72onies, which sought only to exclude the sick, political dissidents and individuals likely to become a public charge.33 At the same time Britain and its settler colonies never formed a self-contained region of labour mobility, and large numbers of people moved beyond imperial boundaries, in particular to and from the United States. This raises the question, therefore, of whether the British government, or the colonial authorities, or migrants themselves favoured the empire, and, if so, how?
For its part, the British government stuck resolutely to a policy of nonintervention, with two notable exceptions. The first was the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (CLEC). Between 1840 and 1869 the CLEC assisted over 340,000 labourers and domestics to migrate,
32 D. Northrup, ‘Migration from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific’, in A. Porter (ed.), The
Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols., Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 88–91, 96; Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 128.
33 S. Constantine, ‘Migrants and Settlers’, in J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis (eds.), The
Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols., Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 163–88 (p. 172).
73Overseas migration mainly to Australasia. The money for their relocation – almost £5 million – came from colonial land sales.34 The second was the Emigrants’ Information Office (EIO), set up within the Colonial Office in 1886. The EIO worked on a shoestring budget, offering advice to prospective migrants but refusing to be drawn into a more active role. Its reluctance stemmed from the belief that state assistance would undercut the work already being carried out by the voluntary emigration sector, from a fear of appearing to favour one colony at the expense of another, and from an aversion to (further) subsidising the internal development of the colonies.35 There was, in short, no ‘emigration policy’ adopted by the British government, other than to allow the free flow of migrants to their choice of destination, and, from the 1870s, to leave the now largely independent colonies to manage their own immigration policies and programmes.
Although fewer than 10 per cent of all migrants from Britain received state support, as many as a quarter of those who went to the empire may have been the beneficiaries of a subsidised passage or land grant.36 Colonial authorities gave priority to recruiting kith and kin from the British Isles because they believed that such people would assimilate more easily, that they would strengthen their social fabric and that they possessed the skills necessary to succeed in their labour markets.37 Thus although migration was, in general, self-initiated, this was more true of the United States than it was of the dominions, where the actions of government agencies helped to direct migratory flows.
As previously noted, from the 1880s there was also a proliferation of immigration restriction and exclusion legislation, of which the ‘Natal Acts’ (1896–7) and Australia’s 1901 Act are the best known. In addition there were the Cape’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1902, and the various discriminatory measures taken by British Columbia from 1898 to 1908.38 This obsession to define outsiders, and to ‘rank-order’ migrants of other ethnicities, focused on, yet was by no means confined to, African and Asian peoples from other parts of the empire. South Africa, Canada and Australia also looked upon Jewish and Catholic immigration with
34 Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp. 137–8, 147, 182.
35 For a fuller discussion, see A. S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics,
c. 1880–1932 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), pp. 139–40, 150.
36 Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp. 138, 153.
37 See for example D. Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and
the Idea of the West, 1856–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 129,
137, 143.
38 In addition to the works already cited see R. A. Huttenback, ‘No Strangers within the
Gates: Attitudes and Policies towards the Non-White Residents of the British Empire of
Settlement’, JICH I (1972), 271–302.
74considerable concern, including those immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.39 Migrants from Britain tended to have confidence in the schemes promoted by colonial government agencies, all the more so when their attractions were reinforced by an encouraging letter home from a friend or relative who had already taken advantage of them. Australian subsidies for free migrants (predominantly rural labourers) began in the 1830s with the bounty permits offered by New South Wales and South Australia.40 So spendthrift was New South Wales that London terminated its bounty payments in 1841, while during the first four years of South Australia’s colonisation programme (1836–40) assisted male migrants are said to have been sent out at such a rate that ‘one was arriving for every sixty acres sold’.41 Similar schemes were subsequently adopted by other Australian colonies, although they were wound down during the 1870s and 1880s. After this, only Queensland and Western Australia continued to offer such support.42 Queensland’s programmes assisted more than 150,000 people to migrate by the end of the century, as the colony ‘recruited disproportionately against the spontaneous flows across the Atlantic’.43 After the passage of the Immigration and Public Works Act of 1870, the year the last British troops departed, New Zealand initiated an energetic recruitment drive that lasted for two decades. Free passage was given to single women, and a nomination system allowed New Zealand residents to bring out their relatives and friends. The scheme was revived from 1906 to 1914 when almost a half of migrants to the colony travelled on assisted passages.44 There were 113,432 recorded nominated and assisted passages to New Zealand: 57,464 from England, 29,880
39 See for example D. R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000),
pp. 78–9, 180–1; and C. Van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver,
Racketeer and Psychopath (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 182, 192.
40 F. J. A. Broeze, ‘Private Enterprise and the Peopling of Australia, 1831–50’, EcHR
35 (1982), 235–53 (pp. 235–7, 245); J. M. McDonald and E. Richards, ‘The Great
Emigration of 1841: Recruitment for New South Wales in British Emigration Fields’,
Population Studies 51 (1997), 337–55 (p. 338–9).
41 P. A. Howell, South Australia and Federation (Kent Town, OH: Wakefield Press, 2002), p. 38.
42 It is estimated that, of the 1.6 million free migrants who had arrived in Australia by the
end of the century, 750,000 had received state assistance; E. Richards, ‘How Did Poor
People Emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the Nineteenth Century?’, JBS
32:2 (1993), 250–79 (pp. 253–5); D. Denoon and P. Mein-Smith, A History of Australia,
New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 87–9, 159,
165–6.
43 Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp. 194–5.
44 W. D. Borrie, Immigration to New Zealand 1854–1938 (Canberra: Australian National
University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 190–3; J. Morris, ‘The Assisted Immigrants in New
Zealand, 1871–79: A Statistical Study’, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Auckland
(1973).
75Overseas migration from Ireland and 19,624 from Scotland, whereas only 7,596 people were brought out from the European continent on government schemes, less than 7 per cent of the total. What motivated migrants? This is a key issue, yet one that continues to elude full explanation. Most migrants did not explain their reasons for leaving the United Kingdom. Improving one’s standard of living was clearly a major motivation. Average real wages (namely, wages adjusted to indicate purchasing power) were lower in Britain than in Australia, Canada or the United States, especially for skilled workers.45 Does this mean that individual self-interest rather than British traditions or the growth of imperial sentiment weighed most heavily on a migrant’s choice of destination?46 In 1889, an official in charge of the EIO appeared to confirm this view when he told a parliamentary select committee on colonisation that ‘the labouring classes do not have any very strong feeling about remaining under the British flag; they go to the country where they think they can do best, or where they may have friends’.47 Yet attributing emigrant behaviour to the pursuit of pure pecuniary gain alone is problematic. If the emigrant’s choice of destination was essentially driven by relative wages, we need to ask how it was that he or she came to know that wages in one location were more attractive than another. Rational choice, after all, is necessarily constrained by the information available, and for the nineteenth-century British emigrant such information tended to be incomplete and selectively generated.
A variety of social networks, many of them deeply personal, proved to be the most important source of information for the would-be migrant. These networks were not ‘unbiased’, often favouring – intentionally, or simply through the relative weight and detail of information they could provide – certain destinations over others. While their existence did not, of course, prevent prospective emigrants from engaging in self-interested calculation, it does indicate that there was considerable scope for culture, ethnicity and religious belief to influence the shape of a migrant’s deliberations. Thus recent research makes it clear that, for many emigrants, the decision about where to migrate involved more than merely comparing real wage rates. The vision of ‘building Britain’s greatness o’er the foam’ could be a powerful motivating ideology. Planting regional and national identities
45 O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, pp. 22–3.
46 A. G. Green, M. Mackinnon and C. Minns, ‘Dominion or Republic? Migrants to North
America from the United Kingdom, 1870–1910’, EcHR 55 (2002), 666–96; Jones, ‘The
Background to Emigration’, p. 75.
47 Report from the Select Committee on Colonisation, Sessional Papers, Vol. X (1889), Qns
1938–9, 1944–6.
76in an empire ‘over which many of these migrants often claimed proprietary rights’ mitigated the sense of dislocation consequent upon long-distance population movements.48 Moreover, even with respect to the economic determinants of migration, quality of life was often as much an issue as the wages on offer: climate, diet, owner-occupation of housing, infant mortality and life expectancy all influenced decision-making.49 The type of society that awaited migrants mattered too. The settler colonies appealed to people seeking greater equality and improved self-esteem. ‘The social freedoms that accompanied colonization’ proved particularly attractive to the ‘more enterprising and adventurous elements of Victorian society’.50 Take the case of South Australia. The colony went through a period of tremendous expansion and improvement during the 1870s and 1880s, on the back of the wheat-growing industry.51 Compared to the UK, good food was cheaper, and the intake of protein, iron, fibre and other beneficial minerals higher; children were taller and healthier; workers’ housing was superior, and their prospects of home ownership far greater. New arrivals remarked approvingly on the absence of servility, and of privilege arising from birth. In 1856 South Australians were the first of the Australian colonies to adopt manhood suffrage and the secret ballot for their lower house of parliament,52 elected on a three-yearly basis. In 1873, they were the first of the Australian colonies to give legal recognition to trade unions.53
Other scholars go further to claim that many British migrants were captivated by a spell of ‘settler utopianism’: the promise of yeoman freeholds, dignified labour, and the opportunity to own one’s ‘home and horse’ in new lands free from the deference and servility of the old country yet still attached to it by cords of sentiment and kin.54 This ideology of
48 M. Harper, ‘British Migration and the Peopling of the Empire’, in Porter (ed.), The
Oxford History of the British Empire, pp. 75–88 (p. 86).
49 See especially A. Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), pp. 132–4, 315, and ‘The British Empire, 1870–1914: A Waste
of Money?’, EcHR 46 (1993), 215–38.
50 E. Richards, ‘Immigrant Lives’, in Richards (ed.), The Flinders History of South Australia:
Social History (Netley, SA: Wakefield Press, 1986), pp. 143–70 (pp. 148–9).
51 R. M. Gibbs, A History of South Australia: From Colonial Days to the Present (Blackwood:
Peacock Publications, 1984), pp. 77ff.
52 The South Australia Act (1856) provided for a bi-cameral parliament with full legislative
authority, subject to some acts requiring royal assent. The parliament’s elected legislative
council was based on a property suffrage, while its assembly was elected on a broad male
franchise, with every male over twenty-one years old entitled to vote after six months’
registration. The South Australians were not the only part of the empire to adopt a wider
suffrage than Britain at this juncture: the Cape franchise, adopted in 1852, was remark-
ably inclusive by the standards of the day.
53 Howell, South Australia, pp. 78–9.
54 J. Belich, ‘The Rise of the Angloworld: Settlement in North America and Australasia,
1784–1918’, in P. Buckner and D. Francis (eds.), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary:
University of Calary Press, 2003), pp. 39–58.
77Overseas migration settler utopianism, it is suggested, stretched beyond the British World to embrace the United States in general, and the American West in particular. Not all would agree. Back in Britain, it should be recalled, there were growing complaints that emigrants to the United States were responsible for sapping the country’s stamina and strength.55 Thus in 1907, when parliament considered whether public money should be used to promote the advantages of the United States as a field of emigration, Lord Curzon gave short shrift to the idea. People who decided to try their luck there, he warned, would soon be swallowed up ‘in the whirlpool of American cosmopolitanism’, or ‘converted into foreigners and aliens’.56 Hence if settler utopianism did motivate British migrants, it remains unclear as to whether it was an ideology focused on the colonies, or one that embraced the United States. Ultimately, as a leading historian of migration reminds us, ‘we cannot know what actually passed through the minds of potential emigrants’.57 Individual choice and personal impulses played a large role, but so too did communal factors. Emigration literature is full of references to enthusiastic ‘outbreaks’, ‘fevers’ and ‘manias’, suggesting that families and neighbourhoods could be swept up by a sense of collective urgency to migrate or by a conviction that migration was their only solution to prevailing distress.58 It is difficult, therefore, on the basis of the above evidence, to establish a manifest ‘empire effect’. Given the amount of lobbying and propaganda on behalf of empire migration, especially from the 1880s onwards, this may seem surprising. ‘The disparity between dismissive views of the relationship between emigration and empire and portrayals of British migrants’ umbilical attachment to their flag is one of the many paradoxes in the complex mosaic of migration.’59 One way of addressing this difficulty, and of distinguishing between aspects of migration common across the English-speaking world and those specific to the colonies, is to look more closely at migrant networks and their influence on social mobility.
55 Thompson, Imperial Britain, pp. 35–6, 135–6. Concern that the USA was sapping
Britain’s stamina and strength can also be identified in earlier periods: in the run-up
to the War of Independence, it was a key factor behind the prohibition on emigration
that operated for the duration of the war, and the complaint intermittently recurred in
the press and in some emigrant correspondence during the nineteenth century. We are
grateful to Marjory Harper for drawing this to our attention.
56 Quoted in R. H. Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914: A Study
of the United States in World History (New York: Octagon Books, first published 1940,
reprinted 1968), p. 45.
57 D. Baines, Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 9.
58 We are grateful to Eric Richards for drawing these references to our attention, and for
discussing the issue of migrant motivation with us.
59 Harper, ‘British Migration’, p. 75.