Frontiers of Civilization in the Age of Mass Migration from Eastern Europe

Abstract

Abstract Between the 1870s and 1914, tens of thousands of peasants left Austria-Hungary’s easternmost provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, heading for the Americas. This article places this episode in the context of contemporary global labour migrations while also emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of this mass exodus. Unlike most migrants around the world, Galicians and Bukovinans emigrated overseas rather than internally; their destinations included the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. By moving, the migrants transformed from objects of Austria’s ‘civilizing mission’ in its eastern borderlands into vehicles for multiple, competing imperial expansion and civilizing projects overseas. From an obstacle to Austria’s ambitions to modernize its eastern periphery, the peasant migrants turned into a disputed resource, simultaneously expanding and threatening Austria’s sovereignty. Paradoxically, because they were less economically developed and more peripheral than their counterparts elsewhere in the empire, Galicians and Bukovinans were more sensitive to shifts in global labour markets than to the policies imposed by their own state officials.