Migrations in the Adjustment between Population and Resources. Eurasian Contributions

It is well-known that in the classical formulation of the demography transition theory migration is essentially seen as a result of the changing balance between births and deaths. In the components of the old East-West debate that are rooted in the Malthusian writings, adjustment behaviours decreasing population pressure on scare resources have been considered, with an emphasis on marriage and infanticide, migration being barely considered. From a heuristic point of view, poor theoretical developments are associated with poor data sources. Indeed, accurate information on mobility and migrants are very rare in historical population. This is one of the wealth of the Eurasian Project for the Comparative History of Population and the Family to be funded on a network of teams who reconstituted population registers data that fill his gap in our knowledge for various rural and pre-transitional settings in Japan, China, Sweden, Belgium and Italy. In this paper, our ambition is to synthesize the many contributions brought by our fellow associates during the last 15 years and to evaluate at which point our findings can be generalized to illuminate the current scientific debates.