66Cambridge University Press, 1995).

8 M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and

the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2008), p. 23.

9 L. Barrow, ‘White Solidarity in 1914’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making

and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols., Vol. I: History and Politics (London:

Routledge, 1989), pp. 275–87; D. Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada’s Response to Immigrant

Workers, 1896–1994 (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1995); N. Kirk, Comrades and

Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia

from the 1880s to 1914 (London:  Merlin Press, 2003), pp.  59–148; J. Martends, ‘A

Transnational History of Immigration Restriction:  Natal, 1896–7’, JICH 34 (2006),

323–44; P. O’Connor, ‘Keeping New Zealand White, 1908–20’, New Zealand Journal of

History 2 (1968), 41–65; C. Price, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration

to North America and Australasia, 1836–1888 (Canberra: Australian National University

Press, 1974); A. T. Yarwood, Asian Migration to Australia: The Background to Exclusion

(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964).

10 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776], ed., with an Introduction and notes, A. Skinner,

Books 1–3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); Books 4–5 (New York: Penguin, 1999),

Book 1, Chapter 8, p. 79.

67Overseas migration search of a better life. Between the mid nineteenth century and the end of the First World War a staggering number of people migrated from the British Isles – 13.4 million in total.11 Moreover, whereas most of the three- ­quarters-of-a-million people who had left the British Isles for America and the Caribbean from 1630 to 1820 were indentured labourers, those who subsequently migrated did so mainly of their own volition.

A catalyst for this unprecedented movement of population was the Victorian revolution in transport and communications. The 1860s saw a rapid shift from sail to steam on transatlantic services, with specialised passenger ships making their first appearance. Subsequent improvements in steamship technology – the compound engine, for example – made journeys cheaper, quicker and more comfortable.12 Meanwhile the building of railways simplified transport to points of departure and from ports of arrival to places of settlement.13 As a result of these developments, many more people contemplated relocating overseas. As one commentator remarks, ‘no other nation had ever been able to move its people about the world with such confidence’.14 Where did they go? There was a bewildering choice of destinations for the nineteenth-century would-be migrant. British people tested the possibilities of settlement across America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, while smaller enclaves of officials, traders and missionaries sought to establish themselves in the plantations of the West Indies and Ceylon; the treaty ports of South America, China and West Africa; the highlands of East Africa; and the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent. The colonies were not, it must be emphasised, the only or even the main destination. Indeed, across Europe people tended to migrate away from the empires of their own country. Migrants from Italy, Austria, Germany and Spain either eschewed their colonies altogether, or moved in much larger numbers elsewhere.15 For British migrants, America was

11 Of these migrants, 9.5 million came from England, Scotland and Wales, and 3.9 million

from Ireland. Figures have been automatically rounded to the nearest thousand and are

taken from B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1988), pp. 81, 85. The Irish figure does not include Irish emigration to England or

Scotland.

12 R. Kubicek, ‘British Expansion, Empire and Technological Change’, in A. Porter (ed.), The

Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols, Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999), pp. 247–70 (p. 251).

13 See K. O’Rourke and J. G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a

Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),

pp. 35, 55 on the significance of falling international transport costs.

14 Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 177.

15 P. Manning, Migration in World History (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 153.

68the chief magnet.16 The Irish, who sustained the highest rates of emigration, preferred the United States to the colonies; America’s Irish-born population exceeded its English-born from 1850.17 What was manifestly true of the Irish was likewise true, if not to the same degree, of emigrants from England, Scotland and Wales (see Table 3.1). Until the end of the century more than two-thirds of people leaving the British Isles chose the United States as their destination. Emigration to America gathered pace during the 1830s and 1840s, and markedly increased during the first great emigration ‘boom’ of the 1850s. By 1862, the radical politician John Bright could confidently declare America the ‘home of the working man’. During the preceding fifteen years, Bright observed, over two million British workers had migrated there, the equivalent to ‘eight Birminghams being transplanted from this country and set down in the United States’.18 Emigration to America and Britain’s settler colonies fluctuated over time (see Figure 3.1). Not until the early part of the twentieth century did the settler colonies become the main destination for emigrants from Britain, although when the move towards the empire did occur it was as sudden as it was striking.19 From 1900–12, 2.5 million people left Britain, 58 per cent of them for the colonies. In 1913, a bumper year for emigration, this figure increased to 80 per cent. Interestingly, there was no corresponding swing in the direction of Irish migration, which went to the United States in much the same proportions as before, albeit that after the turn of the century it was increasingly Great Britain rather than Ireland that was the major source of migration from the United Kingdom.20

Canada was the chief recipient of the extraordinary surge of emigration prior to the First World War. The dominion experienced six of the ten largest annual immigration levels ever recorded between 1903 and 1913, and, in 1905, for the first time since the 1830s, more people left Britain for Canada than for the United States. Eight years later, Canada was taking many more migrants from Britain (142,622) than was the

16 A fact emphasised by all leading historians of migration. But for a recent recognition

and exploration of the significance of America as a destination for British migrations, see

especially Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 119: ‘the single most important fact of the

British diaspora was its orientation to the American Republic’.

17 Of 7.7 million Irish who migrated from 1815 to 1910, 62 per cent headed for the US,

compared with 19 per cent to Britain, 14 per cent to Canada, 5 per cent to Australasia

and less than 1 per cent to South Africa.

18 Quoted in Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 154.

19 See here M. A. Jones, ‘The Background to Emigration from Great Britain’, in D. Fleming

and B. Bailyn (eds.), Dislocation and Emigration: The Social Background of American

Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 33–4, from which

the figures below are taken.

20 Ibid.

69Overseas migration

Table 3.1. Outward movement of people from the British Isles, by destination, 1853–1920 (in 1,000s).

USA

Canada

Australasia

South Africa

Other

Total

1853–60

230.8

58.7

273.1

12.7

—

575.3

1861–70

441.8

90.2

184.4

12.1

24.9

753.4

1871–80

637.9

152.2

241.5

46.7

58.0

1,136.3

1881–90

1,087.4

257.4

317.3

76.1

86.0

1,824.2

1891–1900

718.7

176.4

116.2

160.0

110.6

1,281.9

1901–10

837.5

793.2

218.9

269.8

213.8

2,333.2

1911–20

379.3

822.0

352.6

94.1

180.8

1,828.8

1853–1920

4,333.4

2,350.1

1,704.0

671.5

674.1

9,733.1

Note: Canada includes Newfoundland. Before 1912 these figures, recorded by the

Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, and then the Board of Trade, were

for outward-bound passengers, chiefly travelling steerage, rather than emigrants as

such. Not until 1912 were migrants travelling to the USA, Canada, Australia and

New Zealand counted separately in the statistics. See N. H. Carrier and J. R. Jeffrey,

External Migration: A Study of the Available Statistics 1815–1950 (London: HMSO,

1953), p. 96.

Source: P. Cain, ‘Economics and Empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the

British Empire, 5 vols., Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1999), pp. 31–52 (p. 47).

250000

200000

Canada

People

150000

South Africa

USA

100000

Australasia

50000

0

1865

1870

1875

1880

1885

1890

1895

1900

1905

1910

Year

Figure 3.1 Outward movement of people from the British Isles,

1865–1913. Canada includes Newfoundland. See notes to Table 3.1.

United States (107,530). Opportunities in America were diminishing for British labour: unskilled workers faced severe competition from southern and eastern Europe, while the demand for skilled work was increasingly met domestically. Meanwhile western Canada was experiencing rapid growth. The total population of the prairies almost tripled between the census years 1901 and 1911 from 598,169 people to 1,720,601 people.21 In 1913, the year of greatest immigration, there were over 400,000 new arrivals, including 138,121 people from Britain.22 Most impressive of all was the expansion of Canada’s urban population, which occurred on the back of five main centres: Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon. Sharing the so-called ‘booster spirit’,23 these cities controlled commercial activity in their domains, and paved the way for the huge increases in wheat exports from the Canadian West to Britain before 1914.24 It is urban growth that explains much of Canada’s new-found popularity with British migrants: the prospect of employment in the towns and cities rather than on the land motivated them to move.25 In the winter of 1905–6 the radical critic of empire, J. A. Hobson, travelled across the dominion and penned his study, Canada To-Day. Hobson marvelled at the colony’s amazing growth rate; Winnipeg alone had developed from a little country town of 13,000 inhabitants into a city of nearly 100,000 in only a quarter-of-a-century. Hobson observed how many of the immigrants pouring into Canada passed through Winnipeg, as did a growing proportion of England’s daily bread. The city, he concluded, was playing an ever more visible role in ‘English common life’.26

70Canada was indeed becoming much more prominent in the British imagination. During the 1870s and 1880s it had attracted little attention from the ‘mother country’, whereas by the turn of the century it was enjoying a good deal of coverage in the British press, and was the centre of key political debates, not least those over fiscal policy and tariff reform.27

21 J. A. Lower, Western Canada:  An Outline History (Vancouver:  University of British

Columbia Press, 1983), p. 171.

22 Of these 95,107 were English, 9,706 Irish, 30,735 Scottish and 1,699 Welsh.

23 Namely, a belief in the desirability of growth and the necessity of material success; see,

for example, A. F. J. Artibise, ‘Boosterism and the Development of the Prairie Cities,

1871–1913’, in R. D. Francis and H. Palmer (eds.), The Prairie West: Historical Readings

(Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1985), pp. 408–35 (quotation from p. 411).

24 P. Voisey, ‘The Urbanization of the Canadian Prairies, 1871–1916’, Histoire sociale/Social

History 8 (1975), 77–101.

25 Although recruitment, and much published correspondence, continued to highlight

opportunities on the land, and tried to divert people from the towns and cities.

26 J. A. Hobson, Canada To-Day (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), pp. 13–19 (quotation

from p. 19). Hobson travelled to Canada to make a special enquiry into the issue of tariff

reform, with particular reference to Canada’s relations with Britain on the one hand, and

the United States on the other. A large part of his book was first published in the form

of letters to the Daily Chronicle newspaper.

27 A. R. Dilley, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and the Dominions: London Finance, Australia

and Canada’, unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford (2006); S. J. Potter, News

71Overseas migration What of Britain’s other colonies? Up until the mid century Australia had struggled to escape its image as a ‘convict colony’; many emigrant ballads of the time recounted the misery of those forced to leave England, while an Australian convict ship, docked near Tower Bridge, provided a vivid reminder of the horrors of transportation.28 The gold discoveries of the 1850s and 1860s put Australia on the voluntary emigrant’s map,29 as did the availability of assisted passages, the appointment of recruiting agents (especially for Victoria and New South Wales) and Queensland’s grants of land.30 Keen to compete in the market for emigrants, the governments of the Australian colonies and New Zealand began a recruitment drive. By the 1870s significant financial inducements were being offered, and the level of promotional activity had outstripped that of both Canada and the United States. Yet Australia and New Zealand continued to suffer from the cost and length of the journey there. Migrant horizons did not markedly widen until the opening of the Suez Canal, and the advent of bigger steam-propelled ships. These two developments shortened journey times considerably, which in turn helped the Pacific dominions to attract larger numbers of settlers. The 1880s saw a notable expansion of immigration into New Zealand as nearly 150,000 people entered the colony from Britain during this decade – gold again being the catalyst.31 Migration to South Africa, by comparison, was modest. Although the railway boom and mineral discoveries of the 1870s and 1880s – diamonds at Kimberley, gold on the Witwatersrand – helped establish the Cape and Transvaal as destinations for British (and Australian) skilled workers, much of this migration was temporary and confined to urban

and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), pp. 106–31.

28 A. S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the

Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 56–7.

29 From 1853 to 1860, 28 per cent of British emigrants went to Australia, as opposed to

only 9 per cent to Canada; from 1861 to 1870 the gap began to narrow. For migratory

patterns to the colonies in the mid century, see K. Fedorowich, ‘The British Empire on

the Move, 1760 to 1914’, in S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives

(Oxford: Blackwells, 2008), pp. 82–6.

30 Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp.  126–7, 153, 194; J. Jupp, The English in Australia

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 28–9. In 1855, for example, 50,000

migrants left Liverpool for the United States, 40,000 for Australia and only 15,000 for

Canada; see D. V. Glass and P. A. M. Taylor, Population and Emigration (Dublin: Irish

University Press, 1976), pp. 61, 70. At various times in the second half of the nineteenth

century, agents were appointed for all of the Australian colonies and for the provinces of

New Zealand.

31 Though many of these migrants then left during the so-called ‘exodus’ of the late 1880s

and early 1890s. See T. Simpson, The Immigrants: The Great Migration from Britain to

New Zealand, 1830–1890 (Auckland: Godwit, 1997), pp. 183–7.

72centres. The assisted settlement schemes promoted by Alfred Milner as South African High Commissioner (1897–1905), which aimed at ­re-establishing British supremacy in rural areas, proved a damp squib; of the 400,000 British and 30,000 colonial troops who served in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, fewer than 2,000 joined these schemes. Natal fared worse, receiving only a small number of British settlers. The assisted settlement schemes promoted by its government during the 1870s, which promised English and Scottish small farmers an idyllic existence in southern Africa, soon ran into difficulty when it was realised that the reality of immigrant life was much harsher. Many of those who settled in the colony felt angry and cheated. Moreover, as Natal’s economy moved to sugar production, it became clear that cheap coloured rather than relatively expensive white labour was required. From the 1860s to 1911, 152,932 Indian workers entered the colony; by 1920 its Indian population outnumbered Europeans.32 Throughout the period in question, therefore, there is a sense in which all of the settler colonies were competing with each other, as well as with the United States, for migrants from the United Kingdom. We will return to this point later when looking at the impact of social networks on a migrant’s choice of destination.

An empire effect? British immigrants enjoyed a remarkable freedom of entry to the col-