Migration Systems in the Late Hungarian Crowne Lands

For this project, I will analyze the relationships among migration to the United States of America and other types of spatial mobility, such as internal and migration across state boundaries inside Europe, during the period 1870- 1914. I will examine transatlantic outflows from the Hungarian Crown Lands within the context of long-standing patterns of migration, changing socio-economic structures, population development, and cultural characteristics in the Late Habsburg Empire. While the diverse fields of overseas, internal, and continental migration most often continue to be studied in isolation from one another, my approach assumes that transatlantic migration must be seen as an integral part of spatial mobility as a whole. For this project, I will build upon up two of my and my colleagues` studies on transatlantic, continental, and internal migration in the Austrian part of the Late Habsburg Empire. My project addresses recent debates regarding the patterns and systems of migration, inside Europe as well as transatlantic, which have, due to its actuality, sparked new interest in migration research in many European countries. While, for a long period, migration history has been written as history of nation states, supplemented by regional and local studies, this nation-state historiography has come under increasing criticism. To overcome the limitations of a national historiography and its self-referential evaluations, which tended to underestimate local, internal, and transnational movements of European populations, the comparative approach to states and nations will serve a valuable purpose. Migration was and is a `multidirectional phenomenon`. Migration networks between two regions frequently came about as a result of one socio-economic system; such regions - even when separated by a frontier - will be analysed as one system. Questions, concerning the simultaneity of various mobility patterns inside one migration system, will be one of the most innovative parts of the project. For the statistical analysis I will draw upon a variety of source material, such as passenger records from ships departing from German harbors to New York, national census material, the Hungarian statistical yearbook and separately published statistical series from provinces and cities. My project intends to carefully reformulate different approaches in migration history and evaluate to what extent they are able to explain migration patterns in the Hungarian part of the Late Habsburg Empire. Another important aspect of the overall analysis will be a discussion of gender-specific differences in migrational behavior, as well as the chronology of migration patterns in the life course. Based on the research design, it will also be possible to reconstruct information networks of transatlantic migrants. I will try to get a more systematic picture on the impact of personal relationships on migration decisions. By providing multidimensional analyzes, based on validated empirical data, to describe and explain historical migration systems, the project will contribute to new insights and a reappraisal of various migration patterns in Central Europe.