Rudolph Ackermann, I am an Immigrant
Originally posted on the ‘I am an Immigrant‘ Poster Campaign website, hosted by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI). My Story: We...
Author: acrymble
True crime: why the Irish counterfeiting wave of the late 18th century was a myth
The claim that immigrants or minorities are more criminal than the general population is a common trope. From Donald Trump’s claim that Mexicans in the US were ...
Were the Irish in 19th century London more criminal, or just easier to catch?
The early nineteenth-century Irish in London are often remembered as poor, semi-criminal slum dwellers, associated with the narrow streets of St. Giles-in-the-F...
A Network of Vagrant Gaols
Once declared a vagrant by a magistrate, the person would be taken into custody and would begin their journey back ‘home’. Home in this context mean...
Unintentional Migrants to London
This is the slightly-altered text of the paper I delivered at the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS) conference in Oxford, January 2017. I’d ...
The Month That Urban Middlesex Had No Vagrants
In the late eighteenth century, ‘London’ meant many things. Technically, ‘London’ was the ‘City of London’, the dark blue ar...
Irish Vagrant ≠ Scottish Vagrant
Scotland and Ireland were both far away from London as far as eighteenth century travellers were concerned. For the Irish, getting to London involved a dangerou...
Where London’s Vagrants Weren’t From
Those arrested as vagrants on the streets of eighteenth-century London risked expulsion from the city, back from whence they came. The Vagrant Lives proj...
Whipped and deported: England’s historic resistance to free movement of labour
For some in the Leave campaign, the right to freedom of movement enshrined in the European Union was a bitter pill to swallow, because it let them – outsiders –...
The Most Catholic Street in England?
If you’ve ever studied the Irish in eighteenth or nineteenth-century London, you’ve probably quickly learned that they were clustered in the Rookery...