To Part or Not to Part: Emigration and Inheritance Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Hesse–Cassel

Explorations in Economic History 36, 30–55 (1999) Article ID exeh.1998.0703, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

To Part or Not to Part: Emigration and Inheritance Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Hesse–Cassel Simone A. Wegge* Department of Economics and Business, Lake Forest College E-mail: [email protected] Inheritance institutions in mid-19th-century Germany influenced overseas emigration patterns by affecting the amount of emigration and the type of emigrant. This study of emigration from the principality of Hesse–Cassel suggests that such traditions influence the village economic structure. They also affect individuals’ occupational choice and personal wealth, and ultimately the incentive to migrate. Individuals found important reasons to leave under both systems, but the impartible institution encouraged more emigration. Institutional variations manifest themselves in diverse patterns of individual emigrant characteristics: in comparison, emigrants from impartible villages took less cash, were slightly younger, and more likely to travel alone. r 1999 Academic Press

I. INTRODUCTION Many social historians have hypothesized that European inheritance traditions affected important characteristics of population movements. This work serves as the first test of its kind of the connection between inheritance traditions and the propensity to migrate. I find that for the case of the German principality of Hesse–Cassel, emigration was prevalent under both partible and impartible inheritance practices, but the impartible tradition encouraged more emigration than the partible inheritance tradition did. I also find that the institutions had different effects on the kinds of individuals and families who emigrated, in terms of characteristics like occupation, age, and wealth. In the early part of the 19th-century German emigration to the Americas stemmed primarily from the principalities of Baden and Wu¨rttemberg, the Palatinate, and the Hessian region.1 The sudden upsurge in emigration numbers * This paper was revised while the author was a Research Scholar at Barnard College of Columbia University. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 1995 Social Science History Association meetings, the 1996 Economic History Association meetings, the 1997 Third World Congress of Cliometrics, and the University of Chicago economic history workshop. The author thanks two anonymous referees and seminar participants for their helpful comments and suggestions. 1 Walker (1964, p. 4, 31): Emigration from the principality of Hesse–Cassel was not legally sanctioned until 1831. 30 0014-4983/99 $30.00 Copyright r 1999 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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and its concentrated geographic source in the southwest of Germany spurred contemporary German observers to blame the emigration on the practice of parceling the arable land. Partible inheritance, the primary tradition southwestern Germans used to distribute land across generations, thus became an important cause of emigration. The 19th-century economist Friedrich List, a native himself of the principality of Wu¨rttemberg, believed that people from partible inheritance villages had many reasons to emigrate. He deplored the constant partitioning of land, which led to very small farms in the partible inheritance villages and an increased incentive to leave home.2 In describing early 19th-century German emigration, many social historians after him have continued to emphasize this link between emigration and partible inheritance.3 Yet, the relationship between emigration and inheritance institution is not a straightforward one because migration can be an attractive option under either system. An impartible tradition, also referred to as unigeniture or a single-heir system, for instance, precludes all but one sibling from farming the family land, making emigration an attractive option for the other siblings in the event that regional economic conditions do not provide alternative ways of making an adequate living.4 Others have taken a different stance from List and emphasized the migration stemming from the effects of a unigeniture practice. Habakkuk (1955, pp. 6–8), for instance, hypothesized that single-heir systems encouraged higher rates of emigration than partible systems because the latter had the effect of tying children to the land, no matter how few acres they inherited. This was Habakkuk’s belief despite the fact that he thought partible areas had higher population growth rates. Libecap and Alter (1982, p. 197) provide empirical evidence for a portion of Habakkuk’s migration argument in their study of the late 19th-century New Mexico economy, namely that partible inheritance actually ‘‘discouraged outmigration.’’ 2 One of his fears was that German peasants would rely too much on a subsistence agriculture. High emigration rates from Ireland, relative to the rest of Europe, even prior to the famine, most likely did not escape his attention either. Zwergwirtschaft, or dwarf agriculture, as he called this, remained a chief complaint of his, as evidenced by the following quote: ‘‘The cultivation of small parcels is only useful as a helpful subsidy to another trade, . . . , in the vicinity of a city or market area, or perhaps as an additional support for a day laborer. . . . Where it goes further, or becomes the standard, it appears as the most important problem of the agricultural constitution. As such, it evolves into a potatoagriculture. . . . One looks at Ireland and questions whether we exaggerate . . . there (on the Rhine, Neckar, and Main rivers), there are large villages, in which plows are no longer used, and other villages, where, because the parcels cannot be further subdivided, daughters are given single fruit trees as dowries. And, in many of these villages, the population believes that only through emigration of the whole families can it save itself.’’ See Spann (1926, pp. 456–457). This was originally part of ‘‘Die Ackerverfassung, die Zwergwirtschaft, und die Auswanderung,’’ first published in 1842. I am solely responsible for the translation. 3 Walker (1964, pp. 47–48), Von Hippel (1984, pp. 181, 209), Hansen (1961), Ko ¨ llmann and Marschalck (1973). 4 In this paper I use the terms impartible inheritance, unigeniture, and single-heir system interchangeably.

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In a recent study on emigration in a set of Westfalian counties, Kamphoefner (1987) showed that, indeed, the picture was far more complicated than List originally proposed. Using the example of several Westfalian counties (Kreise), he demonstrated that inheritance tradition was ‘‘neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition.’’5 In these counties unigeniture was the rule, but across the different counties the range in emigration rates was very large. Emigration rates did not depend exclusively on inheritance tradition; instead, they depended more directly on whether peasants relied on proto-industrial activities for their sustenance and on whether peasants lived in regions where new or expanding factories were able to absorb surplus agricultural labor.6 A proper study of the connection between inheritance and migration must examine a region where both partible and impartible practices existed. This is not that easy. In Westfalia, as well as in most of Germany, unigeniture inheritance dominated, while in southwestern Germany partible inheritance was the favored tradition.7 Pockets definitely existed where villages deviated from trend or made use of both systems; these exceptions were found especially in the regions where partible and unigeniture systems bordered on each other.8 To my knowledge, scholars have not taken advantage of these border areas and have instead focused on how a particular type of inheritance institution interacted with the local economic conditions to lower the standard of living of German peasants and make migration a more attractive option. Such an approach precludes asking the following counterfactual: Would emigration patterns have been different in southwestern Germany, for instance, under unigeniture? Specifically, I examine emigration from one such border region, the principality of Hesse–Cassel during the 1840s and 1850s, where approximately 30% of the Hesse–Cassel villages practiced some form of partible inheritance.9 This paper improves upon past work by comparing emigration rates from the same principality but from villages with differing inheritance traditions; it eliminates socioeconomic differences at the regional level that would be found in a study comparing village economies across Germany or Europe. The comparison I am making is possible because Hesse–Cassel lay between the predominantly impartible practices of the north and the partible traditions of the southwest. I use detailed information on emigrants from the 1840s and 1850s who left over 1000 different villages in Hesse–Cassel; approximately 90% of them left for the United 5

Kamphoefner (1987, p. 13). Von Hippel (1984) also recognized how the home production of linen weaving in the early decades of the 19th century helped to increase the number of large and destitute families. 7 This is a simplification for two reasons. First, many families used variations of these two systems. Second, by 1933 certain areas of the southwest, namely the Black Forest, used impartible inheritance, as Mayer-Edenhauser (1942) documents. For the 19th-century, most scholars have described the southwestern area of Germany as predominantly partible, and the rest of Germany as impartible: These scholars include Walker (1964), Kamphoefner (1987), Pfeifer (1956), and Berkner (1976). 8 Mayer-Edenhauser (1942); see Karte 1 for a map of the inheritance systems used in Germany. 9 See Sakai (1967, pp. 10–14). Berkner (1976), Mayer-Edenhauser (1942), and Pfeifer (1956) show this in maps. They are for the most part based on surveys of local officials in the late 19th century. 6

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States. Village emigration records provide information on emigrants’ home villages, occupations, ages, cash assets, date of emigration, and destination.10 I then link this information to cross-sectional data on village characteristics for over 300 of the Hesse–Cassel villages.11 Very importantly, these data include information on actual inheritance practice (not law) for each village. The examination of emigration rates from Hesse–Cassel represents an opportunity to examine a region where both systems of property transference coexisted and to test how the two types of institutions differentially affected the propensity to emigrate. Historical circumstance and the detailed nature of the survey and emigrant data sets make this possible. Still, Hesse–Cassel occupies an important place in the story of United States immigration. Most mid-19th century European emigrants settled in the United States, and of this group German emigrants made up the largest portion after 1853 and until 1893.12 For the period I am examining, Hesse–Cassel had some of the highest emigration rates of all of Germany; only other Hessian areas, other parts of southwestern Germany, and a few parts of Prussia had higher rates.13 In terms of its relative economic development, historians have depicted Hesse–Cassel as one of the poorer and more economically backward regions in Germany during the mid-19th-century.14 Not only did 10 The data I use in this paper are based on archival records for migrants who left the principality of Hesse–Cassel in the years 1832 to 1857. See Auerbach (1987–1988) for more details. The data were gathered by Hesse–Cassel officials who were concerned about several issues, including keeping track of the amount of financial capital migrants were taking with them, preventing young men from departing to avoid military service, and making sure migrants who were leaving paid off debts and did not abandon relatives who might be a burden to their local community. See Auerbach (1993), especially pp. 16–24. 11 Cross-sectional data were collected from a village survey of the social and economic situation in Hesse–Cassel, carried out in the mid-1850s by the Historical Association for Hesse. The survey contains over 200 questions about economic and cultural life; an official for each community (such as the mayor, or a teacher or forester), whether a village or a town, completed the survey. These data are from Bestand H3 in the Staatsarchiv of Marburg, Germany. Munter (1983), especially Appendix B, provides documentation. From this survey I have gathered information on village occupational distribution, land distribution, and other economic variables. 12 In the years between 1830 and 1853, the Irish are generally the largest national group in absolute numbers, with the Germans second and the English third. From 1854 to 1893, Germans make up the largest group in almost every year. See Historical Statistics of the United States, Series C 89–119. 13 Kamphoefner (1987) calculates in the years 1870/1871 the number of immigrants in the United States per 1,000 inhabitants in the district of origin. This serves as a proxy for comparing the regional emigration rates. Classifying Germany into 68 districts, only 12 of them had higher rates: this includes (i) 4 of the 24 districts that made up Prussia, (ii) the Pfalz, 1 of the 8 districts comprising Bavaria, (iii) the Schwarzwaldkreis, 1 of 4 regions making up Wu¨rttemberg, (iv) 3 of the 4 districts of Baden, and finally, (v) 2 other Hessian regions, Oberhessen and Starkenburg of the principality of Hesse– Darmstadt. 14 Several new studies document the economic backwardness of Hesse–Cassel. Frank (1994, p. 93), an empirical study of regional industrialization in Germany, classifies Hesse–Cassel as rural and backward in 1849. Kukowski (1995, p. 6), an extensive and well-documented study of Hessian poverty in the first half of the 19th-century, stresses that Hesse–Cassel is a great region for studying poverty in 19th-century Germany, since it was very backward for both political and socioeconomic reasons.

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the principality cling to its outmoded guild laws until Prussia annexed it in 1866, but its rulers have been depicted as despotic and not at all interested in policies designed to encourage economic growth. Very rural in nature, the majority of employed persons worked in agriculture, which was not at all the case for other nearby regions, such as Baden, Bavaria, or Wu¨rttemberg.15 The focus of this research—at the micro level—allows for a better description of the connection between inheritance tradition and emigration in the 19thcentury European economy. I address how these types of property institutions affected the village economy, and subsequently the propensity to migrate. Another concern in this study is distributional in nature: what does the bequest system do to the wealth distribution or the set of possible occupational opportunities in a village and how does this affect the propensity to migrate? Further, what is special about either system that may encourage more varied economic activity within the village, affecting the level of income and perhaps altering migration incentives? A comparison of the village economies across the two inheritance traditions will illustrate the socioeconomic conditions each type of emigrant faced. II. THE LAW AND ECONOMICS OF INHERITANCE German peasants practiced many traditions to transfer property to their children, ranging from the extreme of unigeniture, under which only one child inherits the parents’ entire stock of wealth, to the other extreme of partible inheritance, whereby parents divide their wealth equally among the children. Under a unigeniture or impartible system parents place concern for the continuation of the family line above all else, while under partible inheritance parents emphasize the welfare of all their children. In between these two, a particular variation on unigeniture was quite popular: the sole inheriting child paid out cash allotments or gave small parcels of land to his siblings. Throughout the paper I refer to this as ‘‘semi-unigeniture.’’ Actually, among the unigeniture villages in Hesse–Cassel, it is well documented by archival records that many heirs bestowed cash or small parcels of property upon their siblings, occurring in about 15% of the total number of unigeniture villages.16 Typically, families within a single community practiced the same custom, with unigeniture and variations thereof the predominant traditions.17 15

Ko¨llmann (1995) documents this with detailed employment censuses for 1847 and 1852. In the village survey which I use to gather information about the migrants’ origins, each village had to specify the inheritance tradition practiced in its village. Over the long run, perhaps 50 years, a village might even change from one institution to the other, especially from the tradition of partible inheritance to unigeniture. The village survey data for Hesse–Cassel records many instances of this. 17 Under unigeniture, the inheriting sibling was usually specified as ‘‘the most suitable son’’ or ‘‘the eldest son,’’ and sometimes the ‘‘most suitable child.’’ Thus it is not the case that unigeniture meant primogeniture. Under partible inheritance systems, those officials filling out the survey made scant reference to the gender of the children, making it then quite possible that daughters received equal or close to equal portions in many cases. Benz (1996, p. 49) even goes so far as to describe German women living in partible inheritance communities as ‘‘full players,’’ in terms of their role in family wealth accumulation. 16

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Ultimately migration historians are concerned with the connection between inheritance law and migration, namely how much migration and what different types of migrants the various inheritance laws encourage. This link is indirect and occurs by way of endogenous population growth. Even List had population growth in mind when he criticized the tradition of partible inheritance for obliging parents to try to provide an agricultural livelihood for all of their children: it encouraged the development of small farms and early marriage, leading to smaller farm (household) incomes and population growth, and ultimately to emigration.18 But population growth within a unigeniture economy can cause problems as well. Economic theory dictates that in an agricultural community that both produces and consumes the bulk of its own agricultural harvests, a consistently high population growth rate coupled with a fixed amount of arable land endangers the standard of living for the village population. The law of diminishing returns plays no favorites as far as inheritance tradition is concerned, so that no matter which tradition the particular village observes, an agricultural village economy with a fixed supply of land and population growth will eventually experience decreasing returns to labor and thus less output per villager. The fertility choices of families directly cause high population growth rates. According to the work of Becker and Lewis (1973), parents care, in addition to their own consumption, about the number of children they raise and the endowment of resources they can provide each child. Razin and Sadka (1995) modify this theory to include an old-age security motive.19 The optimization problem for families thus involves choosing a family size according to such concerns. Nevertheless, fertility outcomes are dependent on the extent to which parents regulate fertility. Knodel (1988, p. 455) provides evidence of family limitation practices in the middle of the 19th century for a sample of German villages.20 Inheritance tradition may have affected age at marriage or the fertility choices of parents, but neither the testing of this possible connection nor the search for which factor was paramount in the determination of fertility rates will be explored here. Rather, I discuss the socioeconomic conditions that differed across inheritance 18 Consider instead a world with zero population growth, Ceteris paribus, partible inheritance will not cause income per capita to fall. In such an economy each property owner has approximately one male heir. Assuming women do not inherit, those families with two male heirs can match up with families with two daughters and no male heirs. 19 Becker’s and Lewis’ theory, however, holds up more easily in an environment where parents have perfect control over reproduction, more likely for developed countries in the 20th century than for most countries in the 19th century. Razin and Sadka (1995) refer to old-age security as an additional motive for raising children, such that children can serve as a means of substituting consumption across time. Furthermore, for the 19th century and for developing countries in general, a theory of family reproductive decisions should also include parents’ demand for child labor. 20 Using family reconstitution data, Knodel (1988) studies the demographic behavior of 14 German villages in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is little evidence in his data of efforts to limit family sizes in the 18th-century, but such behavior shows up in the 19th-century in the form of stopping behavior (attempting to end conceptions once a certain family size is reached), rather than alternative strategies such as birth spacing or the delaying of childbearing.

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type to produce varying incentives to migrate, or different self-selection mechanisms, and thus diverse emigrant populations. In this regard, present and future economic prospects along with the ability to afford migration are the most important factors in a microeconomic model of the migration decision. As an economic outcome, the choice to migrate or not is a positive statement of revealed preference that tells us when a migrant believes he or she can do better elsewhere, especially in the case of future income. A potential migrant, assumed to be risk averse, calculates expected utility both in the destination country and in the homeland subject to his or her personal income constraint, then compares the two. Migration will occur if, in the long run, the estimated standard of living in the destination country minus the financial and psychic costs of moving is at least as high as the estimated standard of living in the homeland. As a result, migrants are self-selected on the basis of an individual-specific standard of living differential and whether or not they can afford it. Economic opportunity and the possibility to marry, no doubt, were important objectives for many migrants leaving Hesse–Cassel in the 1840s and 1850s. If economic chances were unequal or different across inheritance type, however, they affected the rates of migration and the makeup of the respective emigrant populations. This may be evident in the observable emigrant characteristics such as assets, age, occupation, and family size. These variations will relate back to the fertility and life-cycle choices made by emigrants’ parents, and to the emigrants themselves as well as to the economic structure of their respective villages. Inheritance institutions may indirectly affect the propensity to migrate by altering the level and distribution of income at home. In fact, various scholars have shown this by using simulation techniques to demonstrate that a primogeniture system increases the inequality of income distributions and affects kinship relations (Chu, 1991, pp. 78–79).21 Over multiple generations, heirs who are children of heirs become overwhelmingly the largest property owners. These are, however, simple models of complicated kinship relations. A more empirical literature exists that provides examples of unequal intra-family income distributions.22 The principle economic variation across the two types of inheritance systems involved an individual’s access to land ownership. With enough land, an individual had the necessary capital to manage an agricultural enterprise and support a family. Land was also important because it was the chief mode of storing wealth. 21 See also Blinder (1973), Pryor (1973), and Stiglitz (1969), all of whom have argued that unigeniture systems lead to less income equality. 22 The anthropologist G. W. Skinner claims that in the primogeniture systems common in Western Europe and Japan, resources are devoted primarily to the eldest son (or daughter), and younger sons and daughters can become a burden to their families. He states, ‘‘in general it can be said that non-heirs who remained in their native community suffered severe downward mobility’’ (Skinner, 1997). Chu (1991) cites examples from imperial China, where it was not uncommon for a family to focus its resources on a single child, since the success of any one family member brought much prestige to the other family members. Although the distribution of physical and financial resources may be very unequal, the distribution of family prestige is less so.

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Depending on the local price of land, an individual with only a small plot of land might not be able to sustain a living working full time as a farmer but could still finance a move across the ocean. For this sort of plan the individual might need to inherit just a small parcel of the total family holdings, as was often true in the case of partible inheritance or semi-unigeniture. Land, in any case, also increased an individual’s ability to raise livestock, which represented another mode of wealth storage. Dependent on prices for land, we may observe in the data that the average villager from partible inheritance villages had more cash because more people owned land in such an economy. As such, land served as the main source of collateral in credit transactions, allowing land owners greater ability to access capital markets. The particular inheritance regime in place thus has a dramatic effect on land distribution. In a unigeniture village, for example, only one child will enjoy the fruits of land ownership, creating a bimodal distribution of land ownership within the family. Assuming that typically one child inherits the land, siblings do not affect the eventual endowment of land and its value to the heir. In the partible villages, on the other hand, land will be more evenly divided within families, but the impact of yet another child born can affect the income of each person in the family. In such families there may be pressure on various siblings to sell their land portion to a family member and emigrate, thereby increasing income per capita for those who stay. Since family members often sold land to each other at prices below market value, these transactions were all the more feasible for the party doing the purchasing.23 Such concerns apply mostly in the case of high population density. In the event that land is cheap and its availability extensive, partible practices will have very little effect on the distribution of income, as Alston and Shapiro (1984) have argued for the case of the American colonies. Land ownership was the crucial variable in the Habakkuk story, in which he stated that unigeniture systems would generate more emigrants than partible systems. Specifically, Habakkuk (1955) claimed that single heir villages, with a plethora of celibate adults who never married, had lower population growth rates in comparison to the more social partible villages. He explained to this effect, ‘‘I suggest, that is, that the single-heir system tended to retard population growth and division to promote it’’ (Habakkuk, 1955, p. 6). Although Habakkuk believed that partible inheritance fostered higher population growth rates and necessarily lower income per capita, he judged unigeniture systems as encouraging higher rates of emigration than partible systems.24 He based this hypothesis on the matter that those with even a small portion of land were more tied to it than those with absolutely no land. He noted, too, that the difference between the inheritance systems did not really matter in the case of large availability of land. Inheritance tradition also had an effect on the type of rural economy that existed 23 Habakkuk (1955, p. 3). In the village survey data, a couple of villages mention in their answer to the inheritance question that the prices are especially low; see Bestand H3, Staatsarchiv of Marburg. 24 Habakkuk (1955, p. 6); see also Libecap and Alter (1982, p. 185).

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in the villages. In the case of partible inheritance, more heads of households were farmers, albeit marginal ones. Because the ownership and working of land brought a certain degree of community prestige and independence, farming was not an occupation easily relinquished. So, even if they chose not to be full-time farmers, they could use their inheritance to set themselves up as protoindustrialists or to finance further investment in human capital, such as an artisan apprenticeship. In unigeniture villages, on the other hand, most of the children did not have the option of making their living as farmers and had no alternative but to work as laborers or train to become artisans. With no land, they may have had an even greater incentive than their cohorts in the partible villages to engage in artisan apprenticeships. But such opportunities depended on their ability to finance such training. If the inheritance institutions had strong effects on the occupational choices of villagers, we may witness a larger concentration of laborers and perhaps artisans among the emigrants from unigeniture communities, and a larger concentration of farmers among the emigrants from partible villages. The inheritance tradition directly affected the life-cycle choices of young people (potential migrants) as well. In a unigeniture village, for instance, children with older siblings knew early on that farming the family land was an improbable option for them. This tradition resolved some of the uncertainty regarding future economic opportunities. A rational choice for them would have been to invest, if financially feasible, in acquiring human capital in a trade profession or take on work as a laborer, or even migrate very early in their lives. In contrast, young people from partible inheritance villages may have first tried their luck on their small plot of land, combined perhaps with some sort of cottage industry, artisan trade, or day laborer work, before venturing away from the home village. One might expect then that the emigrants from partible villages would be on average older and, at later points in the life cycle, perhaps with young families. In addition, and dependent on relative land prices and land holding size, the emigrants from partible villages may have been wealthier, something I can test with the emigrant data.25 Each village had a fixed supply of land, which meant that with all other things being equal, high population density drove up land prices. On the demand side, it is less clear as to whether the total village demand for land would be greater in the partible or in the unigeniture villages.26 So far I have addressed how the average emigrant may have differed across village type. But how important is the inheritance institution in the migration decision? The moving costs can easily prevent individuals from leaving. The partible institution will help potential migrants to afford the financial portion of 25 The data on the cash assets that emigrants took with them partially reflect the worth of the land an individual owned or inherited, since land was the chief mode of wealth storage. See Auerbach (1993, pp. 19–24). 26 With more potential sellers of land (because more people own land) in the partible villages, land markets may have been more active. Sabean (1976, p. 107) implies this as well. In addition, the demand for land will increase with its fertileness, and in terms of its alternative commercial uses.

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moving costs. With capital resources more equitably distributed in the partible villages, the average standard of living might be greater than that which the non-inheriting children in unigeniture villages could expect to enjoy. In the partible villages, this should hold to the extent that over generations real assets per capita are not split up among the community members to an excessive degree. In terms of the Hessian emigrants, the unigeniture villagers probably had greater incentives to leave, but the partible villagers had more access to cash and could more easily afford to migrate. A great incentive to leave may encourage individuals to save and gather resources to cover the financial costs of overseas migration; but, alternatively, that financial resources for such a move do exist does not increase incentives, a necessary condition for migration. So, we may see higher emigration rates from the unigeniture villages. Thus, an inheritance institution primarily influences an individual’s standard of living in the homeland and his ability to afford the move. If the institution lowers an individual’s long run expected utility in the homeland, it creates an incentive to leave. Or, if it enhances an individual’s ability to afford overseas migration, it makes migration more financially feasible. Third, if the institution promotes higher rates of human capital investment, it may boost discounted expected utility in the homeland or even the expected standard of living a potential migrant hopes to find in the destination country.27 I make note of these differential effects throughout the analysis. In my analysis, the inheritance institution acts as an exogenous variable affecting emigration rates and the emigrant population. Over time, and if emigration becomes a well established practice, this logic may reverse. For example, in Timothy Guinnane’s work on post-famine Irish demography, emigration serves as the exogenous variable (Guinnane, 1992, 1997). He examines the relationship between inheritance patterns and emigration in the Irish household system: parents wanted to hold onto their farm as long as possible, while the eldest son did not want to delay income earning opportunities. A balancing of these two needs was often achieved with the emigration of the older sons and with the bestowal of the farm to younger sons. The option to emigrate, along with the remittances that eventually came with it, affected the inheritance institution, so that by the early 20th century, the custom of unigeniture was well-ingrained, but not in the form of primogeniture. This is a striking development for a society that had largely practiced partible inheritance prior to the famine of the 1840s. Guinnane’s evidence comes primarily from Irish census data of the early 20th-century, at a time when emigration had been a well-established Irish practice for over 100 years, but especially in the years since the famine. Change in the way that 27 The institution may have a large affect on the occupational distribution of a village. If the living standard a potential migrant can expect in the New World is a function of the individual’s portable skills, then inheritance institution will also affect estimated utility in the destination country. If, for example, partible village economies naturally have more skilled artisans who could earn a very good living in the United States, then the inheritance system will also affect an individual’s estimation of his living standard in the U.S.

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households make decisions might very well take decades before it happens with the kind of regularity Guinnane describes. Emigration only becomes a possibility in Hesse–Cassel in 1832, and only takes off in the 1840s. Thus, I think it unlikely that the Hessians of the 1840s and 1850s looked much like the Irish of the early 20th century. III. HYPOTHESES The underlying basis of the hypotheses from the previous discussion is that inheritance institutions produce varying emigration rates and different emigrant populations. The hypotheses are summarized as follows: 1. Emigration Rates: The unigeniture institution encouraged higher emigration rates than did the partible inheritance tradition. 2. Demographic characteristics of emigrants: a. Among the emigrants traveling alone, on average the unigeniture emigrants should have been younger. b. Likewise, among the unigeniture village emigrants, a higher percentage should have been traveling alone (presumably single) because they had better incentives to migrate early in life. Conversely, average family size should have been larger among the partible system emigrants. 3. Occupational and wealth characteristics of emigrants: a. There should have been more laborers and perhaps more artisans among the unigeniture emigrants because a smaller proportion of the village population had access to land ownership and thus farming as an occupation. In contrast, more emigrants from partible villages should have been farmers. b. The emigrants from partible villages may have been wealthier. More citizens from partible villages owned land, so the average cash holdings should have been greater among the partible system emigrants if the average land price in partible villages was sufficiently high.

IV. TESTS OF THE HYPOTHESES A test of the first hypothesis involves examining the interactions of migration rates with village variables, while the second and third sets of hypotheses call for detailed study of the characteristics of the individual migrants. For the first hypothesis I limit my study to a set of villages from 7 of the 21 different Hesse–Cassel counties, meaning that my data cover 308 different villages of the total 1376 Hesse–Cassel villages after accounting for missing data.28 My geographic scope is much wider with regards to the second and third sets of hypotheses, where I examine migrants and their characteristics from over three28 The seven counties (Kreise) I study for the first hypothesis are the counties of Cassel, Eschwege, Melsungen, and Wolfhagen in the province of Lower Hesse (Niederhessen), the county of Fulda in the province of Fulda, and the counties of Kirchhain and Marburg in the province of Upper Hesse (Oberhessen). I selected these counties on a random basis, so that the data set covers different geographical areas around the entire principality of Hesse–Cassel, and approximately 471 of the 1376 villages of the Hesse–Cassel principality. Unfortunately, the archival records for the counties of Cassel and Fulda are especially incomplete, making for a total set of 308 villages. Future work will involve studying a larger set of counties.

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fourths of the Hesse–Cassel counties, covering 80% of the 50,000⫹ migrants in my complete data set.29 Emigration Rates I tested the first hypothesis by regressing village emigration rates on various village characteristics, such as farm laborer wage, the price of land, land per capita, day laborers per capita, and artisans per capita. The price of land controls for returns to agriculture and land per capita for overall village capital resources. I included day laborers per capita and artisans per capita to capture whether high concentrations of either promote emigration. To specifically see the effect of the institution, I incorporated a dummy variable, equal to one in the case of partible villages and zero for unigeniture villages. I present ordinary least squares results with White standard errors. These are in Table 1. With the exception of the day laborer per capita variable, all of the variables are significant at the 5% or less level.30 In particular, the coefficient on the inheritance dummy is negative, indicating that emigration rates tend to be higher in unigeniture villages. The price of land is negatively correlated with emigration, as is land per capita; the more prosperous the farming community, or the more land potentially available per citizen, the less likely its members are to leave. This result affirms both the first hypothesis and Habakkuk’s prediction that the unigeniture institution would be responsible for higher rates of emigration. Characteristics of the Emigrants Imperative to a model of the migration decision is a reflection of, first, the expected standard of living gap between the home country and the land of destination and, second, the fixed costs of migration. These are the two important elements of a migration selection process and result in an emigrant population drawn in a nonrandom fashion from the total source population. A particular inheritance institution is relevant only to the extent that it may produce a sampling rule distinct from that which other types generate (Wegge, 1997). If this occurs, the variation in sampling rules will stem from differences across the village types 29 In examining migrant characteristics, I break the migrants up into groups based on whether a migrant comes from a partible or an impartible village, which I know from the village survey data. From these data I can classify most of the remaining 14 counties in the previous analysis on emigration rates. The following counties use primarily unigeniture: Fritzlar and Homberg in the province of Lower Hesse, Ziegenhain in the province of Upper Hesse, Hersfeld and Hu¨nfeld in the province of Fulda, and Schlu¨chtern in the province of Hanau. The following counties use primarily partible inheritance: Hofgeismar in the province of Upper Hesse, and Hanau and Gelnhausen in the province of Hanau. 30 The coefficient on farmhand wage is positive, but there are two possible stories. This is the wage for farmhands, typically hired on annual contracts; it does not include in-kind payments. Higher wages will help a potential emigrant raise funds for the financial cost of migration, especially if room and board were included as a part of the in-kind payment, which in many villages was the case. Then a positive correlation with emigration is understandable. Alternatively, the wage controls for returns to labor, so that a negative correlation with emigration rates could be expected.

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SIMONE A. WEGGE TABLE 1 OLS Regression Results, 1837–1857 Variable

Pooled

Institution dummy (Equal to 1 if partible) Farm laborer wage

⫺5.96** (2.83) 1.88*** (0.19) ⫺0.08*** (0.02) ⫺2.034** (0.82) 25.63 (19.93) 182.10*** (45.44)

Price of land Land per capita Day laborers per capita Artisans per capita Adj. R Squared F Statistic N No. of Villages

13.25% 165.68 6468 308

Note. Dependent variable ⫽ migration rate. White standard errors are in parentheses (corrected for heteroscedasticity). (***), (**), and (*) denote significance at the 1, 5, and 10% levels respectively. The dependent variable is 10,000 ⫻ (annual emigration rate). Independent Variables: (i) Farm hand wage is the annual wage; (ii) price of land, the price for land of good quality; (iii) land per capita, total arable land divided by the 1840 population.

in terms of an individual’s ability to finance a move, and his long-run expected standard of living differential, given human and real capital. The nature of the potential migrant’s optimization problem does not vary across property institution, but some of the parameters do, in particular, an individual’s wealth. If inheritance matters, then two distinct sampling rules (one for unigeniture emigrants and one for partible village emigrants) will result, materializing in different individual emigrant characteristics, something one can observe in the data. I thus summarized the individual characteristics of almost the entire set of migrants, approximately 40,000 different individuals, and tested for the above hypotheses related to the demographic, wealth, and occupational characteristics of the emigrants. In the following explanations I refer at times to the economic structure in each type of village, but I specifically address this in the following section. As evident from Table 2, more individuals from unigeniture villages migrated

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TO PART OR NOT TO PART TABLE 2 Family Size Distributions for Total Hesse–Cassel Emigrants Family Size (Persons)

Partible

Impartible

1 2 3 4 5⫹

65.6% 11.9 6.1 4.5 11.9

68.9% 12.9 5.4 3.9 8.9

Sample Size (of Groups)

9851

12657

alone to the United States, 69% compared to 66% of the individuals from partible villages. Although this difference is small, unigeniture migrants tended to leave in small groups (of one or two) at higher rates. Not surprisingly, the migrants from partible villages have a greater probability of having left in groups of four or more, 16.3% compared to 12.8%. Probable average family size seems to be larger for the families coming from partible inheritance villages because they were more likely to emigrate later in the life cycle, as hypothesized. Further, I hypothesized that the children from unigeniture villages knew at an early age the assets they would inherit and thus had a very certain estimation of their probable success in farming or any other occupation which required a substantial financial investment. Uncertainty surrounded the decision of who would get the farm until parents actually made a decision.31 But in general, unigeniture children were a bit more free to contemplate migration options seriously at an earlier age, during which time their fellow cohorts in the partible villages may have still been trying their luck in small-scale farming, combined perhaps with an artisan trade or day laborer work. The figures on age distributions, in Table 3, suggest that there are some differences, although not enormous ones. Of the emigrants traveling alone, a greater percentage of the individuals from the unigeniture villages were under or at the age of 20, with the total percentage of 11 to 20 year-olds comprising 51.3% of the single traveler distribution for unigeniture emigrants, and the analogous figure for partible emigrants being 45.7%. For these single travelers, unigeniture emigrants are on average 23.5 years old, younger than the partible emigrants, perhaps by a half year or so.32 And, in terms of the total distribution of emigrants on the left-hand side of the table, the percentage of small children in the partible 31 Often parents would give it to the best suited offspring. For this reason, and because child mortality was a nonzero probability event (first-born sons could always die before any property transfer took place), second and perhaps third sons may have deemed staying at home a potentially profitable use of their time. It depended on their own estimation of the probability of inheriting the farm. 32 Partible emigrants are on average 24.3 years old. The 99% confidence interval for a difference of means test is (0.15, 1.42); thus, there is a statistical difference, but it is not a big one.

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SIMONE A. WEGGE TABLE 3 Age Distribution for Total Hesse–Cassel Emigrants All emigrants

Age range (years)

Single travelers

Partible (%)

Impartible (%)

Partible (%)

Impartible (%)

0–5 6–10 11–14 15–17 18–20 21–23 24–26 27–30 31–35 36–40 41–45 46–50 51–60 61⫹

15.0 9.3 6.7 8.2 17.9 4.7 6.2 8.3 7.9 5.2 4.0 3.2 2.8 0.6

12.8 8.3 6.2 8.9 19.6 4.8 6.0 8.7 8.6 5.7 4.0 2.8 3.1 0.5

0.7 0.5 0.9 9.6 35.2 7.3 11.5 15.1 11.2 3.6 2.1 1.4 0.6 0.3

0.4 0.6 2.2 12.2 36.9 7.3 9.6 13.3 10.4 3.7 1.9 0.8 0.4 0.3

Sample size

4851

4704

1960

2147

groups was much higher, providing further evidence that a greater proportion of emigrants from partible villages were traveling as families. Cash figures are displayed in Table 4, demonstrating that individuals from partible villages had more cash, and specifically, a lot more cash.33 A differenceof-means test shows for both definitions of cash per capita that there were statistically significant differences between the amount of cash that each group, on average, took with them: for the first definition, partible emigrants take about 38 to 52 Thaler more with them. This should be no surprise, given that average land prices were significantly higher in partible villages, and a greater number of families in these villages owned at least a small plot of land: 76.5% of the families in the partible villages versus 66.1 to 69.4% of the families in the two types of unigeniture villages, as the figures on village socioeconomic structure in Table 7 indicate. The two occupational distributions bear special attention. Here I refer to the results in Tables 5–6. I have classified all emigrants into broad groups, as explained in Table 5. A relative comparison of the two emigrant populations shows that day laborers made up a much greater percentage of the unigeniture emigrant population, while artisans made up a greater percentage of the partible emigrant population. Further, the day laborers from the unigeniture villages are younger, on average 29.7 years, while those from partible villages, on average 33 The cash data are for the most part information on the amounts emigrants took with them. In some cases, the cash denotes future amounts that the emigrant may receive from his or her family in the case, for example, of an expected inheritance.

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TO PART OR NOT TO PART TABLE 4 Cash Statistics, Partible and Impartible Groups Migrant

Partible

Impartible

99% CI of difference

Cash per capita a

135.4 Thaler (167.8) 4814

90.4 Thaler (108.8) 8728

(37.9, 51.8)

151.2 Thaler (792.2) 9849

75.8 Thaler (298.9) 12647

(53.5, 97.0)

Sample size Cash per capita b Sample size

Notes. Standard deviations are in parentheses; cash is in Thaler, ‘‘CI’’ denotes confidence interval. a Data exclusive of missing data, no values over 1,000. b Missing data assumed to be zero.

31.4 years, are almost two years older.34 Not only are many of the unigeniture emigrants both young and employed as laborers, and perhaps fed up with their future prospects, they are also more likely to be jobless: of the males traveling alone, 46% did not have an occupation listed in the records, compared with 32% for the partible villages. A ‘‘jobless’’ status could clearly stand for ‘‘missing data,’’ but it is unlikely that some systematic deviation in the official data gathering procedures could explain away such a big difference. The summary statistics in Table 7, to be further discussed below, indicated that day laborers comprise a larger fraction of the general unigeniture village population, and that the number of artisans per capita was much higher for the partible villages than for the unigeniture villages. Consider also that in the total population artisans per capita were 20% more prevalent in partible villages, but 37% more likely to be found in the partible occupational distribution for emigrants. Likewise, day laborers per capita were 22% higher in unigeniture villages, but 65% more likely a part of the emigrant occupational distribution for unigeniture villages. Thus, a village economy that varied across institutions contributed to such divergences in emigrant populations. In contrast, farmers made up a slightly greater percentage of the emigrants from unigeniture villages, although I predicted the opposite.35 In Table 6, I list more specific occupations where the discrepancy between partible and unigeniture emigrants is large. Bakers, butchers, and merchants are more likely to come from partible villages, largely because partible villages contained more types of economic activities.

34 This is not a definitive result, since the 99% confidence interval for the difference in means contains the value of zero. 35 Deleted in proof.

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SIMONE A. WEGGE TABLE 5 Occupational Distributions for Total Hesse–Cassel Emigrants Partible (%)

Impartible (%)

Professionals Farmers Artisans a Laborers Linen Weavers Shoe makers

3.0 11.1 55.0 21.6 2.6 6.8

1.5 13.1 40.2 37.2 2.6 5.3

Sample size

7056

7047

a

Artisan group excludes linen weavers and shoe makers.

V. VARIATION IN VILLAGE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE A property institution affects the economic structure of a village and, in particular, the societal distribution of land. Structural variation across village type may help to explain the differences observed in the emigrant populations. Here I investigated the socioeconomic characteristics of both types of villages, using the cross-sectional data from the historical survey, as previously described. In some unigeniture villages the chief heir or heiress provided younger siblings with a small piece of land or an amount of cash, which could be used as a dowry, set-up costs for a business or artisanship, and so forth. Table 7, which displays the summary statistics of the villages, draws a distinction between the three possible village types, with this variation on unigeniture referred to as ‘‘semi-unigeniture’’ or ‘‘semi-impartible.’’ TABLE 6 Large Discrepancies in Occupational Distribution for Total Hesse–Cassel Partial occupational distribution Farmers Stone & Earth a Metals b Precious Stones c Shoemakers Baker, Butcher Bricklayer Painter Trader, Merchant Day Laborer a b

c

% Partible emigrant occupations

% Impartible emigrant occupations

11.1 1.2 3.6 2.4 6.8 4.4 2.8 1.5 8.0 17.7

13.1 0.7 4.3 0.1 5.3 2.5 4.6 0.8 2.9 33.8

Primarily stone breakers, brick makers, and potters. Various types of smiths, but especially blacksmiths. Primarily craftsmen working with gold and gilders.

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TO PART OR NOT TO PART TABLE 7 Summary Statistics, Rural Villages

Village = Variable Description 1840 Population 1858 Population Number of families Family size Artisans per 1,000 Traders per 1,000 Factory worker per 1,000 No. of other jobs, not listed No. of jobs that export Day laborers per 1,000 Wage of day laborer (sg.) Support per 1,000 Farmers per 1,000 % Farmers a % Small land owners a % Very small property owners a Annual wage of farmhand b Land per capita (Acker) Avg. land of land owner Standard dev., land dist. Average wealth of holder b Price of good/med. land b Wealth in land b Wealth per capita b Emigration rate c Number of villages

Partible

Semi-impartible

Impartible

532 533 108 5.00 58 2 3 3.45 0.63 107 4.0/7.4 19.9 41 22.6% 53.9% 23.5% 23.1/32.5 2.83 12.8 14.8 1015 137/82 118,353 224 7.1% 93

448 458 81 5.73 48 1 0.5 2.41 0.25 134 3.96/8.1 15.7 45 29.4% 36.7% 33.8% 22.9/28.4 3.23 16.8 20.1 1545 116/80 98,461 275 7.8% 40

343 344 61 6.04 47 1.4 1.8 1.29 0.22 131 3.69/7.4 21.7 49 33.2% 36.2% 30.6% 22.0/28.7 3.22 18.2 19.8 985 94/59 63,341 192 9.3% 232

a Farmers have at least 20 Acker (approximately 12 English acres); small farmers have at least 2–19 Acker (1.2 to 11.4 English acres). Very small property owners have either a house or they rent a house and have no land. b In Thaler, about $0.70 US in the 1850s. c Number of emigrants, 1837–1857, divided by the population for 1840.

Definitive variation in the economic structure exists for the three types of villages, although there are essentially two groupings one can make: the partible inheritance village and the two unigeniture village types. I have excluded the officially designated ‘‘cities’’ or ‘‘towns’’ because citizens in these places abided by the partible tradition almost exclusively, and most were little engaged in farming. Overly strict interpretations of such definitions should be avoided, as Berkner (1976) implies in his own characterization of German inheritance practices, in which he emphasizes that inheritance laws do not necessarily equate with actual practice in a village.36 Fortunately, the information I am using is from 36 See Berkner (1976, pp. 71–72), where he states, ‘‘Inheritance laws require that the family property be distributed in certain proportions, ranging from equal portions for all children to favouring

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SIMONE A. WEGGE

a survey about economic life in the village, in which the context is not the inheritance law in place but the practice in use. A number of communities in the village survey records indicated that several practices were used simultaneously, which does not suggest conformity to an ‘‘inheritance law.’’37 Certainly, my data do not capture all the possibilities of how land is transferred, nor how parents provide for the noninheriting siblings in the unigeniture villages. But they are an improvement on past work, given that most social historians have relied on general regional specifications about inheritance customs. In accounting for births, deaths, and over 50,000 migrants who left Hesse– Cassel between 1840 and 1858, population growth during this time was nonexistent for all three village types. Although partible villages had on average larger populations, family size was considerably smaller, with an average of five compared to that of six for the unigeniture villages. Many factors may have contributed to a smaller family size for partible villages, including (i) younger families and thus fewer children in the partible villages, (ii) a concerted effort on the part of parents in the partible inheritance villages to limit the number of children they raised, (iii) children in partible villages starting their own home (leaving their parents’ home) at younger ages than those in unigeniture villages, and (iv) more unmarried adults in the unigeniture villages who remained in their parents’ home. I do not have enough information to provide an answer that distinguishes between these possibilities. Nevertheless, the potential for the migration of young and nonmarried migrants (the fourth possibility) was most likely higher for the two types of unigeniture villages. Per 1,000 village residents the following numbers of farmers, artisans, and day laborers existed by village type, as summarized from Table 7: Village Occupational Concentrations Summarized from Table 7

Farmers per 1,000 Artisans per 1,000 Laborers per 1,000

Partible

Semi-impartible

Impartible

41 58 107

45 48 134

49 47 131

In the two types of unigeniture villages the number of day laborers was roughly 23% higher than in the partible villages. Similarly, the number of farmers per family was approximately 10 to 20% higher as well, while the number of artisans in unigeniture villages was 20% lower.38 With more farmers and thus more farm a single heir. But they rarely determine the form of settlement, which depends on the land tenure, the peasant customs, or economic conditions.’’ 37 Berkner (1976, p. 73) states that ‘‘to know actual practices would require a detailed study of family contracts and land records, which is difficult enough to do for a few villages, let alone a whole region.’’ 38 See Table 1 for definitions of ‘‘farmer’’ and other property owners. I define a farmer as a land owner with at least 20 Acker (12 English acres).

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production, it is conceivable that more day laborers resided in unigeniture villages because of a greater demand for day laborers. That there are more farmers per capita in unigeniture villages partly explains the higher prevalence of farmers among unigeniture emigrants. As can be seen from Table 7, a greater proportion of villagers in the partible villages were small farmers (with 2–19 Acker, or 1 to 11 acres). These were agriculturalists who did not necessarily work full-time as farmers; they may also have simultaneously engaged in a cottage industry of some sort, but they also had less need to hire day laborers.39 The proportion of farmers who were small farmers is much greater, almost 100% greater, in the partible villages, which may indicate that such individuals earned greater profits from production on their own plots than they could as day laborers for bigger farmers. Wages for day laborers were almost comparable across village type, with slightly lower wages (excluding in-kind payments) in the unigeniture villages. The wages, however, cannot tell us anything about constancy of work; a greater concentration of large farmers meant more stable work positions for laborers, which can help explain the occupational breakdowns. Wages for the farmhands were slightly higher in the partible villages.40 Economic activity in the partible inheritance villages was actually more diverse. Partible villages have per capita more factory workers, more individuals with ‘‘other occupations,’’ and more individuals engaged in trade. They also had a greater number of individuals who exported or sold their goods outside the village. Shoe makers and linen weavers were typical artisans in great supply in this region, but the numbers (not presented in Table 7) are approximately the same across the village types. And this diversity carries over to the emigrant occupational distributions as well, as previously commented on.41 Important differences in the land distributions across village type existed. Partible villages had the fewest families with no land or just a house (specified as ‘‘% Very small property owners’’). The majority of families in partible villages, 54%, owned between one and eleven acres of land, an amount insufficient to occupy the land owner full time in farming his own land. Land per capita was the smallest in partible villages, but total village wealth in land was the greatest for these villages. Higher market prices for land lay behind this, and higher prices were a function of a more limited supply of land (in comparison to the unigeniture villages), and perhaps a higher demand for land.42 Because both land was 39

If the small farmers also rented land, they could have been occupied full-time with farming. This may indicate a compensating differential necessary to attract individuals away from other economic opportunities in the partible villages. 41 These findings correspond to Benz’s conjecture that ‘‘The most lively sections . . . were those under partible inheritance.’’ See Benz (1996, p. 48). 42 Land per capita helps to determine the total wealth of a village in land, but so does the village market price of land. Partible villages have a remarkably high price of land, perhaps reflecting a greater demand for land, which is not a surprising result given their very low land per capita figures. A large agricultural population on a small area of land drives up the prices in the village land market. Partible inheritance villages have higher land prices and less land per capita, but the higher prices are enough to push wealth per capita amounts above those for the unigeniture villages. 40

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SIMONE A. WEGGE TABLE 8a OLS Regression Results, 1837–1857 Variable

Intercept Farm laborer wage Price of land Land per capita Day laborers per capita Artisans per capita Adj. R Squared F Statistic N No. of Villages

All villages

Partible villages

Impartible villages

53.851*** (6.984) 0.376 (0.271) ⫺0.111*** (0.019) ⫺4.792*** (0.839) 11.349 (19.656) 58.225 (49.293)

46.234*** (16.68) ⫺0.151 (0.509) ⫺0.064** (0.028) ⫺5.483** (2.228) 93.788** (45.74) 91.018 (102.2)

56.536*** (7.662) 0.544* (0.321) ⫺0.116*** (0.026) ⫺4.444*** (0.912) ⫺27.349 (22.19) 61.392 (54.02)

0.85% 4.30 1932 92

0.83% 8.57 4536 216

0.76% 10.90 6468 308

Notes. Dependent variable ⫽ migration rate. White standard errors are in parentheses (corrected for heteroscedasticity). (***), (**), and (*) denote significance at the 1, 5 and 10% levels respectively. The dependent variable is 10,000 ⫻ (annual emigration rate). Independent variables are: (i) farm hand wage, annual wage; (ii) price of land, price in Thaler of land of good quality; (iii) land per capita, total arable land divided by 1840 population; (iv) day laborers per capita; (v) artisans per capita.

expensive and the amount of land per capita was large in the semi-unigeniture villages, wealth per capita was highest here and the average land holder in this particular type of village was the richest. Further evidence exists in the per capita number of people supported by charity, which also shows that the semiunigeniture villages had the fewest living on the dole. How Village Economic Structure Affects Emigration Rates I examined whether structural differences in the village economies produced varying migration outcomes in a multivariate regression model of migration rate regressed on five different village characteristics including farm laborer wage, price of land of superior quality, land per capita, day laborers per capita, and artisans per capita. Do emigrants leave for the same specific economic reasons? For reasons of sample size, I grouped the semi-impartible villages with the other impartible villages, so that here I distinguish between only two types of villages, partible and impartible. I posed the hypothesis that the estimated model was the same across both types of villages. Three regressions are displayed in Table 8a, the first for the entire village set, the second for partible villages, and the third for impartible villages. The calculation of a test of structural change,

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specifically a test of differential intercepts and slopes, indicates that this hypothesis can be rejected at the 5% significance level.43 So the hypothesis that the aforementioned socioeconomic characteristics are correlated in a similar manner with partible and impartible emigration rates can be rejected. Because the sign of the coefficient on day laborers per capita varies across village type in Table 8a, I estimated a second regression and allowed the intercept terms and the day worker per capita variable to differ across inheritance institution. There may be additional variation, but one difference across the economies that may affect the incentive to migrate is the number of day laborers per capita.44 In this second regression, shown in Table 8b, the sign on the day laborer coefficient is positive for partible villages and negative, albeit not significant at the 10% level, for impartible villages. In an impartible village, it was natural to expect a larger number of laborers per capita because of the higher concentration of landless citizens. In a partible village, a greater social stigma may have been attached to working as a day laborer, since a greater number of alternative occupational choices existed and more people owned land. The results in Table 8a show, however, that various economic variables, including land per capita and the price of land, affected the incentive to migrate in either village type in a similar fashion: migration declines with an increase in land price, a proxy for the return to land and thus an indicator of prosperity; migration also declines with a rise in land per capita. Further, the intercepts capture a difference in the respective economic structure of the villages not accounted for by other variables in the regression. Each village type had a marginally different economic structure, and this created various migration incentives. Nevertheless, the rate of emigration is nontrivial for both types, equal to about 7% for the partible villages and 9% for the unigeniture villages between 1837 and 1857. As previously stated, the villages adhering to the partible inheritance tradition exhibit a wider range of economic activity and a broader range of businesses that export their products, all the more feasible in an economy where workers were not occupied full-time with farming. These villages may have also had a greater degree of proto-industry. Of course, the first half of the 19th-century is a period of significant decline for proto-industry, all the more reason for a proto-capitalist from a partible village to migrate. Thus, we might suspect a greater difference in migration rates in the absence of proto-industry. VI. CONCLUSIONS This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining whether the principle inheritance institutions of 19th-century Western Germany, Anerbenrecht 43 The F statistic for this hypothesis is 2.78. It can be compared to F(6,∞), which is 2.1 and 2.80 at the 5% and 1% significance levels, respectively. 44 The robustness of this result and the particular estimation method are the subject of further research. The proportions data regression method is not used here because it is very sensitive to assumptions made to handle zeros, and my data contain many zero migration rate values.

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SIMONE A. WEGGE TABLE 8b OLS Regression Results, 1837–1857 Variable Intercept-partible Intercept-impartible Farm laborer wage Price of land Land per capita Day laborers per capita, partible Day laborers per capita, impartible Artisans per capita Adj. R Squared F Statistic N No. of Villages

Pooled 37.558*** (8.424) 57.977*** (7.096) 0.371 (0.273) ⫺0.093*** (0.019) ⫺4.573*** (0.851) 86.679* (45.14) ⫺27.263 (21.75) 71.360 (49.33) 14.20% 134.76 6468 308

Note. Dependent variable ⫽ migration rate. White standard errors are in parentheses (corrected for heteroscedasticity). (***), (**), and (*) denote significance at the 1, 5, and 10% levels respectively. The dependent variable is 10,000 ⫻ (annual emigration rate). Independent variables are: (i) intercepts serve just like dummy variables, intercept-partible is one for partible villages and zero for impartible villages, while interceptimpartible is one for impartible villages and zero for partible villages; (ii) farm hand wage, annual wage; (iii) price of land, the price for land of good quality; (iv) land per capita, total arable land divided by 1840 population; (v) ‘‘Day laborers per capita, partible’’ equals actual figure for partible villages, zero for impartible villages, and vice-versa for ‘‘Day laborers per capita, Impartible’’; (vi) artisans per capita.

and Realteilung, influenced the propensity to migrate. In my analysis I suggest that such traditions have an influence on the resulting economic structure of a village, and it is this economic structure that affects migration rates. Inheritance tradition primarily affects occupational choice and personal wealth and thus produces distinct economic outcomes for peasants. Given these outcomes, the attraction to the migration option varies across village type. I suggest that the

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connection between inheritance and migration is indirect: the inheritance institution affects the village economic structure, which in turn shapes migration incentives. Because the incentive to migrate varies across village type, the resulting emigrant populations are distinct. Interestingly enough, it is the unigeniture institution which better promotes emigration, providing support for Habakkuk’s prediction that the unigeniture institution would be responsible for higher rates of emigration. This test discredits Friedrich List’s conjecture that partible inheritance encouraged much outmigration, but its real emphasis is that a proper counterfactual must be addressed: in the absence of partible inheritance, would emigration rates have been smaller? Friedrich List did not address this question. Here I find that on the margin an individual from a unigeniture village is more likely to leave home. Nevertheless, under both systems families and individuals found important, albeit different, reasons to leave, which the test of structural change suggests. Institutional variations manifest themselves in diverse patterns of individual emigrant characteristics. In comparison to emigrants from partible villages, I found that emigrants from unigeniture villages were younger, more likely to travel alone (possibly unmarried), more likely to be a laborer or farmer, and had less cash. The data provide support for most of the hypotheses on emigrant characteristics stated in Section III. Still, some of these differences are small. Proto-industry might provide us with the clue as to why this is so. Such economic activity could be best combined with part-time farming and was perhaps more readily found in partible communities. Much proto-industry in Hesse–Cassel involved the production of linen, but after 1815 the demand for this good steadily decreased, making emigration all the more attractive and possibly generating emigration rates higher than otherwise in the partible villages. Thus, an even better counterfactual to ask about 19th century German emigration would include proto-industry: in the absence of partible inheritance and proto-industry, would migration rates have been smaller? Granted, I cannot control for the latter component, but my findings should be considered in this light. In addition, many villages did not use a strict unigeniture or strict partible system. I cannot always tell from my data. Many of the villages noted as ‘‘semi-unigeniture’’ fall into this class because the surveyor happened to provide more written details in filling out the questionaire. Easily many other unigeniture villages could be improperly classified. So some of these results must be used with utmost caution. If semi-unigeniture villages really make up a larger proportion than 15% of all the unigeniture villages, I could be overemphasizing the effect of village structure on migration incentives. Suppose many more families assisted children with migration costs by encouraging the inheriting child to provide the other siblings with cash. If this were a better alternative to receiving plots of land, which then needed to be sold in land markets of various activity, we might then see higher migration rates in unigeniture villages for basically this

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reason. Of course, the child getting the land often needed to finance the cash payments from the sale of land, so the cash payments could not be too large.45 Lastly, it is not surprising that emigration was an important option for Hessians from all types of villages. Almost completely devoid of any significant developing industrial centers before 1860, Hesse–Cassel is distinct from the Westfalia that Kamphoefner (1987) analyzed. Emigration to the United States, with very few entry requirements (unlike many European nations), served as one of the few ways for many to increase their standard of living. REFERENCES Alston, L., and Shapiro, M. O. (1984), ‘‘Inheritance Laws Across the Colonies: Causes and Consequences.’’ Journal of Economic History 44, 277–287. Auerbach, I. (1987–1988), Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS). Index nach Familiennamen 12, 2 vols. Marburg: Achivschule Marburg, Institut fu¨r Archivwissenschaft. Auerbach, I. (1993). Auswanderung aus Kurhessen: nach Osten oder Westen? Marburg: Hesse State Archive. Becker, G. S., and Lewis, G. H. (1973). ‘‘On the Interaction Between Quantity and Quality of Children.’’ Journal of Political Economy 81, 279–288. Benz, E. (1996), ‘‘Population Change and the Economy.’’ In S. Ogilvie (Ed.), Germany: A New Social and Economic History, 1630–1800, Vol. 2. London: Arnold. Berkner, L. K. (1976), ‘‘Inheritance, Land Tenure and Peasant Family Structure: A German Regional Comparison.’’ In J. Goody, J. Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Eds.), Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Blinder, A. S. (1973), ‘‘A Model of Inherited Wealth.’’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, 608–626. Chu, C. (1991), ‘‘Primogeniture.’’ Journal of Political Economy 99, 78–99. Frank, H. (1994), Regionale Entwicklungsdisparita¨ten im deutschen Industrialisierungsprozeß 1849– 1939. Mu¨nster: Lit. Guinnane, T. (1992), ‘‘Intergenerational Transfers, Emigration, and the Rural Irish Household System.’’ Explorations in Economic History 29, 456–476. Guinnane, T. (1997), The Vanishing Irish. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Habakkuk, H. J. (1955), ‘‘Family Structure and Economic Change in Nineteenth Century Europe.’’ Journal of Economic History 15, 1–12. Hansen, M. L. (1961), The Atlantic Migration 1607–1860. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Helbich, W., Kamphoefner, W. D., and Sommer, U. (1991), News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Hessische Landesvermessungsamt, Wiesbaden, Germany. (1859), Generalkarte von dem Kurfu¨rstenthum Hessens 1859. Berlin: Koenigl. Kart. Inst. Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Marburg, Germany Bestand H3, Vols. 1–80; Bestand 30. Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Marburg, Germany. Bestand 16, Repositur II, Klasse 14, No. 23, Vols. I–III. Interior Ministry of Hesse–Cassel. Hesse–Cassel. Verordnungen, Ausschreiben und anderen allgemeinen Verfu¨gungen fu¨r Kurhessen Sammlung, von Gesetzen, No. XXIV 1834. Kassel. Kamphoefner, W. D. (1987), The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, L. (1991), ‘‘Farm Succession in Modern Ireland: Elements of a Theory of Inheritance.’’ Economic History Review 44, 477–499. 45 In this light, migration may have been delayed in the partible villages primarily because of liquidation problems. And if children inherited large expensive plots, this risk may have been even greater.

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