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Overseas migration

Introduction

Migration was deeply woven into the fabric of British life.1 This was partly a function of numbers:  the sheer  – and unprecedented  – scale of those who left the British Isles. More than that, it points to the fact that many people leaving the ‘old’ country were emphatically not cutting loose. A variety of networks helped migrants not only to move overseas and adapt to their new environments, but, crucially, to stay in touch and involved with the society they had left behind.2 Migrants, indeed, showed considerable determination and skill in forging and sustaining links to friends and family ‘back home’. Return migration and modern technology contributed to this developing sense of a relationship between British people ‘at home’ and British peoples overseas. It is estimated that, from 1860 to 1914, as many as 40 per cent of all English emigrants came back to Britain – some two million returnees, each with first-hand knowledge of the colonies or the United States.3 Some returned for good, others temporarily – to marry someone from their former village, to attend the funerals of loved ones, or simply to see family and old friends. Meanwhile, by taking advantage of the transatlantic telegraph, and fast and reliable postal and remittance services, migrants were able, as never before, to keep abreast of what was happening in the United Kingdom, and to sustain family ties there.4

1 See for example R. Floud, The People and the British Economy, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1997), p. 54; and K. T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–86

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 522–5, 547, 560, 564, 569, 573.

2 On the importance of networks to migrant diasporas, see L. E. Guarnizo and M. P. Smith,

‘The Locations of Transnationalism’, in Guarnizo and Smith (eds.), Transnationalism from

Below (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 3–34.

3 E. Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since

1600 (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. 169; M. Harper

(ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2005).

4 For an early recognition of the significance of migration for British society in the nine-

teenth century, see G. M. Trevelyan, who argued that the ingrained insularity of the

64 Overseas migration The information that filtered through personal and familial networks was crucial to a migrant’s choice of destination. Later in this chapter we assess the relative trustworthiness of the various types of network and information flows into which a prospective migrant could tap. We then go on to look at their impact on the migration process – the first such survey of its kind. This is followed by an examination of a vital if neglected dimension of the migrant experience – remittances, or the sending of monies home. Through newly discovered Post Office archive data we consider how and why migrants chose to remit a part of their incomes to friends and family back in Britain, and the social and economic consequences of their doing so. Migrants were key players in Britain’s exploitation of global resources. The exodus of people from Britain during the ‘long’ nineteenth century opened up ethnically and culturally influenced flows of trade to house, clothe and feed migrants, and of investment to create the necessary infrastructure to transport them and their goods. Migration further facilitated new forms of technology transfer and new patterns of patenting. In this way, greatly increased levels of economic activity resulted from the process of migration itself. Thus the main body of the chapter focuses on what motivated migrants to leave the United Kingdom for the ‘New’ world, and how they contributed to the economic life of the colonies after they had settled there. It is, however, important to understand that the global migrations of the long nineteenth century that caused such a significant shift in the distribution of the world’s population were not only European. The ‘free’ British migrants who left the United Kingdom for other parts of the world built networks to support themselves that often overlapped, and indeed interfered, with other ethnically based migrant networks, especially those arising from the great flows of Asian labour – Indian and Chinese.5 This exodus of people from Asia to work in British colonies in the Caribbean, South East Asia, South Africa and the Pacific is perhaps less well-known than its European counterpart.6 Yet the presence of these ‘foreigners’, or ethnic outsiders, was just as important to the

65English was broken down during Victoria’s reign as the Imperial Penny Post (1898) kept

people at home in touch with family and friends who had ‘gone to the Colonies’, and

emigrants periodically visited the UK with money in their pockets and ‘tales of new lands

of equality and self-help’: English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries. Chaucer to

Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1944), pp. 582–3.

5 For the significance of Asian and African migrations as part of modern world history,

see especially A. McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History 15

(2004), 155–89.

6 For its significance, see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global

Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 133–4.

66expanding global political economy, whether they laboured on colonial plantations, in the mines or on the railways. Recruited as contract labour, or on credit ticket systems, in circumstances that ranged from near-slavery to free migration, these Indian and Chinese migrants travelled mostly alone, with the intention of earning enough money to support their families back home.7 One recent study aptly describes them as the ‘global working class of the British empire’.8 Yet their presence in the workplace tended to disturb a sense of British community, and this in turn provoked powerful outbursts of exclusionary racial thinking, resulting in discriminatory treatment in the labour market, anti-immigration campaigns from burgeoning labour movements, and various forms of state immigration restriction and exclusion that were adopted across the settler–colonial world from the later nineteenth century.9

By exploring migrant networks – both the European networks embraced by the colonies, and, more briefly, the non-European networks that were not – this chapter provides the foundation for the two that follow, which investigate the nature of trade and investment within the British World.

The flows of migrants from Britain: an overview In 1776 Adam Smith observed that ‘man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported’.10 Smith was referring to the difficulties rural labourers were experiencing in travelling around the United Kingdom. He could hardly have predicted that, less than a century later, these very same labourers would be pouring forth to the New World in

7 D. Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: