Size and Structure of the Labour Force

The industrial revolution in Germany is generally dated from the 1840s. It exerted too localized an initial impact, however, to significantly relieve the pressure on subsistence caused by the rise in population from 15 million in 1750 to 35 million in 1850. The heavy emigration that began in the 1840s reduced the annual rate of population growth from over 1 per cent between 1815 and 1843 to 0.7 per cent between 1843 and 1871. The spread of industrialization then permitted the rate of growth to recover to 1 per cent per annum between 1871 and 1890 and to rise to no less than 1.4 per cent per annum between 1890 and 1914, when the population reached 67 million.

Food prices largely determined the timing of the migration of the one million emigrants who had left – mainly from the West and South – before 1860. Unprecedented peaks were recorded when rye prices soared in 1846–8 and again in 1853–5. Emigration from East Germany rose rapidly once land reclamation ground to a halt in the 1860s. The great boom of 1871–3 stimulated high internal migration in West Germany, but failed to divert most East Elbian migrants from American destinations. Both internal migration and emigration declined abruptly in the general slump from 1874 to 1878. The American recovery after 1879, coinciding with agricultural depression in East Germany, released a pent-up emigrant backlog. The emigration rate reached 4 per thousand between 1880 and 1885, when about a million emigrants left Germany.