Early Modern Migration: Huguenots and the Irish (1600-1850)

In 1685, Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes (which had protected French Protestants, known as Huguenots). Around 50,000 Huguenot refugees fled to England, settling mainly in London's Spitalfields and Canterbury. They brought crucial skills: silk weaving, clockmaking, paper-making, and goldsmithing. Spitalfields became the centre of London's silk industry. The Huguenots are often cited as the most economically successful migrant group in British history — within two generations, they were largely integrated into English society.

Irish migration to mainland Britain accelerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Irish provided vital cheap labour for canal-building ("navvies"), railway construction, and factory work. The catastrophic Great Famine of 1845-52 — in which approximately one million people died and another million emigrated — drove an estimated 300,000 Irish to Britain in a single decade. By 1851, the Irish-born population of England and Wales reached around 520,000. They settled in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and London's East End, often in extreme poverty, and faced significant anti-Catholic prejudice.