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By Root 1568 0

often savage. Peasants who had been expelled from land of more than a quarter acre, for instance, were banned from receiving any assistance, even the workhouse. This rural restructuring by force, which never managed to produce a viable system of commercial agriculture (Ireland remained a net importer of food), compounded the potato famine of 1845–49, during which at least a million people died of starvation or disease and another million fled, without any prospects for work, into the arrival cities of England and North America, a loss of a quarter of the population. The Irish soon made up a significant part of the arrival-city populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, London, New York City, Chicago, and Toronto.

So sudden and dramatic was this migration that it briefly turned the arrival city into the hopeless slum of its popular image. During several periods in the first half of the nineteenth century, the influx of displaced rural families was large enough to force urban wages down to inhumane levels. Worse, in the century’s earliest decades, the employees of the mills of northern England were largely children and women, who could be paid even less. The open sewers beneath floors and in uncovered gutters running behind the back-to-back houses were a great source of infection, so that western European arrival cities experienced three or four major cholera epidemics between 1830 and 1860, killing millions of people. Only the sanitary, housing, and humanitarian reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century ended this urban suffering.

Would Europe have been better off if other countries had followed the lead of France and ensured the right of peasants to stay on their subsistence farms? Or would the British approach of a sudden, sharp transition to commercial agriculture and urbanization have produced a higher standard of living in the peasant-dominated countries of western and southern Europe? This is more than a matter of speculative history, since it is precisely the question being asked by regional and national governments today in Asia, Africa, and South America.

One thing that did sharply distinguish the British and French approaches was the divergence between rural and urban life. In France, peasants and urbanites grew further and further apart in cultural and economic terms, whereas in Britain they tended to converge. In the 1860s, the French economist Léonce Guilhaud de Lavergne noted that in Britain rural and urban salaries were almost exactly the same, with no discernible difference “between the Londoner’s way of life and that of the Cumberland man.”13

On the eve of the First World War, agriculture employed 41 percent of French workers and generated 35 percent of France’s national income; in Britain, 8 percent of the workforce was employed on the land, accounting for only 5 percent of gross domestic product. Virtually the entire rural population of England and Wales was absorbed into the arrival cities of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Birmingham, Sheffield, and other industrial centers during this century. By the end of the great European migration in 1914, average British incomes—extending to workers in arrival-city slums—were between 15 and 25 percent higher than those in France, measured by purchasing power, although France had comparable levels of health, literacy, and education.14 It is extraordinary that throughout this period Britain’s population was growing at two to three times that of France, and yet somehow this demographic assault did not produce any social strains profound enough to threaten the integrity of the state. Certainly, there was considerable political upheaval in Britain throughout the first half of this period, resulting in confrontations, such as the Peterloo Massacre, and governments whose treatment of the arrival-city populations was, at best, indifferent and, at worst, savage and inhumane. Yet the new urbanites did not starve, and they did not, in general, feel stuck forever. Arrival was a viable possibility, so violence was rarely a consideration.

The nature