THE ATLANTIC MIGRATION OF THE POTTERY INDUSTRY

Abstract

political animosities, remained for much of the nineteenth century on terms of greater intimacy than any two other sovereign States. The economic basis of that intimacy was a complementarity which ensured that the two countries should be each other's best customer. This was not a simple exchange of raw materials for manufactures between two closed economies, governed by the laws of international trade. Contemporaries as different as Mill and Marx saw it as a matter of inter-regional relations within one single economy, embracing the entire Atlantic region, and dominated by the relations of a 'metropolitan' unit, Britain, and a 'colonial' unit, North America, chiefly the United States.' The key to the growth of the Atlantic economy lay in conditions which permitted a high degree not only of trade but of movement for capital and labour westwards across the Atlantic into more profitable relations with markets and natural resources. A neglected aspect of this topic is the migration from Britain of industrial labour which not only provided the great bulk of British immigration into the United States - in i890, 63 per cent of Britishborn were employed in American industry - but represented far and away the most important element of technical skill in American industrialization. By looking more closely at the role of the emigrant technician we may be able to see more clearly the true nature of American industrialization within the Atlantic economy. Much research must still be done before the significance of industrial migration for Atlantic history may be assessed. However, pioneer work, such as that of Professor Herbert Heaton and Dr. R. T. Berthoff, encourages a more systematic investigation of particular industries.2 Evidence salted away in industrial studies, in county histories, in the early reports of the State Bureaux of Labor and in the United States Tariff, Industrial and Immigration Commissions, suggests a pattern of experience common to the major industries involved. Taking three of the most formative industries, textiles, mining and iron and steel, one may discern several successive phases. First, there is what might be called the migration of creative innovators, the Slaters, Scholfields, Thomas's, Firmstones, and Crowthers, the first generation of Cornish mine captains, of Scottish coal miners: these were the carriers of the new technology who made it effective in the new environment: and although their influence varied industry by industry some achieved the status of entrepreneur or at least of manager. Secondly, close on their heels came the scores and hundreds of skilled operatives who were to provide the essential cadre of mule spinners, machine makers, foundrymen and miners, some seasonal migrants only, most settling into communities of British folkways and craft loyalties, and, more 1 For this hypothesis see Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, i954), and Frank Thistlethwaite, 'Atlantic Partner