- Title:
- Peasants on the move: early twentieth-century labour migration from Russias Western frontier to Canada
- Creator:
- Kukushkin, Vadim
- Date Created:
- 2004
- Degree Awarded:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Subjects:
- immigration labour ethnicity
- Geographical Focus:
- Canada Russia Ukraine Belarus
- Supporting Materials:
- n/a
- Description:
- In the carly twentieth century, thousands of Ukrainian and Belarusan peasants from tsarist Russia entered Canada as wageworkers, employed in the resource industrics and the manufacturing sector. Despite the impressive amount of scholarship on immigration and cthnicity that appeared in Canada during the last decades, labour migration from Russia’s western frontier has failed to attract the attention of historians. Drawing on previously untapped or little used archival and published sources, this dissertation challenges traditional assumptions about emigration from the Russian Empire, which view it as consisting primarily of religious and political refugees, and demonstrates that Ukrainian and Belarusan peasant-workers constituted a substantial share of immigrants from the empire’s western frontier. This study utilizes a systems approach to migration, attempting 1o integrate the New- and the Old-World contexts in which the transoceanic moves of Ukrainian and Belarusan peasants occurred. The migrants are traced all the way from their points of origin in Russia’s western provinces to their transformation into industrial workers and residents of Canadian resource frontier and urban neighbourhoods. Focussing on two neighbouring regions of the Russian Empire, the dissertation contributes to a better and more detailed understanding of the source areas, spatial trajectories, social structure and ethnic composition of early twentieth-century Canadian immigration from Eastern Europe. A comparative analysis of migration from these regions aims at illuminating the similarities and differences in the configuration of migrant flows that connected various parts of the European continent with Canada.
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- Kukushkin, Vadim. 2004. "Peasants on the move: early twentieth-century labour migration from Russias Western frontier to Canada", Department of History, Carleton University
- Link to this page:
- https://cuhistory.github.io/grads/items/hist_161.html
Rights
- Rights:
- Copyright the author, all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.