Abstract

 
 
 In this article we aim to study how Dutch children’s individual destinies result from the complex interplay of family setting and local conditions in a rural environment. We focus on their final move from the parental home, and we will analyse not only timing and incidence of leaving, but also the destinations. To do this, we propose a multi-level competing risk analysis of migration destinations. We focus on two groups: the children of farmers and those of rural workers. Dutch farmers and workers differ in the type of family economy in which children were integrated, and contrasting them will allow us to explain the speed, the directions, and the individual and family backgrounds of the process of leaving agriculture. We make use of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands to analyse last migrations of 8,338 children of farmers and rural workers. As we cover the entire country, we can study the full impact of regional differences on type of agriculture and inheritance, in combination with the family composition. Our results indicate significant effects of specialised versus traditional, mixed farming on the migration behaviour of farmers’ and rural workers’ children, as well as the importance of the number of siblings of the same sex and birth order. The variations in the effects of the sibship among regions with different agricultural systems demonstrate the importance of gender-specific divisions of labour on leaving home.
 
 
Highlights
The decline of farming, and especially the virtual disappearance of crofting, has had strong implications for rural society of the Netherlands in the twentieth century
We compare the final moves away from home of the children of agricultural workers and farmers from ages 12 to 30 and aim to answer the questions: Under what circumstances did children tend to stay at home or in the area? And in what circumstances did they go to another region, to a city, or even abroad? Were there differences in the migration destinations of farmers’ and agricultural workers’ children? We are interested in the interplay of contextual and family factors, and we propose a technique that makes it possible to contrast their effects on the full array of migration decisions
We focus on final moves from home, in contrast to previous work concentrating on first moves (Kok 1997; Bras & Kok 2004), because we expect the final move to be a better indicator of individual decision-making regarding staying or leaving one’s native rural area
Summary
The decline of farming, and especially the virtual disappearance of crofting, has had strong implications for rural society of the Netherlands in the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, several regions already witnessed an outflow of superfluous workers’ and farmers’ children, for instance in order to find work in the expanding cities or to emigrate. This outflow was an uneven process where ‘push’ factors (such as the Agrarian Depression) and ‘pull’ factors (such as urban employment) differed in strength across periods and regions In this article, we take a new look at the process of rural out-migration to better understand to what degree contextual and family factors framed the migration behaviour of the Dutch rural society. We focus on final moves from home, in contrast to previous work concentrating on first moves (Kok 1997; Bras & Kok 2004), because we expect the final move to be a better indicator of individual decision-making regarding staying or leaving one’s native rural area
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