Household Context and Individual Departure: The Case of ‘Escape’ in Three ‘Unfree’ East Asian Populations, 1700-1900

In the past, many people were ‘unfree’ in the sense that their movement was restricted, and out-migration without permission was recorded as an ‘escape’ on the official population registers. Such ‘escape’ behavior strikingly confronted individual departure with dependency of other family members because, being treated as illegal, people who had ‘escaped’ usually would not come back or at least stay out for years. This paper compares such ‘escapes’ and examines the role played by household context in shaping such behavior, taking advantage of large-scale individual panel datasets of three adjacent ‘unfree’ populations from northeast China, southeast Korea and northeast Japan in 18th and 19th century. We not only find similar temporal, spatial, and age patterns of ‘escape’, but also find similar patterns of associations between individual ‘escape’ behavior and certain aspects of household context. In particular, dependency of child and the elderly makes individual more likely to stay than to escape. This is especially true for females and even holds when kin ties are absent. Despite significant differences in political regimes, populations, communities, and social identities of these three East Asian populations, such empirical findings depict a certain universality of human behavior that is bounded to serve certain others.