British Emigration Research Articles

From Wesel to Aarau: a case of a community of English emigrants (1555–1558)

The article discusses the issue of the organization of English Protestant migration to continental Europe during the reign of Mary I Tudor. The study is based on the materials of the English immigrant community that formed in Wesel and subsequently settled in Aarau. The aim of the research is to analyze the factors that shaped the course, structure, and nature of English migration, using the Aarau community as a case study. The study is supported by various types of sources, including documents compiled by authorities in Aarau, correspondence between English immigrants and figures of the European evangelical movement, and self-written accounts by the immigrants. The main research methods are methods of social analysis (group analysis, identification of its key parameters) and network analysis (analysis of communication networks). By examining the English immigrant community and the European evangelicals who supported it, the author identifies key individuals who influenced the conditions for emigration. Catherine Willoughby and Richard Bertie played a significant role in the establishment of the community. Thomas Lever, as a community leader, organized the relocation. Heinrich Bullinger and his associates were involved in relations between emigrants and local authorities. Based on the findings of the analysis of the emigration process, the author identified several key factors that contributed to it. These included the social composition of the group (with a predominance of artisans), the religious beliefs of community members, which determined the geography of the migration, inter-сonfessional relations in the area, and active involvement in the organization of migrant movements and accommodation, both by the pastor and prominent figures of the evangelical community.

Strange Neighbours: Victorians in South America

This essay examines an understudied group of ‘Victorians’: British immigrants to mid-nineteenth-century, independent South America. Such migrants pose – and help answer – important questions about how Victorians who left the geography of British empire and moved into distinctly foreign contact zones understood themselves as agents (or not) of British imperial power. This essay considers two archives left behind by British emigrants: first, the records of the Strangers’ Club, a social club for foreign residents in Buenos Aires, and second, The Neighbour, a newspaper published by and for anglophone residents of Valparaíso, Chile. Together, these records reveal an admixture of belonging and separateness, hierarchy and assimilation, which suggests that nineteenth-century Britons themselves actively considered how their immigrant identities might form part of the forces of empire. Such consideration, in other words, should not be considered a revelation by today’s scholars.

A Latter-day Saint Apostle's Perception of the Southern Bazaar of Liverpool, October 1864

A Latter-day Saint Apostle's Perception of the Southern Bazaar of Liverpool, October 1864

The Heartland: An American History

In this engaging book, Kristin L. Hoganson attempts to overturn the myth of the Midwest as drowsy and disconnected from the rest of the world. An émigré from the East Coast, the author centers her story around Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she teaches at the University of Illinois. She bristles at descriptions of her adopted region as isolated, provincial, or “flyover country.” She draws a page from Thomas Bender's edited volume, Rethinking American History and a Global Age (2002), following her subjects wherever they go. She portrays border-crossings, commodity production, and the environment with equal enthusiasm. In other words, while she starts with a small city, she seeks to do global history.The author views Champaign as a good starting point to figure out if the rural and small-town communities at the center of the heartland myth “have always been as insular as the myth suggests” (xxv). She understands that Champaign had its own particular development and that there is no one typical place to use as a proxy for a region as enormous as the Midwest. She does not want to do local history, which she associates with antiquarianism. And while no one would call her an antiquarian, since she focuses on her adopted hometown, she runs the risk of sounding like a town booster or local critic.At the very least, the history of the Midwest is about two heartlands, the urban and the rural. William Cronon, in Nature's Metropolis (1991), showed one way of studying both by portraying Chicago as the center of a dynamic regional economy. Another way of getting at the diversity of the Midwest would be through studying people whose lived experience exemplifies the porous boundary between rural and urban. For example, the baseball star and evangelist Billy Sunday grew up on the Iowa prairie but moved to Chicago, found God, and then returned to Iowa. Jane Addams grew up in western Illinois and made her career working with immigrants in Chicago.It is hard to interrogate the categories of the Midwest and the heartland without at least a respectful nod toward cities. The region is home to a major metropolis in almost every state and includes Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and numerous smaller industrial cities. These places traded and manufactured goods. They were also centers of Black culture, and therefore our national culture.The author is not obliged to write about African Americans, and she chooses other good topics to explore. However, it would be helpful to explain their absence, or for that matter the near exclusion of the working class, from the story. The traditional story of the industrial heartland and its working-class movements may seem passé. But the tale of the heartland includes them, and has whiteness at its very core. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the New York Times's 1619 Project, has sought, with some success, to recast American history around race. That she grew up in a heartland industrial town, Waterloo, Iowa, cannot be a coincidence.This is a fun book to read. The author teaches and lives in a county dominated by the University of Illinois, which makes for the kind of quirky excitement that only a college town can provide. Her story includes interesting discussions of the highly mobile Kickapoo Indians, whose travels are occasionally by choice and more often involuntary. It also discusses the intersection of ecology and botany, Chinese hogs, wet-prairie drainage, British emigrants, exploration of the North Pole, isolationists, balloonists, weather forecasters, bird-hunting, and the borders with Mexico and Canada.The book includes a distinctive and welcome feature: so-called archival traces made up of short quotations from research notes. These additional primary sources, always interesting and often surprising, suggest new avenues of study for students and professional historians alike. The Heartland, with its varied slices of Midwestern life, combines abundant research with graceful writing. She illuminates how Champaign became part of a broader national culture with a stake in the global economy. It is a tale worth telling.

The liberal corporate order and the market transition in colonial Upper Canada, 1825–1841

ABSTRACT This analysis of the corporate ‘franchise state’ in the settler colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) highlights its role in introducing both a liberal market and a corporate revolution. I contrast the liberal legislative project to create laissez faire markets with the private corporate agenda of those legislators, a group of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ known as the Family Compact. The corporation became the vehicle by which these oligarchs controlled trade and introduced managed markets in the fictitious commodities of land, labor and money; the fictitious commodities were legal reifications (as was the corporation itself) used to govern the trade in real commodities. Control of these corporations allowed these gentlemanly capitalists to also assume control of British emigration and thereby introduce new forms of ‘systemic colonization’ and settler colonialism; and change conceptions of colonial citizenship from loyalism to liberalism. The corporate revolution was thus key to the formation of liberal settler colonialism in the province.

Migration Infrastructure and Brokerage in Victorian Female Emigration Societies

Abstract In the nineteenth century, female mobility was eased by a variety of intermediary structures, which interacted to direct the migration of British women to the Empire. Among these migration infrastructures were female emigration societies such as the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (1861–1886). This organisation was the first to assist gentlewomen in emigrating. It adopted a holistic approach to British female emigration by promoting women’s departure, selecting candidates, arranging their protection on the voyage, as well as their reception in the colonies. Grounded in a multifactorial perspective, this article offers an insight into how female migration brokerage came into being in the Victorian context. It intersects migration with gender and labour perspectives in a trans-sectorial approach of the history of female migration infrastructures in the British Empire, and reveals the diversity of transnational migration intermediaries interacting at meso level between female emigrants, non-state actors, and state institutions.

Explaining Resistance to Early Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants to New South Wales

Abstract In the 1830s, the British government commenced a programme of relocating poor labourers to its Australian colony of New South Wales, a practice known as ‘assisted migration’. Though intended to address the colony’s labour shortage, the new arrivals were met with hostility by the colonial elite, who claimed the immigrants were immoral and unsuitable as workers. While migration historians have shown these judgements to be largely unfair, the forces underpinning these perceptions await a thorough interrogation. This article examines colonial public rhetoric about immigration to reveal attitudes shaped by a tangle of overlapping and reinforcing political, economic, and cultural factors. Ultimately, the colonial elite wanted to control who could enter their community, both physically and socially, which became a temporally persistent pattern vital to the settler colonial project.

Начальный этап идейного формирования пуританизма в ходе Реформации в Англии

The article deals with the origin of ideological prerequisites of Puritanism as a trend in the Church of England which appeared in the course of Reformation. The author traces penetration of Reformation ideas to England from European continent before the beginning of King’s Reformation by Henry VIII (1509–1547) in 1534 and shows the beginnings of English religious emigration on the Continent from 1520s which was formed by Englishmen who were adherents of continental Reformed churches. The author of the article supports the opinion that the decisive factor which contributed to the rise of Puritanism in England was connected with the influence of continental Reformed churches. The ideas of European Reformation were perceived, first of all, by the English emigrants, and later on part of English clergy also supported continuation of Reformation in England in accordance with continental examples.

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer and

Reviewed by: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire by Philip Steer Jason Rudy (bio) Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer; pp. xi + 227. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $99.00. “There is a great difference,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in his 1829 Letter from Sydney, “between looking to a place and looking from it” (qtd. in Steer 202). Wakefield would have felt the accuracy of his words, writing his “letter” not from Sydney—a place he had never visited—but instead from London’s Newgate Prison. Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, Philip Steer’s important analysis of Britain’s settler empire, likewise proves Wakefield true in shifting the predominant view of colonial literature, which generally has found scholars looking [End Page 700] out from the vantage of Britain, to account instead for the perspective from nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand. Steer’s work references a rich context with which scholars of Victorian literature and history will be familiar, including deft readings of works by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. But at its heart, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature makes an argument for taking seriously the literature of Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial spaces. For Steer, “literature” generally means the novel, and what emerges across his chapters are provocations to engage with works that few in the field will recognize, along with compelling arguments for doing so. There is a certain comfort in all the familiar dishes at the corner bistro—a hearty serving of Great Expectations (1860–61), say—and also a particular delight in savoring the less conventional: for example, Thomas McCombie’s Arabin; or, The Adventures of a Settler in New South Wales (1845) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever (1853), both of which emerge as significant novels in Steer’s able hands. Steer charts an innovative methodological route, overlaying literary analysis, political economy, and the formal features of colonial systems (including Australian transportation and Indigenous dispossession, among others). The results are provocative. In Arabin, for example, Steer locates an important midcentury narrative about how a colonialist might be “convert[ed] . . . from a migratory to a settled state” (54). If land in Australia can be made into private property, and British citizens given the right to own that land, then “the emigrant need no longer be thought of as lost to the body politic” (60). This move toward property—a “stadial model” for Australia built on ideas from John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise of Government and apparent throughout McCombie’s narrative—enabled the shift in perspective away from Australia as a dumping-ground for convicts (79). The rise of free settlement on the continent was a direct result of stadial thinking, as was the tragic disregarding of Indigenous Australians whose conception of land possession never aligned with English notions of private property. The 1851 discovery of gold in Australia was to put pressure on the stadial model, as Steer shows in his second chapter. Here the economics of mineral extraction vied with the impulse toward land ownership and cultivation: “if character came from developing land with labor, as Locke had taught economists and novelists to assume, what happened to a society whose wealth came at random from holes in the ground?” (82). I will note here my suspicion that the stadial model was never truly overtaken by speculation, as Steer argues; both modes seem instead to have competed throughout the nineteenth century, offering different possibilities to readers in both Britain and the Antipodes. Steer nonetheless shows the discomfort of British emigrants in perceiving “nomadic diggers and indigenous populations” as equally removed from “settled society” (102). Spence’s Clara Morison in particular frames the gold rushes as “antisocial” (93), “speculative” (95), and ultimately aberrant behavior that must be rejected in favor of “pastoralism, culture, and [a more fixed system of] capital” (95). Alongside Spence’s novel, Steer situates William Howitt’s Land, Labor, and Gold; or, Two Years in Victoria (1855) and Trollope’s...

J.C. Byrne, Entrepreneurial Imperialism and the Question of Indigenous Rights

ABSTRACT This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial schemes and fashioned himself as an emigration expert. In 1848 he published Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, followed by a number of emigrant guides to the individual Australian colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal. Descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferate throughout Byrne’s guides. While his texts were informed by his own travels, he also quoted liberally from official correspondence, newspapers, and other contemporary works. His accounts reflect both his own opinions, and also a broad spectrum of imperial attitudes and approaches towards Indigenous peoples. This article explores Byrne’s ideas of how Indigenous peoples might best serve the interest of British emigrants: that is how they might or might not be made ‘useful’ to British subjects, and also, in some cases, how their inevitable demise would provide ‘peculiar advantages to emigrants’. His accounts of Indigenous people illustrate the problems posed by the ‘native question’ in imperial thinking, and the way in which Britain grappled to envisage the future place of indigenous people within its colonies in the face of growing settler demands for land.

History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonization in South Australia and New Zealand

AbstractThis article takes a fresh look at the history of private colonial enterprise in order to show how companies influenced British settlement and emigration to South Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s, thus connecting the settler revolution to global capitalism. Bringing into a single analytical frame the history of company colonization in the antipodes and its Atlantic predecessor, it examines how and why the actors involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand invoked North American precedent to justify their early nineteenth-century colonial ventures. The article shows how the legitimating narratives employed by the colonial reformers performed two key functions. On the one hand, they supplied a historical and discursive tradition that authorized chartered enterprise in the antipodes. On the other hand, they furnished legal arguments that purportedly justified the appropriation of Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land. In illuminating how language and time shaped the world-making prophesies of these colonial capitalists, the article aims to extend recent work on corporations in global context.

The Ballygiblins

Drawing on interpretations and reactions to the violence of the 1824 Ballygiblin riot in the Bathurst District of Upper Canada, this article examines the local reception of assisted Irish Catholic immigrants to the region. In their reaction to the new arrivals, Bathurst District residents demonstrated the extent to which local priorities for settlement were at odds with that of British emigration policy. The reception of the Irish was conditioned by the legacy of the so-called “old world” in real and expected patterns of violence; by a local culture that prized loyalty, Protestantism, and pioneer manhood; and by the immediate context of British emigration policy and the process by which that policy was applied, interpreted, and experienced.

British Emigrants and the Making of the Anglosphere

AbstractBritish emigrants tend to be lost in their vast numbers and in their historiographical anonymity. They feature very marginally in most interpretations of British expansion in the age of imperialism. There was a remarkable surge in emigration in the 1820s which presaged the Age of Emigration in the Victorian era. This was also a prototype of modern international migration. The origins of this momentous increase in emigration are unclear but recent emphasis gives priority to the influence of the new forms of propaganda and ‘puffery’. In this article it is contended that more consideration should be accorded to bedrock changes in British demography and agrarian life in the propulsion of this mass emigration, which eventually involved about 19 million people from the British Isles in the long nineteenth century.

From the ‘cape of despair’ to the Cape of Good Hope: letters of the emigrant poor in early nineteenth-century England

This article draws on an unusually rich archive to explore the motives and mentality of poor English emigrants in the early nineteenth century. In 1819, the Colonial Department advertised a subsidized emigration scheme to South Africa; 2000 people wrote letters of application preserved in the National Archives. In studying the emigrant poor, historians have been primarily dependent on numerical data derived from passenger lists. The letters of application of 1819 allow more nuanced conclusions about the circumstances and the aspirations of the poor emigrant at a time of severe economic distress. The correspondence shows which trades were particularly drawn to emigration, particularly the framework knitters and the weavers who had lost not only their regular income but their trades. The letters also shed light on the gender tensions which lay beneath the surface of what was promoted as family migration. Most telling of all, the letters show that among the poor there was more to the decision to emigrate than fatalism and passivity. Poor emigrants expected to have to work for their living, but with the reward of greater security, enhanced prosperity, and – in the case of the male majority – the achievement of ‘independence’.

The migrancy of racial and settler imaginaries: British migrants in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

The position of migrants within Eurocolonial settler cities has received growing interdisciplinary attention. Within the field of geography there have been calls for new avenues of research into the encounters of bodies with different histories of arrival and experiences of racialization in such contexts. However, there remains little research on the position of British migrants, despite their ethno-historical links, and the ongoing popularity of such destinations among British emigrants. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first-generation British migrants to examine their reflections on the bicultural and multicultural landscapes of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. This paper makes a number of contributions. First, it documents both the racial and settler imaginaries of British migrants. Second, it highlights the ways normative temporal and spatial assumptions shape encounters with difference in urban settler environments. Finally, through an examination of the heterogeneity of perspectives, histories and investments at work among British migrants, this paper seeks to complicate monolithic ideas of belonging, otherness and identity in racialized settler societies.

Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945 par Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson

Reviewed by: Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945 par Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson Michael Akladios Barber, Marilyn and Murray Watson–Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015. Pp. 288. Invisible Immigrants' greatest strength lies in its recounting of the multifaceted life experiences of the last major movement of English immigrants to Canada between 1945 and the mid-1970s. The English formed the largest national group—over half a million people—of the approximately four million immigrants who entered Canada in this period. From the decision to leave England to the struggles of settlement and adaptation to life, work, and community in Canada, the memories of over seventy English immigrants take centre stage. The authors deserve praise for not letting the "confused and contested state of theory" overwhelm or obscure immigrants' stories (p. 16). With their life-story approach, Barber and Watson build on, and offer comparisons with, Jim Hammerton and Al Thomson's Ten Pound Poms (a study [End Page 450] of the English in Australia) and Murray Watson's Being English in Scotland. The authors challenge the invisibility of English immigrants in Canadian historiography and suggest rather that "in many respects the English are invisible, though audible" (p. 153). Their analysis sheds light on the range of factors motivating English emigrants and on the ways in which they experienced Canada's newly adopted role as a civic nation. The writers ground these narratives in a wealth of secondary literature, select periodicals, and archival documents, and consider them in relation to "contextual issues related to family and gender, social class, welfare, race and ethnicity, sensory perception, technology, and popular culture" (p. 28). However, one should read their conclusions with caution, since about one-third of English immigrants returned to England or moved elsewhere, and the authors interviewed none of these people. The first half of the book is chronological. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the harsh realities of postwar austerity measures in England, Cold War tensions, and the competitive promotional activities of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Throughout, English immigrants appear as active transnationals who moved pragmatically where there was demand for their expertise and mobilized transatlantic connections. Ontario attracted the highest proportion, with British Columbia and Quebec next. After the 1960s, Alberta's developing oil industry attracted more immigrants, and growing emphasis on French language and culture after the Quiet Revolution made Quebec lass attractive. Taking us beyond the typical push-and-pull factors, Barber and Watson show that economic frustrations did not always motivate emigration. For some people, particularly single émigrés, "working as part of travelling was a product of changing attitudes toward leisure, an evolving youth culture, and greater mobility in the postwar decades" (p. 59). After decisions to leave, chapter 3 follows immigrants' touching stories of preparation, departure, and the journey to Canada. Technological advances figure heavily, as ship travel gives way to propeller-driven aircraft and then passenger jets. Chapter 4 offers an engrossing transition from chronological to thematic. In accounts of adjustment to life in Canada and reactions to anglophone--francophone divides, Barber and Watson's analysis of sensory perception and the "audible immigrant" is the book's most compelling contribution. Following the lead of their interviewees, they forgo theories of one-way assimilation or two-way acculturation in favour of adaptation, "a flexible concept that implies change but not necessarily complete conformity" (p. 100). For immigrants audible in their accent and manner of speech, in Montreal this marker of difference could become a point of discrimination; especially for women active in family and community life who felt as "second-class citizens" (p. 108). In addition, we read stories of adaptation to a different monetary system, shopping, cooking, the absence of the English pub, and the power of the "$1,000-cure"—a return visit to England. Chapters 5 and 6 then turn to paid and unpaid work to assess the newcomers' integration into Canadian society. Case studies introduce us to entrepreneurs, professionals, public-sector workers, and working wives. Throughout, English immigrants appear as professional and skilled workers who encountered few [End Page 451] barriers to jobs. Single immigrants accepted accommodations in...

‘The Ill-name of the Old Country’: London’s Assisted Emigrants, British Unemployment Policy, and Canadian Immigration Restriction, 1905-1910

Between 1906 and 1910, Canada passed two increasingly restrictive Immigration Acts to, among other reasons, reduce charitable assisted emigration from London. These acts were passed in response to Britain’s Unemployed Workmen Act in 1905, which contained an emigration clause designed to move London’s unemployed to Canada. Canada deemed these emigrants to be unsuitable largely because they hailed from the impoverished East End of London. Emigration charities felt an imperial betrayal in the wake of the restrictions. Although an exception allowed for a limited degree of charitable emigration to continue, assisted English emigrants were now unreservedly lumped together with other undesirables in the British World. Despite Canadian displeasure, charities continued to send London’s unemployed to Canada until World War I. A more direct relationship between British unemployment policy and Canadian immigration policy is emphasized, opening a space wherein to examine transnational and imperial legal tensions in the early twentieth century British World. This space reveals a nexus of poverty, migration, and restriction that pitted Britain’s needs against Canada’s; it also complicates the concept of loyal nations belonging to a cooperative British World, becoming particularly relevant to the evolution of restrictive Canadian attitudes towards British immigrants after 1905.

I have never been at rest since: The Ballad of Daniel Nash and Charlotte Gregory

This essay treats the linguistic and cultural context of the first five out of a series of eleven letters written 1869–73 by the author’s great-grandfather, Daniel Nash, to the woman he hoped to marry. It addresses the cultural background of the writer and provides the full text of these five letters with a commentary that recovers and explains the archetypal story contained in them. It is drawn from an illustrated book-length study of the complete letter series, “Parting Ways: Memory and Migration, the Story of Two Nineteenth-Century English Emigrants to America,” which seeks to reconstruct the lives and world view of an ordinary pair who were emblematic of a remarkable time, place, and people, and a now-vanished culture. Both the essay and the study from which it is drawn employ a method that combines social history, local and family tradition, and what the historian Robert Zaller has perceptively called ethnoarcheology.

An investigation of the healthy migrant hypothesis: Pre-emigration characteristics of those in the British 1946 birth cohort study.

The finding that migrants to high-income countries have lower rates of morbidity and mortality than non-migrants, controlling for socioeconomic position, is often attributed to the "healthy migrant" hypothesis, which suggests that only the healthiest individuals choose to migrate. This prospective study investigates the healthy migrant hypothesis in a cohort of British emigrants using pre-migration health indicators. We also investigate how early-life health characteristics relate to age at emigration and whether or not the emigrant returned home. Data are from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, a nationally representative cohort study of people born in England, Scotland or Wales in March 1946. Childhood socio-economic position, health and cognitive ability were compared between 4,378 non-emigrants and 984 emigrants. Of the emigrants, 427 emigrated before age 20 and 557 after that age; 602 emigrants remained abroad and 382 returned home. Emigrants had better childhood health (especially greater height), higher childhood socio-economic position and better childhood cognitive ability at age 8 than non-emigrants. Return emigrants were very similar to emigrants who remained abroad. We found support for the healthy migrant hypothesis in a cohort of British emigrants. Our findings improve an understanding of how health is distributed within and across nations.

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealandby Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon. Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. xx, 412 pp. $100 Cdn (cloth). Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand is an inter-disciplinary exploration of the Scottish emigrant experience in New Zealand. While historians have long claimed that New Zealand was more influenced by Scottish culture than anywhere else outside of Scotland, this is the first work to examine these claims in-depth and analyze the ways in which Scots negotiated with and affected their new environment. With the recent increase in ethnic and migration history, principally with regards to the Scottish diaspora, this book provides a particularly welcome, indeed needed, addition to present scholarship. The book is roughly organized into four parts. Following the first chapter, which explains the work's rationale and methodology, chapters two and three examine the statistical research used for the project. They provide a rigorous analysis of the movements, demographics and communities of Scots in New Zealand over different phases of settlement. Through a series of comparative studies of Scottish communities in New Zealand and Scotland, these chapters provide the quantitative groundwork for the more focused case studies that follow. The following section, encompassing chapters four through seven, looks at the impact that Scots had on New Zealand society, through examinations of their economic successes in relation to other British emigrants (particularly the English), their participation in civil society, their impact on the New Zealand environment, and their participation in Scottish ethnic associational culture. Chapters eight and nine examine the ways in which Scots maintained (or relinquished) their Scottishness within the private sphere; exploring the ways that the Scottish emigrants engaged with Scottish and colonial literature, religion, leisure activities and folkways. Finally, Chapter ten places the experience of Scots in New Zealand in a global context. Each chapter challenges long-held stereotypes, explaining why they were created and presenting the realities. One of the main contributions of this book is its successful demonstration of the duality of the Scottish New Zealand experience, one of two conflicting, yet at the same time congruous, cultures--Scottish and British. By primarily employing case studies, this work provides a robust analysis of the ways in which Scots shaped their identity in relation to the land of their ancestors, but also to the land they lived in. Not driven by generalizations based on stereotypes but by quantitative and qualitative data and research, this work provides an unrivalled examination of the Scottish migrant's understanding of themselves in the New Zealand landscape, society, and culture. …