Seasonal Brickmakers

Over the last decades Piet Lourens and Jan Lucassen have published extensively about seasonal brickmakers from the German principality of Lippe-Detmold from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Annually they left in great numbers (10,000 around 1900, or some 40 per cent of the male adult population) with destinations in the rest of Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Poland, Russia, Austria and a few more countries (see bibliography below as well as their publication Hollandgang im Spiegel der Reiseberichte on this site; for more titles on the history of seasonal migration of brick makers, seasonal migration and migration in general see the CV of Jan Lucassen). And together Piet Lourens and Jan Lucassen still carry on this research. For that purpose they have collected all available archival materials and built databases with names of these men, in particular for the period 1778-1875.
In close cooperation with the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen. Abteilung Ostwestfalen-Lippe in Detmold (Germany) and Dr. Wilfried Reininghaus (the director general of the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen) they have published all relevant source documents on this site, viz. the original documents, their transcriptions, and access files of the annual lists of men who left, as handed in by the local authorities (pass lists) and by the "brick messengers" (the so-called "Ziegelboten"-lists): See 'Lippische Ziegler'.

Bibliography of the publications of Piet Lourens and Jan Lucassen on this topic:
• 'Mechanisering en arbeidsmarkt in de Groningse steenbakkerijen gedurende de negentiende eeuw', in: Jaarboek voor de Geschiedenis van Bedrijf en Techniek 1 (1984), pp. 188-215

• Lipsker op de Groninger tichelwerken. Een geschiedenis van de Groningse steenindustrie met bijzondere nadruk op de Lipper trekarbeiders 1700-1900 (Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff, 1987)

• Arbeitswanderung und berufliche Spezialisierung. Die lippischen Ziegler im 18. Und 19. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1999; Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung 6)

• 'Karrieren lippischer Ziegler: Das Beispiel Delfzijl 1855', in: Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 76 (2007), pp. 63-80