From their recent analysis of the relationship between place of enlistment and place of birth of eighteenth-century American militiamen, Villaflor and Sokoloff (1982: 542-543; 559-560) concluded that “a high level of mobility stands out,” a finding that they note is now “a commonplace both in the discipline of American history and in studies of pre-industrial communities.” While these empirical studies have surely refuted the romantic belief in the permanence of all of the personnel of preindustrial localities, they have not demonstrated that mobility was uniformly “high” everywhere. Imprecision in comparing the rates of mobility in two places is inevitable without a comparable index of the extent of movement.

Villaflor and Sokoloff (1982) implicitly reject the notion of a “mobility transition,” a construct that associates higher rates of internal migration with more rapid rates of economic growth (Zelinsky, 1971), which Jones (1981) discerned in his comparison of the handful of studies of local population persistence in the colonial period with those for the nineteenth century. They realize, however, that a precise comparison of the place of enlistment with the birthplace of young men of an average age of 24 with the proportion of adult males who appear on two successive decennial censuses is not possible.