ABSTRACT
Internal migration during the era of Industrial Revolution was not a peaceful process. It was a process according to which people from rural areas seeking to improve life standards and find employment opportunities were moving to cities. In the exemplary case of Britain, this process of internal migration, industrialisation and urbanisation is inextricably intertwined with the 'enclosures' in rural settings and with the infamous 'poor laws' in urban centres. A further type of migratory movements in the post-war period was permanent, settlement migration from Europe to North America and from Asia and Latin America to Australia. For neoclassical equilibrium theories, migration patterns at the macro-level are merely aggregations of micro-processes instantiated by rational individual choices. Structuralist or historical-structural migration theories are mainly based on Marxist, neo-Marxist and other radical traditions and shift their interest from the micro- to the macro-level of societal developments, contradictions and transformations.
