105facilitated contact between people of the same background, they should not be seen as the sine qua non of trans-national communities.159 What we need to appreciate is that many British migrants before the First World War were effectively living in two places simultaneously – resident overseas yet displaying a psychological and practical commitment to their ‘homeland’. For these people, whether they left for the colonies, or for the United States, their departure was not so much a case of ‘cut and run’, as of run, remit and eventually (perhaps) return.
Britishness
The whole process of migration provides many more possibilities for identity. For the British it had three main implications. First, they began to generalise about themselves in relation to others, and to express ethnic, racial and religious solidarities in new ways.160 A strong sense of cultural
158 Bodnar, The Transplanted, pp. 60–1; W. D. Jones, Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh,
1860–1920 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), pp. xx, 11, 16, 178–88, 195–201;
M. Harper, ‘Transient Tradesmen: Aberdeen Emigrants and the Development of the
American Granite Industry’, Northern Scotland 9 (1989), 53–74 (pp. 56–7); Murdoch,
British Emigration, pp. 111, 118; S. Thuernstorm (ed.), Harvard Encyclopaedia of American
Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 326, 330.
159 A. Portes, ‘Globalization from Below: the Rise of Transnational Communities’, in
W. P. Smith and R. P. Korczenwicz (eds.), Latin America in the World Economy (Westport:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), pp. 151–68.
160 Manning, Migration in World History, pp. 138–9, 154.
106superiority developed among them,161 as they increasingly defined themselves not just in terms of who they were but who they were not.162 This negative and oppositional sense of British identity was sharpened by settlers’ contact with indigenous peoples and by the arrival of migrants from other places – the impact of the latter upon labour markets is considered briefly below. Suffice it to say here that the mass migration of the British peoples during the ‘long’ nineteenth century provoked fierce struggles with the original inhabitants of colonised lands,163 as well as settler resistance to other types of non-European migration, expressed most explicitly by the ‘White’ Australia policy that effectively barred the vast majority of Asians from entering the dominion on a permanent basis, and whose discriminatory effects were experienced by immigrants for decades to come.164
Second, the family was a foundational form of migrant identity from which other forms of group identity, including national identity, grew. More than anything else, the ‘bridge’ or ‘chain’ that linked the ‘New’ world to the ‘Old’ was the family. It was frequently in response to overtures from relatives that migrants decided to relocate overseas, while their adaptation to a new and unfamiliar environment was eased by structures of ‘kith and kin’. This meant that ‘Britishness’ was not only a geographically expansive concept but a highly personalised one. It reflected, in a very practical sense, the desire of migrants to continue to be involved in a society that they might have left behind but had certainly not abandoned.
Third, from the mid nineteenth century, the nation state, whether imagined as a piece of territory or a framework of administration, could no longer serve as the sole repository of a British identity.165 The transnational networks of exchange and participation examined earlier in this
161 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 432–50; M. J. Daunton and R. Halpern (eds.),
Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); L. Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–
European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001).
162 L. Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, JBS 31 (1992), 309–29; C. Hall,
Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–67 (Cambidge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. K. Walton, ‘Britishness’, in C. Wrigley (ed.), A
Companion to Early Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
pp. 518, 522.
163 For a penetrating account of the impact of European settlement on indigenous peoples,
and the dynamics of black–white interaction that result, see R. Broome, Aboriginal
Victorians: A History since 1800 (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2005). For an
insightful study of how racial knowledge and the idea of a ‘white man’s nation’ cir-
culated across an Anglo-American settler world, see Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the
Global Colour Line.
164 J. Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
165 For the diasporic identities resulting from migration, and their implications for the
nation state, see Guarnizo and Smith, ‘The Locations of Transnationalism’, pp. 3–34.
107Overseas migration chapter were grounded upon a perception that emigrants from Britain shared a common identity based on their place of origin and the cultural and linguistic traits associated with it.166 The new technologies of the Victorian era – railways, steamships, overland and undersea cables, remittance and postal services – all worked to expand a migrant’s geographical horizons and to encourage him or her to adopt a wider frame of reference. These new structures of settler consciousness did not escape contemporary comment. Inspired by the vision of a ‘racial community of Britons’,167 Sir Charles Dilke (1843–1911), James Anthony Froude (1818–94) and Sir John Seeley (1834–95) all spoke poignantly about the social consequences of demographic expansion, and how it had engendered a sense of the British peoples as a trans-oceanic community, tied together by a shared sense of purpose and a collective memory. Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883) put migration at the heart of British national identity: ‘our Empire is not an Empire at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not consist of a congeries of nations held together by force, but in the main one nation, as much as if it were no Empire but an ordinary state’.168 Migrants were proud of their heritage.169 Yet this did not mean they were content simply to keep alive ‘old’ sentiments, institutions and
For the British case specifically, see D. Marquand, ‘How United is the Modern United
Kingdom?’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?: The Making of
British History (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 277–92 (pp. 286–8), and ‘The Twilight
of the British State? Henry Dubb versus Sceptred Awe’, in S. J. D. Green and R. C.
Whiting (eds.), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 57–69.
166 For the relationship between these two concepts, see S. Vertovec, ‘Transnationalism and
Identity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27 (2001), 573–82.
167 See for example R. Coll’s observation that ‘The crown colonies were administered by
the imperial state but not considered a part of that state, except ceremonially. The
“white” dominions were self-governing and considered close, close enough to be admit-
ted to the counsels of state.’ R. Coll, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p. 93.
168 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, ed. and introduced J. Gross (Chicago: Cosimo,
1971), p. 44.
169 There is a growing body of literature on how migrants evaluated their struggles and
successes in the light of what they knew about their brethren in other settler societies.
On science, see S. Dubow, ‘The Commonwealth of Science: The British Association
in South Africa, 1905–29’, in Dubow (ed.), Science and Society in Southern Africa
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 66–100. On skilled labour,
see J. Hyslop, The Notorious Syndicalist: J. T. Bain, a Scottish Rebel in Colonial South
Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2004), and ‘The Imperial Working Class Makes
Itself “White”: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa before the
First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology (1999), 398–424. On administrators,
see Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and
Colonial Government (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). On missionaries and
108values.170 Rather, they ‘insisted that they had the freedom to improve upon the parent culture in lands of “new” beginnings’. Within carefully prescribed racial boundaries, therefore, migrant conceptions of what it meant to be ‘British’ tended to place merit and virtue before class and status. Responsible government, the secret ballot, women’s suffrage, ‘secular, compulsory and free’ schooling – all these were established in the colonies well before they were in the United Kingdom.171 As we have seen, the settler colonies not only experimented with these ideas about how best to order society: they exported them back to Britain.172
Possibly the most complex of the dimensions to the diasporic identity of the British peoples, however, is that arising from the Anglo-American connection. Prominent personalities of the age – Winston Churchill, Sir Charles Dilke, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Rosebery and W. T. Stead – conceived of ‘Greater Britain’ as a wider English-speaking rather than a narrowly imperial union of peoples.173 But not all politicians and businessmen were so receptive to ideas of an Anglo-Saxon brotherhood. What had once been a loyal and friendly offshoot of Britain was increasingly viewed with a measure of jealousy and suspicion.174
How large, then, did an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mentality loom in the imaginations of the British peoples before the First World War? What implications did it have for the construction of ‘British’ identities? Legal, religious, literary and marriage ties have all been invoked to explain why the United States and Britain ‘drifted together’ after 1850, as have the influence of American inventions, the growth of travel between the two countries and the long-term presence of several wealthy American families in London.175 The evidence presented in this chapter strongly suggests
humanitarians, see E. Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest
for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2002); and A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth
Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). On professional migrants
more broadly, see Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, pp. 17–29.
170 Owram, Promise of Eden, p. 144.
171 C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Bridge and Fedorowich
(eds.), The British World: Culture, Diaspora and Identity (London: Taylor and Francis,
2003), pp. 1–15 (p. 6).
172 Ibid., pp. 6–7. See also M. Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past
& Present 166 (2000), 146–80 (pp. 178–9); C. Hall, ‘Rethinking Imperial Histories: The
Reform Act of 1867’, New Left Review 208 (1994), 3–29 (pp. 9, 14–15, 29), and Civilising
Subjects, pp. 12, 21, 424–5; and Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, pp. 144–6.
173 Although each interpreted Anglo-Saxonism differently: see Heindel, The American
Impact on Great Britain, pp. 126–9. See, for example, the examination of Charles Dilke’s
‘Anglo-Saxonism’, and his views of Anglo-American relations, in R. C. Young, The Idea
of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 196–207.
174 Thompson, Imperial Britain, p. 36.
175 See here Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 432–50; Perkins, The Great
Rapprochement, pp. 149–53; and G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918
109Overseas migration that, from the 1850s through to the First World War, migration worked to forge a stronger consciousness of America in British society than is sometimes appreciated. There was, in fact, an ‘astonishing increase in popular knowledge of the United States’ throughout the British Isles, resulting from emigrant guidebooks and publicity material, and a flood of novels and newspapers describing American geography, economic life, institutions and, above all, pioneer life in the West.176 For example, as newspapers in Wales carried ever-greater volumes of news and information from America, several Welsh settlements there became ‘household names’ in areas of high out-migration.177
This is not to deny that the experience of British migrants to America was different from that of those to the colonies. Indeed, there are several reasons why this was so. Partly it was because of what happened to the English who went to America. They ‘felt stronger pressure than other immigrants to prove their patriotism’, so much so that it was by no means uncommon for those who ‘spoke fondly of their place of birth’ to be ‘confronted with accusations of disloyalty’.178 There are even stories of farmers in the Old Northwest painting great American flags on their barns at the time of the Civil War (1861–5) so as to leave no doubt of loyalty to their adopted country. Others went further and lined up for military service on the side of the Union. For many, the Civil War itself intensified the process of Americanisation, making them more than ever ‘invisible immigrants’. Americans, therefore, tended to be suspicious of English immigrants, especially when they did not readily agree on the superiority of the United States’ system of (republican) government. To some extent, these attitudes softened later in the nineteenth century, as more Americans began to recognise their historic and cultural ties to Britain, and to regard the Anglo-Saxon inheritance as a joint possession of both countries.179 That
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 26–8. For the significance of Anglo-
American technological exchanges, see Graeme Gooday’s study of the early domestica-
tion of electricity: Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). For an earlier recognition of the importance of
literature and travel in forging an Anglo-American culture, see Heindel, The American
Impact on Great Britain, pp. 43ff, 299ff.
176 M. A. Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 84;
Murdoch, British Emigration, p. 136; J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 350–62.
177 B. Jones, ‘Raising the Wind’, pp. 36–40.
178 Van Vugt, Britain to America, pp. 145–8, from which all of the following quotes are
sourced.
179 H. M. Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915 (New
York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 265; W. E. Van Vugt, British Buckeyes: The English, Scots, and
Welsh in Ohio, 1700–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), pp. 56–8.
110said, hostilities to Britain were from time to time reignited by diplomatic rivalries, such as those stemming from the intervention of the Cleveland administration in a boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela between 1895 and 1896,180 as well as by economic rivalries in overseas markets and a dispute over a proposed trade reciprocity treaty between the USA and Canada in 1910–11.181 More than anything else, however, it was the rapidly changing complexion of America’s migrant population that explains why it is so hard to pin down its position in the British World. By the end of the nineteenth century, immigrants to the United States were arriving from many more places than immigrants to Britain’s settler colonies.182 In 1860, people born in the United Kingdom and Germany made up no less than 80 per cent of America’s foreign-born population. (The significance of German immigrants should not be underestimated here. A German–American Alliance, formed in 1901, had a membership of over 2 million by 1914.)183 Forty years later, the English, Scots and Welsh together accounted for just 14 per cent of America’s foreign-born population, compared to 30 per cent for the Germans, still the largest single foreign-born group. The Irish accounted for a further 11 per cent.
By this time, the rate of natural population increase was decelerating in the west of Europe while increasing in the south and east, as the latter rapidly established itself as the main source of immigration to the United States.184 Natives of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy, which in 1860 had made up only 1.2 per cent of America’s foreign-born population, were now no less than 37.5 per cent of the total.185 The arrival of immigrants with unfamiliar languages and cultures was one of the reasons why Britons and Americans became more aware of what they had in common.186 A comparison with Canada is instructive. The complexion of Canada’s prairie population likewise began to diversify during the early twentieth century. Yet Britain continued to be the main source of immigration to western Canada all the way up to 1914, accounting for a half of the population of Manitoba and British Columbia, and a third
180 A. Orde, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895–
1956 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 10–11.
181 W. E. Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ and Hereditary Organisations in
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 310–16; Thompson,
Imperial Britain, pp. 96–7.
182 W. T. K. Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1992), pp. 150–1.
183 Perkins, The Great Rapprochement, p. 141.
184 W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913 (London: G. Allen and Unwin,
1978), p. 181.
185 Figures from Jones, American Immigration, p. 178.
186 Van Vugt, British Buckeyes, p. 61.