Divided Interests, Divided Migrants. The Rationales of Policies Regarding Labour Mobility in Western Europe, c.1550-1914

“Migrations have been part of human history since the dawn of time”. Yet, in the wake of long-term economic transformations over the past five hundred years, human migration and mobility have assumed a dimension which has proved new both in scale and in character. The gradual transformation of the relations of production to a wage-labour economy, and the increasing spatial integration of economic relations, altered significantly the scope and structure of the labour market in which the movement of ‘human beings as factors of production’ takes place. This paper aims to illuminate how the regulation of this movement by western European political authorities over roughly the period 1550-1914 responded to and impacted upon the long-term economic changes which eventually modified the nature and quantity of labour mobility up to the level of today’s ‘globalised labour market’.[...]<br<