The previous chapters have demonstrated how the transformation of the Antwerp economy between the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries went hand in hand with a constant restructuring of migration patterns. Although migrants secured the better half of the employment shift's mixed blessings, rising rural pressure and growing employment instability would by mid-century increasingly limit their room for manoeuvre on the urban labour market. The above discussion has indicated, however, that within the group of migrants there existed considerable differences in the extent to which they succeeded in adapting to the manifold changes in the local opportunity structure. This room for manoeuvre appears to have been strongly dependent on migrants’ geographical backgrounds and personal characteristics such as sex, age and skill, which together determined their susceptibility to push dynamics and responsiveness to specific opportunities. Geographical background and personal characteristics, moreover, appear to have borne a meaningful relationship to one another, in the sense that migrants from specific backgrounds also tended to display certain characteristics, although the extent to which this was the case differed according to the distinct migrant groups. Such a correspondence between migrant origins and profile has in the first chapter been loosely defined as a circuit, a term which has also in the previous chapters been used to highlight newcomers’ heterogeneity. After sketching out the overall diachronic shifts in migration patterns in the preceding chapters, it is now time to take a closer look at the meaning and characteristics of these circuits, which eventually shaped the adaptability of different migrant groups, and which determined the speeds of change with which certain transformations took place.

Four Major Migration Circuits

The preceding chapters have several times referred to the existence of different circuits. The associated distinctions were often cast in relatively general terms, such as urban-born versus rural-born, short distance versus long distance, intra-regional versus inter-regional or foreign migrants.