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Internal Migration and Sectoral Shift in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

Daniel MacDonald Open the ORCID record for Daniel MacDonald [Opens in a new window]
Daniel MacDonald*
Affiliation:
Economics Department, California State University San Bernardino, San Bernardino, CA, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

We study the relationship between internal migration and industrialization in the United States between 1850 and 1880. We use the Linked Representative Samples from IPUMS and find significant amounts of rural-urban and urban-urban migration in New England. Rural-urban migration was mainly driven by agricultural workers shifting to manufacturing occupations. Urban-urban migration was driven by foreign-born workers in manufacturing. We argue that rural-urban migration was a significant factor in US economic development and the structural transformation from agriculture to manufacturing.

Keywords

internal migrationurbanizationindustrialization
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 45 , Special Issue 4: Soils and Sustainability , Winter 2021 , pp. 843 - 862
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Science History Association

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