diaspora” did not diminish as a result, however, and by the time the First World War broke out in 1914, Chinese workers were indispensable in far eastern Russia.
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Today's economic dominance by Chinese in Russian territories north of the Amur has a long prehistory.

By far the largest mainland migration of Han Chinese was not formally “transnational,” nor did it involve typically internal migration. The destination was Manchuria, the ancestral homeland of the Qing dynasty, which had for a long time been barred to Han settlers. It was partly opened up in 1878, but only the combination of persistent or worsening poverty in northern China with new opportunities in the huge expanses north of the Great Wall—soybean cultivation for export, railroad construction, mining, and logging—brought about a real
wave
of migration. Cheap rail and steamer transportation created the logistical foundations. Between 1891 and 1895 barely 40,000 northern Chinese crossed the border per year. But at its peak in the late 1920s, the annual figure was close to one million. Between 1890 and 1937, roughly twenty-five million Chinese set out for the Northeast; two-thirds returned, but eight million settled there for good. It was one of the largest population movements in modern history, exceeded only by the great transatlantic migration from Europe.
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