Paths of Property: Migration, Real Estate, and Inequality in an Immigrant Metropolis, 1850–1900

How did mass migration reshape the ownership of property—and with it, the distribution of wealth—during the age of steam? This talk examines the relationship between migration, real estate, and inequality across nineteenth-century migration systems. It asks how migrants entered property markets, how their investments affected land values, and how these changes altered the position of established populations, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. The talk also ponders on the linkage of censuses, tax records, cadastral sources, notarial deeds, and probate files to make it possible to reconstruct ownership and wealth trajectories at remarkable depth. It treats migrants not merely as workers, but also as buyers, landlords, lenders, and investors whose mobility transformed access to land, housing, credit, and long-term wealth accumulation.

Michael Goebel is Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. His research explores migration, cities, inequality, empire, and modern Latin America in comparative and global perspective. He is the author of Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism and is currently completing a global history of modern cities while developing a comparative project on migration, property, and inequality.