Migration – 18th and 19th centuries
From the late 18th century, Britain underwent an The process that transformed manufacturing from handmade to machine-made, mass-produced goods using water, steam and coal power transported by canal, rail and steamship. Britain was the first country to have an Industrial Revolution., which encouraged workers to migrate from the countryside to the new and growing cities in search of work. Places such as the cotton mills of Lancashire and the ironworks of south Wales saw migration from across England and Ireland.
The process of mass Irish emigration to America and Britain was accelerated by the Irish potato famine of 1845-49 known as the The period in the 1840s when disease hit the potato crop in Ireland, killing about one million people and forcing another million to emigrate., and Irish Catholics went on to have a significant influence on American life and politics in places like New York.
Welsh people had been a significant part of the religious Quaker migration to the USA, but by the later 19th century areas such as Pennsylvania and Ohio saw a high economic demand for Welsh industrial and mining skills. Jackson County, Ohio, was even named ‘Little Wales’. In 1865, 150 Welsh emigrants set sail on the Mimosa for Patagonia, Argentina, to found a Welsh colony called Y Wladfa.
Improvements in sea and rail transport increased the flow of people. By the end of the 19th century, Italian immigrants brought their food and drink to Wales, most famously ice cream, while Jews arrived fleeing violent Persistently cruel treatment, often due to religion or belief. in Russia, called ‘pogroms’.
