In an 1840 issue of the Westminster Review, the textile magnate Samuel Greg Jr. reflected on the challenges he had faced eight years earlier while organizing a docile workforce for the Lowerhouse Mill. He particularly lamented “that restless and migratory spirit which is one of the peculiar characteristics of the manufacturing population, and perhaps the greatest obstacle to permanent improvement among them” (390). While the tramping artisan had been a well-established stock figure of Britain's economic and cultural landscape since at least the early eighteenth century, Greg's complaint registered the novel and distinctly modern phenomenon of mass emigration, which radically increased in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1821 and 1831 alone, over 274,000 people of all class backgrounds emigrated from the United Kingdom, almost triple the sum that emigrated to North America from 1700 to 1780. Between 1831 and 1851, over two million Britons left the country, the majority of whom disembarked in the United States or the settler colonies. While these migrants have been exhaustively studied by historians such as James Belich, John Darwin, and the late Eric Richards, the thousands of spinners, navvies, puddlers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who sought economic opportunity on the European continent have received far less scholarly attention.
Rectifying this historiographic lacuna, Fabrice Bensimon's Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe anatomizes the social–historical foundations of the “restless and migratory spirit” (390) among workers bound for Europe, particularly northern France, as well as the managers and industrialists who employed them. Across six chapters, it tracks the movement of labor, technological expertise, industrial machinery, and cultural practices from Britain to the continent, from the cessation of hostilities with France in 1815 to the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War in 1870. Bensimon argues that this large-scale transfer of British bodies, hardware, and knowledge formed the material and epistemic substrate of European industrialization. In doing so, he illuminates the entangled, concatenated histories of Anglo-European political-economic development. Most compellingly, however, he vividly reconstructs the rhythms of daily life for those peripatetic laborers who brought the experiential foundation stones of the Industrial Revolution with them across the English Channel.
In the book's first two chapters, Bensimon explores the macroeconomic forces and trade-specific dynamics that subtended working-class and artisanal migration. In chapter 1, Bensimon surveys how nascent doctrines of laissez-faire shaped the British state's attitudes toward emigration and economic protection, given the need for postwar austerity measures. In 1819, the national debt, largely inherited from wartime expenditures, rose to 260% of Britain's GDP. Starting in 1825, Parliament began to liberalize long-extant restrictions on the movement of skilled workers and the export of machinery, tools, and engines. These legal reforms, Bensimon shows, strengthened preexisting structural incentives for external migration—unemployment and pauperism had skyrocketed after 1815 as the British economy attempted to absorb over 300,000 demobilized soldiers. In addition to explicating the geopolitical and statist dimensions of the postwar migratory boom, Bensimon draws comparisons between continental migration and domestic population movement, stressing that both tended to be impermanent, brief, and iterative. Cross-oceanic voyages, by contrast, “implied a break with a territory, with a community, and with loved ones,” as evinced by the prevalence of ceremonial “American wakes” in Ireland held before a would-be migrant relocated to North America or Australia—but not when they moved to another county in Ireland, England, or, presumably, Europe (45–46). Bensimon illustrates the intimate proximity of Britain to northern Europe in the affective, imaginative, and literal geography of working-class migration, despite the ties of language and history such migrants shared with their North American or Australasian destinations.
Chapter 2 investigates the three major industries—textiles and textile machine-making, iron and steel production, and rail construction and maintenance—that drew on migratory labor. In Belgium and northern France, some sectors, such as cotton, developed out of “an early history of domestic manufacturing and cottage industries” that were modernized by British capital, technology, and workers who knew how to operate advanced spinning machines (62). In others, British intervention was even more explicit and decisive: nearly all French ironworks in the 1820s and 1830s initially employed small numbers of well-paid Welsh and English puddlers and rollers trained in advanced smelting and decarbonization methods originally conceived in Britain. Likewise, British contractors, engineers, financiers, navvies, drivers, and locomotive manufacturers dominated the French rail industry until the 1850s. Again, Bensimon highlights the hybridity and heterogeneity of these labor flows. For continental sectors protected by tariffs, buttressed by early innovations in proto-industrial modes of production, or wary of the high cost of foreign labor (cotton, machinery, iron), only a few highly skilled mechanics and foremen traveled from Britain to help bridge the technological chasm. In contrast, linen, vulnerable to British imports until the tariffs of 1836 despite long traditions of handloom weaving in Normandy and Brittany, and capital-intensive rail lines tapped large pools of skilled and unskilled labor in a more systematic fashion. Not incidentally, the first large-scale linen and rail firms established in France were owned and managed by the British entrepreneurs such as David Dickson and William Mackenzie, respectively. As Bensimon reminds us, European industrialization did not unidirectionally diffuse from Anglophone entrepreneurial prodigies and master craftsmen, despite their technological advantage, but rather proceeded fitfully, collaboratively, and contingently.
In chapter 3, Bensimon assesses the experiences of female and child migrants, particularly in the lace industry. He details their encounters with new forms of gendered and age-based workplace stratification, though he stresses that these did not differ radically between Britain and France. For example, in the lace industries of Calais and Nottingham, female runners in both countries earned “at most a third of the male lace worker” (134). Confirming the theses of Louise Tilly and Joan Scott from 1978, Bensimon argues that both countries shared masculinist notions of skill and physical prowess that shaped wage differentials and the sexual division of labor. Low-waged children participated in the industry at the similar rates, as the British and French states would not begin to meaningfully eliminate child labor until the 1870s.
Chapters 4–6, the richest and most narratively compelling sections, dive into the cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and political interstices of workers’ lives. Migratory workers, then as now, were forced to navigate the competing pressures of communal assimilation, the preservation of tradition, and xenophobic hostility. Unlike today, English was not widely spoken or read in continental Europe, even among educated elites, and Bensimon provides colorful anecdotes about the hybrid languages, misunderstandings, and improvised methods of verbal translation that proliferated in the workplace. British industrialists established Protestant schools and chapels for their employees in Rouen, Calais, and Ailly, despite occasional hostility from local priests or préfets. Cricket, trade games, newspapers, and English-language pubs similarly preserved migrants’ links with British national culture. Chapter 5 sketches the political allegiances and activities of some migrant workers, who carried with them collective bargaining techniques, modes of organization, and communal reading practices that sustained prior ideological commitments. British workers created friendly societies, Chartist Land Plan associations, and even unions in their new home, despite far more draconian French labor laws. Although proletarian internationalism would not become a dominant political force until much later in the century, British radicals established and maintained correspondence with babeufistes in the 1820s and, later, the utopian socialist Ètienne Cabet. Some British workers, such as the printer George Good or the Irish book gilder Thomas Boylan, participated in the revolution of 1848, though their numbers were dwarfed by working-class Belgians, Italians, and Germans.
In chapter 6, Bensimon describes a series of anti-English riots and agitations, which usually broke out amid “a context of deep economic crisis, of extreme shortage, and therefore of competition for employment and resources,” cresting with the revolutions of 1848 (237). Bensimon persuasively argues that economic grievances were selectively articulated through a nationalist symbolic repertoire, in contrast to more intense, racialized, and frequent bouts of labor violence against the Irish in Britain and New York or East Asian immigrants in California and Australia. While contemporaneous media and government reports speculated about the role played by inherited perceptions of centuries-old Anglo-French religious and geopolitical conflict in stoking workplace animosity, French petitioners and rioters themselves never invoked this historical legacy beyond vague slogans such as “à bas les anglais!” (224–237). Shared class position, Christian identity, and an increasingly international print and visual culture produced far more convivial social relations than these scattered episodes of violence might suggest. This chapter encapsulates Bensimon's more normative, cosmopolitan claim that, despite what E.P. Thompson once termed “the peculiarities of the English,” these workers toiled in a common European context.
Bensimon might have spent more time on those anomalous British migrants—however few—who ventured beyond the Francophone world, to Prussia, the Italian states, Spain, Russia, and Scandinavia, such as the engineer John Barker, who brought carding and weaving machines to Sweden and Finland. Bensimon anchors his study in France, especially its northern regions. This choice is defensible, indeed somewhat unavoidable, for brute demographic and macroeconomic reasons: most continent-bound British migrants ventured to the geographically proximate France. However, Bensimon's rigorously schematic and empirical approach to his (admittedly sparse) source material occasionally flattens the experiences of itinerant workers who did not conform to the broad demographic patterns he lucidly and patiently explains throughout. Along a similar vein, Bensimon might have devoted more space to analyzing individual biographies earlier—such as the four workers discussed at the end of chapter 2, who curiously receive one or two paragraphs of description each—to expand and deepen the qualitative, human dimensions of his story, which receive their fullest treatment in the book's latter chapters.
Bensimon's study will be of immediate relevance to labor historians and scholars of nineteenth-century migratory patterns, as well as the general reader invested in the still-urgent Thompsonian mandate to recuperate the lives of those lost to “the enormous condescension of posterity” (12). Moreover, with nativism resurging on both sides of the Atlantic, Bensimon's book also provides a judicious reminder that “[t]here was never a time when national economies operated in closed circuits” (254), even and especially in the nineteenth century, when the bounded nation-state asserted itself as the primary, natural, and permanent form of political organization.
