The migration legacy of E. G. Ravenstein

E. G. Ravenstein was the first to provide a careful, scholarly study of internal migration. His earliest papers appeared in 1876 followed in 1885 and 1889 with more detailed studies. He used British Census data in all but the last paper in which he turned to data from continental Europe (Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, and others) as well as data from the United States and Canada. His work may be described as descriptive and interpretative, and he provided a number of hypotheses that were extremely insightful and have withstood the test of time. He anticipated the gravity law of migration in which distance and population are key determinants of migration from i to j. He also viewed migration from i to j as generating a weaker counter flow from j to i. He anticipated the idea of intervening opportunities in which migration to any given place is influenced by the absorptive power of alternative places between i and j. Women, he thought, were more migratory than men and tended to migrate over shorter distances than men. He thought the contemporary rural population more migratory than the urban population. In general, he felt that migrants were responding to differences in opportunities as measured by 'greater promise for remunerative labour' in one part of a country relative to another. In addition to other ideas, he noted that the forces underlying migration are complex and include the quality of the public infrastructure, such as roads, climate, taxation, and more.