Migration, households, and agrarian reform in the Baltic provinces of Russia: 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

Earlier research has shown that migration flows affect household size and that these measures in turn are affected by local and regional legal systems that seek to regulate migration. This article explores these connections in those areas of the 19th century Russian Baltic provinces of Livland and Kurland that in the 20th century became the country of Latvia. Different data bases are used to link variables during the decades after the agrarian reforms of the 1816–1819 period, in the decades after the 1860s reforms that made possible the purchase of farmland by peasants, and in the decades after 1920 when the new country of Latvia nationalized land heretofore owned by estates and redistributed it to landless peasants and small farmers. The findings are tentative because the data sources differ substantially from period to period, but the present analysis suggests strong enough connections between agrarian reform, migration, and household size and structure to require a more thorough project.