Industrial Migration 1700–1900: Africans, Irish, Eastern European Jews and the Aliens Act

The two centuries from 1700 to 1900 cover the making of an industrial Britain, the loss of the American colonies, the growth of the second British Empire, the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in the colonies, the Great Irish Famine, the pogroms of the Russian Empire, and the passage of the first general British immigration restriction. Migration in this period is shaped above all by empire, by industrialisation and by persecution abroad. The lesson examines Africans and Black Britons, Irish migrants during and after the Famine, Jews from Eastern Europe after 1881, smaller German, Italian and Chinese communities, and the Aliens Act 1905.

Africans and Black Britons in the eighteenth century

By 1750 there were an estimated 10,000–15,000 Black people in Britain, most in London and the major slaving ports of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. Some were enslaved servants brought by returning planters; some were free sailors working the Atlantic trade; some were domestic servants or musicians; a small number became independent professionals. The legal status of enslaved people in England itself was ambiguous, and a sequence of celebrated cases tested it.

Somerset v Stewart (1772) is the central case. James Somerset, an enslaved man brought to England by the Boston customs officer Charles Stewart, escaped, was recaptured and was held in irons on a ship bound for Jamaica. Abolitionists led by Granville Sharp secured a writ of habeas corpus. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's judgment of 22 June 1772 held that slavery was "so odious" that nothing could support it except positive law, and that since no such law existed in England, Somerset must be freed. The case did not abolish slavery anywhere in the British world, but it established that enslaved people could not be forcibly removed from England against their will. Abolitionists treated it as a de facto end to slavery on British soil.

Three Black Britons of the period are worth naming as historical actors in their own right:

• Francis Barber (c1742–1801), Jamaican-born, came to England in 1750 and entered the household of Samuel Johnson in 1752. Barber was Johnson's manservant and later, under the terms of Johnson's will, his principal heir. He ran a school in Staffordshire.
• Ignatius Sancho (c1729–1780), born on a slave ship, became a grocer in Westminster, a published composer, a published author (his Letters, 1782), and in 1774 the first known Black person to vote in a British parliamentary election, which he did as a qualifying householder in Westminster.
• Olaudah Equiano (c1745–1797), an Igbo man kidnapped and enslaved, bought his freedom in 1766, became a leader of the abolitionist movement in Britain and in 1789 published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, a bestseller that powerfully shaped British abolitionist opinion.

These individuals are crucial because they allow you to write about eighteenth-century Britain without reducing Africans to passive victims. Sancho's letters, Equiano's autobiography and Barber's inheritance are all exam-usable evidence.

The abolitionist campaign, led by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (founded 1787 and including Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce in Parliament), produced the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which banned British participation in the transatlantic slave trade, and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which abolished slavery itself in most of the British Empire from 1834, with a transitional "apprenticeship" system ending in 1838. After 1833 the British government paid £20 million in compensation to slave-owners, the largest single government transaction of the nineteenth century; enslaved people themselves received nothing. The enslaved population freed in 1833 numbered around 800,000, but these people were almost entirely in the Caribbean and not in Britain itself.

Irish migration and the Great Famine

Irish migration to Britain was already substantial by 1800, but the Great Famine of 1845–52 turned a flow into a mass movement. The phytophthora infestans blight destroyed successive potato harvests. Approximately 1 million people died in Ireland and approximately 1 million emigrated — of whom roughly half went to North America and half crossed the Irish Sea to Britain, especially to Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and London.

Liverpool was the first port of arrival and the principal port of onward passage to the United States. The 1851 census recorded 22% of Liverpool's population as Irish-born. By 1861 there were 601,634 Irish-born people in England and Wales and 204,083 in Scotland. Catholic parishes multiplied rapidly: St Patrick's Liverpool, St Chad's Manchester, the Catholic cathedral of St Andrew's in Glasgow.

Census	Irish-born in England and Wales	Irish-born in Scotland
1841	289,000	126,000
1851	520,000	207,000
1861	602,000	204,000
1871	567,000	207,000

Irish migrants worked above all on the transport infrastructure of industrial Britain — the railway navvies who cut embankments, bored tunnels and laid track from the 1830s to the 1870s — and in dock labour, construction, textile factories and domestic service. Their labour was essential to industrialisation and to the urban transport revolution.

Anti-Irish prejudice was pervasive. Punch magazine regularly printed cartoons by John Tenniel and others depicting the Irish as simian, drunken, violent and criminal, particularly during the Fenian agitation of the 1860s. Public health reformers such as Edwin Chadwick and Friedrich Engels cited Irish slums as causes of disease and moral disorder. The phrase "No Irish need apply" — though more common in the United States than in Britain, as historians have argued — circulated in boarding-house advertisements. Anti-Catholicism, perhaps even more than anti-Irish nationality, fuelled the hostility: the Gordon Riots of 1780 had already shown the force of London anti-Catholic sentiment, and the papal re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy in 1850 (the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 was Parliament's response) kept that current alive.

flowchart TD
  A[Great Famine 1845-52] --> B[1 million die in Ireland]
  A --> C[1 million emigrate]
  C --> D[North America]
  C --> E[Britain]
  E --> F[Liverpool 22% Irish 1851]
  E --> G[Railway navvies]
  E --> H[Catholic parishes]
  E --> I[Anti-Irish prejudice]

Jews from Eastern Europe 1881–1914