Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [69]
Jeanne’s migration had been one of hope but not one of happiness. Her parents, farmers and barrel-makers in the southeast of France, had been ruined by the great phylloxera infestation of the 1870s, which wiped out France’s vineyards. Facing starvation, her father had sent his wife and children away to work. He ran the farm, increasingly with the help of Jeanne’s remittances.
By relying on networks of fellow villagers in Paris to win her a stable place in the city, Jeanne Bouvier was typical of the citizens who made up the great European migration of the nineteenth century. Also typical was her sex. While the popular image has young men coming to work in factories and later bringing their families from the village, in reality it was more often the women who arrived first. The historian Charles Tilly found that domestic service, particularly among women, was most frequently the gateway into full rural–urban migration in the nineteenth century (as it often is today): “For the most part, the farmers who moved to cities found low-level employment in services and commerce … Indeed, over the last two centuries the most important single category of urban employment for rural-to-urban migrants within Europe has likely been domestic service. Only an undue concentration on males and manufacturing has obscured that fact.”2
THE FIRST EXPLOSION
By the late eighteenth century, when the modern arrival city had its beginnings, rural-to-urban migration had been part of human life for millennia. People had been moving from the country to the city since about 3000 B.C., when the first urban formations took shape in the Persian Gulf and soon spread across Asia and Europe. For the next 5,000 years, countless millions of peasants, and hundreds of thousands of regional elites, made the move to the city, most making seasonal or career-driven migrations but increasing numbers staying on. But it was not until the final half of the eighteenth century that village-arrival enclaves became a notable and influential feature of the urban landscape. Until then, cities had been tied directly to the agrarian population; from that point on, such arrival cities were the driving force in Western political change.
Much of this shift had to do with disease. For most of those 5,000 years, big cities functioned as “population sumps,” to borrow the phrase of the historian William H. McNeill: They soaked up large numbers of rural people, held them for a few years, and promptly killed them, usually before they could reproduce or settle in any meaningful way. Cities, in the long centuries before most humans had developed immunity, sanitation, or medicine, were great pools of untreatable, lethal “diseases of civilization,” such as smallpox, measles, and the mumps, infections that can be spread only by human-to-human contact in densely populated communities. These were joined, every few decades, by catastrophic outbreaks of epidemic diseases like bubonic plague. In every major city, deaths outnumbered births, and childhood mortality was especially high: The odds of surviving to adulthood in early modern cities were rarely better than even.
As a result, European cities as of the middle of the eighteenth century were growing by only 0.2 percent each year. The total population of western Europe in 1750 was only slightly more than it had been in 1345, before the plague first struck, and many Italian cities had not seen any population increase since Roman times. London in the eighteenth century was so lethal that it required an average of 6,000 rural migrants a year just to maintain its population of 600,000.3 Cities, like armies, destroyed people almost as fast as they could take them in.
In the last half of the eighteenth century, and especially after 1780 or so, the dynamics began to change. In London, baptisms outnumbered burials for the first time in 1790, a trend that began accelerating dramatically after 1801.4 Other European cities soon