A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

762 Ch. 19 • Rapid Industrialization and Its Challenges

Overseas emigration increased dramatically during the nineteenth cen­
tury’s last decades, the result of economic stagnation, marginal and over­
crowded agricultural regions, religious persecution, and the hope of finding a
better life. Between 1850 and 1880, about 8 million Europeans emigrated,
most to the United States. Russia and Eastern Europe sent an increasing
number of impoverished people abroad. Between 1890 and 1914, about
350,000 Greeks—one-seventh of the population of Greece—left their coun­
try, most for good. Emigration from Europe was itself facilitated by the trans­
portation revolution, as steamships carried millions of people to a new life
across the oceans.
With improving economic times in the late 1890s, emigration slowed down
from Germany, while remaining high from Ireland and increasing dramati­
cally from Italy. During the first decade of the twentieth century, emigration
from Europe rose to between 1 and 1.4 million people each year. Most of
those packing themselves onto overcrowded steamers went to the United
States: Italians and Irish to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; Portuguese
to Providence and New Bedford; Germans and Bohemians to Chicago, Mil­
waukee, and Philadelphia (see Table 19.5); Poles to Chicago and Detroit. In
1907, due to their sheer number, Italian emigrants sent back enough money
to cover half the commercial deficit of their native country. Pushed by crop
failures and pulled by the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862 (which virtually guar­
anteed land in the American West), waves of Swedes, along with Norwegians
and Finns, began to emigrate to the northern United States. By the 1930s, 3
million Swedes had changed countries, leaving a population of about 6 million
at home. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese left for Brazil in search of jobs
as laborers, following the abolition of slavery in that country in 1888.
Between 1871 and 1914, more than 1.5 million Jews left Russia and Polish
Russia for the United States, fleeing poverty and periodic anti-Semitic vio­
lence. Many left their homes with little more than a few cherished items and
great hopes. One Jewish emigrant from a village in Belarus remembered that
his family carried empty suitcases as they left home—they did not want the

Table 19.5. Emigration to the United States, 1871-1910

1871-1880 1881-1890 1891-1900 1901-1910

Germany

Ireland

England/Scotland/Wales

Scandinavia

718.000 1,500,000 505,000 341,000

437.000 656,000 388,000 339,000

548.000 807,000 272,000 526,000

243.000 655,000 372,000 505,000

56.000 307,000 652,000 2,000,000

73.000 363,000 574,000 2,145,000

39.000 213,000 505,000 1,597,000

Italy

Austria-Hungary

Russia/Baltic states

Source: Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immi­

gration and Assimilation (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 11.