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Different transitions: comparing China and Europe, 1600–1900

In ‘The mobility transition revisited’, Jan and Leo Lucassen invite us to compare. They already provide a strong temporal comparison between European mobility before and after the Industrial Revolution. They also provide excellent tools for further comparison with other parts of the world. The crux of their comparative method is to break up migration into an array of mobilities that includes emigration, immigration, colonization, urbanization, seasonal, and labour (soldiers and sailors), and to develop methods of quantification for these categories that can be readily adapted to other contexts. Most importantly, these categories create the possibility of nuanced comparisons between different structures of mobility, rather than just crude comparisons between societies that are more or less ‘mobile’ or ‘modernized’. In his 1971 article, ‘The hypothesis of a mobility transition’, Wilbur Zelinsky also distinguished different kinds of mobility and how they emerged and declined over time along with the process of modernization. By applying this method to the quantification of early modern migrations, the Lucassens retain the methodological strength of Zelinsky’s analysis while undermining the basic assumption of a total transition from an immobile to a mobile society. Instead, the Lucassens demonstrate that the increased European mobility of the nineteenth century was largely due to the sharp increase in transatlantic migration, urbanization, and the tripling of nearly all forms of mobility in Russia. At the same time, internal colonization and mobility associated with military and naval service actually declined. The mobility transition (if we still wish to call it that) was less a transformation from an immobile to a mobile society than a shift in the predominant forms and locations of mobility. Zelinsky’s assumptions about the linkage of a mobility transition, a demographic transition, and ‘modernity’ are further undermined when we realize that over 50 million Chinese and Indians moved into Southeast Asia and nearly 30 million Chinese moved to Manchuria during the period of mass European emigration. Yet neither India nor China underwent the same demographic transition and massive urbanization as Europe in this period. The changes that took place in Europe were specific to that continent. They cannot be theoretically generalized without a more rigorous comparison to other regions that also experienced large increases of migration but under different conditions. The Lucassens provide us with tools to compare these mass emigrations in the context of other forms of mobility and how they changed over time.