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Expectations Unfulfilled – Norwegian Migrants in Latin America, 1820–1940

Edited by Steinar A. Sæther

BOOK INTRODUCTION

Steinar A. Sæther1

In the course of world history, approximately eighty million individuals have moved from one continent to another. More than sixty million of these movements occurred in the long century between 1820 and 1940.2 Latin America was a prime receptor of international migrants; around fifteen million people from Europe, Asia, and Africa went there between 1820 and 1940.3

The total population of Latin America increased from twenty-one million in 1820 to almost 210 million in 1960, a ten-fold increase in part because of the effects of mass immigration.

During the same period, nearly one million Norwegians emigrated. Norway and Ireland were the countries with the highest transatlantic migration rate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Yet, Norwegians constituted a minuscule share of the total number of migrants who came to Latin America. Indeed, while Latin American states received millions of immigrants, and Norway was one of the major sources of emigrants in relative terms, very few Norwegians ended up in Latin America.

Why? That is the central question underlying the studies in this volume. How can we explain that so few Norwegian migrants went to Latin America and even fewer chose to remain?

It may be objected that the articles in this anthology cover too few migrants over a too long period within a too vast territorial space. Does it make sense to study these seemingly disparate and fragmented migratory experiences together? Migration scholars, often with good reason, tend to focus on larger movements more concentrated in time and space.

In the case of Latin American immigration history, they have paid particular attention to the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian migrants. But the study of the smaller migrant groups is also important, partly because in sum the smaller groups constituted a large proportion of the immigrants in Latin America. This volume contributes