In the period 1815–1870, several thousand British workers and engineers went to the continent for work purposes, playing a decisive part in European industrialisation. Workers emigrated because they could market their skills at good value; or because their British employers sought to make the most of their technical lead by setting businesses up abroad, and by producing on the continent, they could avoid protective tariffs.

Which social and cultural factors enabled British capital to flow to continental and indeed global enterprise, British skills to shape labour processes overseas, and British male and female labourers to seek and find overseas employment? This introduction to the Special Issue raises a series of questions on these flows. It asks what numbers went to the continent, in comparison with the large flows to the US and the British World. It addresses the legislative and economic aspects of these labour migrations and tries to relate these to the discussion on the supposed ‘high-wage economy’ of the British industrial revolution. It also focuses on the practicalities of migration. Last, it is also interested in the cultural, religious and associational life of the British migrants, as well as in the relations with the local populations.

Finland urbanised and industrialised slowly. In 1820 Tampere was a tiny inland town in the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. Although Finland was a latecomer to industrialisation, Tampere took the path of many other small towns in Europe. It grew around a relatively fast-growing cotton mill with the help of foreign, mainly British know-how. In this article I give an analysis of the policies and networks that made Finnish industrialisation possible from 1820 onwards, and of the roles the British industrialists, technicians and cotton industry specialists played in this process.

Between 1815 and 1870, thousands of British artisans emigrated to the continent. Among them, hundreds of lacemakers from the East Midlands went to work in northern France, especially Calais. Thanks to the ‘bobbin-net’ technology, they had a competitive lead. By emigrating, they could sell in French markets without paying duties or smuggling costs. They maintained close connections with the East Midlands, where they bought machinery and cotton thread, hired their workforce, and obtained first-hand information on patterns and techniques. These migrant artisans played a decisive part in boosting continental industrialisation and in creating a unified zone of production in north-western Europe.

Labour emigrants in the nineteenth century had ever-increasing access to a global employment market. Many of those who left Great Britain looked beyond Europe, to the British Empire and the United States. They took advantage of improvements in transportation, and followed a wide variety of occupations. Decisions to emigrate were often shaped by their involvement in trade unions and were based on concerns about living standards and working conditions. This study considers a selection of globetrotting British settlers and sojourners who went to Canada, the United States and Australia between 1815 and the 1880s. The article analyses the historiography of labour migration; carries out an empirical study constructed around four pieces of analytical scaffolding; and closes by identifying recurring threads in the multi-hued tapestry of labour emigration, highlighting how concerns and traditions about recruitment, wages and working conditions, which had emerged in the nineteenth century, created legacies that persisted into the period after the First World War.

This article assesses the wide range of experiences of illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Antwerp. It exposes many instances of pauper agency, yet also cautions against simply assuming that all single mothers were similarly forceful in their dealings with illegitimacy. Four key factors affected the options a single mother had at her disposal in dealing with illegitimate pregnancy: the way poor relief was organised, the relative accessibility of judicial processes, the administrative settings, and the prevailing ideas about illegitimacy and morality among the general community. The article shows how these factors changed in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, impacting on the strategies that single mothers could adopt.

‘Vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ have recently become hot topics in historiography. The main focus is on systemic vulnerability: the reasons why certain societies were better able to overcome crisis. In this article I want to address another type of vulnerability – inspired by the insights of Wisner and Blaikie: social vulnerability, and the differentiated impact of crisis on different social groups. Based on a unique corpus of sources – the grain censuses drafted during the grain crisis of 1556/57 – and a reconstruction of household budgets, I will reconstruct vulnerable groups, the root causes behind their vulnerability, and their coping mechanisms. By doing this I will show how systemic resilience could go hand-in-hand with vulnerable people, thus adding more depth to a growing research strand.