Survey of the Archival Sources concerning Migration and Settlement ...

ut unfortunately the major part of the archives has not yet been charted. This dualnature of the archival sources can best be illustrated by the fact that only a minority ofthe records covered in this overview are based upon substantive archives/collectionswith an obvious and intrinsic relation to migration. These so-called first categoryrecords deal predominantly with organizations which were founded by and/or existedfor migrants (these records are marked with an ♦). The majority of our records thereforemust be regarded as a distillation from archives/collections with a less obviousrelationship to migration, the so-called second category records.IV. Individual migrants in the archives of the IISH 14The international archives and collections occupy approximately 1,500 metres of shelfspace and amount to 343 items (apart from the documentation collections), divided into257 archives or collections of individuals (roughly covering the second half of thenineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century) and 86 of organizations, afew collections on special subjects included. All these 'international running metres' aredescribed in Atie van der Horst and Elly Koen's Guide to the International Archives andCollections at the IISH. The IISH's 'Dutch archives' originated from Dutch people ororganizations working in the Netherlands or its former colonies. In De Nederlandsearchieven van het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Mies Campfensmade accessible more than 4.5 kilometres of documents which comprise the Dutchcollections.This section will seek to examine and illustrate the degree to which individual archivecreators at the IISH can be related to migration history. If we take the broad definitionas described before in section II, it follows from the short biographies in the abovementioned archival guides that most of the 'foreigners' have been migrants. The Dutchdid not migrate on a large scale and if they left Holland to settle abroad, it was in nineout of ten cases in one of the colonies such as the Dutch East Indies or the NetherlandsWest Indies. The major part of the – non-Dutch – personal papers relate to individualsof European descent. Taking the native land of the person concerned as the criterion, arough geographic classification produces the following percentages: Germany 25%,Russia 22%, the remainder of Eastern Europe 8%, France 12%, Great Britain 7%, Italy6%, Austria 6%, Spain 3%, Switzerland 3%, Belgium 2%, other 6%. These percentages– including the total number of Dutch archive creators – are given in table 1 on page 17which illustrates the ratio per nationality between persons who migrated and those whodid not. Most migrants can be found in the ranks of the Germans, Russians and otherEast Europeans.Not surprisingly the activities of these archive creators often cover many countries,including the Americas, the Far East and the Middle East and Third World countries.This is in particular true in the case of those who were exiled once or more than once orwere forced to flee. No less than 33.5% – Dutch persons excluded – of the archivecreators died as émigrés, mostly in the USA and in Paris, Berlin, London andSwitzerland. In table 2 on page 18 the ratios between émigrés and immigration countriesare shown.