ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates local policies in early modern Europe have a lot in common with national policies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as local relief provisions were gradually taken over by the state from the end of the nineteenth century. As a result, nation states were confronted with dilemmas with respect to foreign migrants somewhat similar to those encountered in early modern cities. Early modern local and modern national migration regulations therefore show a difference in scale but not so much in principle. Before examining early modern urban migration regulations, the chapter sketches the extraordinary impact of migration on Dutch cities, especially in the western coastal part of the current provinces of South and North Holland. In the migration history of Amsterdam most attention has been paid to conspicuous and colourful migrants from the Iberian Peninsula, rich southern Dutch traders and French Huguenots, although as we saw they constituted only a minority of the city's foreign-born population.
