Between Land and Sea: Professional and Residential Mobility of Sailors (France, 18th Century)

Isabelle Seguy, INED
Arnaud Bringe, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Laure-Hélène Gouffran, CNRS
Aurélie Hess, CNRS
Philippe Hrodej , université de Bretagne Sud
Emmanuelle Charpentier , université de Toulouse
Thierry Sauzeau, Université de Poitiers

While Ancien Régime populations have long been perceived as immobile by historian-demographers, who studied them through the prism of demographic events recorded in single place, an ANR-funded research project, GEMER (“Seafarers of Early modern France: maritime careers, coastal links and health conditions”), offers the opportunity to track the professional and residential mobilities of sailors and their families, as much as their local roots. Three maritime territories on the Atlantic seaboard and the Mediterranean coast can be studied using the same sources and the same study protocol. This multi-scalar analysis sheds light on the specific behavior of seafarers, both on land and at sea.

Keywords: Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, Linked data sets , Data and Methods, Internal Migration and Urbanization

See extended abstract.