Transcription
Okay, y'all, it's time to talk about migration in the period 1750 to 1900, and there was a lot of it. So let's talk about all the causes, and if you're ready to get those brain cows milking, let's get to it!
First, let's consider the environmental causes of migration during this period. But first, remember the context from the last few videos, namely that the world was largely being shaped and molded by the forces of industrialization. The more the world industrialized, the more people began to migrate.
The first cause of migration is significant demographic change, which is to say the global population practically exploded. For example, from 1850 to 1914, the population of Europe grew exceedingly fast because new medicines and increasingly varied diets increased people's lifespans. Since populations were living longer and people didn't stop having babies, you know, way more people. This was especially true in rural areas, where, thanks to industrialization and the mechanization of farming, more and more people were out of jobs. So what are they going to do? Migrate! Exactly.
The increasing poverty rural people were experiencing pushed them to migrate elsewhere to find jobs, and that largely meant moving to cities where they found industrial jobs in abundance. Oh, if you want to know, guys, to follow along with this video and all my videos, check the link in the description.
The second environmental factor that caused this massive uptick in migration was famine. In some places that had not industrialized, they still practiced primitive agriculture, and in a few cases, the result was massive and deadly famines. For example, the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s was devastating. The potato was the staple food of the Irish poor, thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and it made up a big portion of their diet. But when a blight struck their potato crops in the mid-1840s, it led to widespread famine in which millions of the Irish poor died of starvation, and millions more left the country and immigrated elsewhere, not least to urban centers in the United States.
Now, the real question is: what facilitated all this migration? The answer is new transportation technology. Like demographic change, famines, and political turmoil, migration was not a new phenomenon during this period. All of that is just like, you know, a Tuesday in any given period of world history. But what's different about this period is that when people experienced those push factors, they now had many more options for traveling than ever before.
New modes of cheap transportation, like the railroad and the steamship, facilitated this wave of migrations, both for those who migrated within their own countries and those that migrated internationally. The vast majority of these migrants settled in urban centers in both imperial states and in colonial territories, where manufacturing jobs were abundant. This led to a massive growth in cities during this period, which is what we call urbanization, with many European cities experiencing something like a 30% growth. And to that, I say, dang!
But these transportation technologies also had another effect: many migrants left their homes and never returned from their destination societies. However, some of them took advantage of the cheap transportation and returned home. For example, in the last part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese merchants migrated to places like Argentina and Brazil, both for economic opportunity and to escape the religious persecution of the Ottoman Empire. Because the departure and arrival of steamships and seaports throughout the Americas was kind of like a daily reality, a large portion of them were able to return home. So that's nice!
Now, finally, we need to consider the economic causes for migration, and essentially, this boils down to people moving because they needed to find work. There were basically two flavors of this kind of job-seeking migration. First, some migrants relocated elsewhere freely based on their own decisions and desires. They considered their own joblessness and their economic suffering and thought, "You know, this is dumb. I'm going to go find a job somewhere else." So they migrated. During this period, lots of migrants to the United States fit that particular category. Millions of Irish, Italian, and German immigrants left their home societies and relocated to the urban centers of the East Coast of America. Then, on the West Coast, millions of Chinese immigrants relocated there to find work in the booming railroad industry.
But the second flavor of migration for work wasn't as cheery. In this case, millions of people migrated for work because they were forced to. The globalized economy still very much relied on coerced and semi-coerced labor. Let me give you an example of each. In terms of coerced labor, the Atlantic slave trade was still booming at the beginning of this period. Now, to be fair, many states that relied on slavery would abolish it later in this period, but it was still a significant cause of the forced movement of people early on.
Also, under the heading of coerced labor was convict labor. For example, both the British and the French established penal colonies in various places throughout their empires, including British Australia and French Guiana. Instead of spending the money to stuff convicts into jails at home, they just sent them across the world to do hard labor in the colonial holdings, things like railroad building.
Then, on the semi-coerced side, let's talk about indentured servitude, which describes an arrangement in which a laborer would sign a contract to work for a certain number of years, usually between three and seven, in exchange for free passage to their destination. You see, as I said before, outright slavery would be largely abolished during this period, but that doesn't mean that industrialized states didn't still need real cheap labor in order to keep them on top of the world's economic heat. So indentured servitude filled a lot of that gap.
For example, because poverty was a growing concern in India, the British government facilitated the migration of indentured Indians to various parts of their empire, including the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The British also operated tin mines in Malaysia, where they made use of Chinese indentured servants who were suffering the effects of their poverty at home.
Okay, click here to keep reviewing for Unit 6, and click here to grab my video guides, which help you get all the content of this course firmly crammed into your brain fold. I'm glad we got to hang out, and I'll catch you on the flip-flop. Himler out!