The rise of working-class movements has recently been subjected to a great deal of historical scrutiny. Although this literature treats a variety of topics, much of it is devoted to different aspects of socialism: the radical, reformist, or utopian nature of socialism, the sociological roots of the movement among artisans and industrial workers, and the creation of an alternative, or socialist, subculture. One reason socialism has been investigated so intensively is that historians have assumed that socialism represented the authentic working-class ideology. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have conveyed the idea that socialism alone promoted class consciousness, that socialism led workers to realize that they formed a distinct group and had to act together to defend their interests. Other movements among workers have been considered to be conservative and, as such, have been discounted as unrepresentative of workers' interests.

Although small and consequently often overlooked, Belgium none the less provides historians with an interesting case study for comparing social and economic trends among Western European countries. Belgian society in the nineteenth century was transformed by the same forces as its close neighbours – Britain, France and Germany. Indeed, Belgium was the second country in the world to industrialize and it has long been one of the most heavily urbanized societies as well. Yet urbanization and industrialization affected Belgium in some significantly different ways than they did other Western European countries.

International migration has flowed and ebbed in two long waves over the last two hundred years. The major determinants of international migration have been the economy and the state. The economic forces impinging on migration are demography, technology, the level of wages, and geographical proximity, transportation, and communications. The state is the confluence of social and political forces within countries which define, encourage or curtail, and regulate movement across borders. The lesson of the nineteenth-century migration system is that states created it or allowed it to happen. They also always had the power to end it, and they eventually did. The huge break in the history of migration which accompanied the era of the world wars points to the decisive power of the state to control migration and, by extension, the direction of economic development itself. The present article reviews the major phases of the history of modern migration in order to put the present crossroads in perspective.