Mobility and Modernity uses voluminous German data on migrations over the past two centuries to demonstrate why conventional assumptions about the relationship between mobility and modernity must be revised.

Steve Hochstadt combines careful quantitative methods, easily understood numerical data, and social analysis based upon broad reading in German social history to show that current beliefs about the direction and timing of changes in German mobility, which have been based on late-nineteenth-century anxieties about urbanization and industrialization, do not match the data.

Migration rates in Germany rose continuously throughout the nineteenth century, and have fallen during the twentieth century. Mobility, Hochstadt argues, was not an unprecedented accompaniment to industrialization, but a traditional rural response to specific economic changes. Hochstadt's more precise analysis of urban in- and outmigration shows the mechanism of urbanization to have been the migration of families rather than the much greater, but also more circular, migration of single men and women.