Measuring Global Migration, 1800-1938: Gross Flows, Returns, and the Distribution of World Population

Humans have been migrating since the out-of-Africa dispersal, roughly 300,000 years ago, but the nineteenth century marked a major leap forward. For the first time in history, millions of people voluntarily migrated over long distances, from Europe to the Americas and Oceania, and from India and China to Southeast Asia. Yet we still know too little about these flows. The recent literature has made great progress in analyzing migrants' motivations and the microeconomic impact of their arrival, but the conventional wisdom still relies on the data compiled by Ferenczi and Willcox (1929) on gross migrations in the Atlantic economy. In this paper, we reconstruct new worldwide series for total (gross) and net migration, including inter-Asian and, partially, inter-European flows from 1800 to 1938. We estimate that more than 150 million people, about 10% of the world population, migrated, but half of them returned home. They accounted for between a sixth and a tenth of the workforce in the Americas and from a fifth to three-quarters in Australia and New Zealand. We also estimate the long-run effect of migrations on the distribution of the world population.