Irish immigrants supplied Western Europe’s cheapest industrial labor

Evidence

The Irish immigrant was an important element in the industrial English working class (by 1841, 400,000 Irish-born immigrants were living in Great Britain). He was, as Thompson describes the Irish worker of the early nineteenth century, “the cheapest labour in Western Europe.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 254

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early Irish immigrants worked in conditions resembling slave labor — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 33; Famine-era Irish immigrants were poorer and entered as unskilled laborers. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 142