82Information from
emigrant agents,
charities, pressure
groups, trade
Self
unions, and
shipping and
railway firms
Information provided
by exhibitions, the
press, and other
publications
Figure 3.2 Migrant networks and information in the British World.
Beyond this migration-specific information, there was a variety of peripheral contextual information that was of potential interest to the would-be migrant. Such information could be gleaned from exhibitions, literature and the press, the latter in particular exhibiting an imperial bias during our period.75 As for the networks that carried such information, it is clear that some of them functioned in a similar fashion across an English-speaking world, especially those based on family ties. But what we know about other migrant networks – in particular settler societies, emigration agents and charities – suggests that they were more active or firmly rooted in the British imperial world than they were in a wider ‘Anglosphere’. In some cases they even explicitly favoured the empire over other destinations.
Family networks Migration was a life-changing event, cushioned by the family – the lynchpin of a migrant’s choice of, and adjustment to, his or her new
75 D. Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, 1849–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992); Potter, News and the British World.
83Overseas migration environment.76 First of all, the family carved out channels of emigration ‘because families and friends were in close contact even when separated by wide oceans, [and] immigrants seldom left their homelands without knowing exactly where they wanted to go and how to get there’.77 The information provided by relatives and friends was current and candid, and served as a useful corrective to the publicity drives and advertisement campaigns of the railway and steamship companies and colonial governments.78 Such information often arrived in the form of a personal letter home that contained details of employment prospects and wages. Indeed, precisely because the information contained in such letters was considered superior, it was not uncommon for them to be circulated around neighbourhoods and communities. In view of the cost of postage, letter-writing was quite restricted in the mid nineteenth century, when unstamped letters were sometimes sent home with a pre-arranged device scrawled on them to denote good news, thereby saving relations the expense of redeeming the mail.79 By the 1860s, however, letter-writing was on the increase. The volume of correspondence between Britain and Australia grew by 7 per cent during this decade and, by the mid 1870s, the Postmaster General could report that the public now attached more importance to the speed than the cost of postage to the colonies. Thus, by the late 1880s, well before the introduction of the Imperial Penny Post,80 the sending of letters and parcels was regular and widespread. This was partly a result of the formation in July 1875 of the Postal Union, a single postal territory embracing the great majority of the world’s correspondents. Several British colonies subsequently joined the Union, although Post Office archives do not give a clear indication of the amount of mail being exchanged between Britain and various parts of the empire until the early 1900s. The volume of correspondence grew most rapidly between Britain and Canada, a finding consistent with the view that it was letters from family and friends that did the most to facilitate secondary migration. Table 3.2 offers snapshots of the situation in 1904 and 1909. Moreover, as we shall see, the significance of family correspondence went well beyond the provision of information. Remittances – at first
76 Manning, Migration in World History, pp. 121, 124.
77 J. E. Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 57.
78 See for example P. Hudson and D. Mills, ‘English Emigration, Kinship and the
Recruitment Process: Migration from Melbourn in Cambridgeshire to Melbourne in
Australia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Rural History 10 (1999), 71–4.
79 H. Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton: Greenwood Press, 1948), p. 394.
80 R. M. Pike, ‘National Interest and Imperial Yearnings: Empire Communication and
Canada’s Role in Establishing the Imperial Penny Post’, JICH 26 (1998), 22–48.
84Table 3.2. Mail exchanged by the United Kingdom with the
colonies, 1904 and 1909 (measured in 1,000 lb).
Despatched
Received in
Despatched
Received in
in 1904 to
1904 from
in 1909 to
1909 from
India
2,983
582
3,675
818
South Africa
3,764
860
2,513
601
Egypt
390
77
618
139
West Indies
508
87
549
83
Canada
1,367
668
5,022
1,362
Australia
1,753
629
2,080
841
New Zealand
771
328
1,103
462
Notes: The figures for Egypt for 1909 also include post to and from Morocco.
The West Indies includes foreign as well as British territories. Canada
includes Newfoundland. New Zealand includes Fiji.
Source: 51st and 56th Reports of the Postmaster General on the Post Office
(1905 and 1910), Appendix B, Post Office Archives, Freeling House,
Phoenix Place, London.
enclosed as cash in letters, later more commonly sent in the form of money or postal orders – paid for the fares of relatives left behind to join family members who had already migrated. As well as helping to pay for and direct the flow of migrants to particular locations, family-based networks supported the process of resettlement.81 Among the first challenges faced by migrants was that of finding suitable housing and employment. Kinship groups could be of great help here. By pooling experience, knowledge and capital they gave a new migrant a much wider range of connections and contacts than would otherwise have been the case. Thus kith and kin ties not only played a role in financing and planning emigration, they contributed to the survival and upward social mobility of migrants after their arrival.
Above all, it was the reliability of family networks that put them at the centre stage of migration. For those who did not enjoy kinship support, substitute or surrogate forms of family network were often the next best
81 See for example the recent work that has appeared on migration to New Zealand, includ-
ing: T. Brooking, ‘Weaving the Tartan into the Flax: Networks, Identities, and Scottish
Migration to Nineteenth-Century Otago, New Zealand’, in A. McCarthy (ed.), A Global
Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities since the Eighteenth Century (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 183–201; L. Fraser, ‘Irish Migration to the West Coast, 1864–
1900’, New Zealand Journal of History 34 (2000), 317–40; A. McCarthy, Irish Migrants
in New Zealand, 1840–1937: ‘The Desired Haven’ (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), and
‘Personal Letters and the Organisation of Irish Migration to and from New Zealand,
1848–1925’, Irish Historical Studies 33 (2003), 297–319.