Artisans Abroad recovers the lost story of the workers whose migration carried industrialization from Britain to the European Continent and beyond in the nineteenth century. Scholars have focused on capital and machines, neglecting and erasing the human brain and sinew essential to technology transfer. The book painstakingly reconstructs the movements of skilled and unskilled men and women, whether Nottingham lacemakers or Welsh ironworkers, and the indispensable role they played introducing British industrial methods in France and elsewhere in Europe. While eighteenth-century migrants consisted largely of artisans, the period examined here increasingly produced a labour force with skills acquired in British industry. Not only Britons, but migrants from across Europe could be found in many Continental workplaces, supporting the author's contention that “there is no such thing as a self-sufficient economy and labour market” (p. 253).
The author frankly confronts the challenges of reconstructing the lives of mobile working people who rarely left documentary traces. He has overcome this by skilfully assembling a remarkable array of sources from regional archives ranging from France, Britain, and Belgium to Canada. These include business and industrial records, family histories, parliamentary papers, consular records, press accounts of strikes and other conflicts, memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies, some by workers themselves, as well as a wealth of contemporary visual evidence.
The book examines four case studies: textiles, specifically lace, mechanized through Nottingham lacemakers’ migration; iron and steel, which benefited from the importation of British puddlers; machines; and railways. In some industries, employers drove migration by importing workers to set up and run machinery in France; these included linen production, iron, and railways. In lacemaking, however, workers themselves initiated migration, bearing skills to France and elsewhere.
Nottingham led the world in machine-made lace from the early nineteenth century into the twentieth. Too expensive for individual artisans to own, steam-powered lacemaking machines necessitated new forms of industrial organization, bringing lacemakers together into factories.
Britain lifted its ban on emigration in 1824 and on exporting machinery in 1843 – although smuggling antedated these concessions. Lacemakers in modest numbers moved from Nottinghamshire, carrying experience in machine lacemaking to Calais and other French as well as German lacemaking centres. Lacemakers’ migration took familiar forms: chain migration of friends and kin as well as circular migration between Northwestern Europe and Nottinghamshire, shaped by trade cycles and consequent unemployment. Migration between Britain's east coast and Northwestern Europe reproduced patterns within the British Isles – that is, short distances undertaken for durations of three to five years. Although accurate figures remain elusive, the author estimates no more than a few hundred such migrants lived in each French lacemaking town (pp. 40–41), totalling perhaps 20,000 between 1815 and 1870, with comparable numbers in cotton and linen. Their impact on French and Continental industrialization proved out of all proportion to these modest numbers: “small scale, but high value” (p. 44).
Mobile skilled workers and even inventors became essential to other Continental industries, including textiles, iron and steel, and railways, all dependent on British migrant operators and mechanics. The author has documented how tinkerers, who invented and repaired early industrial machinery, became indispensable, rising socially throughout industrializing Europe into the haute bourgeoisie and even into government (as in Russia, Sweden, and Norway) (p. 62).
Cockerill, inventor of textile machines, went on to perfect the blast furnace and design railways. His son made a career travelling around fixing machines. Conversely, French inventors, like the Seguin brothers, travelled repeatedly to London, Scotland, and the north to confer with British engineers, including George Stephenson, and to purchase machinery and hire workers. All of this informed them in building Europe's first suspension bridge across the Rhône in 1925, as well as steamboat boilers and a steam locomotive antedating Stephenson's.
France's textile industry depended on handicraft production as late as 1800 – indeed, until the arrival of smuggled British machines and British workers to keep them running. Dundee and Ulster linen workers travelled with spinning machines, despite Britain's export ban, as machines alone proved useless without operators and repair persons. British workers operated the machines producing French linen's spectacular growth between 1836 and 1860. British ironworkers likewise appeared wherever Continental ironworks could be found. Iron puddlers and rollers went to France, Germany, and Belgium, recruited in advance of factories’ construction by both British and French employers. As cheaper local workers acquired skills and replaced them, British ironworkers moved from works to works and country to country, part of “an integrated labour market for Welsh and English iron workers” (p. 81). Cornish miners similarly helped establish mining operations in the United States, South Africa, South America, Australia, and the European Continent, including Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and France.
The Seguin brothers notwithstanding, British capital and expertise proved responsible for major Continental rail systems, relying on unskilled British navvies or labourers as well as masons with experience in railroad building. British entrepreneurs William Mackenzie and Thomas Brassey imported between 2000 and 5000 workers, mostly navvies, for the Paris–Rouen railway, along with equipment of all kinds, down to superior shovels. Even French railway carriages and stations followed British designs, constructed in transplanted British shops. British train drivers operated the railways, and coal for locomotives initially came from Britain. Across Europe, Welsh iron master John Hughes employed one hundred Welsh ironworkers and miners at Russia's largest complex of blast furnaces, collieries, and brickworks in Yusovka (Hughesovka), now Donetsk in the Donbass.
A rare glimpse of these dynamic events from British workers’ point of view appears in the autobiographies and letters of four highly mobile artisans: a leather dresser; an itinerant gas mechanic who ranged from St. Petersburg to Boston; an Irish Chartist shoemaker; and a goldsmith who tramped from London to Hamburg, finishing in a Paris workshop staffed by workers of many lands. Although many such men set their own agendas, most British workers arrived on the Continent at the behest of a specific employer and/or for a specific project.
The book usefully confronts gendered distinctions among migrant workers. Although young, unattached men historically dominated long-distance migration, some important industries largely employed women, including lacemaking and other textile production. Unlike male migrants, however, women textile workers failed to improve their wages by travelling to France where, like French women, they commanded the same low wages despite their skill.
Further, when lacemaking machines arrived on the Continent, a gendered division of labour arrived with them, in which men operated machinery, assisted by women and children, ending women's historic control of production, product, and trade. As in Britain, super-exploited children's and women's labour enabled French textile industrialization and its profitability. The author adeptly mined recondite sources for traces of these women's agency: Nottingham workers raised £275 for striking Calais lacemakers in 1890, for instance. Such solidarity reflected close and frequent transnational communication attending migration.
Mindful of current debates, the book also considers relations between British migrants and Continental populations. Most British workers arrived innocent of Continental languages and cultures: still, the author has documented substantial intermarriage between British lacemakers and native French people, resulting in transnational family formation. British employers established Protestant schools and other facilities suspect in Catholic France, yet numerous men who married French women converted to Catholicism. Further, workplaces developed polyglot argots enabling their diverse workforces to communicate. As in most migrant populations, children adapted easiest to language and culture, often acting as guides for parents. Still, English-language newspapers and cultural forms such as rugby set British workers apart, as did their embrace of Chartism and trade unionism. In view of this, the author examines several anti-British riots, concluding that their causes lay elsewhere than chronic xenophobia, instead provoked by wage differentials, unemployment, or British machines rather than people. Affected workers returned penniless and terrorized to Britain all the same, or moved on to Australia or other destinations offering better prospects. In this respect, the author argues, migration knit the Continent together with Britain and the empire into one transnational labour system.
For British industrial workers, migration remained worthwhile as long as wages remained higher than in Britain, or until French workers acquired the skills to supplant their British trainers or competitors. As industrialization and industrial workers moved from Britain first to Belgium, then France, and, finally, Germany and elsewhere, the gap between British and Continental economies inexorably narrowed by the end of the period covered, with it wage differentials, thus the advantage of migrating.
The book is densely packed with rich information, reflecting the painstaking research needed to piece together evidence from unlikely and scattered sources. At times, the detail can feel overwhelming, a testament to the challenge of recovering the hidden history of a hitherto neglected question and population. It simply makes clear the amount of work remaining to complete our understanding of migrant workers’ role in European and global industrialization.
This evidence convincingly collapses distinctions between long- and short-distance migration, temporary and permanent migration, and those between British and Continental industrialization and labour markets. The book persuasively argues for considering labour and skill as equally important movable wealth to machines, technology, capital or profit, and human skill and labour as critical in the spread of industry from Britain to Europe and beyond.
