Urban Migration: How Rural Workers Built the Industrial Cities

One of the most dramatic demographic changes in British history took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when millions of rural workers and their families moved from the countryside to the new industrial cities.

The Pull of the Industrial Cities

The first cause of the urban migration was the pull of the new industrial cities. The new factories needed workers, and they offered wages that, while low by modern standards, were often higher than what could be earned in the countryside. The promise of regular work, even at the difficult conditions of the early factories, was enough to attract many rural workers, especially those who were struggling to make a living in the countryside.

The construction of the canal network in the late eighteenth century required large numbers of navvies, the manual laborers who dug the canals. The construction of the railway network in the 1830s and 1840s required even more. The building of the new factories and the expansion of the existing ones required large numbers of factory workers, including many women and children.

The Push of the Countryside

The second cause of the urban migration was the push of the countryside. The Agricultural Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had transformed British farming, and the result was a large surplus of rural labor that could not be absorbed by the agricultural sector alone. The enclosure movement had dispossessed many smallholders, and the new system of large-scale farming required fewer workers than the old system.

The Pattern of Migration

The pattern of migration varied over time and by region. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the migration was often over short distances, with workers moving from the immediate countryside to the nearest industrial town. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the migration tended to be over longer distances, with workers moving from the rural south to the industrial north, from Ireland to Britain, and from the countryside of Britain to the industrial cities of North America.

The Sectors of Migration

The migrants to the industrial cities entered a wide range of occupations. Many worked in the new factories, especially the cotton mills of Lancashire and the woolen mills of Yorkshire. Many worked in the iron and coal industries, especially in the West Midlands, South Wales, and the Northeast. Many worked in the building trades, especially during the construction booms of the canal and railway eras.

The Effect on the Cities

The urban migration had a profound effect on the industrial cities. The populations of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, and Glasgow all grew rapidly, often at a rate of several percent a year. The result was overcrowding, poor housing, and inadequate public services, and the new industrial cities became notorious for their slums, their pollution, and their disease. The article on industrial cities describes the conditions in the new industrial cities in more detail.

The Effect on the Countryside

The urban migration also had a profound effect on the countryside. The depopulation of many rural areas led to the collapse of rural communities and the abandonment of villages. The remaining rural population was older and more isolated, and the rural way of life was transformed.

The Long-Term Significance

The urban migration of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was one of the most important demographic changes in British history. It transformed the country from a predominantly rural and agricultural society into a predominantly urban and industrial one, and it laid the foundation for the modern British economy.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about urban migration is the relative weight of push and pull. Friedrich Engels, writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), emphasized the push: enclosure, the loss of common rights, the collapse of cottage industry, and the workhouse. The modern economic-history consensus, articulated by Robert Allen in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009), is closer to a pull story: the urban wage premium of 50-70 percent over rural wages in 1800, combined with the falling price of bread after 1815, made the move pay even for unskilled workers. Feinstein’s Domestic Capital (1998) and Humphries’ Childhood and Child Labour (2010) complicate both stories by showing that migration was highly age-selective, that children and adolescents moved before families did, and that the “rural idyll” that migrants were supposedly pushed from was already a region of seasonal hunger and pauper letters. The interesting current question is whether the migration created the urban poor, or whether the urban poor — including Irish famine migrants after 1845 — created the slums that the early social investigators described.

Selected Sources

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948).
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962).