Circuits, Networks and Trajectories
Anne Winter · 2015
Th e previous chapters have demonstrated how the transformation of the Antwerp economy between the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries went hand in hand with a constant restructuring of migration patterns. Although migrants secured the better half of the employment shift ’s mixed blessings, rising rural pressure and growing employment instability would by mid-century increasingly limit their room for manoeuvre on the urban labour market. Th e above discussion has indicated, however, that within the group of migrants there existed considerable diff erences in the extent to which they succeeded in adapting to the manifold changes in the local opportunity structure. Th is room for manoeuvre appears to have been strongly dependent on migrants’ geographical backgrounds and personal characteristics such as sex, age and skill, which together determined their susceptibility to push dynamics and responsiveness to specifi c opportunities. Geographical background and personal characteristics, moreover, appear to have borne a meaningful relationship to one another, in the sense that migrants from specifi c backgrounds also tended to display certain characteristics, although the extent to which this was the case diff ered according to the distinct migrant groups. Such a correspondence between migrant origins and profi le has in the fi rst chapter been loosely defi ned as a circuit, a term which has also in the previous chapters been used to highlight newcomers’ heterogeneity. Aft er sketching out the overall diachronic shift s in migration patterns in the preceding chapters, it is now time to take a closer look at the meaning and characteristics of these circuits, which eventually shaped the adaptability of diff erent migrant groups, and which determined the speeds of change with which certain transformations took place.