Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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The nature of the small town had also changed. Certainly most of the once-
characteristic localism had gone. Social geographical changes would become
more pronounced in the post-Second World War period with counterurbanisa-
tion seeing in some accessible places the virtual takeover of housing of almost
every type by commuters to neighbouring cities. Such developments further
destroyed the rural- and country-based nature of some British small towns,
transforming them from solitary urban areas to being subsidiary, detached parts
of distant, larger, urban centres.
Industrial development was to be another factor bringing post-war changes,
such as the policy to set up small factories in the small Scottish burghs to widen
their economic base. Commercial development would be significant, too, with
the growth of national retail chains and out-of-town shopping centres affecting
traditional retailing patterns and structures. The assumption of mass transporta-
tion with its effects on movement, not just commuting but shopping, leisure and
tourism, would be important. All these factors combined to challenge the tra-
ditional nature of the small town. Adams presented a detailed study of how the
Scottish burghs whose ‘roots lie in the countryside’ tried to react to these prob-
lems in the s and s.
82
A book on the English country town had a chapter
entitled ‘The twentieth century: under siege’.
83
Clark begins his chapter on small towns in Volume II of this series
84
with an
interrogation of the diary of Thomas Turner of East Hoathly, Sussex, whose
visits to his local small town of Lewes exemplified an ‘almost constant interac-
tion between villagers and small towns’ in the early Victorian period. Turner’s
descendants, if they are still in East Hoathly, now probably travel by car to
different places for their needs. Nor would Lewes or any other small town still
depend on the production and selling of goods for the local market as was often
the case in small towns in .
As to whether the traditional small country town still exists at all, even in rural
areas, we might consider Lutterworth again. Here its shops are still mainly locally
owned, rather than being national chains. The main street is even free of antique
shops. However, there are several out-of-town shopping centres within reach of
its car-owning population, many of whom are recent in-migrants who work in
Leicester or Rugby, and the local Chamber of Trade is engaged in a consider-
able battle to try to maintain Lutterworth’s centuries-old traditions as a ‘typical
market town’.
85
Its market is still held on a Thursday and generally ‘the market
is the single strongest uncontaminated link between the twentieth century town
and the town at any other period of its perhaps millennium-long past’.
86
Stephen A. Royle
82
Adams, Urban Scotland, p. .
83
Chamberlin, English Country Town.
84
P. Clark, ‘Small towns –’, in P. Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol.
; – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
85
J. Goodacre, The Transformation of a Peasant Economy (Aldershot, ), p. .
86
Chamberlin, English Country Town, pp. –.
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·
·
Migration
(i)
M
been a ubiquitous and, at times, a dominant pres-
ence in modern British cities. In , for example, in almost all the
great towns, newcomers outnumbered natives and, among the adult
population, the migrant majority was overwhelming. In cities such as
Manchester, Bradford and Glasgow, more than per cent of the population
over the age of twenty had been born elsewhere and more generally in urban
Britain the proportion was over per cent.
1
The growth of suburban Britain
in the interwar years also gave rise to settlements in which the migrant presence
was spectacular. The population of Hendon, for instance, more than doubled
between and to reach , and migration accounted for per
cent of the increase.
2
The differences between these two movements – mid-nineteenth-century
migration to industrial and commercial centres and migration out of cities into
suburbs in the twentieth century – should alert us to a further feature of migrants
in modern Britain: namely, their dazzling heterogeneity. A preliminary inven-
tory of migrants would necessarily enumerate the migrant contribution to the
mid-nineteenth-century industrial labour force, as well as the fundholders and
annuitants who congregated in county towns; it would include both village girls
I would like to thank Joanna Bourke, Martin Daunton, Dorothy Porter, Simon Szreter and Naomi
Tadmor for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1
A. Redford, Labour Migration in England,–, nd edn (Manchester, ), p. ; R. Dennis,
English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ), pp. –; E. H. Hunt, British
Labour History – (London, ), p. . The figure of per cent is calculated from M.
Anderson, ‘Urban migration in Victorian Britain: problems of assimilation?’, in Immigration et
société urbaine en europe occidentale,XVIe–XXe siècle, sous la direction d’Etienne François (Paris, ),
p. . Anderson’s work is based on census enumerators’ books for a widely drawn sample of twenty-
two urban areas.
2
Census of England andWales, , County of Middlesex, table ,p..
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sent away from home into domestic service, as well as their employers –
Victorian suburban and small-town householders in flight from the environmen-
tal and social disorder of large cities; it would take note of nineteenth-century
artisans moving through well-established tramping networks intending to return
to their homes, as well as unemployed workers in the late s and s,
fleeing from depressed areas and hoping to settle in London or the Midlands; it
would encompass immigrants from overseas, from places as far apart as Germany
and Jamaica; and it would be incomplete without mention of the tens of thou-
sands of itinerants who swelled and then deserted nineteenth-century cities as
the seasons changed. Upon examination, this inventory would lead us to ques-
tion whether migrants had the least thing in common save the fact of their
mobility.
Even this criterion of mobility, however, does not provide secure ground for
understanding migration, for there has been a great deal of spatial mobility
which traditionally has not been analysed as migration. We need to ask, then,
what does distinguish migration from mobility? We know, for example, that
mid- and late-nineteenth-century slums were inhabited by an intensely mobile
population, and we know too that its movement was generally confined within
the space of a few streets.
3
Such mobility has not normally been included within
studies of ‘migration’.
4
In , however, this practice changed. In that year, and
subsequently, the census included a question dealing with residential mobility
over the previous year. The registrar general’s reports on the census have regarded
the answers to this question as one index of migration.
5
This is significant for it
indicates that at least one part of what distinguishes migration from the myriad
other moves made by individuals is that it is a move noted by the government,
or by some other formal institution, at either a national or local level.
6
But it is not only the formal institutions of government that regard some sorts
of movement as particularly significant. Informal and cultural boundaries are also
important. For the inhabitants of the small Devon town of Colyton, Richard
David Feldman
3
H. J. Dyos, ‘The slums of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, (), –.
4
An interesting exception is C. Pooley and J. Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the
Eighteenth Century (London, ). For examples of the customary approach see A. Cairncross,
‘Internal migration in Victorian England’, in A. K. Cairncross, Home and Foreign Investment
– (Cambridge, ), pp. –; D. Friedlander and R. J. Roshier, ‘A study of internal
migration in England and Wales: Part ’, Population Studies, (), –.
5
D. Coleman and J. Salt, The British Population: Patterns,Trends and Processes (Oxford, ), p. .
Only now are British historians beginning to treat all residential moves as a form of migration. See
C. G. Pooley and J. Turnbull, ‘Migration and mobility in Britain from the eighteenth to the twen-
tieth centuries’, Local Population Studies, (), –. It is interesting, though, that even here
the title betrays equivocation over whether mobility and migration are really the same thing.
6
Indeed, the definitions of what constitutes an urban area used by historians of migration also derive
from administrative boundaries. This is acknowledged in D. E. Baines, Migration in a Mature
Economy (Cambridge, ), p. . See too J. Williamson, Coping with City Growth during the
Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Wall has suggested, it was not the parochial boundaries but a somewhat wider
and, we may presume, unofficial boundary that distinguished ‘natives’ from
‘strangers’.
7
Moreover, the boundaries established by officialdom were also
invested with ‘unofficial’ significance by the people who lived within them. The
reception of migrants was informed not simply by the fact that they had arrived
from another parish or town or country but by the meanings with which their
origins were invested. In , twenty years after the establishment of the new
town at Hemel Hempstead, one resident, who claimed to represent ‘old Hemel
Hempstead’, complained resentfuly, ‘The newtowners came down here from
dusty smoky London and we absorbed them into our culture. But they don’t
know the minds of us country people.’
8
Likewise, migration, for those who
undertook the journey, could be understood as a rupture with their past lives,
even if the distance travelled was modest. The Watling Resident, the successful
local newspaper on a suburban London County Council estate, addressed its
readers’ predicament thus in its first issue in May : ‘we have been torn up
by the roots and rudely transplanted to foreign soil’, a sentiment that was
‘repeated over and over again’ by residents on the estate. But these migrants had
not been uprooted from distant lands or counties; rather, they were from inner
London and more than half had previously lived a few miles away in the north
London boroughs of St Pancras, Islington, Finsbury and Paddington.
9
Migrants,
then, were not merely people on the move but people on the move who crossed
institutionally defined and (or) cultural boundaries.
These considerations hold important revisionist implications for the histori-
cal study of migrations and migrants. First, they suggest that studies of migra-
tion need not only address the causes and consequences of spatial mobility but
should also turn to examine those processes which lead certain sorts of mobil-
ity to be defined as migration, and to examine the consequences of this, both in
public policy and in social and political discourse. In a necessarily selective and
preliminary way, one aim of this chapter will be to do just this.
But it is not only by directing attention to policies, images and debates that
attention to the political and cultural dimensions of migration may be useful. It
can also illumine some of the long-standing questions in the history of migra-
tion. What were the causes of migrations? How did migrants respond to their
new environments? What were the responses of established populations? This is
particularly the case because the history of migration has often been written as
the history of an event whose causes and consequences have been determined
by impersonal, ‘natural’ forces.
The modern study of migration in Britain conventionally is traced to an essay
Migration
7
R. Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family: an illustration of the adaptive family economy’, in L.
Bonfield, R. Smith and K. Wrightson, eds., The World We Have Gained (Oxford, ), p. .
8
F. Schaffer, The New Town Story (London, ), p. .
9
R. Durant, Watling (London, ), pp. , .
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published in in the Geographical Magazine by E. G. Ravenstein, himself a
German immigrant, and elaborated by the same author a decade later in two
lengthy contributions to the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. In these essays,
Ravenstein enunciated what he termed ‘the laws of migration’. As this phrase
indicates, his work was animated by an assumption that the investigation of
migration could be modelled on the study of phenomena within the field of
natural science.
10
More than a century later these positivist origins continue to influence
research.
11
First, following Ravenstein, the causes of migration in the nineteenth
century remain widely understood to have been the outcome of the choices of
income maximising individuals as they responded to the pushes and pulls of the
labour market. Migration is thus seen as the outcome of individual responses to
external social forces – a natural process of cause and effect.
12
Second, the history
of migrants within cities has often been understood within a similarly mechan-
istic model. In this case, scholars have set out to assess the migrants’ level of adap-
tation to a new and unfamiliar environment from statistical measures of, for
instance, residential and occupational clustering.
13
This emphasis on adaptation
further illustrates the influence of natural science on histories of migration. For
the concept of adaptation is necessarily predicated on concepts of what is
‘normal’ and what is ‘deviant’ whose origins lie in nineteenth-century physiol-
ogy.
14
The concept of adaptation introduces an emphasis on the ways in which
migrant groups, on account of their inherent qualities, responded to an inde-
pendently given set of circumstances. In this case, scholars emphasise the collec-
tive characteristics of the migrants in question – the consequences that follow
from their Irish or Jewish origins, for example. At one level, this perspective
differs from the one adopted by economic historians who explain the decision
to migrate by hypothesising a universal human nature that responds to market
David Feldman
10
Ravenstein explained that his project had been spurred by William Farr’s remark that migration,
unlike other demographic events, ‘appeared to go on without any definite law’. E.G. Ravenstein,
‘The laws of migration’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (), . The first essay appeared
as ‘Census of the British Isles, , birthplaces and migration’, Geographical Magazine, (),
–.
11
Acknowledged, for instance, in Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, p. .
12
See Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, for an account written within the positivist tra-
dition but which is alive to the wide variety of factors influencing decisions to migrate. But note
that for Pooley and Turnbull migration encompasses all residential mobility.
13
M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge, ), p. . The
results are both reductive and uncertain. Thus one study argues that the marked tendency of the
nineteenth-century working classes to move residence over only very short distances was caused
by their strong sense of community, while another study derives the evidence for sense of com-
munity from the very same tendency to move only short distances. R. Dennis, ‘Intercensal mobil-
ity in a Victorian city’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new series, (), ;
C. G. Pooley, ‘Residential mobility in the Victorian city’, ibid., new series, (), .
14
I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
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stimuli in uniform and predictable ways. But what both approaches hold in
common is a mechanistic view of cause and effect, and a view that impersonal
and structural forces, whether the market or ethnicity, determine social out-
comes.
But if, instead of regarding migration as a natural event, we take the view that
migrations have occurred when people cross boundaries, and that it is this
which converts mere mobility into migration, we should be encouraged to
investigate whether institutions, policies and perceptions can illumine the causes
and consequences of migration. We can ask to what extent political circum-
stances and cultural practices shaped the pattern of migration, and we can also
ask how far the social and political relations within the city itself shaped the
opportunities open to migrants. In other words, what this chapter will propose
is a more interactive and less mechanistic analysis of the causes and consequences
of migration.
(ii) C. ‒
In these decades migration was conceived as a part of the problem of environ-
mental and social order in the face of unprecedented urban growth. The impact
of rural migrants on towns and cities was central to social investigation and to
social policy. Yet if we look at all mobility in this period we find a different
pattern of movement. For instance, the majority of residential moves were not
from rural to urban settlements but took place either within a single settlement
or were to other settlements of a similar size.
15
This discrepancy between the real
pattern of mobility and its representation within policy and discourse underlines
the distinction drawn above between mobility and those aspects of mobility
which are categorised as migration.
Although rural to urban moves did not typify the pattern of mobility for indi-
viduals, from a societal point of view the aggregate net movement away from
the countryside is what distinguishes these decades. At least per cent of the
demographic growth of urban Britain in the nineteenth century can be attrib-
uted to movement away from rural areas.
16
Indeed, from the s net out-
migration from agricultural areas was so great that between and they
suffered an absolute decline in population, and it is only after that the rate
of movement was checked significantly.
17
From to London alone
received a net increase of .m migrants. Other gains were spread more widely.
The eight largest northern towns received, on balance, , individuals,
Migration
15
Pooley and Turnbull, ‘Migration and mobility’, .
16
Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, p. .
17
R. Lawton, ‘Population changes in England and Wales in the later nineteenth century: an anal-
ysis of trends by registration district’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, (),
; Cairncross, ‘Internal migration in Victorian England’, pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
while the colliery districts and the smaller textile and industrial towns together
grew by an additional ,.
18
Why did these migrants leave home? From Arthur Redford writing in the
s to Jeffrey Williamson writing in the s the predominant answer por-
trays migrants as instrumental individualists responding to plentiful opportunities
for higher real wages.
19
But can the dynamics of internal migration be grasped
by a list of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors operating on actors governed by individual
self-interest? Here I shall suggest that such explanations are not so much mis-
guided as radically incomplete in at least three ways.
The first shortcoming is that they neglect to consider those social relations and
institutions in town and country which left individuals free to respond to urban
labour markets. To an extent such influences have been discussed, but as resid-
ual influences only; alibis hauled into view to explain whatever resists the pre-
dicted pull of urban wages. In this spirit, E. H. Hunt has argued that the slow
response of labourers in southern agricultural counties of England to higher
urban wages can be ascribed to their entitlement to relief under the poor law,
tied cottages, security of employment and the influence of local elites over the
flow of information on urban conditions.
20
But social and institutional factors were not only obstacles. Above all, in order
to understand why so many people were in a position to respond to the lure of
urban wages, we must take account of the radical reduction in the landholding
peasantry, the decline of life-course service and the emergence of an agricultu-
ral and, more generally, a rural labour force dependent on waged labour. Arthur
Redford developed his argument that higher wages pulled migrants into towns,
in part, to refute John and Barbara Hammond’s view that migrants had been
expelled from the land by enclosure. But even if Redford were correct, the
Hammonds’insight, that movement away from the land was facilitated by chang-
ing social relations in the countryside, and specifically by the long-term erosion
of access to land, remains indispensable for understanding why so many people
were in a position to respond to urban wages.
21
The contrast with the situation
in France is striking. In England and Wales in the late nineteenth century just
per cent of the land remained in the hands of peasant proprietors. In France
the equivalent figure was per cent and there the capacity of higher urban
wages to attract migrants was correspondingly weaker.
22
David Feldman
18
A. Cairncross, ‘Internal migration in Victorian England’, pp. –.
19
See Redford, Labour Migration in England, p. ; Williamson, Coping with City Growth, p. . See
too E. H. Hunt, Regional Wage Variations in Britain, – (Oxford, ), p. . For a con-
trary view, though, see S. Pollard, ‘Labour in Great Britain’, in P. Mathias and M. Postan, eds.,
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
20
Hunt, Regional Wage Variations, pp. –.
21
Redford, Labour Migration in England, pp. –; J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Town
Labourer (London, ), p. .
22
P. O’Brien and C. Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France,– (London, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
In France the Revolution advanced and entrenched peasant proprietorship. In
Britain too the state and the law were significant in shaping social relations but
in this case they promoted a highly concentrated system of landownership. The
parliamentary enclosures of the second half of the eighteenth century and early
nineteenth century were carried out by a process heavily weighted in favour of
large landowners over smaller fry, and in which the wishes of the landless labour-
ers, artisans and small traders who had enjoyed access to the commons were dis-
regarded. These enclosures loosened the hold of rural society on two distinct
groups: small landowners – who received land but who were then forced to sell
due to the expenses incurred in the business of enclosure – and landless families
for whom access to common or waste land had formed a vital element in their
livelihood. In the Scottish Lowlands which, far more than the Highlands, pro-
vided migrants to urban Scotland in these years, the authority of landlords was
still less restrained. Cottars – households provided with a small holding in return
for seasonal labour – comprised between a quarter and a third of the Lowland
rural population. But they were rapidly and comprehensively transformed into
a landless labour force in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by
landowners who were able to evict them at will.
23
A second shortcoming of most accounts of migration is that they ignore those
ways in which the relative attractions of the urban and rural economies were
magnified by political decisions. Rural manufacture and retailing, sectors which
had expanded dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century, slipped into
decline thereafter in the face of urban competition. This collapse was closely
connected to the spread of the railways which promoted the distribution and
competitiveness of town-made goods.
24
Railway development was enabled by
private acts of parliament, and in many places some interest groups opposed the
spread of the locomotive.
25
The response of rural petty producers to railway
development, however, has yet to be researched. More securely, we can point to
the removal of protection from agriculture as a political development which pro-
moted migration away from the countryside. Free trade was predicated upon the
idea that the long-term future of British agriculture lay in low costs and high
Migration
23
J. M. Martin, ‘The small landowner and parliamentary enclosure in Warwickshire’, Ec.HR, nd
series, (), –; M. Turner, Enclosures in Britain (London, ), pp. –, –, –;
J. M. Neeson, Commoners (Cambridge, ); K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor
(Cambridge, ), pp. –; T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh,
), pp. –.
24
E. A. Wrigley, ‘Men on the land and men in the countryside: employment in agriculture in early
nineteenth-century England’, in Bonfield, Smith and Wrightson, eds., The World We Have Gained,
pp. –; J. A. Chartres and G. L. Turnbull, ‘Country craftsmen’, in G. Mingay, ed., The
Victorian Countryside, vol. (London, ), pp. –.
25
On landowner opposition see D. Spring, ‘English landowners and nineteenth-century industri-
alism’, in J. T. Ward and R. G. Wilson, eds., Land and Industry:The Landed Estate and the Industrial
Revolution (Newton Abbot, ), pp. –.
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productivity. Indeed, the total labour force employed in farming shrunk in every
decade between and . The increase in British farmers emigrating to
the United States in the decade following repeal suggests that this translated
into fewer farmers, less employment and out-migration in the short term as
well.
26
Third, and most important, any adequate explanation of migration must take
into account the role of familial decision making. A model of migration which
accounts for mobility as a response to real wage differentials is a blunt instrument
in so far as it can only account for a general tendency, it cannot address the
reasons why some people responded to urban opportunities and others did not.
27
One part of the explanation for such differences lies within the dynamics of
family economies. Handloom weavers, for example, remained in their same
declining trade once they had moved from village to town in the s. But what
made their journey worthwhile was the urban factory employment available for
their children.
28
Migration reveals the family economy as a ruthless system of
organisation. In Lancashire the non-inheriting sons and daughters of farmers
left in droves to join the tide of urban migrants.
29
In Colyton too, the sons of
labourers, with nothing to inherit, were the most likely to leave home. Farmers
and tradesmen were more likely to retain sons than daughters. Sons could be
employed in the family concern, while the collapse of rural trades left girls
unable to contribute to family incomes and they, accordingly, were forced by
circumstances and by their parents to leave home. In this respect, it is significant
that the greatest single contribution to the outflow of rural population were the
young girls dispatched into service.
30
This evidence suggests that the calculative
element in migration operated at a familial not an individual level, and that the
different employment opportunities available for different family members con-
tributed to their different propensities to move.
31
In these years there was substantial in-migration from Ireland as well as inter-
nal migration within Britain. The number of Irish in England and Wales grew
from , in to , in and, over the same period, the Irish
population in Scotland rose from , to ,. Although it came to be
shaped by its own desperate rhythm, Irish immigration was not entirely sui
generis. Here too familial behaviour and political influences shaped the pattern
and scale of movement. In the case of Ireland, even more than in Britain, the
decision to migrate was a familial decision and was closely tied to decisions over
David Feldman
26
W. E. Van Vugt, ‘Running from ruin? The emigration of British farmers to the U.S.A. in the
wake of the repeal of the corn laws’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –.
27
On variation at a village level see A. Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History –
(London, ), pp. –.
28
Anderson, Family Structure, pp. –.
29
Ibid., pp. –.
30
W. A. Armstrong, ‘The flight from the land’, in Mingay, ed., The Victorian Countryside, , p. ;
Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, pp. –; Anderson, Family Structure, pp. –; Wall, ‘Work,
welfare and the family’, pp. –.
31
Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility.
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the inheritance of land; as David Fitzpatrick has elucidated: ‘Since migration
normally occurred shortly before marriage became probable, and close to the
moment when household control was transferred from one generation to
another, the decision to migrate may be treated as the outcome of a choice
between marriage and succession, celibacy and dependency in Ireland, and
departure.’
32
After , Irish emigration cannot be treated independently from
the famine and for the same reason it cannot be treated apart from government
policy. Successive years of potato blight can be regarded as a natural disaster; the
consequences of this disaster, however, were influenced by ideology and human
agencies. The British government contributed £,, in famine relief.
Nevertheless, Whig policy was constrained by a desire to moralise landlords,
who had to be taught to employ the poor or support them through rates, and
by a fear of demoralising the masses by allowing them to be both idle and in
receipt of funds. In other words, government policy served to intensify the crisis
in Ireland and one consequence of this was higher levels of emigration.
33
How, then, did migrants fare in British cities in the mid-nineteenth century?
From data for analysed by Michael Anderson, we can say that the employ-
ment chances of British-born migrants and non-migrants were similar. Likewise,
the levels of overcrowding in migrant and non-migrant homes were not very
different. It is the Irish who fared badly. Irish male immigrants were three times
as likely as their British migrant counterparts to be in unskilled employment,
their households, on average, were larger and they were more likely to live as a
subsidiary household in a shared house.
34
Findings such as these have been used
as indices of the degree to which immigrants adapted – or failed to adapt – to
urban life. However, this emphasis on adaptation draws attention away from the
ways in which the city itself – its social relations, discourses and institutions –
interacted with immigrants to shape their behaviour.
In the case of British migrants this means that we need to take account of the
open and fragmented character of housing and labour markets. The predomi-
nance of rented tenures and, outside of Scotland, short-term leases, meant that
housing was easily available. Weak trade unions, the attractions of migrant
workers as strike breakers, high rates of labour turnover, casual hiring and inter-
nal subcontracting which delegated hiring to some members of the workforce,
were all influences that served to fragment labour markets and help migrants to
find a niche. In the case of London, for example, while migrants did not on the
whole secure a foothold in the older trades located in the inner core of the
capital, they were disproportionately well represented in other fields of employ-
ment such as the building trades, the police force, in breweries and gas works
Migration
32
D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration, –’, in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, vol. :
Ireland under the Union, I, – (Oxford, ), p. .
33
C. Kinealy, ‘The role of the poor law during the famine’, in C. Poirteir, ed., The Great Irish Famine
(Cork, ), pp. –.
34
Anderson, ‘Urban migration in Victorian Britain’, pp. –.
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