Irish & Jewish Migration; Movement Within the Empire
A Century of Mass Movement, 1815-1914
Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the start of the First World War (1914), Britain and its empire saw the largest movement of people in their history up to that point. Three flows define the period: Irish migrants pushed into Britain by famine and poverty, Jewish refugees pushed out of the Russian Empire by pogroms, and a vast traffic of Indians, Chinese and others across the empire as labour, often under indentured contracts. The British state also continued to push convicts out, sending around 162,000 people to Australia under transportation until 1868. None of these movements happened in isolation — they fed each other.
The Great Famine of 1845-49 killed around one million people in Ireland and drove almost as many again to emigrate, most of them through Liverpool. Russian pogroms from 1881 brought around 150,000 Jewish refugees to Britain by 1914. The 1905 Aliens Act — Britain’s first peacetime immigration law — was a direct response to that arrival.
Irish Migration: Push, Pull and the Famine
Irish migration to Britain pre-dates the famine: Liverpool already had a large Irish-Catholic community by the 1830s, working in dockyards, building canals and railways. The Great Famine of 1845-49 turned a steady migration into a crisis. The potato blight (a fungal disease) destroyed the staple crop of around three million Irish people; British government relief was slow, ideologically constrained by free-trade doctrine, and partial. Around one million Irish died; another million crossed to Britain or beyond.
The Irish settled in industrial cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, Cardiff. By 1851 around 23% of Liverpool’s population was Irish-born; in Manchester it was around 13%. They lived in the worst housing, took the worst-paid manual jobs, and faced anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility — cartoons in Punch portrayed Irish migrants as ape-like, the ‘Paddy and the pig’ stereotype. Yet they kept communities alive: Catholic parish churches, Gaelic Athletic Association teams (founded 1884), and political pressure that shaped Liberal politics for the rest of the century. The 1850 restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England responded in part to this growing Irish-Catholic presence.
Foreign immigration was a small fraction of the migration story. Far larger was the rural-to-urban shift inside Britain itself. In 1801 around 80% of the British population lived in the countryside; by 1901 around 80% lived in towns and cities. Manchester grew from 75,000 in 1801 to around 645,000 in 1901; Glasgow from 77,000 to 762,000. Cotton mills, steel works, mines and railways pulled rural workers off the land just as the Highland Clearances (Lesson 8) and similar enclosures pushed them. Irish, Jewish and (later) Caribbean migrants arrived into communities already in flux.
Jewish Migration: Pogroms, the East End and the Aliens Act
In 1881 Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated. Across the Russian Empire, anti-Jewish riots — pogroms — killed thousands and dispossessed hundreds of thousands. The May Laws of 1882 imposed strict residential and economic restrictions on Russian Jews. Around two million Jews left the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1914; most went to the United States, but around 150,000 settled in Britain.
They concentrated in London’s East End — Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Stepney — and in Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and South Shields. Jewish migrants worked in the ‘sweated trades’ (clothing, cabinetmaking, tailoring); ran small shops and printing presses; and built communal institutions including synagogues, the Jewish Chronicle (founded 1841), the Jewish Free School and Yiddish theatre. The 1905 Aliens Act, passed under pressure from Conservative MPs and groups like the British Brothers League, was the first peacetime restriction on immigration to Britain. It targeted ‘undesirable’ aliens — without naming Jews, but everyone understood whom it meant.
Transportation: Migration as Punishment
From 1788 the British state shipped convicts to Australia, in lieu of the prisons it did not have, and in lieu of the American colonies that had accepted convicts before 1776. Around 162,000 men, women and children were transported to New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia between 1788 and 1868. Most were sentenced for petty theft — one in three for stealing food or clothing — and around 20% were Irish, including political prisoners after the 1798 Rising and the 1848 Young Ireland uprising. Survivors’ descendants now number around 20% of the modern Australian population.
Asians in Africa: Indenture After Abolition
When slavery was abolished in 1833, plantations across the British Empire faced a labour crisis. Indenture filled the gap. Between 1834 and 1920, around 1.5 million Indians and 200,000 Chinese were shipped to British, French and Dutch colonies on three- to five-year contracts. Around 32,000 were sent to British East Africa to build the Uganda Railway (1896-1901), nicknamed the ‘Lunatic Express’ for its cost and danger. About 2,500 died. Around 6,500 stayed on after their contracts ended — the basis of the East African Asian community whose later expulsion by Idi Amin (Lesson 13) brought 27,200 Ugandan Asians to Britain in 1972.
Indenture was technically free contract labour, but conditions, mortality and physical control made many contemporaries call it ‘a new system of slavery’ (the title of Hugh Tinker’s 1974 history). Migrants did not always go home: around half of Indian indentured labourers stayed in their destination colonies, creating Indian communities from Mauritius to Trinidad to Fiji, and small but enduring populations in East and Southern Africa. The 8-mark comparison question can compare indenture with earlier slavery, with European emigration, or with later post-1948 Commonwealth migration. The strongest comparisons name dates, numbers and conditions.
Three nineteenth-century migrations show three different drivers. Irish migration was pushed by famine and economic collapse; Jewish migration was pushed by religious persecution; Asian movement within the empire was pulled by post-1833 plantation and infrastructure labour shortages. The 1905 Aliens Act was the British state’s first peacetime restriction on incoming migration.