Immigrant and Migrant Labor in the Industrial Revolution

Introduction

Millions of people moved during the Industrial Revolution. Some simply moved from a village to a town in the hope of finding work, while others moved from one country to another in search of a better way of life. The primary reason for relocating during this period was to find employment. On one hand, this involved migration from the countryside to the growing industrial cities; on the other, it involved movement from one country — in this case, Britain — to another. Poor working conditions, housing, and sanitation led many people to choose emigration. At the time, the British controlled a massive empire including America, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and many people moved to these countries in search of a new life.

Migration was not limited to people moving out of the country; it also involved many people moving into Britain. In the 1840s, Ireland suffered a terrible famine. Faced with the massive cost of feeding a starving population, many local landowners paid for laborers to emigrate because it was cheaper than providing poor relief over a long period of time. Approximately one million of these laborers migrated to Britain. This paper examines the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England and explores the impact that immigrant and migrant labor played in contributing to the economic growth of the period.

Background: Britain's Rise as an Industrial Nation

Immigrant and migrant workers were a significant factor in providing labor for the Industrial Revolution that took place in Great Britain between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. This mass migration was rooted in a variety of causes, but all migrants were attracted by the promise of economic opportunities offered by the growing British economy. The influx of people added to a growing urban population and shaped the character of the cities in which they settled.

According to Judge and Langdon (2009), two factors were prominent in Britain's emergence as the first industrial nation in Europe. First, Britain led in the transformation of agriculture, which enabled the country to produce enough food to feed a growing urban labor force. Second, Britain established itself as a pioneer in the Scientific Revolution, which allowed it to reduce the unit cost of production through improved technology.

Before the Industrial Revolution, crops were grown in open fields with limited results. The advent of enclosed fields enabled farmers to produce two yearly crops while allowing one-third, instead of the traditional one-half, of the field to lie fallow. Innovations such as the intensive use of fertilizer, rotation between root crops and seed crops, the use of hybrid seed, and improvements in land drainage techniques increased crop yields, allowing farmers to provide sufficient food for the growing urban labor force needed to support changes in manufacturing during this period.

Pre-Industrial Revolution manufacturing was chiefly accomplished through the "putting-out" system. An entrepreneur would secure raw material, find parties to work with it, and collect the finished product for sale elsewhere; workers received a piecework wage. The factory system, by contrast, called for an entrepreneur or company to gather individual workers under one roof and one managerial authority. Workers were paid on a fixed pay scale and labored under tight discipline performing a single, repetitive part of the production process.

Britain was positioned to take the initial lead in the industrial production of goods and services for several reasons. In the early eighteenth century, the British were the Western world's most experienced traders and entrepreneurs. English colonies were spread around the world, and the North American colonies were the largest markets for goods outside Europe. The English national bank had operated as a credit and finance institution since 1603, interest rates were lower than anywhere else, and the English stock markets were the world's largest and most flexible for raising capital.

The British pioneered the inventions that made steam engines the standard form of mechanical energy for industrial production. They controlled the raw materials of the early Industrial Revolution — coal and cotton. Their coalfields were large and easy to access, providing fuel to run steam engines. Cotton came from India and North America, both of which had strong political ties to England. The cotton was transported across the ocean on English ships, woven in English factories, and exported to the rest of Europe without competition for a century. Finally, the geography and topography of England made the country ideal for moving goods to market. There were few natural obstacles to travel and transport, and the river system was connected by canals during the eighteenth century, making transportation cheaper and safer than elsewhere.