Industrial Britain: Irish, Scottish and Eastern European migrants
Irish Migration and the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution transformed the geography of Britain’s population. Irish workers had been crossing the Irish Sea for seasonal agricultural labour throughout the eighteenth century, but the scale changed dramatically after the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. By 1851, around 520,000 Irish-born people were living in England and Wales — the largest single immigrant group Britain had seen. Irish workers filled the most physically demanding and lowest-paid jobs in the industrial economy: building railways and canals (the “navvies”), working in textile mills, and labouring in dockyards.
Irish communities concentrated in specific urban areas: Liverpool (where the ferry from Dublin arrived), Manchester, Glasgow and London’s East End. These were tight-knit communities that maintained Irish cultural and religious identity through Catholic parish networks. The visibility of Irish poverty, combined with anti-Catholic prejudice, generated significant hostility. Irish workers were sometimes paid less than English workers for the same job, and “No Irish need apply” signs appeared in some lodging houses and workplaces.
Irish migrants contributed significantly to British political movements. Feargus O’Connor was born in Cork and became the most recognisable leader of Chartism — the mass movement for democratic reform. His newspaper, the Northern Star, sold 50,000 copies weekly at its peak. William Cuffay, a Black Chartist leader born to a formerly enslaved man, also demonstrates the diverse origins of the movement’s leadership.
Eastern European Jewish Immigration 1881–1914
A second major wave of migration followed the pogroms that swept through the Russian Empire from 1881 onwards. Triggered by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a wave of antisemitic violence drove hundreds of thousands of Jews to emigrate. Britain, and particularly London’s East End, received approximately 150,000 Eastern European Jews between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Stepney became centres of the new Yiddish-speaking community.
These Ashkenazi Jewish refugees brought distinctive cultural, religious and political traditions. They built synagogues, Yiddish theatres and a thriving press. They also brought radical political ideas — socialist and anarchist thought from the Russian Pale of Settlement. Jewish workers were prominent in East End labour disputes, including the London tailors’ strike of 1889. The Match Girls Strike of 1888 at Bryant and May’s factory in Bow, east London, was another landmark event of the early labour movement.
The Aliens Act of 1905 was Britain’s first peacetime immigration control legislation. It gave immigration officers powers to refuse entry to “undesirable aliens” — defined as those without the means to support themselves or with criminal records. The Act was directed primarily at the Eastern European Jewish community, who were arriving in large numbers and generating a tabloid-driven debate about overcrowding and alien influence in the East End.
The Act had significant exceptions: political and religious refugees retained a right of entry. In practice, it reduced but did not stop Eastern European Jewish immigration. Its historical significance is as the template for all subsequent British immigration legislation — the principle that the state had the right to refuse entry to non-citizens was established for the first time. Its passage was contested: some Liberal MPs argued it was directed at a persecuted people and would prevent genuine refugees from finding safety.
The Naturalisation Act 1870
Before the Aliens Act, the primary legal framework for migration was the Naturalisation Act of 1870. This law replaced a patchwork of earlier statutes and created a systematic process by which foreign nationals could apply to become British subjects. It established the principle that naturalisation was a deliberate legal act rather than something acquired automatically by residence. However, it did not address immigration control — anyone could enter Britain freely; the question was only what legal rights they could acquire once here.
The contrast between the 1870 Act (which addressed citizenship) and the 1905 Act (which controlled entry) marks a decisive shift in how the British state related to immigration. Before 1905, Britain had no peacetime border control. After 1905, immigration became a regulated, legally contested domain — a change that reflected the scale of arrivals, rising nationalism across Europe, and the political influence of tabloid newspapers that blamed immigrants for urban overcrowding and crime.
Scottish migrants were also a significant presence in industrialising England. The growth of coal and steel industries in the north of England, the docks of Liverpool and the factories of Birmingham drew skilled Scottish workers seeking higher wages. Unlike Irish migrants, Scottish workers generally faced less systematic hostility — shared Protestantism, the Act of Union (1707) and legal British citizenship reduced the discrimination they encountered, though prejudice against Scottish accents and culture was not absent.
Migrant communities contributed to the political movements that shaped Victorian Britain. Irish Chartists like Feargus O’Connor bridged Irish nationalist and English working-class radical traditions. William Cuffay, son of a formerly enslaved man, became a prominent Chartist leader in London until his conviction in 1848 and transportation to Australia the following year. The abolitionist movement had drawn on testimony from the Black community — Equiano, Sancho, the Sons of Africa — and continued to link questions of race and freedom to broader debates about rights and democracy.
Eastern European Jewish immigrants brought anarchist and socialist traditions from the Pale of Settlement that fed into the early British labour movement. The Match Girls Strike in Bow, driven by a workforce largely of Irish descent, demonstrated that migrant communities were not passive subjects of English politics but active participants in shaping the emerging industrial democracy.