Empire, the Economy, and Immigration Britain 1850–2000
To survey the changes in British population between 1850 and 2000 requires some large-scale generalizations. At the beginning of my period, Britain had an empire that held a quarter of the world’s population, but by the end of the period Britain had become part of the European Union and contained one-sixth of the Union’s population. For the first hundred years of the period, Britain was exporting its population to the empire; for the last fifty years, the empire had struck back. The last 150 years have seen huge transformations of the British economy. There has been a shift from agriculture to industry and from industry to services. Coal production rose from 50 million tons in the middle of the nineteenth century to 300 million tons in 1913. By 1999 it had returned to below its 1851 level. Mining scarred the landscape of all the coalfields. Oil production rose from none in 1970 to about 128 million tonnes in 1997, but left hardly a mark on settlement. The steel industry rose and fell. In 1860 there was no crude steel produced (Mitchell 1975: 399). By 1960 25 million tons were produced and now it is down to about half that level. The United Kingdom has undergone the demographic transition. The population rose from 10 million in 1801 to 38 million in 1901 to 59 million now. Six million more people have left the United Kingdom than have entered it since 1851. A tide, from the beginning of the twentieth century, has swept the rural population into the biggest cities until the post-1950 backwash has scattered it out to suburbia, exurbia, and market towns. Urbanization has been followed by suburbanization; suburbanization by counter-urbanization. The Fordist system of mass production produced the Fordist city of mass-produced housing design, the Victorian, terraced inner city. The post-Fordist era hollowed out the inner cities and produced the green belts, the new towns, and the scatter of light industry. The new international division of labour squeezed the manufacturing employment of the country out to the third world.