How did the migration of people help promote the growth of industrialism in the nineteenth century? Why did people leave the land to work in factories and abandon towns to move to the cities?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: One of the big problems for historians of industrialization is to explain why people left the land for factories and abandoned the country for the towns. Part of the answer may be that most migrants had no choice. The mechanization of agriculture reduced the amount of rural work available. Landowners' economies of scale concentrated more land in fewer hands. Global specialization shifted production of food and raw materials out of the industrializing world, leaving some rural workforces unemployed. Yet the very success of industrialization meant that factory owners had to compete with one another for labor, as businesses crowded the marketplace. Farsighted owners, moreover, realized that contented workers were most productive.