Migration has long been considered a modern phenomenon that grew to significant importance only in the long nineteenth century, during which Europe was transformed from a largely rural and agricultural society into a highly urbanized and industrialized region. Between 1750 and 1914 the number of people living in European towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants increased sixfold, while their proportion in relation to total population more than tripled from 12 to 42 per cent. In addition, the number of cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants expanded from 28 to 195, raising their proportion of total population from 3 to 13 per cent. Rural–urban migration has often been considered a major factor in achieving this spectacular growth in urban population. Older historiography and sociology regarded urban migration as both a salient symptom and the main vehicle of the ongoing modernization process, which was pushing people out of dwindling rural activities, and pulling them into more productive urban manufacturing. While large-scale migration was considered an essentially new and city-oriented phenomenon driving urban growth, migrants were in turn seen mainly as the desperate victims of rural uprooting. The increasing marginalization of rural income activities left them no other choice but to try their luck in cities, where they became the prime victims of the overcrowding and degeneration, which the unprecedented and unregulated growth of urban populations entailed.

Over the past decades, research in different domains has led to significant revisions of this powerful image of a one-off rural–urban population transfer in the course of the long nineteenth century. One fundamental revision is that migration was not such a new or modern phenomenon as implied in earlier visions. Several studies have by now amply demonstrated that also in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Europeans moved, in search of work, a career, a spouse or simply a better life, sometimes over long distances and often several times in a lifetime.