Managing Mobility in Early Modern Europe and its Empires

This book examines how migration and mobility were controlled, supported, and restricted in early modern Europe and European colonies. The aim of the book is to investigate how different actors, such as rulers, regional lords, local authorities, and corporations tried to regulate different forms of mobility and how those on the move reacted to these attempts. The book examines the agency of both the authorities and the migrants, shifting focus between the macro and the micro level. The chapters will also illuminate the ways gender, religion, language, ethnicity, occupation, and socioeconomic status were entangled in the regulations concerning mobility. Control of migration is inextricably linked with power relations. In this book, mobility is seen as a wide social process, which covers daily or seasonal movement as well as less or more stable migration.

Katja Tikka is a legal historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her researchfocuses on early modern Nordic legislation in different fields and societies. Tikka also teaches legal culture at the University of Lapland, Finland as a visiting teacher.

Lauri Uusitalo is a postdoctoral researcher in the Unit of History, Philosophy and Literary Studies at Tampere University, Finland. His research explores the history of early colonial Spanish America, and in particular, indigenous agency in the colonial society.

Mateusz Wyżga is Associate Professor in the Institute of History and Archival Studies at the University of the National Education Commission, Krakow, Poland. His research focuses on the history of mobility and migration, rural history, the socio-economic history of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and historical demography. He is also interested in social archival studies and regional historiography.