Sorry if this has been asked before— will happily read an old thread if anyone has link.
Okay... so early in the 19th century London became the worlds largest capital, largely due to a migrant population. Why? The layman’s sources I’ve found online say it’s because of migrants from the country looking for work. What was happening to the farms that made people want to go to the city? Famine in Ireland, but what about the rest of Britain? Was something happening in the countryside? Were there tremendous amounts of people coming from other countries?
This question has been bothering me for days and I can’t figure it out!
Thanks in advance! 😸
The last famine in England was in the 1620s, and in lowland Scotland in the 1690s (the Highlands suffered from the same potato blight as Ireland, and I have been unable to locate the date of the last famine in Wales).
Part of the disappearance of famine was likely because of the English poor laws, but another cause was the British Agricultural Revolution, which had been going on since medieval times. So maybe the world's slowest revolution. And it wasn't just British, it also was across the Netherlands and northern France (including what is now Belgium). So like great job naming that one, 19th century historians. Anyway, this 'revolution' was an ongoing set of improvements in food production, from the development of four-crop rotation practices to improved ploughs.
This agricultural revolution was associated with an increase in the population, Maddison's long-term historical series shows the UK's population rising from an estimated 4m in 1500 to 6m in 1600, 9m in 1700 and 21m in 1820. So there were a lot of kids growing up and they couldn't all inherit the family farm. Farm work is also very hard, and the outcomes are notoriously volatile, making manufacturing work more attractive to labourers than it might appear to people who are used to comfortable, temperature controlled, office jobs.
There is a lively and long-running debate about what happened to working class wages when during the Industrial Revolution, did living standards for this group start to rise only in the 1840s or 1850s, or did they start earlier, maybe the 1810s? But it does seem rather clearer that there was a change in the social structure over the industrial revolution. Allen (2018) estimates that the 'Bourgeoise' (large-scale capitalists, bankers, merchants, high officials and investors) rose from 3% of the population in 1688 to 8-9% in the mid 19th century. The "lower middle class" rose from 6-7% in 1688 to 15-16% over this time period. It is much more agreed that real incomes for these two groups rose (as well as for wealthy landowners).
So in short, England saw an increase in population and an increase in incomes for significant shares of said population.
The higher incomes, or at least the chance thereof, are of course attractive to would-be immigrants. England was also relatively peaceful and liberal during this time. The USA (and its predecessor colonies) had higher wages for the working class, but getting to England from other places in northwestern Europe was much cheaper and easier than crossing the Atlantic. London was always a port city that attracted travellers, there were considerable Germans and French, but Irish immigration quickened after 1815, and Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe started arriving in numbers from the 1880s to 1890s. This was partly offset by many Brits emmigrating to the USA and British colonies.
Sources (not linked in text)
Allen, Robert C. (2018), Class structure and inequality during the industrial revolution: lessons from England's social tables, 1688–1867, The Economic History Reivew, Vol 72, pages 88-125. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ehr.12661
Daniel R. Curtis & Jessica Dijkman (2019) The escape from famine in the Northern Netherlands: a reconsideration using the 1690s harvest failures and a broader Northwest European perspective, The Seventeenth Century, 34:2, 229-258, DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2017.1410494, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0268117X.2017.1410494, https://repub.eur.nl/pub/114830
HOYLE, R. W. (2010) Famine as agricultural catastrophe: the crisis of 1622-4 in east Lancashire. Economic History Review. Nov2010, Vol. 63 Issue 4, p974-1002. . DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00510.x.
Lloyd, Amy, Emigration, Immigration and Migration in Nineteenth Century Britain, University of Cambridge, https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/intl-gps/intl-gps-essays/full-ghn-contextual-essays/ghn_essay_bln_lloyd1_website.pdf
Solar, Peter M. 1995, Poor relief and English economic development before the industrial revolution. Economic History Review. Feb95, Vol. 48 Issue 1, p1-22. 22p. DOI: 10.2307/2597868.