In the first half of the nineteenth century, Antwerp went through a total transition from a middle-sized regional textile centre to a booming international port town of more than 120,000 inhabitants. An easily accessible and well-connected inland port in the densely populated Low Countries, Antwerp was favourably located to act as a major transit centre for the Southern Netherlands, part of the Northern Netherlands, the German Rhineland and the north of France – mostly densely populated and rapidly industrializing regions. The exploitation of these geographical assets became possible only as a result of the conjunction of certain economic and political conditions, and took place at the cost of deteriorating living and working conditions of Antwerp's labouring poor. The smallholding regions in the city's immediate hinterland, meanwhile, were confronted with strong population growth and increasing proletarianization, resulting in an overall increase of rural push forces. Migration patterns in turn displayed several important shifts over the first decades of the nineteenth century. Mapping these changes in space and time and analysing their relationship to the changes in the city's local opportunity structure is the main point of this chapter. The nature of this relationship, in turn, sheds light on the adaptability of migration patterns, and on the contribution of migrants to the observed transformation of Antwerp's economic structures. What was the role of newcomers in the city's rapid conversion to a port town? What implications did the changes in local opportunity structure have for the socio-economic prospects and life-cycle trajectories of newcomers? And how did new patterns of migration relate to those established for the late eighteenth century?

Converting to a Port Town

Antwerp's conversion from a regional textile centre to an international port town was anything but a gradual or linear process. It took place at different speeds in different phases, which were tied up with the different political regimes under which the urban economy operated.