Influxes of refugees from one country into another may be viewed by the indigenous population either as a nuisance, even a threat, or as an asset, an enrichment of the existing society and culture. Examples of the former kind would include, in British history, the large numbers of Irish immigrants used to break strikes in the 1840s and 1850s, European tailors brought over for the same purpose in the 1860s, and the group of poor Jews fleeing from East European pogroms in the 1890s and early 1900s. Such groups of workers pressed on the already suffering poor of the cities; they took employment which the native population needed, or accepted the lowest-paid jobs at salaries and under conditions which their British peers refused, thus making it difficult for the combinations of workers (trade unions) to fight for better wages and conditions all round. They were, understandably, both miserable and resented.
The other kind of refugee was one who had a special skill which complemented, rather than competed with, the existing labour force, or who arrived at a time when unemployment was not a pressing problem. Such were the Huguenots who fled from religious persecution in France at the end of the seventeenth century. Among them were skilled silk-weavers who settled down to their traditional work, many of them in the Spitalfields area of London, and who seemed to add to, rather than drain, the resources of the host society. More recently, many of the Germans and other Europeans, mostly Jewish, fleeing from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, have enriched the scientific and cultural life of Britain to a quite remarkable degree. Other ‘exiles’ who were clearly assets were those who came, not because of religious or political persecution, nor because they were starving for lack of work in their native countries, but because Britain offered them a wider field for their activities. Thus the Hanoverian Georges brought with them, or in their wake, talented artists and musicians of whom the most famous was Handel, a number of learned men including the astronomer Sir William Herschel, and a community of businessmen and financiers who set up international banking-houses in London. Among these latter were the Rothschilds, the Goldsmids, the Barings, and the Grotes, some of whose descendants were to play a part in the story of the German refugees in Britain after the 1848 revolutions which this book sets out to tell.
To which of the above-mentioned groups do the refugees of 1848 belong? The answer is to neither, specifically, and to both, in certain cases. As a group, they were heterogeneous in their politics, religion, and profession or trade. Though all suffered under repressive German governments—many had been imprisoned for anti-state activities—and all of them were forced into exile, their political views varied widely, from the communism of Marx and Engels to the internationalrepublicanism of Karl Blind and the intermittent constitutionalism of Gottfried Kinkel. In some cases, as with the tailors and carpenters among them, they competed with their poor British brethren for jobs at low wages and under appalling conditions. No doubt they were often resented, though a few of them, chiefly Marx’s friends Lessner, Eccarius, and Lochner, became leading members of English trade unions in the 1860s and after, and one, Friedri
