British Emigration Research Articles

THE DORKING EMIGRATION SCHEME OF 1832

Statistical records of British emigration for the I9th century are very poor. Therefore it is important that all information that can be produced on assisted emigration should be considered to enhance our knowledge of the process of migration. In I832 the Dorking Emigration Scheme facilitated emigration of a group of poor rural labourers and their families from Surrey to make a new life in Canada. These were people dependent for support on parish relief. This article discusses this scheme in relation to British emigration policy in the years I8I5-30. Investigating assisted emigration at a local level enables an assessment of the viability of Wilmont Horton’s claim that one great cause of distress at the time was redundancy of population.It is evident in Dorking that emigration was seen as a way to alleviate the growing problem of rural unemployment. But was it just a scheme for ‘shovelling out paupers’, or are there other important factors that must be considered?

Emigration from the UK, 1870-1913 and 1950-1998

International migration is determined by both economic and political forces. This article examines the influence of economic, demographic and policy variables on British emigration to four principal destinations in two different eras. Before 1914 the economic and demographic forces that drove British emigration can be clearly identified. Had the same conditions applied in the post-Second World War period, mass emigration from Britain would have continued until the early 1990s. But from the mid-1960s these influences became less powerful as they were increasingly inhibited by immigration policies in the principal destination countries. The long-term decline in emigration is largely accounted for by shifts in policy, especially those that curtailed or abolished the preferences previously extended to settlers from the UK.

The Quest for Family and The Mobility of Modernity in Narratives of Postwar British Emigration

AbstractIn this article I focus on ways in which the postwar generation of British migrants to Canada and Australia construct their stories as epic struggles with family themes of both loss and triumph at the centre. While, during the postwar years, there is among some migrants evidence of the emergence of a more adaptable, sojourning ‘mobility of modernity’, most life stories told by the migrants suggest a more traditional pattern in which family themes dominate. In these narratives postwar migrants structure their accounts along traditional ‘epic story’ lines reminiscent of Oscar Handlin's long superseded thesis about dislocation in the old country, alienation in the new and ultimate triumph over material and cultural obstacles. But the ‘epic’ quality of these stories is deeply attached to family themes; the disruption of family networks and attempts to rescue the old or create new ones are central to the way the migration experience determines the structuring of life memories. The very act of migration focuses attention on its impact on kinship. The predominantly urban, nuclear family form of postwar British migration does contrast sharply with more traditional rural patterns based on extended family movements and ‘chain migration’. But British migrants' emphasis on the ‘quest for family’ and the refashioning of migrant identity in their narratives underlines the coexistence of traditional themes within countervailing trends towards the mobility of modernity.

Causes of death of British emigrants on voyages to South Australia, 1848-1885.

During recent decades, great advances have been made in measuring death rates on a number of transoceanic routes over several centuries. This article builds on measurements of mortality on voyages to Australia in the nineteenth century. These have shown that it was on Australia-bound convict and government-assisted vessels, which operated under the auspices of government agencies, that the maritime adult death rate was first brought into line with that on land. The novelty of this article lies in its analysis of a new body of evidence on causes of death on 323 vessels arriving in South Australia between 1848 and 1885. Surgeon-superintendents, working under strict regulations, recorded the cause, age, sex, and date of death of every patient whom they had attended for days or weeks. This is, perhaps, an extraordinary situation that mimics, as it were, the records of a medical practice in a working-class area, over a thirty-seven year period. Surgeons faced intensive scrutiny upon arrival, and were fined if their records, or supervision of the voyage, were considered to be faulty. Hence, severe penalties for inaccurate reportage ensured a high degree of accuracy. Their records allow an assessment of the impact of seasonality on the outcome of the voyage and raise questions about why and how the pattern of deaths over the voyage leaves us with a hump-shaped curve when one might have expected the opposite.

Emigration from the UK, 1870-1913 and 1950-1998

The international labour market has not been globalised to the same degree over the last 40 years as have international markets for goods and capital. Immigration policies in developed economies clearly hinder the mobility of labour. But how much difference does it actually make? This paper compares emigration from Britain to four principal destinations in the era of free migration before 1914 with emigration to the same places since the 1960s. As the doors were kept open to British emigrants for longer than most, the deglobalisation of British labour only dates from the 1960s. Since that time there has been a secular fall in British emigration, and this has been a major component in the transformation of the UK from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration. Before 1914 the economic and demographic forces that drove British emigration can be clearly identified. The same effects, applied to the later period, suggest that mass emigration from Britain should have continued until the early 1990s. But from the mid 1960s these influences became less powerful as they were increasingly inhibited by immigration policies in the principal destination countries. The decline in emigration is largely accounted for by shifts in policy, especially those that curtailed or abolished the preferences previously extended to settlers from the UK.

British emigration to the empire-commonwealth since 1880: From overseas settlement to Diaspora?

British emigration to the empire-commonwealth since 1880: From overseas settlement to Diaspora?

The geographical context of planned group settlement in Cape Colony: the 1820s British emigrants

Mapping of aggregate data on 53 groups of British emigrants in 1820 to the eastern Cape reveals considerable variation in their behaviour. While the impression of failure is frequently mentioned in published accounts, the different types of group appear to have quite distinct patterns of behaviour. Proprietary groups were less persistent and appeared to adopt pastoralism earlier. The joint-stock groups were more tenacious in settlement and pursued a more diverse agriculture, eventually. The planned groups lacked farming experience for the most part, although this did not seem closely linked to subsequent persistence or to degree of success in livestock raising. The study concludes that the basis for permanent occupation of the Albany district that was created in the first four years varied among the groups with persistence linked to social institutional cohesion provided by the mutual support derived from shared origins in Britain as well as occupational background in farming. Additional factors leading to greater persistence may have included shared religious persuasion, as well as the successful diversification of livelihood into pastoralism and frontier trade.

Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain (review)

In Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (1995), Andrew Hassam observed: "a city was praised for being like London; a countryside was viewed with suspicion if it behaved differently from a British countryside" (205). In his new book about Australian travellers who made the reverse voyage "home" from Australia to England, we find that a city praised for "being like London" might actually be London; the landscape being looked for and recognized actually was in Britain. Even those born in Australia wrote about their travels in Britain with a sense of recognition, an uncanny familiarity with the places they were to visit.

British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire

This paper draws attention to the ways that free British emigrants made connections between a set of very different sites of colonization in southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand during the first half of the nineteenth century. The paper argues that a distinctive settler discourse was forged through correspondence across an imperial network, linking each of these sites with each other and with Britain. Within this correspondence, arguments were orchestrated not only against indigenous resistance, but also against British humanitarians' attempts to regulate colonial expansion. In constructing different notions of morally legitimate behaviour in the colonies, the paper will suggest that settlers and humanitarians were also disputing the proper qualities of Britishness itself. Their dispute informed dominant representations of raced and classed others, not only in these colonies of settlement, but also within the imperial metropole.

“Working” in the West: The Canadian Prairies as Playground in Late-Victorian Literature

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian literature, specifically fiction about the Canadian West, frequently had multiple national origins and audiences. Some fiction by Canadian authors was published solely in Canada; a good percentage was also published in the United States; and some novels, particularly by popular writers like Ralph Connor, were published in Toronto, New York, and London. During the same period, a number of British novelists were also writing stories about the Canadian West, published first in London for British readers and, if successful, subsequently in New York or Toronto. For Canadian and British-born novelists alike, the prairies and foothills of the West (though frequently portrayed with very little accuracy or detail) served as an ideal setting for adventure and romance. While the entire corpus of turn-of-the-century novels written about the West has generally been considered part of Canadian literature, regardless of an author's origin, the ideological and mythologica l functions of the West in this literature often vary significantly depending on a given author's nationality. The purpose of this essay is to draw a line of distinction between fictions of the Canadian West produced by Canadian and British writers and, by analyzing constructions of work and masculinity in these texts, to show that British novelists utilized the West to address particular British cultural anxieties quite removed from the concerns of Canadian writers. More specifically, I will argue that while Canadian-born authors like Ralph Connor and Robert J.C. Stead attempted to fashion a masculinity of work suited to civilizing the Western territories, British writers engaged in a cultural redefinition of the gentleman, a redefinition designed to celebrate the masculine and genteel virtues of emigrant manual labor at a time when British gentlemen faced professional unemployment at home. Late-Victorian novels like John Mackie's The Heart of the Prairie (1899) and James Morton's Polson's Probation (1897) insist that gentility cannot be sacrificed by working in the West, and that only by working with his hands can a British boy achieve manhood and become a gentleman. These British texts purport to ennoble manual labor and thus appear to concur with Connor's steadfast Christian manliness. However, because the British narratives so rarely depict work and replace it with a West filled with adventure and sport, what emerges from these texts is less a sense of genteel, working manhood than a state of perpetual adolescence which handicapped actual British emigrants with false expectations. II will begin by discussing briefly the masculine mythos in the novels of Ralph Connor before proceeding to the major focus of the essay, British fictions of the Canadian West. In Ralph Connor's fiction, the ideal man is invariably a Westerner. J. Lee Thompson and John Thompson have shown that, for Connor, a man's full potential can only be realized in the West, just as Canada's national destiny will only come to fruition in the stern but redemptive environment of the West. (1) In novels like The Sky Pilot, The Man from Glengarry, The Foreigner, and Corporal Cameron, Connor symbolizes the making of a nation in the making of a man, and thus settles on a readily identifiable model of manhood as the exemplar of Canadianness. Like the British authors discussed below, Connor too is invested in the ideal of the gentleman who works hard, but with an eye toward how that ideal defines a Canadian. For Connor, the true Canadian is Anglicized, in that he adapts English habits of orderliness along with a Protestant outlook, but without the Englishman's sense of class hierarchy. Kalman Kalmar, the hero of The Foreigner (1909), successfully sheds his Eastern European traditions and becomes a go od Canadian--Canadian enough to marry the Scottish heroine Marjorie Menzies. Connor felt that if Canada was to achieve cultural greatness, however, the West must not only assimilate foreign cultural identities, it must also call forth a new breed of Anglo-Saxon man, a breed significantly different from the men found in many British novels about Canada. …

Betwixt and Between: Individual Narratives of British Emigration to South Africa

Betwixt and Between: Individual Narratives of British Emigration to South Africa

Rhyming slang world-wide

Rhyming slang (RS) sprang to life in mid-19th century London when it was first recorded by Ducange Anglicus (1857) together with other unusual forms of slang, such as back slang and Polari. In the period of extensive British emigration to the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, this special type of lexis was also carried around the world — though in much less regular distribution than might have been expected on the basis of shared socioeconomic colonial histories. Three types of development were possible: 1. individual RS items might survive (and possibly acquire new meanings); 2. they might die out, leaving a historical record of their extraterritorial existence at best; 3. they might prompt local fashions, imitating the pattern but creating new words. The phenomenon of RS has found various references in books on national Englishes (such as those by Baker (1970), but significantly less so in Ramson (1966) and Mencken (1977)); however, it has never been explored on a contrastive level. Such an approach has become more feasible today now that the set of historical dictionaries of English is complete following the publication of the works edited by Silva (1996), Ramson (1988) and Orsman (1997) — even though slang is badly documented, since it was not always considered worthy of inclusion in general dictionaries.

English Emigration, Kinship and the Recruitment Process: Migration from Melbourn in Cambridgeshire to Melbourne in Victoria in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

There are still comparatively few investigations which look, in detail, at who the rural English emigrants of the nineteenth century were, the villages and communities they came from, and the rural kinship and recruitment networks which supported their decision. Deficiencies in the published statistical returns, and the fact that good historical data about the English is mainly concerned with the first half of the nineteenth century, have not helped further emigration research. This has led to the situation whereby English emigration has been largely disregarded by some historians or, because British governments were initially preoccupied with emigration as a means of relieving distress, interpretations have tended to rest, precariously, on generalisations that English emigration was the product of economic dislocation. The dearth of historical studies is most striking if we note that, between 1853 and 1930, the English contributed over nine million emigrants to the European diaspora, that numerically they dominated Britain's non-Irish (English, Scottish and Welsh) emigration to most of the destinations available to them, and that the English have proved to be some of the most mobile and persistent of all international migrants.

Anything in Skirts Stands a Chance: Marketing the Canadian North-West to British Women, 1880-1914

Urgent! Thousands of nice girls are wanted in the Canadian West! Despite the popular view that anything in skirts stood a chance, the Canadian government's campaign to attract British female emigrants between 1880 and 1914 posed barriers of class, education, an d training. Period documents suggest that the government achieved its greatest impact through a strategy that stimulated the efforts of businesses and British societies with similar interests in Canadian settlement.

Explaining the Modern Mortality Decline: What can we Learn from Sea Voyages?

During the past two decades, scholars have attempted to quanify the mortality at sea of a large number of seaborne populations. We now have estimates of death rates associated with over 13,000 voyages between 1497 and the First World War. These include voyages of Portuguese and Dutch travellers to Asian destinations; African slaves, European convicts, and free emigrants to the Americas; British convicts to Australia; British government-assisted emigrants to South Africa and Australia; and African, Indian, Chinese, and Pacific Islander indentured labourers to various destinations in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean regions. Whereas the death rate on slave voyages did not decline over time, the death rate of young adults and older children on non-slave voyages plummeted in the early-to-middle nineteenth century, preceding the modern mortality decline on land. Yet, the infant death rate of babies who embarked, or who were born at sea, although steadily declining, remained very much higher than infant mortality on land. The reduction in infant maritime mortality, which lagged well behind that of voyaging adults and children, thus mirrors the difficulty in reducing infant death rates on land. This paper surveys the recent literature on mortality at sea, drawing implications for our understanding of the modern mortality decline on land.

Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era

Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era

The Great Emigration of 1841: Recruitment for New South Wales in British Emigration Fields

In 1841 the colony of New South Wales offered an unprecedented number of heavily subsidised passages to British emigrants. It sought specific categories particularly single young women domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The colony preferred English and Scottish rural immigrants....While the influence of the selection criteria as well as local factors was pronounced this paper argues that the recruitment also expressed the changing propensities to emigrate within the regions of the British Isles. In particular it demonstrated the willingness of young Irish women to emigrate where facilities were provided to overcome their poverty. The immigration of 1841 was a turning point for Australia: it was the largest recruitment before the gold rushes of the 1850s and already signaled some of the main characteristics of Australian immigration history. (EXCERPT)

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

Sailing to Australia, Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants

Sailing to Australia, Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:ERICKSON, Charlotte Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth CenturySPENCER, Sarah (Editor) Immigration as an Economic Asset: The German ExperienceSTALKER, Peter The Work of Strangers: A Survey of International Labour MigrationKANE, Hal The Hour of Departure: Forces that Create Refugees and MigrantsCOLLINSON, Sarah Beyond BordersSULLIVAN, G. and S. GUNASEKARAN Motivations of Migrants from Singapore to AustraliaADELMAN, Howard, Allan BAROWSKI, Meyer BURSTEIN and Lois FOSTER (Editors) Immigration and Refugee Policy –Australia and Canada ComparedLUCASSEN, Jan Dutch Long Distance Migration. A Concise History 1600–1900