The rise of the steamships and railways in the first half of the nineteenth century transformed the demographic landscape of the entire world in the modern era. No two technological inventions have been responsible for as much migration and demographic change as these. Steam engines entered widespread use in Europe, particularly in Britain, in the eighteenth century. They drove the advent of the Industrial Revolution as engineers and inventors worked out ways to attach steam engines to machines like spinning looms and replace manpower with steam-power. By the start of the nineteenth century inventors were working on ways to attach steam engines to ships and wagons to use them to replace wind-power and horse-power. The major breakthroughs came in the 1820s when the first trains began travelling between British towns and cities, while gradual advances built up to the SS Great Western becoming the first purpose-built steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean in April 1838. The advent of the trans-Atlantic steamships happened to coincide with a population boom in Europe owing to better sanitation and medicine. Thus, between the 1840s and the 1900s, tens of millions of Europeans left the Old World and went to live in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and other countries in the Americas. Eventually the steamships drove mass migration to places like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand too. And when people arrived to ports like New York, Sydney and Buenos Aires, they boarded trains to further horizons like Chicago and Mendoza. The steamships and railways changed the world. Hundreds of millions of people today will have an ancestor who migrated on them in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.[1]
Steamships and railways chronology of eventsSteamships and railways chronology of events
The first steam engine was actually built in the city of Alexandria in Egypt in the early Roman imperial era in the first century CE by a shadowy figure named Hero. The technology was used as novelty to do things like open temple doors without anyone having to pull them open. But, owing to the mass use of slave labor across the Roman Empire, the technology was never fully deployed as part of Roman proto-industrial activity.[2] The steam engine was not resurrected until the early eighteenth century when Thomas Newcomen built a functional steam engine. It was developed further in the century that followed and inventors and industrialists began to use steam power for many activities. For instance, steam engines were eventually deployed to power machines in the new factories that emerged in northern England from the 1770s onwards as the Industrial Revolution began.[3]
It wasn’t long before people began to wonder if they could attach steam engines to wagons to power them without using horses, or to use steam engines as an ancillary to wind-power on board ships. Decades of innovation took place in the first half of the nineteenth century. For instance, the first steamboat, the Experiment, sailed from Leeds to Yarmouth in England in 1813. The Aaron Manby became the first steamship to cross the English Channel to France in 1822.[4] Similar innovations were occurring when it came to steam-powered carriages, while engineers were also realizing that that these could travel much more efficiently if they were placed securely on purpose-built railway tracks. The first public railway commenced operating between the towns of Stockton and Darlington in county Durham in northern England in September 1825.[5] Finally, as steam-powered ships continued to evolve, ambitious plans for building a steam-powered ship that could undertake trans-Atlantic voyages from Britain to cities like New York were being undertaken. The first of these, the SS Great Western, built by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, undertook its maiden voyage from Bristol to New York in April 1838.[6]
Railway and steamship travel continued to evolve over the next half a century and more. It was a slow process. For instance, as the American West opened up in the late 1840s, plans were immediately being considered for how to build railway lines to connect the cities of the East Coast all the way to the emergent cities of the West Coast in California, Oregon and Washington State. It took until 1869 for the First Transcontinental Railroad to be completed and large parts of the west of the country had to wait until the 1880s, 1890s or 1900s until they were connected to the East Coast by railway.[7] In Argentina, the Transandine Railway to connect the coastal region to the Mendoza area and the Andes Mountains in the interior was first conceived in the mid-1850s. The railway only opened in 1910.[8] On the seas it took seventy years to go from the SS Great Western to enormous trans-Atlantic steam-liners like the RMS Titanic, an enormous vessel, despite its tragic end.
Extent of migration on the steamships and railwaysExtent of migration on the steamships and railways
Between the 1840s, when the first steamships began regularly ferrying people across the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas, and the 1900s when the migration peaked and then rapidly decline after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, an estimated 50 to 60 million people migrated to the New World. Contrast this with the period between 1492, when Europeans first began colonizing the Americas, and 1800. During this time there was probably no more than about three million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to settle in the Spanish Empire, Portuguese Brazil and various French, English and Dutch colonies. A caveat is that the forced migration of African slaves via the Transatlantic Slave Trade between 1492 and the 1860s was substantially larger and involved about twelve million people.[9] This migration from 1840 onwards was fueled by a population spike across Europe brought about by the invention of vaccines and rising average life expectancies in the Old World. Moreover, the voyage to the Americas was shortened from about six to two weeks as a result of the advent of the steamships.[10]
The migration in question came from different countries at different times. For instance, in the 1840s the Irish established a precedent as they fled from the potato famine that struck the island in the second half of the decade in large numbers. Then other national groups began to follow them, notably the Italians from the 1860s, while the Germans, Czechs, Poles, Romanians, and various people from Scandinavia joined them in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s led to a mass flight of the Jewish population from the Pale of Settlement to the US as well.[11] Cities like New York were magnets for such immigration and the city became a haven of Irish, Italian, Jewish and German migrants between the 1840s and the 1900s.[12]
Roughly 30 to 35 million people migrated to the United States, three to four million went to Canada, approximately four to six million went to Argentina and Brazil, while even countries like Chile experienced the influx of hundreds of thousands of Europeans. When these migrants arrived they often settled in cities like New York, Boston, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro along the coast, but many others moved on further westwards on the railways, drawn to the American West by offers of land through legislation like the Homestead Act of 1862. These processes were not restricted to just the Americas. Although the scale was smaller, the steamships and railways also contributed to the European settlement of southern Africa, parts of Asia like India and Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand.[13]
Demographic impact of the steamships and railwaysDemographic impact of the steamships and railways
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The demographic impact of the mass migration associated with the steamships and railways cannot be understated. There are, for instance, approximately 1.1 billion people in the western hemisphere today. A very conservative estimate would be that 200 million of these are descended from a person who migrated to the Americas between 1840 and 1914 on board the steamships. Of those a sizeable proportion would then have moved inland on the railways to the Great Plains, the Canadian Prairies or the Midwest where their descendants continue to live today. It is more likely the number is closer to 300 million or 350 million. Inevitably, though, because of the lack of accurate demographic records prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, it is almost impossible to work out the figure accurately. Nonetheless, there is no doubting that the steamships and the railways transformed the world as we know it, leading to the populating of huge parts of the world with people of European ancestry.[14] A substantial proportion of the world's population investigating their family genealogy will discover an ancestor who migrated to one part of the world or another on the steamships or railways between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.
See alsoSee also
Explore more about migration in the age of the steamships and railwaysExplore more about migration in the age of the steamships and railways
- Passenger and Immigration Lists, 1500-1900 records collection on MyHeritage
- New York Castle Garden Immigrants records collection on MyHeritage
- Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 records collection on MyHeritage
- New York, Passenger List Book Indexes 1906-1942 records collection on MyHeritage
- Boston, Massachusetts Passenger Lists, 1891-1943 records collection on MyHeritage
- Canada, Passenger Lists, 1865-1922 records collection on MyHeritage
- Passengers arriving in New York from Ireland 1846-1851 records collection on MyHeritage
- Italians Immigrating to the United States records collection on MyHeritage
- Germans Immigrating to the United States records collection on MyHeritage
- Australia, Inwards Unassisted Passengers to Victoria, 1852-1923 records on MyHeritage
- Angel Island’s Immigrants from 80 Countries at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Genealogy Escape Room: The Case of the Only Name Change at Ellis Island at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Eric Richards, The Genesis of International Mass Migration: The British Case, 1750–1900 (Manchester, 2018).
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heron-of-Alexandria
- ↑ Eugene S. Ferguson, ‘The Origins of the Steam Engine’, in Scientific American, Vol. 210, No. 1 (January, 1964), pp. 98–107.
- ↑ http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/articles/Tipton/aaronmanby.htm
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7v183eenm1o
- ↑ https://bristolha.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/bha008.pdf
- ↑ https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/may/completion-transcontinental-railroad
- ↑ https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/infrastructure-projects/transandine-railway
- ↑ Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994).
- ↑ Raymond L. Cohn, ‘The Transition from Sail to Steam in Immigration to the United States’, in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June, 2005), pp. 469–495.
- ↑ T. J. Hatton, ‘Migration out of Europe’, in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (London, 2001), pp. 9821-9824.
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/immigration-to-united-states-1851-1900/
- ↑ https://docs.iza.org/dp7866.pdf
- ↑ This is based on the estimates of 50 to 60 million migrants between 1840 and 1914 in Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, ‘The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact’, in International Migration Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (2000).