Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500–1700

Lien Bich Luu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351928540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Immigration is not only a modern-day debate. Major change in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a surge of political and religious refugees moving across the continent. Estimates suggest that from 1550 to 1585 around 50, 000 Dutch and Walloons from the southern Netherlands settled in England, and in the late seventeenth century 50, 000 Huguenots from France followed suit. The majority gravitated towards London which, already a magnet for merchants and artisans across the centuries, began a process of major transformation. New skills, capital, technical know-how and social networks came with these migrants and helped to spark London's cosmopolitan flair and diversity. But the early experience of many of these immigrants in London was one of hostility, serving to slow down the adoption and expansion of new crafts and technologies. Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500-1700 examines the origins and the changing face and shape of many trades, crafts and skills in the capital in this transformative period. It focuses on three crafts in particular: silk weaving, beer brewing and the silver trade, crafts which had relied heavily on foreign skills in the 16th century and had become major industries in the capital by the 18th century. Each craft was established by a different group of immigrants, distinguished not only by their social backgrounds, social organisation, identity, motives, migration pattern and experience and links with their home country but also by the nature of their reception, assimilation and economic contribution. Change was a protracted process in the London of the day. Immigrants endured inferior status, discrimination and sometimes exclusion, and this affected both their ability to integrate and their willingness to share trade secrets. And resistance by the English population meant that the adoption of new skills often took a long time - in some cases more than three centuries - to complete. The book places the adoption of new crafts and technologies in London within a broader European context, and relates it to the phenomenal growth of the metropolis and technological developments within these specific trades. It throws new perspectives on the movement of skills from Europe and the transmission of know-how from the immigrant population to English artisans. The book explores how, through enterprise and persistence, the immigrants' contribution helped transform London from a peripheral and backward European city to become the workshop of the world by the nineteenth century. By way of conclusion the book brings the current immigration debate full circle to examine the lessons we can draw from this early-modern experience.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Migration and the Diffusion of Skills

Migration and Economic Development

There is a general consensus among historians that England experienced a profound economic change between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. At the beginning of this period, England was an economic backwater, standing on the edge of the economic heartland centred in Italy, the Mediterranean, the Low Countries and Germany. A good barometer of this relative economic underdevelopment was its overseas trade, characterized by the domination of a single export – cloth – which accounted for almost 80 per cent of England’s total exports in 1565. The revenue from this single export was then expended on a long list of imports. Besides raw materials and luxury consumables such as wines and spices, many basic industrial items also came from abroad, from goods like crude iron, battery, nails, needles, pins, knives, paper, soap, glass, and mirrors to ‘frivolities’ such as tennis balls and children’s dolls, and yards of sumptuous Italian luxury textiles such as velvets, silks, satins and taffetas.¹ Early modern England thus suffered from two economic problems: the love of foreign luxuries, and the lack of native skills to satisfy its own wants. Yet this very state of underdevelopment became the backbone of English economic progress, as it generated stimuli for individual creativity and fostered the national craving to transcend its existing limited international role, in other words, cultivating the virtue of adversity² By the early seventeenth century notable industrial progress had been achieved. Reflecting on their industrial achievements in 1608, Londoners proudly proclaimed that while during Elizabeth’s reign ‘Englishmen were not so skilful in trades, to make all kind of wares … but now … the people [had] mightly increased both in number … and in all good skill, and [were] skilful of all kind and manner of trades.’³ At this date, John Stow also claimed that ‘the best and finest knives in the world are made in London … The Englishmen began to make all sorts of pins and at this day they excel all nations.⁴ Many other goods were also now made in England, including those which had previously been imported from abroad such as silks, gloves and hops.⁵

Some historians trace the origins of industrial progress in England to the period of the Reformation, when it started to catch up with other European countries by establishing many new industries and by putting others on a commercially significant footing for the first time. Existing industrial sectors such as mining, metallurgy and textiles experienced considerable expansion, innovation and diversification, while new industries such as brass and copper, paper, alum, gunpowder and sugar refining were being developed. A whole range of consumer industries was also encouraged, such as soap, stockings, pins, needles, and pots and pans.⁶ Prof. John Nef felt that the industrial achievement between 1540 and 1640 constituted ‘an early industrial revolution’. In his celebrated study of the rise of the coal industry in 1932, he recognized that this ‘early industrial revolution’ was ‘less important than that which began towards the end of the eighteenth century, but pointed out that these earlier developments were of great significance in laying the foundations for Britain’s later industrialization.⁷ Christopher Hill treated the 250 years between 1530 and 1780 as a unity, and believed the changes taking place in that period prepared England for the ‘takeoff into the modern industrial world’.⁸ Despite these changes, L.A. Clarkson believed that England by 1750 was still a long way from achieving the Industrial Revolution. Although industrial production was greater in volume and more diverse than had been the case in 1500, the quality was inferior to Continental standards, and the economy on the whole remained basically agricultural. However, it is perhaps fair to accept that by the early eighteenth century, as Prof. Donald Coleman noted, English industry was in a stronger position relative to the outside world than it had been two centuries earlier: it had caught up technically, it had a wider base from which to advance, and it had a bigger and wealthier home market.⁹

The causes of the British Industrial Revolution are complex and the explanations wide-ranging. Social mobility has been recognized as one of the key forces of change. In his article on ‘The social causes of the British Industrial Revolution’ published in 1967, Harold Perkin traced the social roots of industrial progress to the existence of a large ‘middle rank’, the dispersal of capital, the open social structure, and the roles of property and patronage as sources of mobility¹⁰ EA. Wrigley in a recent paper, has nicely summarized the chief agents of change, stating that the exceptional British economic success grew out ‘of the corn sack, the cotton mill, and the coal mine’, alluding thereby to the revolution in agriculture, textile and fuel. According to him, these changes were connected to the phenomenal growth of London. In his article on A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy 1650–1750’, Wrigley mapped out how London’s exponential demographic growth, riding on the back of massive internal migration, harnessed extensive changes in other parts of England – the creation of a national market, the change in agriculture and raw material supply, the improvement in commercial facilities and transport, and the introduction of higher real incomes, rationality, new forms of social mobility and consumption patterns.¹¹ In 1971, F.J. Fisher examined some of these links in greater depth. Describing London as ‘the engine’ of the English economy as well as engine of economic growth, Fisher investigated in particular the capital’s role as a centre of consumption and centre of trade.¹²

But London above all was the centre of industry in England. A.L. Beier has in fact described London as the ‘engine of manufacture’. With only some 180 trades in the Middle Ages, London by the 1690s could boast at least 721 different occupations within the City of London alone – the true figure was undoubtedly much higher, as many new industries were situated outside the city walls. These new industries were based on refining or finishing colonial produce, devoted to import substitution like glassmaking or metalworking, or catered to the new consumers of luxury commodities such as jointed furniture, coaches and clocks.¹³ Particularly successful was London’s effort to develop a native silk industry, which by the early eighteenth century employed 40 000 and 50 000 people in the capital.¹⁴ Yet the question of how London expanded its pool of skills and built up its industrial base, laying the foundation of its economic might and its subsequent role as the workshop of the world, remains a neglected and nebulous subject. Such a need prompted the Centre of Metropolitan History to launch a three-year interdisciplinary project in 1992 to investigate the ‘Growth of a Skilled Workforce in London’ between 1500 and 1750. Set within the broader context of the project, the research upon which this book is based investigates the link between immigration and the expansion of the stock of human capital and skills in London in this period.

Massive internal immigration to London in the early modern period was recognized by Wrigley as the motor of demographic and economic change in the capital. However, he crucially omitted the role of Continental migrants, known as aliens and strangers, in the transformation of London. This is a serious omission, for two reasons. First, this was the principal conduit via which many skills and industries travelled from the more advanced parts of Europe to England, offering a faster route to industrial development. Second, England experienced an unprecedented scale of immigration in this period, enabling it to tap a rich source of human skill and technical expertise. Between 1550 and 1750, there were three principal waves of mass immigration from the Continent, constituting three of the four great west European migrations of the early modern period.¹⁵ The first wave occurred in the spring and summer of 1567, once the government in Brussels regained control of the situation and news of Alva’s imminent arrival spread. It has been estimated that between 60 000 and 100 000 people may have fled the southern Netherlands in this period, among whom were some of the wealthiest and most skilled.¹⁶ The second wave of massive immigration occurred after 1585, when the southern Netherlands was recaptured by Spanish troops, typified by the fall of Antwerp in 1585. Perhaps as many as 100 000 to 150 000 people may have uprooted between 1585 and 1587 in search of a better life in the Dutch Republic, Germany and England.¹⁷ In total, in the three-and-a-half decades between 1550 and 1585, 40–50 000 foreign refugees may have come to England,¹⁸ or about a quarter of the total number of people leaving the southern Netherlands, with the majority gravitating towards the English capital. The third wave of refugees came in the late seventeenth century, when some 40–50 000 Huguenots may have fled France to England. Although the Huguenot immigration in the seventeenth century will be touched upon in some chapters, the primary focus is on the first two waves of immigrants who laid the industrial foundations in London.

Contemporaries on both sides of the Channel were acutely aware of the economic impact of the population movements outlined above. Fears of depopulation in Flanders were voiced before 1566; in 1566, many returned from exile, only to leave again in 1567. As the first mass exodus unfolded, Philip II was informed of the detrimental economic effects of the human plight precipitated by the troubles, with many people leaving the Netherlands with their families and tools to go to London and Sandwich, and how the establishment of the drapery in England destroyed local industry there.¹⁹ Jacques Taffin, the Treasurer of Flushing (a rebel town in Zeeland), in an effort to press Elizabeth I for military support against Spain, plainly told her in 1573 of the need for reciprocity because: ‘You receive many Strangers into the Realm … so you find them good honest, and virtuous people, and the realm by them Receives many Commodities, as cunning in many sciences wherein before you were altogether ignorant.’²⁰ In England, the beneficial economic effects brought by immigrants were also acknowledged in elite circles. In his treatise on the cloth industry published in 1577, an English writer had observed that: ‘by reason of the troubles grown in other Countries, the making of baies, friesadowes, Tuftmoccadowe [types of the New Draperies], and many other things made of wool, is mightly increased in England … For this Cause we ought to favour the strangers from whom we learned so great benefits … because we are not so good devisers as followers of others.’²¹

Historiography

The contribution of immigrants to the Tudor economy has received much attention from historians, and the current historiography has been approached from four perspectives: English economic history and industrialisation, the diffusion of innovations and technology, industrial case study and local community study.

English Economic History/Industrialization Perspective

Writing in the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution was still in full swing, economic historians such as J.S. Burn, F.W. Cross, W. Cunningham and S. Smiles claimed that immigrants played a vital role in English industrial development.²² The most influential work representing this school of thought is William Cunningham’s Alien Immigrants to England, first published in 1897 (fifteen years after the appearance of his Growth of English Industry) and later reissued in 1969, testifying to its enduring appeal and relevance. In Alien Immigrants, Cunningham contended that the arrival of skilled artisans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stimulated English economic development by precipitating a diffusion of advanced skills.²³ Although sharing Cunningham’s broad argument, George Unwin felt that fifteenth-century immigrants were also significant. In his Gilds and Companies, published in 1908, he claimed that:

the alien immigran...