The globally connected Western Ukrainian village

Abstract

What analytical framework do we need in order to study villages shaped by intensive and long-lasting migration processes? The author tackles this question by scrutinizing the history of a Western Ukrainian village from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in a case study. Migrants and non-migrants alike were closely interconnected to each other by manifold networks. This kind of interconnectedness proved to be amazingly persistent and did not lose its function even decades after the migration processes themselves had come to an end due to economic or political caesurae. In order to fully grasp this phenomenon, it is necessary to synthesize migration and village history, striving towards a ‘micro history of the globally connected village’.