Preliminary Programme

This paper seeks to investigate the role of local authorities in the implementation of national migration policies and regulations in Belgium during the nineteenth century. Contemporary migration policies and regulations are often analysed from a top-down perspective with a preferred focus on (national) legislation and political process making. How these policies and regulations were brought into practice and what the role was of local authorities in this is much less well known. This paper argues that it is not possible to understand the actual impact of national migration policies and regulations in nineteenth-century Belgium without taking into account the role of local authorities, in essence the city.
Not only do cities have a long tradition in migration regulation in Western Europe, they also have their own interests and concerns when dealing with migrants. During the process of political centralisation in the nineteenth century and the gradual incorporation of cities in newly forming nation-states, it cannot be denied that the action field of local authorities in regulating migration was changing. This does not mean however that they were staying behind empty-handed. This paper argues that cities indeed lost in some way means of regulating migration in comparison to earlier periods, such as the decisive power to expulse someone from its territory, but at the other hand also gained new powers and instruments to influence immigration, emigration and potential settlement. Moreover, it will be argued that the renewed position in which cities were finding themselves (still) allowed them to play a key role in regulating migration and settlement, be it with other instruments and in other ways as before. This created a potential field of tension between local and central authorities in nineteenth century Belgium, as interests and concerns were not always running parallel. Earlier research has shown that Belgian central authorities in that period were mainly concerned about their own economical and political interests, resulting in a policy that was directed towards keeping (relief) costs for migrants as low as possible on the one hand and expulsing migrants that were in any way disturbing, be it socially or politically, on the other. There is no reason to assume though that cities shared these interests whatsoever and could not have different, even opposing, views.
This paper seeks to analyse this potential field of tension between city and state in the implementation of migration policies and regulations in nineteenth century Brussels. It does so by using sources that were mostly produced by local authorities, mainly the Mayors’ office and the Brussels police services. Overall, these authorities were the main executors of national migration policies and regulations in nineteenth century Brussels and they were the direct link between migrant and state. By analysing foreigners’ files, obtaining information on the profile of the migrant, and extensive correspondence between local and central authorities this paper has the explicit goal of analysing the implementation of migration policies and regulations in nineteenth century Belgium from a bottom-up perspective and by doing this highlighting the key role that local authorities (still) played in regulating migration in the nineteenth century. (Show less)

Historiography on politics on current Belgian territory can be characterized by a century-old field of tension in power structures: the friction between local autonomy on the one hand, and dependency of the central government on the other hand. While some scholars discover one important constant throughout the nineteenth century - namely, a clear subordination of local authorities to central administration -, others yet tend to stress the victory of localism coming along with Belgian independence. In this respect, a study focusing on the specific case of Antwerp migration policy in the aftermath of Belgian independence could serve as a case-study offering concrete proof in interpreting Belgian nineteenth century politics.
To date, historical research on migration policy has often been characterized by a dichotomy separating early modern and contemporary studies. Whereas historians of the early modern periods have devoted considerable attention to migration policy at the local level, historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have mainly focused on the national framework in which a migration policy could develop.
However, the mere existence of a national framework did not mean that century-old traditions of local decision-making were being wiped out. After all, the central government remained heavily dependent on lower levels of administration - such as cities-, the latter being the first actor with whom the newcomer got in touch. Moreover, they constituted the main channel through which national migration policy in the nineteenth century could be executed. Given the fact that these local authorities had developed a strong tradition of dealing with migration and their specific interests on their territories for many centuries, this undoubtedly created a field of tension between the local and the central level of authority.
By focusing on the specific case of Antwerp – which during this period transformed from a regional textile centre into an international port town and thereby recruited an increasing number of newcomers from various regions – and proposing a bottom-up perspective, this research aims to offer some insights into the complex interaction between local and central government regarding migration policy during the second half of the nineteenth century.
To achieve this goal, a great deal of attention will be paid to sources that contain the communication between the local and the central level regarding migration policy. In this respect, the aliens’ records – which are the reflection of the registration of ‘national aliens’ at the local level -, will be particularly helpful. This system came into force in Antwerp from the 1840s onwards and generated a lot of correspondence between the local administrations and the central government, discussing the migrants’ denial or admittance into the country. Analyzing a sample of these registers at certain points in the nineteenth century can be of great use when assessing the potential manoeuvrability of Antwerp authorities regarding national migration policy.
The hypothesis is that national legislation left considerable space for local autonomy in practice and that central interventions were in turn influenced by local traditions. The goal is to elucidate the extent to which Antwerp had room for manoeuvre with regard to migration policy in the aftermath of Belgian independence and how this city possibly used this room to model its policy according to its proper interests. (Show less)

Great cities eat people, and few have been more voracious than eighteenth-century London. According to E.A. Wrigley and Jeremy Boulton London needed between 6,000 and 8,000 new migrants per year just to maintain its rate of population growth over the course of the eighteenth century. But we know little about those systems of circulation, administered by local authorities, whereby some stayed, some left, and many were forcibly evicted. The sheer size of the population, its mobility and anonymity has discouraged even the most ambitious historians from addressing these issues. By using the unique lists of vagrants created by the Middlesex 'Vagrant Contractor', Henry Adams, during the 1780s, this paper and broader project will map the ebb and flow of migrant labour in to and out of the capital. The lists include details of over 14,000 vagrants removed through London between 1778 and 1794 and their analysis allows us to model this vagrant flow in a new and more detailed way.

By digitizing these records, and identifying the precise location of each parish of settlement, and by mapping the resulting data, this paper illustrates the complex dynamics that characterized vagrant migration, and vagrant removal in this period. It will explore who was being caught up in the system of removal - their gender, and the nature of family groups; the seasonality of arrest and removal, and issues of recidivism. And by comparing this group to workhouse and pauper populations, and to those removed under the English Poor Law, it will also define what characteristics marked out a criminal 'vagrant' from the wider run of mere paupers.

By mapping the origins of this sample of Londoners - their homes across the whole of the British archipelago - this paper will also expose a newly complex pattern of recruitment to migration. It will argue that a typical vagrant came from one of Britain or Ireland’s chief towns or cities, particularly those in the south and west of England, as well as Cork and Dublin on the Irish east coast, and that long-distance migration from England and Ireland to London formed an important source of new migrants, to the exclusion of the Welsh and Scots. By applying a more granular approach that includes parish of 'settlement', it will also illustrate that this large scale pattern was composed of a set of more subtle ones. Some parishes, towns and villages simply provided more migrants and more vagrants per head; while other apparently similar towns and villages contributed little to the vagrant flow.

Big city migrants are slippery creatures who have left few traces. By analyzing a unique source that ties together the start and finish of a vagrant's journey this paper will provide a glimpse of the stayers and goers of late eighteenth-century London and illuminate for the first time, not just who magistrates and constables thought they were dealing with (the literary and legal categories of vagrancy), but the flesh and blood of thousands of vagrants lives. (Show less)

New Zealand’s 1870 Immigration and Public Works Act sanctioned a programme of government-subsidised immigration overseen by their London-based Agent-General, charged with recruiting migrants who were ‘sober, industrious, of good moral character, sound mind, free from bodily deformity, and in good health.’ Yet, whilst the 1873 Imbeciles Passenger Act concurrently sought to impede the immigration of those certified as ‘lunatic, idiotic, deaf, dumb, blind or infirm’, the Agent-General became increasingly criticised by officials in New Zealand for selecting equally unsuitable types of government migrants, including the apparently ‘knowingly insane’.
Such culpability has already been considered, such as in Raewyn Dalziel’s 1975 essential study of this New Zealand-British diplomatic relationship. Yet, in light of current historiographical focus on both the language of immigration restrictions pertaining to health, (for example Alison Bashford) and ethnicity in relation to asylum studies (for example Angela McCarthy), the role of the Agent-General as migrant selector requires revisiting. In order to uniquely concentrate on the practical mechanisms of excluding the insane at the borders, this paper seeks to examine the discourse between colonial officials and their British-based counterparts surrounding the complexities of selecting ‘sound-minds’.
Using evidence from the New Zealand Journals of the House of Representatives relating to ‘insane’ immigrants, this fresh approach considers the charges made against, in particular, the first Agent-General Dr Isaac Featherston. Whereas Featherston emphasised that the ‘emigration of any person known to be insane would not under any conceivable circumstances be sanctioned’, a number of cases suggest the challenges of maintaining this assertion. This paper will use these examples to show how the New Zealand agents were forced to justify their selection procedures, whilst at the same time, some colonial politicians, in their desire to increase their population, conceded that ‘out of such a number some would likely to become lunatics during the voyage, or from circumstances arising in the colony.’ Furthermore when Julius Vogel, instigator of the 1870 Act, whom himself had been so critical of Featherston, took on the role of Agent-General, he also conceded that ‘mental-defects’ in migrants were hard to identify.

Accordingly this paper considers the paradoxes and practical challenges of the attempts to select those with ‘sound minds’, in an era when colonial administrators struggled to distinguish between so-called moral and mental illness. In addition, whilst some migrants arrived in New Zealand showing symptoms of ‘insanity’ after the voyage itself, colonial officials wrestled with how to manage such cases who after all had been deemed suitable by their counterparts in Britain. And, in actuality, the paradoxes involved in how to prevent so called ‘half-scamps, half-lunatics’ from emigrating to colonial visions of ‘Better Britain’ would persist beyond this era of assisted emigration, as is being examined in the overall PhD thesis ‘Preventing 'Unsound Minds' from Populating the British World: Australasian Responses to 'Insane' Immigrants, Circa 1850-1924’.
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Studies concerning vagrancy in the early modern period already demonstrated that so-called ‘vagrants’ were actually a highly mobile and diverse group of people in search of employment opportunities: temporary unemployed people looking for work, seasonal migrants or people performing an itinerant trade. When it comes to the nineteenth century, Timothy B. Smith argued that the growing body of beggars and vagrants mostly consisted of impoverished rural people who took to the streets in search for work (Smith T.B., 1999).
In nineteenth-century Belgium policymakers were convinced that they had to intervene actively when it came to the growing problem of so-called ‘beggars’ or ‘vagrants’. These people were (still) seen as a serious threat to society and were incarcerated in the ‘state benevolent colonies’. In 1891 a new law was issued in Belgium to handle the growing ‘problem’ of vagrancy. The legislation however kept the definition of vagrancy vague and mostly targeted people without fixed residence or employment. The law was loaded with moralizing ideas and intentions developed by central legislators, but left local police officers and judges in charge of the actual practice of arresting and convicting vagrants.
In this paper we aim to investigate how a central policy regarding vagrancy and mendicancy – which was essentially vague and subject to interpretation – was put into practice by local authorities. Belgium in the period of 1880 to 1910 will act as a test case. In order to demonstrate how a specific local context could influence the application of a central policy, we will compare the cities of Brussels and Antwerp. Where possible, we intend to map the different stages in the practice of this vagrancy law: Who was arrested? And who was subsequently convicted? Finally we intend to tackle the question of who was subject to the selection process that was entailed by this vagrancy legislation. (Show less)