Industrial Britain: Irish, Empire and Refugees, c1700–c1900
A New Britain, A New Migration
Between c1700 and c1900, Britain became the world’s first industrial nation and the largest empire in history. The factory system, railways, the cotton mills of Lancashire and the docks of Liverpool created a hunger for labour. The Empire stretched from the Caribbean and India to West Africa and the Pacific. Both forces reshaped migration. Famine in Ireland (1845–52) drove the largest wave of European migrants Britain had ever known; the Empire pulled in lascars, ayahs and African mariners; and political upheaval in Europe pushed German socialists, Italian craftsmen and Polish Jews toward Britain’s growing cities. Migration in this period operated through both push and pull factors at scale.
Four migrant streams shaped 18th- and 19th-century Britain: Irish famine migrants from 1845; lascars, ayahs and African seafarers from the Empire; political and economic refugees from Europe (Germans, Italians, Eastern European Jews); and a smaller community of formerly enslaved Africans — including Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince — whose voices fed the abolitionist cause.
Industrial Pull, European Push
The Industrial Revolution turned northern English towns into factory cities almost overnight. Manchester’s population grew from around 25,000 in 1772 to nearly 250,000 by 1851. Liverpool became the western entrepôt of the Atlantic. Both cities sucked in labour from rural Britain and Ireland. Italian organ-grinders and ice-cream makers settled around Clerkenwell in London, building Britain’s first ‘Little Italy’ by the 1850s. German political refugees fled the failed 1848 revolutions: Karl Marx arrived in London in 1849 and lived in Soho before settling in Kentish Town. German Jewish bankers (the Rothschilds) reshaped London finance from the 1810s. Polish refugees came after the 1863 January Uprising. Each group answered both an industrial pull and a political push.
Smaller groups of migrants reshaped specific trades. German pork butchers were a familiar sight in northern English towns by the 1880s. Italian craftsmen made the mosaics and statues that decorated late-Victorian churches and town halls. Hostility surfaced when economic competition pinched. Italian street musicians in London faced a long public campaign to drive them off the streets, and suspicion of German and Eastern European workers grew from the 1880s as newspapers campaigned against ‘pauper aliens’. The role of the press matters — the popular press from the 1850s onwards routinely framed migration as a threat to wages, public health or national security, well before the 20th-century debates over the Aliens Act.
Irish Migration: The Largest Wave
The Great Famine of 1845–52, caused by potato blight and worsened by the British government’s reluctance to halt grain exports from Ireland, killed around one million people and forced another million to emigrate. Many travelled the short crossing to Liverpool. By 1851, around 22% of Liverpool’s population was Irish-born. Anti-Irish hostility, much of it shaped by anti-Catholicism, was intense: the slogan ‘No Irish need apply’ appeared in some advertisements in industrial cities, and the press routinely portrayed Irish migrants as carriers of disease in stereotyped cartoons. Yet hostility was patchy. By the 1870s, second-generation Irish migrants were integrating into local trade unions, the Catholic Church and Liberal politics. Working alongside other migrants, they helped shape Britain’s first organised labour movement.
A common error is to assume that because Irish migrants were ‘white’, they faced no prejudice. The opposite is closer to the truth. Anti-Irish hostility ran deep through the mid-19th century, fuelled by anti-Catholic prejudice, fear of cheap labour, and panic about cholera and typhus outbreaks (Liverpool’s 1849 cholera epidemic was widely blamed on Irish migrants). Punch cartoons from the 1860s depicted the Irish in subhuman terms. Newspapers framed Irish neighbourhoods as places of vice and sedition. The Irish are a clear reminder that hostility to migrants in 19th-century Britain was not only racial — religion, class and political fears mattered as much.
Empire and the Atlantic
The Empire produced its own migration streams. Lascars — recruited from Bengal, Yemen and elsewhere — made up roughly a quarter of the British merchant marine by 1855, often working on lower wages than white British sailors. They lodged in dockside lascar boarding houses in London, Liverpool, Cardiff and South Shields. Indian ayahs travelled with British colonial families to care for children, sometimes finding themselves abandoned in London at the end of the voyage; an Ayahs’ Home in east London was set up to support stranded women. Smaller numbers of African mariners worked the Atlantic trade routes.
Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade reshaped Black presence in Britain. Enslaved Africans were sometimes brought to Britain by their enslavers, but their legal status was contested. The 1772 Somerset case (in which Lord Mansfield ruled that enslaved persons could not be forcibly removed from England against their will) is often misread as ending slavery in Britain. It did not — it limited removal, and slavery continued legally throughout the British Empire until the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography (1789) and Mary Prince’s narrative (1831) provided first-person evidence that fuelled the abolitionist cause. Their work shows formerly enslaved Africans as active campaigners for civil liberties, not just as victims of empire.
It is often said that Lord Mansfield’s 1772 Somerset judgement ended slavery in England. The reality is more complex. Mansfield ruled that the enslaved James Somerset could not be forcibly returned to a Caribbean plantation against his will, but he did not declare slavery itself unlawful in England. Adverts for the recapture of runaway enslaved people continued to appear in newspapers into the 1790s, and slavery remained legal across the British Empire until the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. The Somerset case mattered — it gave abolitionists a legal foothold — but it was a single ambiguous ruling, not the abolition of slavery in Britain.
The Built Environment and Cultural Impact
Migration in this period left a permanent mark on the urban environment. Catholic churches and convents spread across northern industrial cities to serve Irish congregations. The synagogues of Manchester’s Cheetham Hill and London’s East End served growing Jewish populations. Italian cafés, ice-cream parlours and mosaic workshops added a continental layer to British high streets. German political clubs in Soho hosted Marx, Engels and the wider exile community. Migrant labour built much of the railway network, the canals and the docks — many of the navvies who dug the Manchester Ship Canal in the 1880s were Irish. The Empire’s edge thus reached into Britain’s cities, and migration was no longer a south-eastern story alone.
The Great Famine of 1845–52 drove around one million Irish migrants out of Ireland, with Liverpool the main entry point — by 1851, around 22% of Liverpool’s population was Irish-born, the largest single migrant influx Britain had seen.