Lessons · Teaching · industry, immigration and the cities
Factories, arrivals, and cities that grew faster than they could cope
Industrialisation moved work from farms and workshops into factories, drawing millions of people into cities. Large-scale immigration supplied much of the labour. Cities grew faster than housing, sanitation and schooling could follow, and the conditions produced both reform movements and organised labour.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
In beta. This lesson was written for Hone and has not yet been checked by a state certification officer. Practice material, not professional advice. What that means.
What it is for
Almost every pupil has a family story somewhere in this, which makes it the most personal topic on the road. It is also where the idea arrives that a society can decide to change its own rules, through law, organising and votes.
How to think about it
Follow one worker: where they came from, what work they found, what the housing was like, and what changed it. Handle immigration honestly by naming both the contribution and the hostility that met each wave, because both are documented and both are examined.
Worked example
Work moved from farm and workshop to factory, and people moved with itThe migration inside the country is as large as the one across the ocean.
Millions arrived from Europe and Asia and supplied much of the labourEach wave met both demand for its work and hostility to its presence.
Housing, sanitation and schooling lagged far behind the growth of the citiesWhich is what the reform movements were responding to.
Organising, reporting and new laws changed hours, safety and child labourA society changing its own rules, which is the idea worth leaving.
Your turn
Name what moved from farms and workshops into factories.
Industrialisation moved into factories
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Treating immigration as a single event with a single reaction. Each wave had its own origins, its own work and its own hostility, and the differences between them are what an examination asks about.