Climate Variability and Human Migration in the 19th Century Netherlands

Julia Jennings, California Institute of Technology
Clark Gray, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Human migration is frequently cited as a potential social outcome of climate change and variability, and the effects are often presumed to have been stronger in the past. Yet, few studies of the historical past have tested the relationship between climate and migration directly. In addition, recent studies that link demographic and climate data are not consistent with Malthusian narratives of displacement responses. Using longitudinal individual-level demographic data from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) from 1822-1922 and precipitation and temperature data from the Netherlands that cover the same period, we examine the effects of climate variability on migration. We employ multilevel discrete-time event history models to test multiple key hypotheses about the climatic effects of migration in this context, including whether climatic variability increased migration, especially for the poor, and whether the strength of these effects declined over the study period as the Netherlands modernized and developed.