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Chapter 8
Global Economy, Regional Migration, 1800-1900
Factories and fields
The term factory changed its meaning during the eighteenth century. From a commercial depot where goods
were bought and sold, it became a productive center where goods were made using machinery. Factory
production expanded during the nineteenth century. Factory-produced goods—textiles, soaps, shoes,
agricultural implements, then steamships and railroads—were sold all over the world. Wage labor forces were
concentrated in the large and small factory towns. Migrants from the surrounding areas reinforced the work
forces of the growing factories, and migrants from greater distances joined them as well.
The factories were situated close to crucial resources such as water power or, later, coal for steam power.
Further resources included a skilled labor force and the accumulation of previous investments: long after the
decline of water power as the motive force for factory production, mill towns remained in the river valleys of
Flanders, the English Midlands, and New England, where they drew on the work forces, the machinery, and the
suppliers that had been gathered there.
Factories also relied on produce from the fields and on the transportation networks linking factory and field.
The global wheat market, for instance, linked productive centers on every continent. Factory owners relied on
consumers who might be anywhere in the world. The rise of Lever Brothers and the English soap industry,
therefore, was more than a simple story of invention and investment in factory towns. It required raw materials
from the Mediterranean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, along with a global system of transport and
marketing.
In the course of the nineteenth century, industrialization changed the world economy. Migrants flocked to
growing industrial and commercial cities with steel foundries, commodity exchanges, and banks, especially in
Europe and North America. Similar urban centers grew in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Bombay, and Shanghai. But an
equal number of migrants moved to rural areas, working in mines and on farms producing industrial raw
materials: iron ore, coal, diamonds, rubber, guano, sugar, cacao, hides, wheat, and rice. Still others moved about
as transport and construction workers, digging canals, serving as crew for steam and sailing ships, operating
railroads, and directing teams of animals.
Industrial economy and migration
What was the key to the development of industrial production? Inventions have received most of the attention:
new technology in textile machinery, steam engines and iron foundries. But new technology was not enough.
Production could not go forth without raw materials—in wool and cotton, in minerals, or in vegetable oils for
soaps—and many of these came from areas far from the industrial heartland. Nor could production go forth
without markets for the output—the buyers at home in England, France and the U.S., but also the buyers in
South America and South Asia. Technology, capital, raw materials, and markets were all essential to the new
industrial economy.
Equally central was labor. In this survey of industrialization, we will focus on the labor that performed each
industrial task. Wherever labor was needed for industrial development, workers were recruited as wage workers,
as settlers, as slaves, or as contract laborers. The movement of laborers around the world in the nineteenth
century provides a map of those places where labor was most needed. The question is, which were the most
important destinations of migrating workers? Was it the factories in nearby cities? Was it mines or plantations
across the seas? Or was it the continual shifting of workers in construction and transportation?
Let us first consider the experience of short-distance migrants in the industrial work force. These migrants
went from rural areas in Europe to European cities, and from rural areas in the U.S. to U.S. cities. Typically, a
small peasant landowner or a village craftsman found that acreage was too little or manufactured goods too
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competitive to keep poverty at bay. Such migrants were predominantly young and intent on working hard and
improving their situation in their new society. Migrants to the Rhine Valley helped create the great industrial
center known as the Ruhr and expanded the commercial center of Amsterdam.
On the European continent, industrial and urban growth accelerated during the course of the century and
developed a steadily growing and differentiating set of regional productive systems. Milan and Prague are
examples of cities that drew on their hinterlands during the late nineteenth century to become major industrial
centers. Similarly, Barcelona built on its strength as a commercial center to construct a substantial industrial
base. The rise of Barcelona and its wealth, in turn, brought about a development in Catalonian nationalism.
Catalan, the language of the several million people living in the hinterland of Barcelona, is a dialect distinct from
the Castilian Spanish that had long been the official language of Spain. While Barcelona clearly participated as a
regional metropolis in the global economy, its expansion in the industrial age was also very much a story of
regional migration and the development of regional identity. A distinctive regional artistic and architectural
tradition gained wide attention in this era.
Of the long-distance migrants, some went to distant cities for industrial work. Such was the case of the
German and Irish migrants to Baltimore and Boston. More commonly, long-distance migrants of the nineteenth
century went to fields, to mines, and construction sites. Scandinavian migrants went as wage laborers to
farmlands in the American Midwest. Indian migrants went as indentured workers to mines and plantations in
Mauritius, in South Africa, in Malaya, Fiji, and the Caribbean.
Migrants to Malaya were attracted by the work in tin mines and plantations of rubber and palm oil. One
common form of Asian migration involved a temporary sojourn in a new country, where the migrants went to
earn money that would enable them to resettle in their home village in better circumstances. More than half of
Chinese and Indian emigrants returned to their homeland. This return rate varied by destination. Over twothirds of Indians who sojourned in nearby Asia or Africa returned home, such as railroad workers in the British
colony of Uganda, but few indentured servants returned from Fiji or the West Indies.
New technologies of transportation
Most labor migrants went to factories or fields, but a third category of laborers enabled the factories and fields
to remain in contact. Of all the new technologies, the advances in transportation were among the most
productive. Even where the technology of transport did not change, as with oxcarts or transport by human
portage, the growing commerce of the industrial age required an expanded work force.
The new transportation infrastructure included roads, bridges, wagons, canals, steamships, new port facilities,
railroads, and stations. Creation of this transportation network brought demand for further industrial output for
shipyards, railroad cars, digging equipment, and explosives.
In the early centers of industrial manufacturing in England, the Low Countries and the northeastern United
States, an active stage of canal building began at the opening of the nineteenth century. Canal building then
accelerated on every continent. In China, the earlier centuries of canal construction laid the groundwork for a
wave of expansion. The greatest engineering project of the nineteenth century was the construction of the Suez
Canal, completed in 1869, which brought fundamental change to the shipping lanes linking Europe and Asia. In
all these cases, canal construction required years of work by hundred or thousands of laborers. Coming from
near and far, they lived at the work site, and they had to move on when the work came to completion.
Railroad construction began in England in the 1830s, and then accelerated in region after region throughout
the world until the network was virtually at its full extent by the outbreak of World War I. The United States and
France were early in starting their railroad networks, but so also were Cuba and the Ottoman Empire. The
Argentine railways were a particularly complete and successful regional network. Workers had to be recruited to
build the railroads on every continent: Chinese workers in the western U.S., Indian workers in East Africa, Irish
workers in South Africa, and Russian workers to build the Trans-Siberian railroad, which opened just after 1900.
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Construction of these new transportation facilities and conveyances was the heroic stage; operating and
maintaining them were long-term enterprises. Crews and dockworkers were needed for the steam and sail ships
of every waterway. The crews of Indian Ocean steamships shuttled between Suez, Aden, Bombay, and
Singapore, loading and unloading coal and commodities, and working the boiler rooms. These crews were
African and Asian men, many of them slaves or ex-slaves; they were an industrial work force afloat.
New markets for goods and labor
Did the markets for industrially produced goods encourage migration over long or short distances? The
markets for factory-produced textiles encouraged migration to the mills of the English Midlands and New
England. However, the same markets encouraged migration of slaves to cotton-producing lands in the U.S., and
migration of sheepherders to Australia and New Zealand.
The expanded demand for grains brought migration of farmers to the American Midwest, to Australia and
Argentina, and to eastern Russia. The growing world market for rice encouraged migrations to rice-growing
areas of Thailand and Java. The expanded demand for ivory, used in jewelry, billiards, and pianos, extended
elephant hunting all over Africa. The demand for diamonds brought a wave of migration to South Africa. A
steady rise in demand for coffee brought workers to Brazil from Italy, and to northern Angola from surrounding
areas.
The problem of allocating labor among all the competing demands for strong arms and accurate fingers grew
steadily more complex. A world market for labor grew up, in which the differing conditions of peasants, wage
workers, slaves, and serfs could hardly avoid encounters and discussions as to their relative benefits for worker
and master.
Not only did the nature of each day's work change significantly, but there also was great change in the nature of
relationships between workers and the others with whom they interacted. These others included employers,
owners, landlords, governments, and still more. The struggles of wageworkers, as working classes formed in the
industrializing cities, have been documented in considerable detail. The case of Mauritius provides a distant yet
typical example.
Conclusion: The story of the global economy
Telling a tale of world history is a complex task, perhaps particularly so for the world economy in the
nineteenth century. Rather than develop a narrative in which you try to explain the whole global economy at
once, it may be clearer if you follow a single thread. That is, you might pick a single product or a single migration
and trace its connections to reveal the shape and the changes of its role in the global economy. You might focus
on railroads, steamships, textiles, cocoa, or lumber and paper goods. Alternatively, you could focus on Indians
moving to Fiji, or Bohemians moving to Prague and Chicago. Almost any product or any migration, if traced in
detail, will reveal a narrative connecting factories and fields.
Workers around the world faced complex changes in their conditions of employment. If heedless employers
and dangerous machinery impoverished and shortened the lives of many, the rise of labor unions and
community organizations gave workers new resources. Overall, while the era of industrialization brought waves
of new discipline and oppression, it coincided with a sharp tendency toward emancipation of laborers. Slaves
gained freedom in one country after another, serfs gained freedom to move, indentured servants gained more
advantageous contracts, peasants struggled to reduce the amounts of their rent payments, and wageworkers
gained some recognition of their rights to organize. In all these cases, release from previous bondage made
workers more likely to migrate.
The emancipation of labor was far from uncontested. Russian serfs, even after emancipation, had to apply for a
passport to move. Former slaves in the Americas gained no compensation for their enslavement and
encountered limits on their movement and difficulty in buying land. Chinese workers faced legal expulsion from
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the Americas after 1880. Trade unions were periodically outlawed or tested in long strikes. Slavery remained in
force in many parts of Africa well into the twentieth century. Yet, for all these limits on the freedom of labor,
migrants moved with more liberty and greater rapidity than before to every corner of the industrializing world.
New technology changed the links between factories and fields and the allocation of labor among them. The
telegraph was the first technology to provide instantaneous contact among regions beyond visual contact.
Governments and businesses, eager to obtain immediate news on decisions and prices in distant areas, invested
heavily, and within a very few years, there had been a great expansion in overland and undersea cables for
telegraph communication. Those who controlled the information had new power over those without access to
it. However, the lives of all were changed by the new speed of information. With quicker and (sometimes) more
precise information, migrants could now undertake their voyages in more purposeful fashion, as they had a
better idea of what would await them at their destination.