It’s often said that immigration is good for economic growth. They tend to be entrepreneurial; creating jobs and bringing new ideas.

But how important was immigration to the British Industrial Revolution?

Quite, it turns out. 

As I’ve mentioned before, if we’re to understand the causes of modern economic growth, we need to look at the causes of greater innovation in Britain at the time. Looking at the innovators themselves is a good place to start. My PhD research uses a sample of 677 inventors and innovators, active in Britain between 1650-1851.

Of those 677 innovators, 79 were either first-generation immigrants, second generation immigrants, or of immigrant descent. That’s a whopping 11.8% of the key innovators of the period.

Now, this does include Irish innovators. But even when we remove them, assuming we’re looking at UK innovators rather than British ones, then that still gives us 53, or 7.8% non-UK immigrants. We could even remove 2nd generation immigrants and those of immigrant descent. The figure would still be as high as 5.7% (39 in total).

The number of immigrants in Britain over the period could never have been much higher than 100,000, given that that was the number in 1851, when we first have reliable records of the numbers. Considering the population of Great Britain was about 10.6 million at the time of the 1801 Census, the number of immigrants in the general British population can never have been much higher than 1%.*

So, even despite tightening all those definitions of who would count as an immigrant, 5.7% is very, very statistically significant.

Who were these immigrant innovators? Some Examples:

There were some relatively well-known ones, like the mechanisation pioneer Marc Isambard Brunel (born and raised in France), and his son the civil engineer and steamship propulsion pioneer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

There was Karl Wilhelm Siemens (1828-83) from Hanover, perhaps most famous for the Siemens and then Siemens-Martin processes in steel (1867-). He took out at least 113 patents in the UK, for a huge range of industries. These included numerous improvements in insulation for telegraph lines (1854-), gas purification for heating (1864), early refrigerators (1855), pneumatic delivery systems (1866), and the electric arc lamp (1867), to name but a few. His brother Werner founded Siemens in 1847, the hulking multinational conglomerate that exists today. Karl became its representative in London in 1850.

Also from Hanover was the former band musician and later astronomy pioneer Wilhelm Herschel, who was also the discoverer of The Georgian Planet (aka Uranus) in 1781. Although some had seen it before, he was the first to identify it as a planet. Not only was it named after his patron George III, but he wanted the planet’s name to reflect a new age where discoveries were named on a rational basis rather than after superstition (“if in any future age it should be asked, ‘when this last-found Planet was discovered?’ it would be a very satisfactory answer to say, 'In the reign of King George the Third”). The element Uranium was named after it in 1789 as part of the European-led propaganda campaign to promote the use of “Uranus” instead of “The Georgian Planet”. This competition to get a name to stick resulted in a curious exception - it is the only planet in our solar system to be named after a Greek deity (Ouranus, latinized) rather than a Roman one.

I should also mention Wilhelm’s sister, Caroline Herschel (although she’s not on my list, as a scientist rather than an innovator). She became the first woman to ever be paid for her contributions to science, in 1828.

Wilhelm’s son John Frederick William Herschel should also be noted as a significant pioneer in astronomy, continuing his father’s gargantuan efforts to record every double star in the heavens. But he’s perhaps even more famous as a pioneer of photography. It’s from him that we get the terms 'positive’ and 'negative’, as well as 'snapshot’ and even 'photographer’.

My personal favourite was Benjamin Thompson, an important pioneer in applying thermodynamics to practical purposes. If you can, try and access his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography. It’s a gripping read. From Woburn, Massachusetts, he eventually became a Count of the Holy Roman Empire as Count Rumford (a town in Virginia). His greatest innovations were perhaps the Rumford stove, along with the convection oven and the pressure cooker. He may also have been responsible for the first thermal underwear, while consulting for the Bavarian army.

This is just a small sample of the 53 I could mention, to give you an idea of the extent of their contributions to the IR. I’ll provide more important examples in a future post, perhaps. In sum, just think of the modern-day Brunels, Siemens, Herschels and Thompsons that anti-immigrant sentiment discourages, and the laws that might be preventing them from fulfilling their potential to better the world.

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*We could even produce ridiculously ultra-conservative estimates, for example by comparing the 100,000 figure with the population of Britain in 1650, at the beginning of the period (about 6.5 million). Even this gives us a maximum proportion of a mere 1.5%, and doesn’t change the statistical significance of the 5.7% finding.