Impact of immigration in the Industrial era 1750-1900 - OCR AImpact of mass immigration on daily life

19th century mass immigration affected the lives of everyone in Britain, sometimes in ways we don’t realise. Here are four examples:

Food and drink

• Italian immigrants gave us ice cream.
• German immigrants gave us the ‘full English’ breakfast.
• Jewish immigrants gave us fish and chips.
• Coffee (originally from Ethiopia), tea (from China and India), chocolate (from Central America) and sugar (from plantations in the Americas) all came on merchant ships with largely ‘foreign’ crews - and sugar was grown on plantations relying on slave labour until 1833.

Fashion

• Jewish tailors and seamstresses in the sweatshops of London, Leeds and Manchester created cheap, good quality clothing. This meant that many working-class British people could afford new clothes for the first time in their lives. In addition, many of the well-known clothes retailers that are around today such as Marks and Spencer, Burton and Moss Bros were started by 19th century Jewish immigrants.
• Asian fabrics, porcelain and furniture became highly fashionable after the East India Company started importing them on ships with largely ‘foreign’ crews.

Relationships

• Long before the next wave of mass migration in the mid-20th century, ‘mixed’ marriages were becoming common. Many ‘white English’ people today in fact have ‘mixed’ ancestry - Irish, Scottish, Italian, German, French etc. Many also have African or Asian ancestry but these can be harder to trace if their ancestors had English names. In Cardiff, Hull, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, South Shields and Bristol, children of ‘foreign’ seamen and British mothers grew up in mixed ethnicity communities.

Religion

• During the Early Modern period England became a place of religious discrimination, with only Church of England worship allowed. Starting with Huguenots and Walloons and continuing with Irish and Italian Catholics, German Lutherans and Jews, migrants brought their own faiths and opened places of worship. This resulted in freedoms for English Catholics and Nonconformists, too. Thanks to the influence of immigrants, Britain became a place where freedom of worship was guaranteed.