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By Root 1585 0

year 1848 marks a significant fulcrum point. After the Europe-wide wave of revolutions and uprisings that year, which seriously threatened the viability of the state and the economic order, the arrival city became a focus of official attention for the first time in history. The reforms didn’t happen quickly, and they were often ineffective, but they did begin to change the hopes of the poor. It was in 1848 that the first English Public Health Act was enacted, that child labor was banned, and that the first real public-housing development was proposed. None of these reforms would really be comprehensive or properly funded for decades, but they began having a gradual and noticeable effect on social mobility. A number of recent studies, drawing on large sets of records, have found that such reforms served to block the transmission of poverty and the creation of permanent pauperism and that social mobility increased as public education and social-welfare policies were introduced.25 It was this shift to state involvement, more than anything else, that transformed the nineteenth-century arrival city. Before 1848, it was a destitute place; in the second half of the century, with government investment and outside attention, it became a great engine for progress and growth.

THE TRANSATLANTIC ARRIVAL

If you wanted guaranteed social mobility, you had to cross the Atlantic. The difference was great. If the fin-de-siècle European arrival city gave the poor villager a passing chance of securing a better life, in the New World it was almost certain. Throughout the nineteenth century, North America offered stunning levels of upward mobility. One study found that, in the United States, 81 percent of sons of unskilled laborers moved up into higher occupations, compared with only 53 percent of British sons, and downward mobility was also lower.26

This was well known to people in even the most remote rural villages of Europe, and the resulting response created the largest international migration in human history. Between 1800 and the First World War, about 50 million Europeans left the continent permanently for a new home, and as many as 65 million emigrated for part of their lives. By the end of the nineteenth century, fully 20 percent of Europeans had moved to the Americas, Australia, or South Africa. More than half of those migrants wound up in the United States. And, during the key period between 1846 and 1890, almost half of them came from Britain and Ireland.

It was overwhelmingly a rural-to-urban migration. The Europeans who came to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did not generally move first to a metropolis within their own country; they moved straight from the village to the New World, usually following paths laid by neighbors and friends. By the end of the century, 80 percent of migrants had a relative waiting for them. And, as the historian Leslie Page Moch has chronicled, it wasn’t just villages that moved across the ocean but the most remote and deprived villages: “In Italy, they were the provinces around the Alps to the north and east of Milan and around the southern Apennines. The people most likely to leave Spain and Portugal were from their Atlantic islands (Canaries and Azores) and from the mountainous northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula … Scandinavian emigrants most likely came from the mountains of south-central Norway and south-central Sweden, Oland Island, and the Danish Islands of Bornholm and Lolland-Falster. The Scottish highlands sent dis-proportionate numbers abroad early in the century.” People from such remote locations were isolated from information about urban jobs in their own countries; it made just as much sense to migrate overseas.27

Records show that the steep rise in emigration rates in most European countries was driven largely by the demographic and economic changes in the countryside, which also drove people to the cities of their own countries. Indeed, when labor shortages began to appear in the cities of Europe, emigration rates to the New World tended to decline, as