In the course of the long nineteenth century, roughly between 1750 and World War I, Europe's population was confronted with profound economic, demographic, social and political transformations that in retrospect wrought its transition from a pre-industrial to an industrial society. Although few of the developments contributing to this transition were in themselves novel, the acceleration in processes of proletarianization, demographic growth and agricultural and industrial reorganization cumulated in a process of structural and irreversible societal change which eventually resulted in the highly urbanized and industrialized society of twentieth-century Europe. This transition was not an automatic, self-evident or straightforward affair, but an uneven process at different speeds characterized by regional, temporal and structural discrepancies in the development of labour supply and demand. Structural changes at macro level resulted in changing constraints and opportunities at household level, and implied considerable challenges of adjustment. Migration constituted an important strategy in trying to adapt to the changes in households’ material conditions. At the same time, existing patterns of migration had to accommodate themselves to shifts in the structural conditions which had underlain most early modern migration practices. The uneven development of push and pull forces and the ‘embedded’ nature of many migration channels meant that migration patterns underwent a costly process of adaptation at different speeds, whereby costs and gains were distributed unequally.

Cities were certainly not the only possible destination for migrants. However, to the extent that cities formed the focal point of many of the economic, political and social transformations of the long nineteenth century, the evolution of urban migration patterns is of particular interest in assessing continuity and change in people's adaptive strategies. While urban migration was no new phenomenon, its scope and function were significantly altered as both cities and their hinterlands underwent structural transformations which remoulded the spatial distribution of income opportunities. To what extent did established patterns of urban migration succeed in adapting to the structural change in constraints and opportunities at points of origin and destination?