Immigrants in the world-system : domestic industry and industrialization in northwest Germany and the migration to Osage County, Missouri, 1835-1900

Abstract

This dissertation examines the trans-Atlantic migration of a group of Westphalian and Rhennish farmers to Osage County, Missouri, in the nineteenth century. Employing U. S. manuscript census schedules and German emigration lists, the study traces individual immigrants to specific source villages in Germany. The socioeconomic community structure of two sample source villages before and during the migration is reconstructed with the aid of Prussian tax rolls. The economic progress of the immigrant community in Missouri, compared with a control group of Old-Stock American farmers, is traced through time using manuscript schedules of the U. S. agricultural censuses. The international migration is placed within the context of Wallerstein's world-system model, viewing the migration as a function of fundamental economic changes in the semiperiphery of the world-system during the Industrial Revolution. The study finds that the socioeconomic structure of the source villages was characteristic of protoindustrial regions in Europe. It is shown that British hegemony in factory organization and machine industry, especially in the arena of cotton textiles, during the early nineteenth century undercut the market share for domestically-produced goods, eventually driving it into insignificance and throwing many into unemployment. Overseas migration was but one way out. The study has three main findings, with implications for further research. First, the main impact of British factory organization and machine industry in the semiperiphery of the world-system must be seen as rural de-population, of the peasantry being forced off of the land. Second, British machine industry disrupted the whole economy of overpopulated protoindustrial regions, resulting in the proletarianization of large numbers of people. Many migrated to emerging industrial districts while some with enough financial means opted for overseas migration. Third, the immigrants in this study were economically pre-adapted for their experience in the United States because they, through protoindustry, had long been participants in the capitalist world economy and were thus well-informed about how it worked. By opting for overseas migration they chose not to become proletarianized by leaving an area where their function in the world economy had been marginalized by technical change and going to an area where it would not be.