Nordic Migration to the New World

The statistics on nineteenth and early-twentieth century migration from the Nordic countries to the USA are dramatic. In 1800 the population of Norway was under 883,000. A century later around the same number of Norwegians had migrated to the USA, meaning that a greater percentage of the population of Norway went west than from any European country except Ireland. The population of Sweden in 1800 was larger (2.35 million); Sweden was an independent European power, while Norway was part of the kingdom of Denmark and would enter into union with Sweden from 1814. Nonetheless, by 1914 over a million Swedes had departed for America, making Sweden the largest net exporter of its citizens of all the Nordic countries, which together had provided nearly three million American immigrants by 1920.

These striking top-level figures conceal a much more complex set of realities. For example, the pace of migration was not uniform, gradually growing in intensity until the 1880s, which witnessed the greatest concentration of transatlantic migration. While the migration process from Norway began in 1825, significant emigration from Finland had its heyday at the start of the twentieth century and was more urban in nature than the typically rural/agricultural immigration pattern adopted by the Norwegians. This essay is entitled Nordic Migration, but it is important to note that, just as it was not uniform across time, it was not uniform across the region either. Each country had its own economic, cultural and religious history in the period in question, and indeed Norwegian emigration and immigration patterns were highly local, meaning that even generalising for that one country is problematic, and we are dealing not just with the peninsular countries of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), but the whole Nordic region, including Finland and Iceland.