111Overseas migration of that of Saskatchewan and Alberta.187 It was the gradual dilution of America’s demographic connection to Britain that diminished the sense that ‘it was still the product of the diaspora’. By the end of our period ‘it had become home to many different diasporas, most notably those of Italy and Eastern Europe’.188
Conclusions
If the phenomenon of globalisation is about ‘the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world’,189 then flows of migrants across national borders have long been integral to it. The great migration of the ‘long’ nineteenth century was the most intensive period of migration in human history. It saw an unparalleled 100 million people move around the world – perhaps as many as one in every ten people may have been affected by this experience.190 A quarter of these migrants were European, and the United Kingdom was the largest source of migrants within Europe, exporting on average around 2 million people per decade from the 1870s to the 1920s. One effect of this mass movement of peoples was an impressive convergence in living standards across Britain, the United States, Canada and Australasia – a key measure of economic integration according to a leading historical study of globalisation.191 Yet for globalisation to be useful as a concept it needs to take account not only of the physical ‘conquest of distance’ but of the resulting ‘intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’.192 In his exploration of the cultural dimensions of globalisation, Arjun Appadurai makes precisely this point. He argues that mass migration has transformed the way ‘the imagination works as a social force’ in today’s world.193 For Appadurai and other cultural theorists this development has largely been a recent one – the conjunction of modern forms of migration and electronic forms of communication. This is questionable. Mass migration from Britain after 1850 had a profound impact on the ‘manner in which people viewed the world
187 J. Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1996), p. 382.
188 Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 209.
189 J. E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 9.
190 Manning, Migration in World History, p. 149; A. MacGillivray, A Brief History of
Globalization: The Untold Story of Our Incredible Shrinking Planet (London: Carroll and
Graf, 2006), pp. 151–2.
191 O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, pp. 1–28.
192 R. Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 8.
193 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis, 1996), p. 6.
112and their relationship to it’.194 The technological developments of these years did not simply ‘open up dizzying possibilities of enhanced global mobility’.195 They also affected how migrants – and the families they left behind – imagined their social and political spaces, thereby making their migrations a defining aspect of their identity. Improvements in communications and transport technology – in their time no less powerful than those we are witnessing at present – brought the British peoples ‘at home’ and overseas into more frequent and intimate contact with each other. One consequence of this was that many of those who left Britain saw themselves as belonging, to varying degrees, to a ‘commonwealth of nations’, the nucleus of which was the Anglo-Dominion relationship, but which radiated outwards towards other English-speaking societies, including the United States. Of course, mass migration was not exclusively European. A considerable international flow of indentured or contract labour was generated by British (and French) colonialism, and there were domestic flows of indigenous labour within colonial regions.196 For the most part, however, these two streams of migration, voluntary and coerced, did not mix. ‘Differences in economic circumstances, geography, and imperial polices were responsible for directing most European immigrants to other temperate destinations, while African, Asian and Pacific Islanders went largely to tropical ones.’197 Yet there were regions where these two migratory streams did mix, and here the power of imperial networks to discriminate against coloured peoples, and to exclude them from ‘the privileges of responsibility and skill’, was markedly apparent.198 This power consisted not only of the formal power of the colonial state, but the informal power conferred by belonging to a pan-British community, membership of which, while open to negotiation,199 was profoundly skewed along ethnic and racial lines.
194 Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space and Empire in British Political Thought,
1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77 (2005), 561–2.
195 Constantine, ‘Migrants and Settlers’, p. 163.
196 Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, and ‘Migration from Africa, Asia,
and the South Pacific’, pp. 88–100; O. W. Parnaby, Britain and the Labor Trade in the South
West Pacific (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964); S. Marks and P. Richardson
(eds.), International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives (London: Maurice Temple
Smith for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984); H. L. Wesseling, The European
Colonial Empires, 1815–1919 (Harlow: Pearson–Longman, 2004), pp. 18–19.
197 Northrup, ‘Migration from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific’, p. 96.
198 Offer, The First World War, p. 168.
199 As J. Ridden argues, ‘Debates about identity were concerned with pragmatic benefits
and power relations, as well as issues of emotional and cultural attachment.’ For Irish
Catholics, see J. Ridden, ‘Britishness as an Imperial and Diasporic Identity: Irish Elite
Perspectives, c. 1820–70s’, in P. Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness,
1837–1901 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 88–105 (quotation from p. 89).
113Overseas migration The railways were one of the major sites of conflict between British, Asian and African migrant workers. Take the case of South Africa. Well before the mineral revolution’s escalating demands for wage labour, racial discrimination was a firm feature of economic networks there. During the 1870s, the building of the Cape railways saw large numbers of white workers arrive from Britain via an emigration service that was supported by Cape funds, employed a full-time agent and staff in London, and exploited contacts in the labour market in the west of England.200 In this way, the Cape railways were able to draw in British workers, who eventually comprised a third of the total workforce. They were employed as skilled artisans, and as semi- and unskilled navies tackling rock-cutting and other heavy work. The need for speed and economy in railway construction partly explains the Cape government’s willingness to pay a higher price for white labour. But there were also powerful pressures from colonists to keep the wage rises of black workers within bounds, and to swell the ‘civilised sector’ of the population by further settlement from Britain. The construction of the CPR – one of the great feats of nineteenth- century railway building – was also a source of racial tension. This time the conflict was between the white workers who were laid off on the CPR’s completion, yet decided to remain in Canada, and the so-called Chinese ‘coolies’, migrants mostly from the poorer rural districts of south-east China. The Chinese workers were brought out on the initiative of a young American entrepreneur and federal government contractor, Andrew Onderdonk. Tasked with building the most difficult mountain section of the line, running from the Rockies to the Pacific, Onderdonk relied heavily on the Chinese. He knew of their capabilities through having managed major public works in San Francisco on which they had previously been employed. In the early 1880s approximately 15,000 Chinese men entered British Columbia, many of them travelling in organised groups and residing in railroad camps supervised by a contracting agent.201
A significant number of these Chinese contract labourers lost their lives to injury and disease.202 Those who survived discovered that they
For anglicised Afrikaners, see M. Tamarkin, Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners: The
Imperial Colossus and the Colonial Parish Pump (London: Routledge, 1996).
200 A. J. Purkis, ‘The Politics, Capital and Labour of Railway Building in the Cape Colony,
1870–1885’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1978), pp. 330–90,
441–56. See also A. S. Thompson, ‘The Power and Privileges of Association: Co-Ethnic
Networks and the Economic Life of the British Imperial World’, SAHJ 56 (2006),
43–59 (p. 56).
201 M. Bliss, Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 216, 219.
202 Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates, p. 50.
114were not to be repatriated after their contracts expired, earlier promises notwithstanding.203 Despite having little choice but to stay in Canada, they were accused by British Columbia’s infant labour movement of taking jobs away from Europeans and of threatening their rates of pay. In fact, Chinese immigrants in Canada were mostly employed casually in work no-one else wanted to do, such as logging, farming or salmon canning, or domestic service or laundry, although there were direct clashes with white workers in the sugar mills and the coalmines. Their presence in Canada resulted in the formation of anti-Chinese societies to curb workplace competition, as well as the introduction of company regulations and restrictive legislation that forbade the use of Chinese labour.204 Subsequently, such measures were extended to ban the Chinese from government employment, to subject them to special taxes, to deny them certain forms of legal protection and to prevent male residents from acquiring wives overseas. There were also riots in Vancouver in 1887 and 1907 aimed at intimidating the Chinese from competing with white workers. British migrants, by contrast, enjoyed privileged access to the networks via which they moved, and proved adept at exploiting these networks for their own gain.205 Indeed, as recent research shows, the dynamic international labour market that was such a marked feature of the nineteenthcentury English-speaking (or Anglophone) world, and of the integration of its commodity and financial markets, was animated by a shared sense of proletarian Britishness.206 A doctrine of ‘white labourism’ or racial socialism was widely espoused. It manifested itself particularly powerfully during the controversy over Chinese indentured labour in South Africa, when skilled workers from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland who had migrated to Transvaal challenged the presence of ‘ethnic out siders’ in the workplace who threatened to undercut their wages. But the doctrine is evident more broadly in the remittance capital flows examined above, and the networks that underpinned them. Remittances might
203 Barman, The West beyond the West, pp. 133–48; Lower, Western Canada, pp. 147–8.
204 For the discrimination they faced, see, especially, P. S. Li, The Chinese in Canada
(Toronto: Canadian Historical Association, 1988), pp. 11–31; P. Ward, White Canada
Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), p. 1048; E. Wickberg (ed.), From
China to Canada: A History of Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1982), pp. 21–7.
205 M. Boyd, ‘Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments
and New Agendas’, International Migration Review 23 (1989), 638–70.
206 Hyslop, ‘The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself “White”’. See also Kirk, Comrades
and Cousins, pp. 14, 158–9, 203ff, who draws distinctions between the attitudes of
115Overseas migration even be likened to a form of imperial-wide social insurance – part of a bigger push to shore up a separate racial status, including job security, better pay and higher standards of welfare, for British citizens.
In several spheres, these migrant networks exercised an important influence upon economic behaviour. The case of the law is instructive.207 With the exceptions of Quebec and South Africa, a common-law culture spread throughout the British World and remained largely peculiar to it.208 Commercial law (property, contract and tort) was wedded to English solutions. This was not a result of jurists in Canada, Australia and New Zealand deferring to the ‘mother country’; nor was it because of the threat of appeal to the Privy Council. Rather, colonial jurists saw ‘the Law of Westminster’ as supreme. Here it is important to appreciate that, for much of our period, the settler colonies had relatively few jurists who were born and trained in their own land – the first Australian-born jurist was not appointed in New South Wales until 1881. The majority of jurists were professional emigrants, who regarded themselves ‘as proud bearers of Britain’s common-law tradition’. Unlike their American counterparts – and in this respect the USA did differ from Britain’s settler colonies – they were not empowered to make new common law for themselves. To be sure, they tended to ignore English precedent when it stood in the way of their own perceptions of social justice. Yet locally fashioned law was offset by a body of English precedent contained in legal reports and treatises, which, it should be noted, were much more widely available in the colonies than were the reports of American judicial authorities. As well as taking their legal culture with them, migrants carried their material culture too. They had to be clothed, housed and fed, and this presented opportunities for British manufacturers, the nature and significance of which are explored in the next chapter. In their rapid creation
socialists in Britain and those in the settler colonies, the former asserting the suprem-
acy of class over race and racism, the latter race over class. For an exploration of the
racial attitudes of British workers through the prism of the Chinese indentured labour
controversy in the early twentieth century, see Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?,
pp. 69–72.
207 The rest of this paragraph draws on P. Karsten’s path-breaking study: Between Law
and Custom: ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora. The
United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 7–9, 498–519. All quotations are from this source. On
the spread of (capitalist) concepts of property, see also A. R. Buck, J. McLaren and
N. E. Wright (eds.), Land and Freedom: Law, Property Rights and the British Diaspora
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
208 In Quebec, there was an explicitly civil (French) law jurisdiction by the end of the nine-
teenth century. In South Africa, there were substantial elements of Roman–Dutch law.
India, by contrast, drew heavily upon Hindu and Muslim systems of law, as well as that
of England.
116of new infrastructure – especially transport infrastructure – migrants, moreover, needed capital and credit. British investors, both institutional and private, supplied much of this money. Their information-determined preference for colonial stocks and shares was an important feature of financial markets in the second half of the nineteenth century, and is explored in Chapter 5.