The genesis of international mass migration: The British case, 1750-1900 9781526131492

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The genesis of international mass migration

The genesis of international mass migration The British case, 1750–1900 ERIC RICHARDS

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Eric Richards 2018 The right of Eric Richards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 3148 5  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported. (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776)

Alice was asked to give an account of herself in Wonderland. The Mock Turtle demanded that she ‘Explain all that’. But the Gryphon interrupted impatiently, ‘No, no! The adventures first … explanations take such a dreadful time’ … Then the Mock Turtle retorted, ‘What is the use of repeating all that stuff? … if you don’t explain it as you go on?’ (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865) For the most part, people sort themselves into a small variety of types, and you have the amusement of recognising the traits and idiosyncrasies that you anticipate. (W. Somerset Maugham, The Travel Books, 1955)

Contents

Preface Map: locations associated with selected sources of emigrants from the British Isles, 1750–1900 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

The migration mystery Islands of exit Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times West Sussex and the rural south The discontinuity The North American theatre Migration in Shropshire and the English Midlands Agrarian turmoil and the activation of mass mobility West Cork and North Tipperary The Australasian case Upland adjustments: west Wales and Swaledale and the sequences of migration Cornwall, Kent and London Remote departures: the Scottish Highlands The Irish case The European extension British emigration and the Malthus model A general view of the origins of modern emigration and the British case

page viii x 1 20 38 55 73 87 105 120 136 150 165 180 192 207 225 248 259

Index 279

Preface

Why did very large numbers of people begin to depart the British Isles for the New Worlds after about 1770? They were the vanguard of mass economic migration, the carriers of new global labour forces, agents of dispossession and settlement, of family dreams, of individual aspirations, of imperial strategies. But it was new in scale, and it was a pioneering movement, a rehearsal for modern international migration. These first mass inter-continental stirrings began, most of all, in the British Isles. What activated these great exchanges of humanity, the precursors of so much modern population transfer and turmoil around the globe? The leaving of the British Isles, in particular, had momentous consequences for the rest of the world. These emigrants and their progeny in effect re-peopled entire continents, spreading their genes, their culture, their economic systems, and their ways of life across the globe. The exodus was achieved with relatively little political reverberation, little intellectual consideration, and little historical notice. Yet, of course, it was an epic project and, it is argued, a prototype for so much modern migration in countries which have followed a pattern similar to that begun in Britain and Ireland. What generated this outward thrust from the off-shore islands of Europe? Was it so perfectly natural, simple and straightforward that no explanation is required? This improbable proposition is the problem at the centre of the present account, which is essentially an argument constructed from the dispersed findings of modern historiography and historical demography. It is a synthesis aimed at an awkward and unwieldy question, most often hidden within the complicated story of modernising societies. The following chapters are deliberately unalike in scope and density, and deal in quite different degrees of generalisation. Thus thematic chapters (1, 3, 5, 8, 16 and 17) are interspersed between chapters devoted to particular regions and countries, campsites on the longer road to general explanation (2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15) and some broad-gauge considerations of the wider

Preface

ix

questions regarding humanity’s modern mobilisation.1 Rather than a conventional chronological narrative the plan is to juxtapose actual migrant behaviour with the problematic quest for underlying causes. The primary purpose is to explore modern historical knowledge to seek an understanding of the ultimate causes of international migration. I have received vital support from the Australian Research Council and have benefitted from visits to the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London, the Australian National University, Case Western University in Ohio, the University of Toronto, Wuji University, the University of the Highlands and Islands, and the generosity of the Carnegie Trust Centenary Professorship in Scotland in 2014. I have also benefitted from discussion with Andy Bielenberg, Jeanette Neeson, David Soskice, Robert Fitzsimons, Ngaire Naffine, Heidi Ing, Michael Ekin Smyth, Ralph Shlomowitz and particularly with fellow enthusiasts who have participated in the series of seminars published under the rubric ‘Visible Immigrants’. I alone am guilty of any remaining errors. Eric Richards Brighton, South Australia, September 2017 Note 1  On the interplay of ‘structural analysis’ and ‘micro narratives’, see the suggestive commentary of Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West (New York: Knopf, 1986), Preface.

SHETLAND ISLANDS

ORKNEY ISLANDS Stromness Loch Laxford

Isle of Lewis

St. Kilda

Handa

SUTHERLAND

ASSYNT

OUTER HEBRIDES

Fort George

North Uist

S c o t t i s h

South Uist

H i g h l a n d s

Skye

Barra

Fort William

Ardnamurchan

BADENOCH

SCOTLAND INNER HEBRIDES

DONEGAL

Kippen Jura

NORTHERN IRELAND

Doolough SLIGO

Newry

Isle of Man

GALWAY

Galway

IR IRELAND Clonlisk

Dublin DUBLIN Balinlass

Pen Llyn

Schull Mizen Peninsula

Cardigan

STAFFORDWrexham SHIRE Bala Ironbridge Oswestry SHROPSutton Maddock

WALE S

Madeley Coalbrookdale Highley

Worcester GLOUCESTERSHIRE

Carmarthen Merthy Tydfil

Baltimore

km

Hull

E N GLA N D

Liverpool

Llanbrynmair SHIRE Whitchurch Bridgnorth

Redruth

0

Swaledale

MONTGOMERY- SHIRE

TIPPERARY

WEST CORK Skibbereen

Wensleydale Reeth

Jurby Kirk Michael Kirk Andress Foxdale & Douglas & Laxey Ramsey

200

Hodson

CORNWALL

Clavering

London

Isle of Thanet Gravesend

Dorking KENT Benenden Petworth SUSSEX Sullington Lindfield Chichester Storrington Tarring Aldingbourne

WILTSHIRE

CHANNEL ISLANDS Guernsey Jersey

Locations associated with selected sources of emigrants from the British Isles, 1750–1900

1

The migration mystery

Caesar’s crossing that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.1

Horizons Laurie Lee’s memoir Cider with Rosie contains a marvellous evocation of life in a Gloucestershire village of the 1920s, in which he mourned the loss of the world of his childhood. With a certain poetic license he charted the end of an era of British rural life: ‘soon the village would break, dissolve and scatter’. Laurie Lee had ‘belonged to a generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life’. It was a time when the old estate was sold off and soon the farm and domestic servants were ‘dispersed and went to the factories’. They were off to the towns, to the factory lathes, to the war eventually: ‘We began to shrug off the valley and look more to the world’. One village boy had left early in this local dispersal and emigrated to New Zealand where he succeeded as a prosperous farmer. On his bumptious and triumphant visit back to the village he was mysteriously murdered by local lads.2 He thus personified the rewards and hazards of emigration in melodrama. Cider with Rosie was a relatively late version of a universal, even generic, story of English rural dispersion and emigration (though less commonly marked by murder). Virtually every family in modern society is conscious of the widening radius of its kinsfolk and its contemporaries. Sisters and brothers, children, cousins and friends, are likely to be dispersed in different suburbs, towns, counties, countries, and even in different continents. This scattering of kith and kin was already a common refrain in the letters of ordinary British families in the mid-nineteenth century and even more in those of the Irish. Australia, where I now live, is a special case because of its remoteness for most emigrants, yet it is the second-most immigrant country in the world. It has a

2

The genesis of international mass migration

very high proportion of foreign-born people among its population, and its people are extremely mobile between its main population centres. But Australia is not much different from other western-style countries, marked by its high level of internal and external mobility and a very high degree of urbanisation. Most Australians live in five big coastal cities and look to the vast inland with increasingly unconvincing nostalgia. The Australian migrant experience is a replica of the general western template of dispersion and concentration, a paradox of modern life which creates endless tensions and challenges to political systems everywhere. But it is also a continuing and spreading pattern for other continents and the rest of humanity. By 2008 more than half of the world’s population lived in urban places.3 Mass mobility was, and remains, a generic phenomenon, and its nature and origins require explanation. Humanity seems always to have been a mobile species, from its earliest African origins through to its long-term stretchings to the ends of the earth. And now we seem more mobile than ever, forever dislocating and relocating within and between countries. Mobility seems like a defining trait of the species, a constant and perpetual shifting of people through each succeeding generation – behaviour so general that it may need no history, an endless predictable seamless spreading of people in all directions.4 Mobility seems like a non-variable in human affairs, twirling apparently without restraint. My own track through the twentieth and into the present century is part of this essential pattern, but a relatively late version of the western model. In rural North Wales my grandparents, until the 1930s and 1940s, were farmers and farm labourers, with families of five and eight children on each side. Some of my great uncles had gone to South Africa, Australia and Canada before the First World War. A family farm, close to the River Dee not far from Wrexham, was lost in the Great Depression and this grandfather and his damaged family retreated to the nearby town. Most of his family were then growing up and leaving for urban jobs; their collective mobility was further enhanced by the Second World War. My other grandfather was a farm labourer; he survived the hard times, but his children also left for towns and jobs beyond the home county. In the next two generations our radius widened much further, and my own daughters now move in three continents. This family history is particular in its detail, but the pattern is replicated in the common genealogies in our times. We have left the land, we are concentrated in towns and cities, and we are dispersed. But as a group in the British Isles our families were late in their dispersion – most British people left the land in the previous two centuries and now less than 5 per cent of the British population live directly off the land. There are, of course, countless variations on this simple story and they comprise a central characteristic of modern life. The contention of this book is that emigration history is not seamless, that it contains large shifts over time and

The migration mystery

3

place, and that the modern scale and velocity of mobility have very particular historical roots. These roots were first significantly manifested about 250 years ago, primarily in the British Isles; the subsequent root system has spread its way across more than half of the globe, its onward progression continuing and unstoppable. As the Economist declared, British emigration was ‘the single most widespread global dispersion of people from one small territory that the world has ever seen’.5 There was, in essence, a disjunction, a turning point, a great change, in the disposition of humanity. At its centre was a mysterious gyration which somehow galvanised millions of people into the act of uprooting. They moved both short and long distances, in all manner of formations, but most frequently as families. Ultimately some of this movement was converted into a further extending centrifugal force – and part of it was transformed into oceanic migration – to other continents, including even Australia, to the very edge of the world of mobility. These international movements were exotic manifestations of the central generic disturbances of the world, the ultimate mystery probed in this book. Types of migration Elevating modern mobility into a ‘mystery’ may seem unnecessarily dramatic for something ostensibly quite simple and commonplace. After all, migration – at home and abroad – in all its varieties, is surely a straightforward matter. People ordinarily move from home to take advantage of revealed opportunities or incentives, or to avoid some negative prospect. They move when relocation is beneficial and sufficiently cheap. New employment opportunities emerge in other places, new technologies are created in other towns and countries. New lands and resources are made accessible; new transport methods facilitate movement. Cities grow, empires are opened; new economies erupt, and people shift in response to the exposed betterments on offer. Modern times are full of this narrative, and it is hardly surprising, despite the many obstacles thrown across the path of such spontaneous and rational migrations. Indeed it might be more useful to tell the entire story in terms of the impediments to movement, the politics of control and inertia, rather than the simple matter of people pursuing their best interests. If this is so then there are few puzzles remaining about why people move within and between countries, or indeed the origins and causes of such migrations, in the past or the present. In some ways these are indeed uninteresting questions because the answers are already obvious. The prime reasons why people migrate are easily listed. There are many who are coerced – such as slaves and convicts: in the age of slavery more than 11 million people were forced from Africa to the Americas and there have been countless other millions of slaves forcibly migrated to serve

4

The genesis of international mass migration

distant masters and mistresses (within and beyond Africa).6 They are a large part of the wide narrative of international migration and slave migrations which continue to this day. European convicts were also shipped overseas from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. From the British Isles alone about 60,000 were sent to the American colonies before 1776; and after American Independence 160,000 British and Irish convicts were transported to the Australian colonies, through to 1868. And there were other flows of convicts east and west, even in recent times. The causes of these emigrations were unambiguous since they mainly excluded any volition among those coerced.7 They should include twentieth-century atrocities such as the forced labour recruitment into German labour camps in the 1930s and 1940s; to these should be added the involuntary migrations undertaken at the end of the Second World War across much of Europe and especially within the USSR which systematised the flow of forced labour to its gulags. By contrast, millions of free people from the eastern Atlantic, from Europe, were spirited willingly across the ocean at the beginning of our times, the recoverable past, the start of the modern experience. These people invaded, possessed, appropriated and settled the distant west Atlantic continent; and further movements later wreaked similar consequences across other continents – the Euro-domination of much of the globe. It was, without much exaggeration, a reconstitution of the known world. It was propelled, differentially and preeminently, by common folk – that is, the emigrants – surging forth into entirely new territories of European expansion and so-called civilisation. But the term ‘free emigration’ masks many variations. Coerced migration, beyond slavery and convictism, takes myriad forms and happens under many levels of pressure. Historically, very large numbers of people, mostly from conditions of extreme poverty, have translated themselves overseas under contracts which gave them free passages as indentured labour and with possible repatriation: in the eighteenth century most British and German emigrants to North America were ‘indentured servants’; millions of Indians became contracted emigrants in the nineteenth century to such destinations as Fiji, the Caribbean and Mauritius; Pacific Islanders were taken to Queensland; and large numbers of Chinese were contracted to California, Australia, South East Asia and South America. The trade in ‘bound’ contracted labour has swelled in recent times, especially from Asia to the Middle East. The sheer primitive pressure of circumstances makes these migrations appear less than entirely a free choice. Similarly, people flee sudden crises such as famine, if they can somehow raise the fares to a distant place, the classic example of which was the great Irish exodus during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s. Among all the received theories of migration, the idea of Malthusian escape is particularly influential, namely

The migration mystery

5

people avoiding the consequences of population overload, even though the costs of emigration usually militate against such rational mobility. In the history of migration there have also been many categories of refugees fleeing wars, religious and political persecution or else seeking new contexts in which to pursue their particular ideologies and ways of life: emigration has been a theatre of social, political and religious experimentation (as well as ‘Eldorados’ of many sorts8), particularly in the early colonial era before conformity became consolidated in the New Worlds. And the list of induced migration extends indefinitely to include people who were bent on avoiding military service, avoiding wives or husbands, mothers-in-law or fathers-in-law, and every complexion of family disorder or restraint. Not least has been the exuberance of youthful ‘animal spirits’ – the sheer adventurism and excitement of leaving home to gain accelerated independence. A high proportion of emigrants have always been young single males, and very young, recently married couples.9 The most universal factor propelling emigration has always been the great force of economic advantage – for better living standards, a better future for the next generation – depending on the differential of incomes and prospects between home and destination. This is the universal driver of emigration. People move most obviously to take advantage of conditions elsewhere which are seen as preferable to those at home and those of previous employment. These migrants behave in a perfectly rational fashion and do not seem to require close interrogation as to motive – indeed more at issue is why more people have not made such a change when it was on offer. Sometimes special lures and incentives have been set in front of potential emigrants: for instance, the offer of free or very cheap land or profit in the place of destination – common in nineteenth-century schemes in both North America and Australia. Similarly, powerful incentives were provided in the form of subsidised passages across the globe – notably to Australasia and Brazil, some of which operated into the late twentieth century and still lubricate the flow of certain recruitments of scarce labour to specialised parts of the globalised economy. International emigration has also depended on the basic facilities of migration. The development of railways and shipping was crucially important in the great age of migration in the nineteenth century: safer and cheaper lines of expatriation reduced costs and increased the sense of security among the pools of potential migrants. On top of this was the accessibility of ‘new lands’: enticing opportunities opened up to migrants, and all in a remarkable context of free movement for ordinary people leaving and entering many countries. The great empires of settlement were magnets for migrants of every description and category – into the American, African and Australian continents and eastwards from continental Europe towards Siberia, which provided a less well-known

6

The genesis of international mass migration

counterpoint to the ‘go west’ syndrome. Added to this were very large but barely measurable movements of populations within China and India and across Asia. This is an extendable list which, taken together, and with much more detail, offers a straightforward and reasonable explanation of migration in modern times. Migration seems timeless, an invariable human characteristic. And there seems little reason to ponder migration any further: the mystery becomes a chimera. Long views The story of mobility continues today: very large flows of people are on the move in all directions within countries and across the world. This swelling phenomenon has the widest significance for the distribution of the world’s population and for the stability of political relations between nations, not least for distant destinations such as Australia, my own distant and hospitable haven. But Australia is a very small player in the global game in terms of absolute numbers – especially compared to the extraordinary numbers of people now on the move between rural and urban conglomerations in other continents. Thus the astonishing creation of mega-cities in our own times – cities such as Shanghai, Djakarta, Mexico City, Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai, Manila, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Lagos, Casablanca, Cairo and many more, especially in China, during the past two decades.10 Most public attention is monopolised by the emergency migration of refugees out of war crises, but these flows tend to be more sporadic and smaller than the ongoing transit of people from the land. The modern world is seething with the sheer movement of people, but most of all in the exit of rural folk into urban conglomerations in recently industrialising countries. More than half of the world’s total population is now urbanised, with very large numbers of people cut away from their rural origins. But there is nothing new about the magnetic attraction of towns and cities – though the velocity and scale of modern urbanisation is probably unprecedented. The United Nations’ World Population Report announced that humanity would make ‘the historic transition from a rural to an urban species’ in 2007 or 2008.11 This movement of people off the land and into cities and abroad is at the heart of the process of ‘modernisation’ which accompanies industrialisation. The transition almost always entails both urbanisation and migration. Rural people flock to the cities – but they also emigrate. Urbanisation and emigration have been driven by similar forces at work in rapidly modernising societies. Proposing the phenomenon in this form runs against the idea of endless continuity – modern migration is different in scale and scope in comparison with most previous history. And the stark argument of this book is that there has been an acceleration in the pace of change, which has distant and common roots. The most telling marks of this underlying discontinuity were twofold,

The migration mystery

7

namely the explosive growth of cities in the nineteenth century and, equally, the unprecedented surge in international migration – most of all in the 53 million people who left Europe in the long nineteenth century. The world has fundamentally changed and the search for its historical antecedents – the agenda of this book – leads back to the eighteenth century and to the British Isles. The shift from the countryside to the cities is a modern generic tendency which was first seriously manifested in the British Isles in the late eighteenth century. These origins in islands off the shores of north-west Europe were connected with an explosive population growth, which was associated with the revolutions in agriculture, industry and transport. These changes in the bedrock of life were also expressed in the extrusive movement of people overseas – into oceanic migration. This was the British and Irish Diaspora which had earlier origins but which moved up to top gear in the 1820s and 1830s – the beginning of modern mass migration. It mostly pre-dated, by several decades, similar outpourings from other parts of western Europe. It was a fundamental historical discontinuity and constituted the authentic start of mass migration. It was the prototype of modern mobility. The Australian case is significant because its own development coincided and interlocked with the changes on the other side of the world. Colonial Australia was initially peopled from the core of the British process which later became the universal model of industrialisation. Far more people emigrated to America and those flows had a longer history, but they too exhibited the same acceleration during the early decades of the nineteenth century. H.J. Dyos, the historian of urban Britain, memorably characterised these vast intercontinental transfers of population as ‘one of the hinges of history’.12 A central question is how this recurrent process has shifted over historical time and evolved into the present world of migration. Its stirrings began in the deepest root systems of those pioneer rural societies. Only after 1850 did urban origins overtake the rural genesis of the story. The Atlantic shift Many of these propositions about historical discontinuities are not only debateable but also defy definitive measurement. Most fundamental is the idea of an extraordinary and unprecedented shift in the location and mobility of population which somehow fed into international migration flows by the late 1820s. In terms of causation it is most likely that the process had rural origins but the activation of the underlying system remains a mystery. How indeed was the mechanism established and set in motion? Solving a mystery requires a hypothesis: here it entails a fundamental generic question about the way in which people are released from the land and shifted towards urban and overseas destinations. According to American historian,

8

The genesis of international mass migration

Winifred Rothenberg, this was explicitly a ‘long and mysterious transformation in which the countryside was propelled from a millennium of inertia’, affecting the very foundations of all economic life: it remains one of the most compelling questions facing modern historians and social scientists.13 The case for the existence of this mystery is deepened and enhanced in the work of another influential American historian, Bernard Bailyn. He presents the idea of the entire Atlantic world being in unique turmoil in the late eighteenth century. According to Bailyn there was a great structural transformation which caused the massive mobilisation of peoples from one end to the other of the linked oceanic system, from Luanda to the Hebrides, from the Elbe to the Mississippi.14 Bailyn’s language is rich in metaphor and full of geological imagery, of subterranean layers residing beneath the human structures of the times, of ‘deeper elements’ which generated ‘mysterious social strains’. This was the ‘Atlantic System’ shaken by seismic changes affecting the very foundations of economic and demographic existence. Thus the colonisation of the Americas, notably in the later eighteenth century, was a crucial part of an oceanic system which connected very large movements of people on both sides of the Atlantic, rearranging population patterns in the three inter-connected continents: it produced massive transfers of migrants between Europe, America and Africa. Bailyn speculated about ‘grand tectonic forces’ that impelled vast movements of people.15 The entire Atlantic basin was convulsed into intercontinental flows of human beings over a territory that stretched across the Atlantic Ocean. He imagines immense movements of people ‘outward from their original centres of habitation – the centrifugal Völkerwanderungen that involved an untraceable multitude of local, small-scale exoduses and colonizations, the continuous creation of new frontiers and ever-widening circumferences … and, in the end, the massive transfer to the Western Hemisphere of people from Africa, from the European mainland, and above all from the Anglo-Celtic offshore islands of Europe.’16 Movements of people on this scale challenge not only the requirements of explanation but even the limits of language. Eric Hobsbawm has employed terminology which matched that of Bailyn, describing the parallel mobilisation of the rural people of Germany as the mass Landflucht of the peasantry, ‘the then current term’.17 But Bailyn went further in his speculations to invoke what he termed ‘latent events’ that ‘conditioned and set boundaries’ to these developments across his Atlantic system, by which he meant those ‘events that contemporaries were not fully or clearly aware of, at times were not aware of all’. The point is that historians – including Bailyn – have lapsed into a curiously theatrical vocabulary when they reach for explanations of the great saga-like narratives of migration which they are able to describe in such rich detail.18 Historians have thus resorted to a language of mystery and metaphor when they come to grapple with the great structural changes which underpin the array

The migration mystery

9

of contributory causes of migration. There is a search for local origins which eventually possessed universal and massive consequences. It suggests, at the very least, a hierarchy of causes to deal with the needs of historical explanation. These unexplained forces were manifested and activated at the level of the family and the special locality. In the British Isles, individuals, families and entire communities responded increasingly to new horizons and new pressures, which were eventually revolutionary in their effects within and beyond their national boundaries. In this essential mixture were the ultimate origins of international migration. Modern migration historiography Migration history comes in three main schematic forms: first the individual account, second the general narrative of migratory behaviour, and third the grand theories of migration. The most universal account of emigration is the rich and multiplying body of personal and family stories of the emigrant experience. This form of documentation is at its most generous and uninhibited in the extraordinary expansion of genealogy which often illuminates migrant trajectories in so many family histories. Emigrant letters between home and destination, sometimes from people who were barely literate, provide a direct entrée into these deeply personal worlds.19 In addition the oral recollections of emigrants have been garnered to document large swathes of the twentieth-century story of international migration. Both of these methods of direct migrant documentation have been successful in reconstructing the individual experience of the act of emigration, and also the repercussions of those actions in the onward career of emigrants. But individual experience is by definition atomistic: individual testimony is often unrepresentative and highly selective.20 Charlotte Erickson, the historian of British emigration to nineteenth-century North America, believed that emigrant letters give undue emphasis to those who failed and those ‘who did not break their ties with the homeland’;21 others think the bias is more likely to favour the successful and, of course, the literate. More­ over, while both sources offer much insight into the general ways of thinking and behaving among migrants, they are often disappointing about the propellants of their great decisions to emigrate: they are typically shy about their activating impulses, and uninterested in self-interpretation. As a genre, these personal testimonies are surprisingly inarticulate and unrevealing about what actuated or generated the act of emigration, even the great transoceanic migrations. The second primary category of migration history has a broader remit, the middle-level narration which describes the process of emigration, often in fine detail. It deals with the voyages, the conditions, the circumstances, the personnel, the destinations, the conditions at reception, and the subsequent lives of the immigrants. Here the administrative details of the passages are prominent: the

10

The genesis of international mass migration

recruitment and shipping systems, the organising institutions, the bureaucrats, the empresarios22 and the padrones who famously recruited Italian migrants for America. This is the infrastructure of international migration and must include the political framework, often critical in the determination of emigration and immigration. It also involves the composition and organisation of emigration: the panoply of the means and forms of emigration, the grouping of migrants, in families and as individuals, female and male, urban and rural, age cohorts, and the categorisation of emigrant populations. These matters occupy the middle terrain of international migration – describing how the great flows of people were achieved, their timing and the shifting of destinations and the sources of migrants. Such mechanisms and basic apparatus of migration determined the character of particular emigrant flows, and are utterly crucial in working out how the systems operated, how sometimes they retarded and sometimes smoothed the extraordinary flows of people across the globe. These mechanisms worked in different combinations for multitudes of migrants over four centuries. Systems were constructed to convey, for instance, indentured labour out of London in the eighteenth century. Other schemes were devised for crofters from the Scottish Highlands; for copper miners from Cornwall; for farmers from Aberdeenshire; for the onward migrations to New Zealand, or Fiji; and most of all for the slaves and convicts emigrated forcibly to the Caribbean and the Americas. At this level, in this category, we are probing some of the basic essentials of international migration, explaining how it was facilitated and made possible. Such considerations also provide a large part of the explanation as to why emigration happens. For instance, once certain channels were constructed for emigrants, these conduits became positive generating systems in their own right – helping to establish the self-reinforcing mechanisms of emigration. Similarly much emigration history is about the way these channels were discovered, constructed, maintained and funded – and how some people found them more attractive or resistible than others. Describing these apparatus, and the variations, is one of the main modes of migration history. In modern migration historiography, the third level of endeavour deals mainly in aggregates and abstractions – this is the effort to capture the entire phenomenon in its fullest scale and the way in which it was activated from its sources. This type of emigration history operates across the entire horizon of oceanic migration and attempts to reveal the fundamental propellants of these great movements of humanity. Here the endeavour is to locate the essential origins of mobility – which, of course, induces much theorising, especially among economists, demographers and geographers. But it is also home to a great corpus of empirical work which inevitably leads to masses of numbers and variables: statistical data in large tranches and correlations galore.

The migration mystery

11

Thinking on this scale, against a background of millions of migrants in motion, has produced grand panoramic versions of the story. And most of it has been focused on the Atlantic theatre, the earliest and the biggest of the intercontinental migrations. Oscar Handlin famously depicted the North American version as that of migrating Europeans, in their millions, being ‘Uprooted’ from the Old World, seeking haven in the New, meaning the United States.23 Frank Thistlethwaite in the early 1960s re-shaped the subject by insisting on linking the two sides of the Atlantic into a connected explanation of this migratory turmoil. In essence he tried to wrench the question of emigration out of its America-oriented obsession and to break through the implied ‘salt water curtain’ which separated the grand immigrant story from the worlds whence the emigrants came. Linking the two sides of the curtain is indeed the prior requirement of any explanation of the underlying causes involved in the transmission of tens of millions of people from one side of the Atlantic to the other (and the return of many of them as well).24 Meanwhile the economists and economic historians have sought the fundamental conditions which activated the great waves of emigration. The Welsh economist Brinley Thomas discovered a reciprocating mechanism of economic cycles, evolving in interacting formation on each side of the Atlantic – and which generated sequences of migration in response to supply and demand conditions on each side. It was a theoretical construction, reinforced with elaborate statistical data, not unlike a clever well-greased steam-driven Victorian engine, clattering along and then feeding tens of millions of people out across the globe.25 Even simpler, and notably deterministic, is the standard model employed by the Harvard economist Jeffrey Williamson and his associates26 – a model which sees emigration as a perfectly rational long-distance response to differentials of income between the Old World and the New. Migrants are here depicted as a potential international labour force, always prompted to seize opportunities to maximise incomes where better wages beckoned, and therefore always working to produce a convergence of international wage levels and induce rate-reducing differentials at all times. The mechanism operates across all decades and centuries, but is subject to shocks and exogenous crises (such as war and banking catastrophes) which impede the process of convergence. In a perfect but improbable world there would be a natural and satisfying resolution of economic differences to the mutual benefit of the merging economies. It is curious that there persists a continuing disconnection between these large thinkers. It is symptomatic of the fractured character of modern knowledge that although two of the most influential people mentioned here, Williamson the economist and Bailyn the historian, are both at Harvard, their work never intersects: there is no dialogue, no connection, and yet they deal with basically the same problem. Their ideas of motion stand in opposite positions and it is a

12

The genesis of international mass migration

very odd spectacle, perhaps especially to an antipodean. Nor is there much obvious connection between the three levels of my schema.27 Still more mysterious, amid these theories and mechanisms, is the prior problem of what set the engines in motion, most especially what generated the universal differentials which seem so entirely critical in these schemes of migration. But if differentials of income and prospects were the primum mobile of migration, the critical prior question must address the determination of the differentials. What caused the widening differentials which were required to mobilise millions of migrants?28 This is one of the mysteries at the centre of the migration puzzle. Chains of causation These great changes in migratory behaviour, it will be argued, possessed small beginnings: they started with people moving along country lanes from cottages into the towns and villages of a now lost rural world. The broad story is traceable in the genealogies of individual families, travelling backwards over their emigration to their origins, showing the steps undertaken along the way.29 But the precise propellants, even in the most microscopic analysis, remain mostly obscure. International migration originated in specific and localised conditions, often within rural family economies. The processes of oceanic mobilisation require analysis at the local level, involving changes which, however, accumulated consequences at a compound rate into massive relocations of population. It was in families that the underlying shifts in the structures of society were first confronted. That is where decisions were made which, in enormously aggregated forms, eventually erupted into overseas migration. The intellectual challenge is to connect the microscopic study of specific documented cases with the macro level of aggregated statistics and theorising. The prototype was located in the British Isles, somewhat before it spread its roots to the rest of Europe and beyond. The flight or drift from the land in Britain and Ireland was widespread across most decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was the lament of many commentators in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when British farmers and landlords were beginning to express alarm about their shrinking pools of agricultural labourers, especially when the new trade unions were urging some of their members to emigrate, thereby creating upward pressure on rural wages. Many travellers, it was claimed, found parts of rural England ‘as deserted as the veld of Africa’.30 There was a continuous diminution of the British agricultural population. In 1909 C.F.G. Masterman described it as ‘the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life of the city’. It would be more than surprising if this structural transformation in the lives of almost everyone was not connected ultimately to the vast flows of emigrants out of Britain, nor also

The migration mystery

13

in the very psychology of migration and in the expectations that those generations carried with them to overseas destinations. Masterman believed that ‘Nine out of ten families have migrated in three generations’.31 To accord the central role to the agrarian transition in the original propulsion of migration is not, of course, to exclude other factors such as technology, education, government policy and communications, all of which figure repeatedly throughout the following account. It does, however, assert the original priority of rural change in the mechanisms of fundamental change. The British case was the prototype of modern rural-urban migration and has been replicated, with important variations, across the world through to the present day. A synoptic view of the likely mechanisms which activated the system suggests some simple propositions. After about 1750, as witnessed in many parts of the British Isles, there was a revolutionary rise in agricultural productivity. This was connected with the continuous migration of people off the land, usually labourers and peasantries and their offspring. These original agrarian movements were integral and essential to the activation of modern economic growth and urbanisation. At the same time there was fundamental demographic expansion – a massive, unprecedented growth of numbers far in excess of rural labour needs. The much more efficient new agriculture in the modernising economy began to shrink its employment opportunities at a time when the population was growing at a totally unprecedented rate and scale. These dislocated peoples then flowed, willingly or not, through myriad channels into internal and external migration systems, including overseas diasporic outflows. Moreover this historical experience, first activated in the British Isles, became the model of modern mobility replicated across the world to the present day. The British Isles was the prototype case of agrarian transformation associated with industrial growth and mass migration. Here agricultural productivity increased by extraordinary leaps in the years 1750–1860. It was connected with the radical re-organisation of farming methods – often with great turmoil and distress (including eviction, enclosure and dispersal) in many parts. But mostly the change was in the form of more gradual, intermittent and unco-ordinated evacuations which eventually and decisively reduced the populations of all rural regions, feeding urban growth and emigration too. These workings of rural society under radical change produced outflows which were erratic, unpredictable and sporadic – with simultaneous forces of inertia and release operating to inhibit or accelerate the seemingly chaotic movements. These two fundamental processes (agrarian and demographic) produced net out-migration in many different patterns and at different velocities. How all this worked – statistically, logistically and in the minds of the people at the time – is at the very centre of the perceived relocation of population. Until about 1840

14

The genesis of international mass migration

rural folk dominated the outflows of emigrants from the British Isles. Thereafter the cumulative urbanisation of the British population began to change the character of the outflows from Britain, and increasingly its emigrants became townsfolk. The genesis of such migration was formed in its rural phase, before it was transformed into an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. The enhanced mobility and rapid urbanisation emerged vitally in this context of agrarian and industrial acceleration in the late eighteenth century. A little later, by 1830, these economic transformations were also feeding the movements of mass emigration out of the British Isles. There was a simultaneous and unparalleled expansion of population in the British Isles, a trebling of numbers in less than a century. This concurrent demographic revolution was equally crucial in the creation of migratory outflows. In addition, the widening of income differentials (between regions, between countryside and the towns, and between home and abroad) was reinforced by the emergence of a new social psychology of mobility, which altered the horizons of British people on the move. All this migration was an unspecified turmoil manifested across a vast terrain, but which has never been closely expounded or explained. The consequences are clearer, but the original causes are mainly unattended. It was probably related to the great re-alignment of land availability: as it became tighter in Europe it became more available in America and Australasia. These were links along the chain of causation towards the migration of millions of the British people in their confusing permutations. Making the final connection with the act of emigration is often the most teasing problem. The widening gyre These structural transformations underpinned the massive redistribution of the British population, and the evidence of the consequences was displayed across the migratory contexts of the times. Moreover, it will be argued, the process was much replayed in other parts of Europe in different combinations and following different chronologies. The reception of migrants abroad – the final link in the chain – should carry the marks of the original centrifugal forces from which they emanated. The emigrants were the final expression of the underlying propellants which powered the exoduses, the human witnesses of structural changes in their homelands. There was nothing automatic about any of these transitions, and much of the present quest is directed to the vital release-mechanisms, the pressures, the opportunities, the differentials, the responses, the resistances, the time-delays and the extreme local variations in the reactions to agrarian and demographic changes. Migration was famously subject to surges and declensions, to frenzies and humours of every sort which certainly mesmerised participants and their contemporaries. Meanwhile our general understanding of migration is still gripped

The migration mystery

15

by simple notions of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ and by dense descriptions of the recruitment of the migrants and their subsequent travails. The present account concentrates on the categorisation of migrants in terms of, for example, the prevailing degrees of duress, expulsion, coercion, initiative, volition, escape, desperation and adventure. This, of course, is slippery work because migrants rarely gave direct expression to their actual and psychological status on departure. But our working hypothesis is that the original impulses for dislocation began in the villages and local communities of the British Isles (before spreading across many parts of Europe32). Our proposition needs to be tested against the evidence at that level. The historical approach can establish a longitudinal account of the great processes by means of accumulated documentation covering many decades and variants. A longer bow is drawn when we claim that it connects a central question in modern economic growth with the widening gyre of migration (including even as far as Australia), past, present and future. Campsites The great hazard in this approach is that of homogenising a story which is composed of millions of lives with all their individualities and unique characteristics, properties and contexts. The search for recurring patterns, for connecting tissue, leads into the swallowing cavern of unicausality – even worse, of attributing large processes to necessarily large causes. After all, the story of migration, even from Britain alone, can be told in terms of the millions of family histories, in all their dense detail, idiosyncrasy and human interest. Ultimately the migration question is that of establishing the conditions of change and their connections with the world-wide outflows of British people over the century after 1750. Rather than seeking a universal law of migration, the question is more directly practical: what indeed potentiates a home population towards migration? What creates the pre-disposing conditions? And how did the early modest flows of people across the Atlantic become converted into floods of humanity (later encompassing most of Europe too)? For Australia and elsewhere the critical question is: how did the initial flows of free migrants after 1788 relate to the grand structural changes occurring in the British Isles in the age of rural transformation? Most of all, were these subterranean changes the ultimate, generic, activating sources of the emigrating masses? The programme here is to find a way of linking the precise detail of the local experience to the large-scale transitions affecting entire societies. It particularly involves identifying the stages in the emigrants’ transit from rural origins to ultimate destinations. It locates the classic pathways out of Britain through individual and family experience to create a series of models of migration. This exposes the conditions out of which migrants departed, the manner in which

16

The genesis of international mass migration

their worlds were activated to this end, and some of the general uniting lines of causation. There are always general and local considerations in this agenda and the method of this book is that of interspersing particular concrete chapters between more discursive treatments of the generic process which is the quest of the study. So there follows a series of ‘campsites’ – pilot studies of specific migrations within the broader British context. These constitute closely localised investigations of migrations from districts which produced prolific emigrations to North America as well as to Australasia. There are innumerable candidates and those chosen have been selected for their variety of conditions as well as their relatively rich documentation. They include a number of islands (the Isle of Man, St Kilda, the Channel Islands), some southern rural sites (West Sussex, Cornwall, Shropshire), some remote zones (the West Highlands, Tipperary and West Cork), some semi-industrialised localities (the West Riding of Yorkshire, Tayside), London, the Welsh Uplands (Montgomeryshire), as well as the overwhelming and unavoidable case of Ireland. They provide a spectrum of cases, seeking some common denominators.33 Within these selections there are some especially interesting connections – for instance between the Scottish Highlands and New South Wales in the 1830s, and with Victoria in the 1850s; between the Isle of Man and Ohio in the 1820s and 1830s; between the Yorkshire Dales and the United States in the 1840s; and between Cornwall and South Africa and South Australia in the later nineteenth century. The method, therefore, is to create a series of exact chains of events and processes from closely defined localities in the British Isles. Thus, the rural economy and demography of the Isle of Man is very well documented in primary and published sources and provides a good case study of the precise circumstances which gave rise to a twenty-year migration of certain types of farmers to Ohio in the 1820s. Such studies offer more penetration of the generic processes at work. Beyond the particular case there is interspersed some treatment of the spread of these changes to continental Europe and the interconnections created with North American and Australasian destinations, necessarily in programmatic form. The big question is the realignment of population across the globe towards international migration and, subsequently, hyper-urbanisation – of which Australia comprised a distinct but well-defined variant. Local studies are employed to build towards the grand question of oceanic movement. How were the great changes translated into oceanic migration? What were the patterns, the varieties, the sequences? The starting hypothesis is that the answers lie within the documentation of localities in the source districts. The greatest challenge is to discover the ways in which the larger forces (e.g. population growth) were responsible for delivering migrants to the seaports. Mostly the evidence is essentially circumstantial: here

The migration mystery

17

we track them from their own hearths and listen to what they said. They were most often silent witnesses to their own history, yet they were the carriers of historical change. We need the earthy details of actual lives juxtaposed with the grand shifts in the structures of British life. But finally there were those structural subterranean seismic changes in the eighteenth century invoked by Bailyn – the mysterious forces let loose in the off shore islands of north-western Europe. This ultimately is a holy grail – though it may seem also like a search for historical phlogiston. Nevertheless the search starts in the Isle of Man and the Channel Island of Guernsey. Such insular cases provide our first concrete examples of the accelerated emigration from Britain in the 1820s – the exact phenomenon in miniature we seek to explain. Notes 1 E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 11. 2 Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 262–3, 269, 279, 113–17. 3 See Independent, 27 June 2007; Guardian, 28 June 2007. The latter argues that ‘In the first wave of urbanisation [in the early nineteenth century], overseas migration [to North America or Australia] relieved the pressures on European cities … Restrictions on international migration today make this almost impossible’. 4 M. Livi-Bacci talks of migration as a fundamental entitlement: ‘migration is a human prerogative and so a normal constitutive element of any society’. A Short History of Migration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. x and also pp. viii and 124. 5 Economist, 26 December 1992, p. 34, quoted by Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 10. See also Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 24–5. 6 For a summary of the numbers involved, see Bernard Bailyn, ‘Considering the slave trade: history and memory’, in Sometimes an Art (New York: Knopf, 2015), pp. 6–8. The Anglocentric and Eurocentric versions of the migration narrative have been severely criticised in recent times, notably the notions of ‘the White Atlantic’ in a context in which three-quarters of the people who crossed the Atlantic between 1500 and 1820 were Africans. This, of course, was prior to the onset of European mass emigration. 7 The ejection of minorities from nation states has a long and unsavoury history. See, for example, Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 8 See, for example, Andrekos Varnava (ed.), Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), and Rowan Strong, ‘Pilgrims, paupers or progenitors: religious constructions of British emigration from the 1840s to 1870s’, History 100 (2015), 392–411. 9 On the frequency of emigration after the death of a wife, husband or parent and similarly the desire to end a marriage, a family scandal, or simply ‘dissipation’, see Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England, p. 25.

18

The genesis of international mass migration

10 There are currently reported to be about 200 million internal migrants in China. See Xin Meng and Chris Manning, The Great Migration: Rural-Urban Migration in China and Indonesia (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010). The scale and character of these ‘tidal waves’ of internal migrants is well discussed in Delia Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 11 As reported by David Satterthwaite in the Guardian, 17 Jan. 2007. 12 H.J. Dyos, ‘The Victorian city in historical perspective’, in David Cannadine and David Reeder (eds), Exploring the Urban Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 18. 13 Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 14 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987), p. 8. 15 He refers to ‘deep-lying cultural tectonics that undermined the foundations of the whole of Atlantic civilization and led to profound transformations’. Bailyn, Sometimes an Art, p. 167. 16 Bailyn, Peopling, pp. 4–5. 17 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987), p. 122. 18 See Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, p. xx. 19 The international study of such documentation now encompasses correspondence from the great Chinese Diaspora, opening up possibilities of cross-cultural comparisons. See, for example, Ding Lixing and Zheng Zongwei (eds), Chinese Qiaopi and Memory of the World (Wuyi University, 2014), especially Gregor Benton, ‘Documenting the lives of emigrants through their letters: the overseas Chinese case’, in Chinese Qiaopi, pp. 484–507. 20 The challenge of individual testimony, collected in large anthologies, is to detect ‘the patterns that run through much of the material’. See W.A. Armstrong, in The Encyclopaedia of the Victorian Era. vol. 2, edited by James Eli Adams et al. (Danbury, Conn: Grolier Academic Reference, 2004). 21 Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London: London School of Economic and Political Science, 1972), p. 6. 22 These were agents recruiting for Mexico and Texas in the 1820s. See Graham Davis, In Search of the Better Life (Stroud: History Press, 2011), p. 207. 23 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little Brown, 1951). See also the subsequent revision of the account, which places capitalism at centre stage in the entire process: John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 24 Frank Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe overseas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, 11e Congrès International des Sciences Historiques: Rapports (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1960), p. 45. 25 Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1973).

The migration mystery

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26 See Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005), which takes the long view and offers explanations of international factor movements, and supply-and-demand conditions in the evolving international labour market. 27 Cf. Erickson, Leaving England, p. 3. It is a problem not unlike the dilemma at the core of Fernand Braudel’s stupendous work on the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, where his famous three strata (l’histoire événementielle, les conjonctures, and la longue durée) never seem to interconnect in any useable fashion. See F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. English translation (London: Collins, 1972–73). 28 A straightforward account of the problem of explaining mass mobility is contained in the excellent Introduction to Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (eds), International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives (Hounslow, Middlesex: Temple Smith for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984), especially p. 19ff. 29 See, for instance, the forensic detection undertaken by Graeme Davison, Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia’s Golden Age (Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2016). 30 Herman Ausubel, The Late Victorians (New York: Van Nostrand, 1955), p. 11. 31 C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 2nd edn, 1909), p. 76. 32 The recent migration of rural populations to the cities of Europe (for example, in North Germany, Portugal, Spain, France, Slovakia and Greece) has been described as ‘a silent blight, a steady, almost unremarked haemorrhage of people leaving the countryside for the cities’. See Sarah Tisdall, ‘Silent blight as the young leave the villages for cities’, Guardian Weekly, 28 Aug. 2015. 33 Michael Frayn, in more philosophical mode, employed a similar method: ‘We can’t look at everything, but we can choose a few particular sites, a few vantage points with wide views. What I’m proposing is that we should go this way and that, without any particular system, wherever a path seems to offer, to get the lie of the land’, The Human Touch (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 8, for which reference I owe Ngaire Naffine my thanks.

2

Islands of exit

Rural origins Emigrants wrote home and told of their reactions to their great act of transoceanic relocation. Their correspondence is the closest evidence of their innermost intentions. Thomas Kelly was an emigrant from Doolough, Jurby, on the Isle of Man. He had left for Ohio in the United States by way of Liverpool, the rapidly rising emigrant port, in July 1827, accompanied by his wife, father, sister, five daughters and ten other Manx people. During the voyage, marked by severe weather, he lost his two-year-old daughter. Kelly was a middling farmer of the old sort – of peasant stock facing tightening conditions and increasing pressure on the land. Prospects in the 1820s were dismal and he had heard of much better land easily available in America. The news of his subsequent rapid success in Ohio, and that of other Manxmen, was soon transmitted back to the Island. A typical emigrant letter declared: It would give us great joy to see our countrymen here. If you would just come, we are sure you could make a good living. All here are making a good living and all very satisfied that we came to this country, this land of liberty and luxuries.1

Kelly was at the centre of a communicating network linking the Isle of Man and Ohio. Social networks were indeed crucial in the maintenance of emigrant flows, monitoring and moderating the element of risk in the decision to emigrate or not. Emigrant letters were part of the mechanisms of migration, and increasingly influential as literacy widened in the following decades. Islands attract social analysts because they seem to offer less complicated conditions, simpler forces at work, and are commonly insulated from wider national influences. Small islands are especially interesting because they show their main features in relatively manageable form. The Isle of Man, not so small, fits the bill partly because it is neatly located, equidistant from England, Scotland,

Islands of exit

21

Wales and Ireland. These Manx people emigrated out of a rural base mainly unaffected by industrialisation. Here farming people spontaneously uprooted themselves in unprecedented numbers, ostensibly unaffected by circumstances beyond the island, yet they became assimilated into the much larger exoduses departing so many quarters of the British Isles. The Isle of Man is therefore an ideal starting point in the quest for the engines and mechanisms of emigration, and a particular version of the widespread surge in British emigration in the 1820s. Here the conditions for migration were exposed in close detail and were documented by some of the emigrants themselves – the voice of the migrants can be heard over the Atlantic waves. Most of the islands of Britain were largely unaffected by direct industrialisation before 1850: they were on the periphery of the great changes. The Isle of Man provides relatively straightforward conditions in which to examine the operations of migratory flows in a context which remained primarily rural, with some mining and fishing as secondary factors. Manx people were well connected with the sea-routes and possessed a strong tradition of seafaring and maritime enterprise. Emigration from the Island had a long history, but swelled most significantly in the 1820s, the moment when Thomas Kelly migrated to Ohio. The people involved during that transformative decade – the emigrants – bore their own witness to their trans-Atlantic departures. According to Lockwood the population of the Isle of Man was 14,426 in 1726, 19,144 in 1757, and 24,942 in 1784.2 From the late eighteenth century the number of people more than doubled, to 40,081 in 1821 and then to 52,381 by 1851. This was the central demographic reality. But the Isle of Man was not an advanced farming country and was not noted for its level of agricultural improvement. During the Napoleonic Wars the main economic response to wartime imperatives, and the accumulating pressure of a rising population, was the extension of cultivation up the sides of hills to the 100 foot mark.3 Fishing, especially for herring, had developed strongly but was a volatile source of prosperity – moreover the export market for herring was damaged by the curtailment of slavery, especially in the 1830s.4 Lead, silver and copper mining employed large numbers but was also fickle in its employment in the middle decades of the century. Eventually the Manx economy (like that of the Channel Islands) became increasingly dependent on the tourist industry as it emerged in the last decades of the century. The geographer R.H. Kinvig observed that emigration was a central factor in the Manx experience, partly because little industrial development had occurred and the rural sector was not absorbing the population increases: ‘Without urban industry to make up for the fall in agricultural employment, the Isle of Man was largely saved by the highly successful tourist industry’ (in the early twentieth century). By then the proportion of the population on the land had greatly decreased.5

22

The genesis of international mass migration

The long-run features of the Island’s economy were therefore less than hospitable to its swollen population. Short-run conditions may also have exacerbated local problems. There was rioting on the island in 1825 as a consequence of attempts to collect a tithe on the potato crop, which added to the turmoil surrounding the rising popularity of Methodism across the Island.6 One report claimed that the emigration of 1826 ‘took place in consequence of the potato tithe of 1825’.7 The decline of fishing and the rising congestion in farming set the scene for emigration. In the Island context in the post-Waterloo years there was a general tightening of rural conditions with the very rapid rise of population; there were several poor harvests, rising rents and intensifying competition for the land, and falling crop prices; and there were parallel problems in the fishing industry – though none of these adverse conditions assumed catastrophic proportions. The Manx emigrations of the 1820s were clearly propelled by special local circumstances which included land scarcity, falling prices, religious tensions and family networks. But they also fitted a more broadly based model of emigration general in other parts of Britain. The influential historian of emigration, Charlotte Erickson, contended that, before 1840, most British emigrants to the United States were derived from rural counties outside the industrial mainstream of the economy. They tended to be small-scale farmers, not so much peasants as men of small capital, tenants who faced increasingly competitive agricultural conditions and perhaps diminishing prospects for their growing numbers of children.8 The Manx emigrants to Ohio closely conformed to this pattern and spoke directly of their predicaments. Manx outflows Dramatic and sudden exoduses of several hundred people from the Isle of Man began in the mid-1820s. It was essentially a concentrated outflow of Manx people to Ohio, where the emigrants developed strong connections which were sustained for more than a century. The Manx people made landfall in New York and then travelled, mainly by way of the Erie Canal, to the Western Reserve in Ohio. By 1883 there were as many as 4,000 Manx immigrants and their descendants living in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. They displayed considerable cohesion in their patterns of immigration and settlement. The first Manx settlement was associated with the Corlett family in 1822 in a party of fifty emigrants from the parish of Kirk Michael directly to the Western Reserve in Ohio.9 In 1826 three more families arrived, buying new farms on arrival, followed in the next year by another seventy families to the Warrensville district. The first Methodist service was held at Newburgh in 1826. The passage from Liverpool was about thirty-seven days. Apparently ‘most of them [the emigrants] were poor, and almost without exception they encountered the ague

Islands of exit

23

and fevers incident to a new country’. Eventually so many letters were sent back to the Island that one of the recipients’ houses was nicknamed the ‘Ohio Cottage’: here the American letters were read aloud to all and sundry.10 Long-term changes swirled about the Manx communities, creating different degrees of urgency. How these wider circumstances were translated into emigration was often an elusive process. The relatively small numbers of emigrants who chose to leave the Island were prompted by more immediate and often less definable conditions, sometimes exposed in their emigrant letters. As always, the data are fragmentary: the emigrants rarely interrogated themselves about their own motives. Their letters are commonly prosaic at best and yield only hints and suggestions about their inner motivations.11 But they have the ultimate advantage of representing the unmediated voices of the people themselves. Erickson says that the Manxmen emigrated in community networks rather than as single family groups,12 and they had very good lines of information. The Corletts provide a clear example: they were a modest middling family in the old mould. They had been small farmers for five generations, their lands scattered in strips amounting to forty acres. They represented the traditional peasant model, already reduced to a small minority across most of mainland Britain. William Corlett was forty-four and, as the eldest son, had inherited his scattered farm. But he then sold the land to enable the family to cross the Atlantic. He was neither especially ambitious nor idealistic: he seems to have ‘emigrated for entirely economic reasons’. Emigration was attractive to small farmers facing adverse conditions: Corlett had found it difficult to provide for his four sons and two daughters. There had been no industrial growth in his parish and the population declined even in the 1820s. His own father, a few years earlier, had been to London to protest against the higher taxes of wartime and the imposition of the new tithe law in 1817 which caused rioting on the Island. The purpose of Corlett’s letters was to attract other members of the family to Ohio, the encouragement continuing into the 1840s. The fate of the family is especially interesting: they had already mainly dispersed away from the family home. One brother had gone to London to be a tailor; and a sister married a carpenter and went to Liverpool. A nephew migrated to Manchester. Only two remained in the parish: brother Thomas stayed on as a weaver, having married an older woman who had inherited property from her father; but his sister married a local farmer and also remained in the parish. Thomas Corlett was unable to persuade more of the extended family to join him in America. But the general pattern of dispersal was maintained in his own large family in Ohio, clearly showing the urgent challenge of providing for the next generation. In Ohio one of Corlett’s sons sought employment in the canals in order to raise money to get land, at which point he was able to set up independently; another son became a clergyman; two other sons became carpenters.

24

The genesis of international mass migration

Thus the Corletts had emigrated for land but found themselves following other careers, though still seeking the traditional security of land.13 The Corletts were a family in transit, taking zigzagging movements unknowingly towards urban life. They were rural people, but not aware of the general transitions occurring around them on the Isle of Man, not reacting directly or consciously to the larger trends. But somehow, in a more local and immediate context, they were stirred into emigration, partly by opportunities, more perhaps by their own vital calculations of prospects for their own children at home compared with the promise beyond the Atlantic. In terms of the mechanics of migration there emerged a pronounced sequence of departures from certain localities on the Island among rural people, fishermen and, later, construction workers and miners.14 It was commonplace economic migration involving a straightforward calculation of the widening differential between income and prospects in Ohio compared with those available in the Isle of Man. It was a perfectly rational reciprocation between two particular components of the Atlantic system, a relocation of population, technology and modest capital. The mechanism which set the flow going required some initial risk-taking by the first-contact migrants. This was followed by the usual paraphernalia of correspondence, advertising, persuasion and family-based chains of movement and connection. The movements of these Manx people were registered in their letters back and forth. Ohio beckoning These myriad decisions were formed in the cottages and fields at home, in the minds of the people who composed a small segment of the vast oceanic migration. Their letters are often the only remaining clues of their inner dramas. William Van Vugt, a historian of British migration to Ohio, gives emphasis to the original impact of the earliest reports which unleashed ‘the pent up demand for emigration’, attracted by Ohio’s rich farm lands. Van Vugt argues that the Manx economy benefitted from the migration, which indeed continued to the end of the century: those who remained found better opportunities, some of the local pressures being relieved by the emigrations.15 In the mid-1820s about 200 Manx farmers and families found their way towards the Western Reserve and their descendants made Cleveland, Ohio, and the Cuyahoga, the capital of the Manx in the United States, setting up churches and benevolent societies which maintained a remarkable measure of cohesion.16 There was a pronounced degree of clustering and solidarity. The original groups enthusiastically encouraged fellow-Manx people to join them. Many were Methodists, some spoke the Manx language. The Cleveland Herald, on 3 August 1827, reported the arrival of 200 Manx people the previous week: ‘These people appear to be well-assorted with reference to sex and age and there is apparently

Islands of exit

25

no possibility of them becoming paupers’. The Manx inflow was part of a considerable immigration of English people in the 1820s – and there were 1,200 of them in Cleveland as early as 1830.17 The exact stimuli for these quasi-communal expatriations are not explicit in the Manx documentation. But the facilitating conditions are easily recognisable: the availability of shipping via Liverpool, the flows of information back from Ohio, and the letters from succeeding migrants back homewards – were all present. At bottom, the critical consideration was access to land, its relative availability at home and in Ohio, and the returns on the land – and the future prospect of possessing land. Evidently the farmers on the Island were being pressed and squeezed by the high levels of rents and the fall in prices for their products – some of which related to the cyclical depression in agriculture which was affecting such a large part of agriculture across the whole of Britain in the 1820s.18 More speculatively, it is possible to detect the longer-term effects of a greater population on limited land resources – expressed in elevated rents – and the simultaneous reducing demand for labour and lower profits for farmers. The low wages of labour reflected the general pressure on the rural sector. None of these circumstances were made explicit in the letters sent home: any diagnosis of the underlying factors can only be read into the account by inference. The letters home carry many hints which were consistent with the idea of a society under pressure. And its people responded positively to news of the beckoning and more favourable conditions available in Ohio. The transfer of people was therefore set in motion. Cycles of letters One such Manx migrant was William Kelly, a local school teacher with two children, who together with two other families set up in Cleveland in the 1820s. They leased fifty acres from the Connecticut Land Company. Kelly’s letters were published in his home community and became the catalyst for further immigration. Early in the piece, Kelly wrote back home from Ohio: ‘A man can earn three times as much here in America per day and provisions are thrice as cheap, as in the Isle of Man … It makes no odds whether a man be rich or poor’. And he gave precise detailed information about how to transplant to ‘this land of liberty and luxuries’. The main problem of the prospective migrants was their disengagement from their ties (including leases and debts) in the Isle of Man. And the obvious implication was that the opposite conditions applied in Ohio. William Kelly told his kinsfolk on the Island: ‘It is worthwhile to come out, let every man judge for himself, but if we who have come here were in the Isle of Man then we would again come to this plentiful country’. These letters were not written for propaganda purposes or for advertising.

26

The genesis of international mass migration

The general motivation was captured in a conversation about America in 1831, reported from the local market in Jurby on the eastern side of the Isle of Man: the talk was that ‘the land is cheap there; that the fields are fertile and acres are boundless, that the son of a poor man has the same chance as the son of the rich. Our fifteen year lease will soon expire. Should we renew it or go to far off America, should we do it?’19 This was the moment of decision for one family with four sons and four daughters: they overcame their doubts and the usual inertia and they all departed from Douglas for Ohio by way of Liverpool. A striking aspect of the Manx emigration was the composition of the departing people. Many relatively prosperous people left for America and there was report of ‘almost a panic … by a middle class going to America’ – activated by letters sent back from Ohio. ‘It makes no difference … that a man is rich or poor, if he can get there’. The critical problem was the actual cost and dislocation of emigration: ‘we often lament that so many of our countrymen have not the means of emigrating here … The poorest man can purchase land here’, reported another Manx migrant.20 The selective mechanisms of emigration were evidently at work: men who had accumulated some assets – substantial tenant farmers – possessed the minimum resources to undertake these trans-Atlantic steps. It was this command of assets that set them apart from their poorer neighbours and the bulk of the labouring classes, at least at the start of the flow of emigration to Ohio. This was therefore a perfectly rational migration without extreme pressure; the main impediment was the cost of the passage and the disengagement with ‘home’, both economic and emotional. The migrants exchanged a land-scarce context for a land-rich one. It meant that the initial emigration favoured the better-off, the young and the unattached – though family migration was still the main model. These were economic migrants who saw the widening differential favouring departure, and the apparatus of migration opening up on the prospect. William Tear and family arrived in May 1826. On the Island Tear had occupied 90 acres, which he sold off, then sailed to Ohio. He reported that conditions in Ohio were so good that ‘the people in the Isle of Man will not believe’. This letter was highly practical – regarding provisions and the price of fuel – intelligence especially vital to working people. He was emphatic: ‘there is not one called master or mistress, or servant, but a free people, and ready to stand for arms for freedom, and liberty and religion’. He exclaimed, ‘My boys this is the place’. Social standing and status were crucial to these migrants as they painted the advantages. They were especially rapturous about the signs of Methodism all about them, devoted to ‘the glorious melodious work of salvation’. Methodism and emigration were frequently linked in other parts of England and Wales, as we will see in later chapters. William Tear also reported the precise conditions of re-settlement: ‘A lot of 100 acres most excellent land for 336 dollars. 30 acres of this land is improved’,

Islands of exit

27

and wages were very good. ‘Work is plenty; I got employment the next day after I arrived’. The promise was palpable: ‘in fact any person by industry can get as rich as a Lord in a few years’. Moreover Yankees were not so proud and haughty as folk back in the Isle of Man.21 Tear said that: ‘we often lament that so many of our countrymen have not the means of emigration here, and it would give us the greatest joy to see them here’. This was one of many such enticing letters, evidently a key mechanism in the activation of emigration. The reminiscences of Manx families supplied mounting evidence of their expatriation and the tensions they aroused in the home population. For instance, they complained of the slow uptake of the encouragement offered by kin in Ohio. In one case a mother figure was the most responsive element in the equation: she, ‘unlike many other women, began to favour it, and urge it on’. Similarly the mere access to a geography book was crucial in focusing the mind of the family to bring them towards emigration. Disengaging from home was not easy: it often required the sale of an interest in a piece of land and this constituted, in effect, a ‘burning of their boats’. The moment of departure was a further trial of the emotions, as exposed in one report of the leaving: The neighbours felt as if it was the funeral of their friends. The company went along some of the way, some weeping, never expecting to see any of their faces again. Astonished that people as well off as they were would think of going to a far off unknown land of America, which was very near being outside the world.22

Hence relatively prosperous people were prominent among the earliest migrants – some of whom were evidently persuaded to pay too much for their new land in Ohio. The familiar cycle of letters began commonly with a father’s letters, which carried the greatest authority. The letters were read to everyone – from the ‘top of a sod hedge’ in one instance. Letters were also published in the Manx newspapers and carefully examined for inaccuracy. The emigration was soon no longer confined to the better off: labourers were given unambiguous advice that they could live in Ohio as well as ‘a man that has from 20 to 30 acres of land in the island’; that is, he could soon rise to the level of farmers at home. There were no tithes to aggravate them, and Ohio was ‘for the most part, a civil, enlightened and religious society’. But, most of all, land was the lure: ‘The poorest man can purchase land here’.23 The migrants in this group were mainly from the Kirk Andress part of the Island: many were farmers but there were also fishermen, labourers, shoemakers, servants, weavers, coopers, preachers, brick makers, dressmakers and cooks. The Isle of Man was only marginally affected by these emigrations – though population pressure slowly diminished during the rest of the nineteenth century. The 1820s stand out as a concentrated moment in the more generalised seeping

28

The genesis of international mass migration

of the increment of the population increase out of the Island. In fact, of its twenty-one parishes, sixteen reached their maximum populations in 1851 or before. Meanwhile the total population of the Island rose continuously to the end of the century. Significantly, most of the increase was relocated in the urban centres of Douglas and Ramsey. Agriculture and mining absorbed a much reduced proportion of the Manx population (mirroring the general British experience). Consequently internal migration ran parallel with the external flows – of which the Ohio element was the best known. In the rural districts there was no replenishment of the departed population. Thomas Robert Malthus had influentially argued that emigration caused a strictly temporary vacuum which was always refilled by a resurgence of reproduction – but here there was no evidence of this proposition, no re-filling of the Manx vacuum. Malthus’ prescriptions had little purchase in these conditions.24 The American emigration of the 1820s and 1830s operated to reduce rural pressure in the Isle of Man, not dramatically, and always secondary to internal movements. Emigration fed the needs of expansion on the Ohio frontier. It was a story often re-told across the Anglo-sphere: a modest and selective evacuation, an agricultural adjustment by way of emigration which helped to reduce the absolute numbers dependent on Manx agriculture without impeding rising productivity on the home farms.25 A Manx newspaper in 1827 characterised the migration as a transplantation beyond the Atlantic: Persons of easy fortunes, who have a sufficiency for themselves during life, but who are desirous of leaving a comfortable provision for all the members of their families at their decease. A gentleman who can, over and above his immediate and daily wants, spare £400 or 500 may, by crossing over to the United States, make a most valuable purchase; and having therewith to support himself and family during the process of necessary improvement there, may await the issue, until his land be cleared, fenced, and regularly laid out, so that an elegant mansion may at any future period be erected on it.26

These people were selling small properties (which may have been in their families for generations) to facilitate the first emigrations – it was the ‘middle class’ of people with thirty to fifty acres. The first settlers for Ohio were somewhat better off than the later ones. This was a common initiating pattern. These people, above all else, valued the promise of holding land, of sustaining independence and following their religion. Though their occupations were varied, they were essentially rural folk from the old land-based society, moving on to a new one which promised to reproduce their home standards with better security. They were following their own priorities and making a free choice. But it was choice bounded by a particular context, in which there were fewer options at home on the Island. They found their rents rising, prices reducing, alternative

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employment volatile, and the demand for rural labour diminishing. These were the marks of a society that had doubled its population in two generations and where the land had less proportional need of their labour. Towns on the Island and on the mainland, and even in America, were beginning to offer better options for those who were sufficiently suggestible and mobile, but land still dominated their thoughts. Rents, prices, wages and tithes were foremost in their thinking. These emigrants of the 1820s have been described as ‘alienated small farmers seeking a freer environment, especially from the social and educational constraints of the island’. Subsequently the scope of Manx emigration widened and by the 1830s emigration to Ohio became ‘a safety valve for the nonlandholding classes who were economically squeezed’.27 The Manx newspapers reported particular groups leaving for America – for example, 100 in April and 26 in May 1837; 69 in March 1841; 190 in April 1842, when there was talk of an ‘emigration epidemic’;28 and another 100 went in April 1850. In the 1850s and 1860s there was a Mormon-inspired migration to Salt Lake which accounted for more than fifty families in total. The links with Ohio were more sustained and seem to have attracted small farmers and industrious labour in particular. By 1848 there were also small streams of Manx migrants going to Australia29 and Natal. In 1849 they were described as ‘consisting chiefly of small landowners and farmers, but including some mechanics as well’ and in that year a local business found good trade supplying seeds and implements from the Island to the settlers in America.30 Many were joining relatives in the Midwest. In 1851 the Mona’s Relief Society was set up in Cleveland to help immigrant Manx fallen on bad times.31 The main emigration season was early spring and was especially noted in the north of the Island. These emigrations were not always popular on the Island. In 1842, during the ‘emigration epidemic’, American land speculators were accused of setting lures and improbable incentives. Emigration agents were at work but ‘others [were] inspired with a possible hope of finding in a distant clime a maintenance which their utmost labour scarcely suffices [at home] to procure for their families’. The Manx Sun commented biliously that ‘The fools who form the first class are deserving of sincere pity, of the latter class we regret the cause of their departure from their native soil, and hope that they find in the far west, their visions of independence and comfort realised’.32 There were always special conditions in every individual emigrant household; there were also random factors at play in the context in which these Manx people set off in substantial numbers for Ohio in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But, in the larger picture, these people were part of a wider articulation of forces on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of these forces had been fifty years in the making and the moment of escape for some was sudden, even precipitate, apparently without clear consideration. Yet the individual migrant decisions were part of the momentous exodus which took many different forms in these decades.

30

The genesis of international mass migration Population pressure

The Manx emigrations to Ohio were clearly not confined to aspirant farmers – emigrants are rarely so neatly contained in such tight categories. There were other specific transfers of people – most notably people from the lead-mining communities of Foxdale and Laxey, made redundant by fluctuations in the industry in mid-century. This was a clear expulsive force which persuaded many to emigrate to the mid-west states of America. It was a classic labour transfer within a particular industry, between a declining sector in the Isle of Man and its expanding counterpart in the American mid-west. Decades ago the historian Frank Thistlethwaite categorised this sort of migration: it was skill acting as a ‘trace element’, following migrants across the world. It was much enlarged in the Cornish case.33 The connection once established in Ohio possessed a momentum sustained in various practical and symbolic ways. Eventually the concentration of Manx migrants made Cleveland the centre of the ‘World Manx Association’. In the 1920s and 1930s a liner was regularly chartered to carry American descendants home to the Isle of Man, with special visits to Douglas Bay. Frank Kermode, the renowned Manx-born literary scholar, in 1995 regretted that ‘These were moving occasions but they happen no longer – the Depression, the war, the jetliner, all conspire to put an end to those sentimental journeys. Now, no doubt, the American Manx no longer have any interest in going “home”. For myself, I have, in a single generation, lost the piety to do so’.34 Kermode underestimated the strength of genealogy and the surge of roots tourism at the end of the twentieth century when ‘piety’ was indeed much revived. It was inevitable that the pre-1840 emigrants from the British Isles were mainly agricultural folk since they made up the lion’s share of the population until the later nineteenth century. Many of their surviving letters demonstrate a rational, calculating and intelligent understanding of their decision to leave the country. They overturn the ‘Hodge’ stereotype of agricultural labourers as ‘intellectually, emotionally subnormal’. As K.D.M. Snell has shown, their ‘first priority’ was their family and ‘the quality of social relations was one of the foremost attractions of many favoured emigrant destinations’.35 It is tempting to regard these emigrants as people extruded from the Island – by their own volition of course – in a time of population pressure. The 1820s were the peak moment in the demographic history of the Isle of Man and there were many symptoms of pressure in the rural sector. The most likely cause of the exoduses from the Island was the underlying disturbance in the balance of the population in relation to the availability of farmland and employment. The population had grown to such an extent that there were simply too few farms to accommodate the new generations; the pressure was transmitted into the shrunken prospects of such families, probably exacerbated by the continuing

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consolidation of farms into larger, more efficient units.36 But there is no clear systematic evidence to sustain a statistical correlation of these variables; the story can only be told in the broadest terms, in its most likely construction. The Manx people were leaving at a time before the emergence of newer sectors in the economy which possessed any capacity to absorb the incremental increases. These emigrants were the by-products of a great change in the very framework of their lives. The problem is that they were not aware of the larger transformations that had created the context of their expatriations. Guernsey emigrants Another island, Guernsey in the English Channel, experienced a parallel emigrational career. Here the population was about half that of the Isle of Man, but denser. Guernsey doubled its numbers between 1821 and 1901, but this was complicated by simultaneous immigration and emigration at various times in that century. It also possessed an unusual economic structure – an agriculture dominated by small occupying farmers, more in the French mode than that of England. The critical contrast with the Isle of Man was the absence of great estates: most of Guernsey was distributed into middling yeoman farms of 10 to 150 acres.37 Partible inheritance reigned and there were far fewer purely agricultural labourers. Much employment on the island was part-time, spread between farming and fishing and other pursuits. The population grew more slowly than was typical in England, but faster than that of France. It was a densely populated small island and concentrated in the trade centre of St Peter Port. Quarrying was the basis for growth elsewhere. The seafaring element in Guernsey life enhanced the chances of emigration, and mobility in general. There was an emigration of 1,200 islanders to America in 1815–19, coinciding with the run-down of the naval garrison at the end of the French Wars. In the following decades there was recurrent emigration, matched by relatively low birth rates. By the mid-century emigrants from Guernsey had reached as far as Australia and, derived mostly from their seafaring links, eastward through India towards the Antipodes. Guernsey people knew this world from their shipping information. In the colony of South Australia there emerged a miniature network of Guernsey people who were involved in shipping enterprise and who were quick to seize opportunities of colonial maritime enterprise.38 Emigration from Guernsey swelled again in 1851–61 and the local newspaper, the Comet, talked of an ‘emigration fever’. But there had been no potato famine, and the islanders appear to have responded more positively to the attraction of gold rushes in the New Worlds.39 There was an echo of the Manx accounts. Thus N. Le Prevost from Guernsey arrived in New York in the summer of 1840 and proceeded to Ohio to follow his cousins to Racine. He reported back to his aunt, most emphatically about

32

The genesis of international mass migration

the price and availability of land, the soil qualities, wage rates and low taxes. In comparison, he remarked sardonically, ‘God bless Guernsey with all its slaves’. His message became a paean of praise: ‘My dear aunt, if there are any Guernsey men who wish to quit their mother to come to America to purchase land let them come straight here [to the Prairies] without stopping elsewhere’. He touched on other priorities – such as work opportunities for daughters, the array of churches and, perhaps most of all: ‘In America there is no distinction – a poor man is as much respected as the richest.40 Erickson notes the prevalence of such farming families from outside industrialising regions among the emigrants to America before 1840.41 Guernsey’s context of emigration was unusual. In contrast to the rest of Britain, farming became much more lucrative from the 1870s: greenhouses supplying tomatoes to the London market now created an external demand and drove a new commercialised agriculture which encompassed even the small farmers who prospered in the new trade. This curtailed the emigration which had been sporadic throughout the previous century and which had siphoned off most of the natural increase. In Guernsey in the second half of the century population growth was quite strong. The decline of the population in rural parishes was much reduced during several decades and after 1881 there was some modest growth. This surprising trend was halted and then reversed in a large exodus in the years 1901–11: now it was reported that ‘the young men on the island, seeing a practically blank future before them, are emigrating at a phenomenal rate’.42 Guernsey, despite its special local circumstances, conformed to a general pattern identified by Dudley Baines, who pointed out that one-third of all English emigration in the period 1825 to 1930 occurred in the extraordinary years 1900–14.43 In the Guernsey account there were flows and counter flows, shifting local circumstance evidently affecting the trends, though the ultimate decline of the rural population was always resuming. Special local factors are the enemy of general explanation. The Canadian historian Bruce Elliott has argued that ‘factors such as trade cycles, the impact of war, industrialisation and the agricultural revolution affected different localities and regions … in different ways and to different extents and with varying chronologies and impacted upon social classes differently’.44 Such an emphasis becomes an invitation to celebrate local difference and variance, to extol local specialness until the larger agendas are obscured behind the forest of individual trees. Hebridean parallels The emigration records of the Isle of Man and Guernsey display great contrasts in their trajectories, though the final shape was rather similar. Both islands, in

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contexts of unprecedented population growth, lost people to overseas destinations; in both islands the old rural sector declined in proportional terms. The island story is far from unambiguous in its meanings and there were myriad other island stories within the Age of Emigration, each throwing varying light on the deep origins of mass emigration from the British Isles. For contrast, brief mention can be made of two other island experiences from the mid-nineteenth century, from the Outer Hebrides and the north-west coast of Scotland, both located on outer peripheries of the main migration systems. They further highlight the perennial puzzles bedevilling the account of emigrant origins. These two island communities were sites of ‘precipitate emigration’ in the mid-nineteenth century: sudden collective emigration affected the insular communities of St Kilda (to Port Phillip in 1852) and of Handa (to Canada in 1847/8). Each episode was small enough and sufficiently well documented to allow detailed investigation of the propellants of these emigrations, and expose the pressure of circumstances (notably from their respective landlords) in each case. The tiny islands of St Kilda, on the outer edge of the continental shelf, thirty miles out into the Atlantic, were cut off from the mainland for many months in every year of the nineteenth century. On St Kilda a population of about 110 subsisted on an extraordinary bird-based economy, the community apparently held in balance with little change over many decades. In late 1852 a third of the population decided to take advantage of an offer of free emigration to Port Phillip in Australia (a third of their number died en route, mainly of measles). In this case there was no evidence of population pressure, famine, land scarcity, rent increase or inducement by the landowner. There may have been some theological turmoil in their minds, but the emigrants seem to have freely decided on a new opportunity, perhaps influenced by information about prospects beyond their hermetic world. Yet there was little following emigration from St Kilda until the famous total and final evacuation of the island in 1929. Another island along the Highland littoral had a similar experience of evacuation, though under quite different conditions. Handa was home to about fifty families in the north-west of Sutherland. Not so cut-off from the world as St Kilda, they were more adversely affected by the potato famine of the late 1840s. Handa had experienced a series of transitions. In 1726 it was home to two families. At the turn of the century it was cleared for sheep, and then inhabited by a shepherd only. But in 1828 the island was re-populated with about twelve tenants on small lots, growing potatoes with a few cattle and sheep and the prospect of fishing. In 1839 the population was seventy-five and apparently in good heart and able to pay their rents regularly. But the potato famine of 1846 was severe and led to the removal of the entire population in the following year. The degree of pressure exerted by the landlord was disputed – the local factor claimed that the people begged for assistance to emigrate; the folk memory

34

The genesis of international mass migration

maintained that they were removed to add Handa to a mainland sheep farm. The Handa people were among the emigrants sailing from Loch Laxford to Montreal and to Pictou in 1847.45 On Handa, in contrast to St Kilda, there was much more evidence of pressures from the landowner and competition for their land. Here the landlord helped to persuade most of the people to emigrate; those that demurred were re-settled with reluctance on the rest of the Sutherland estate. By 1853 the entire island had been evacuated and turned over to a sheep farm: the problem of destitution on the island was thus eliminated in one fell swoop, and the land was redeployed to a more remunerative use. This was a case of induced emigration, initiated by the landlord (though some of the people of Handa apparently requested his help in their emigration) and facilitated by prevailing emigration schemes which connected migrant-seeking destinations with potential reservoirs of British migrants in the mid-century. Eventually the fate of St Kilda and Handa was much the same: they were both totally depopulated and their people scattered to the emigration world. But the mechanisms and the propellants of their respective migrations differed markedly. Even in these closely paralleled examples the modes of emigration were at variance, set in opposition to grand overarching general propositions, the grail of this study. Emigration was often unpredictable, sporadic, unplanned, temperamental and unstructured, frequently subject to whims and enthusiasms or crises in the lives of individuals or even communities. It was sometimes like a swarming of bees, and perhaps containing an inner logic. They had begun to swarm in the late eighteenth century, even before the vital ‘discontinuity’ in our narrative. But the outward movements had been constrained and sporadic, as the next chapter will survey. Notes 1 Quoted in ‘Manxmen come to Lake County’, Historical Society Quarterly, 4: 3 (Painesville, OH: Lake County Historical Society, August 1962), p. 1. 2 During the eighteenth century there had been some immigration from England, which enhanced the continuing Anglicisation of the island. See W.B. Lockwood, Languages of the British Isles Past and Present (London: A. Deutsch, 1975), p. 137. In 1656 there had been few who could speak English on the island; by 1817 a third of the population spoke English; by 1874 the number of Manx speakers had declined to about 12,000. 3 British troops were stationed on the island, and their withdrawal at the end of the war was another depressant on the local economy. See Jack William Birch, The Isle of Man: A Study in Economic Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the University of Bristol, 1964), p. 20, following A.W. Moore (1900). They quote the Manx Advertiser to the effect that ‘Many farmers, especially the smaller ones, were

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ruined, and they, with a number of the labouring class, being unable to obtain employment, emigrated to America, especially between 1825 and 1837’. Birch, Isle of Man, p. 79. 4 The suppression of smuggling in the late eighteenth century was regarded as a precipitant of emigration to America by G. Wood, An Account of the Past and Present State of the Isle of Man (London, 1811), quoted in Birch, Isle of Man, p. 20. 5 See R.H. Kinvig, The Isle of Man (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975), pp. 154–5. 6 See Hampton Creer, Never to Return (Douglas, Isle of Man: Manx Heritage Foundation, 2000), p. 53ff. David Craine, Manannan’s Isle (Isle of Man: Manx Museum & National Trust, 1955), p. 198. 7 A.W. Moore, Manx Worthies (Douglas: Broadbent, 1901), p. 208. 8 See Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, introduction and chap. one. 9 Ibid., p. 104. 10 The sequence of early migrations is outlined in David D. Van Tassel and John J Grabowski (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 126ff. See W.S. Kerruish, ‘The Pioneer Manxmen’, in Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County, 1: 1 (Cleveland, OH, 1882). See also ‘Manxmen come to Lake County’. Some of these letters were first printed in the Manx Advertiser in the 1820s and were minutely scrutinised for error and misrepresentation. 11 Canny remarks: ‘Why individuals chose one form of emigration over another must remain speculative, because appraisals of motivation were seldom stated at the moment when emigrants departed from home’. Nicholas Canny, Europeans on the Move (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 282. 12 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 106. 13 See Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, pp. 103–4; on post-emigration mobility see Eric Richards, ‘Restless and unsettled’, in Margrette Kleinig and Eric Richards (eds), On the Wing: Mobility before and after Emigration to Australia (Spit Junction, New South Wales: Anchor Books Australia, 2014). 14 The decline of the Manx mines was clearly an expulsive force and miners found new employment at Laxey and Foxdale in Ohio (in the common Cornish migratory pattern). 15 See William E. Van Vugt, British Buckeyes: The English, Scots and Welsh in Ohio, 1790–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), pp. 87–94. 16 See S. Thermstrom, Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 695–7. 17 See ‘Lists of ships and passengers’, in Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, 2 vols. (Northwalk, OH, 1896). 18 See Derek Winterbottom, ‘Economic History, 1830–1991’, in J. Belchem (ed.), A New History of the Isle of Man (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 211–12, which refers to the impact of the potato failure and the loss of commons. 19 Letters from the Manx Advertiser in the 1820s, reproduced in The Historical Society Quarterly, no. 4 (Lake County, OH, 1962); Annals of the Early Settlers’ Association of Cuyahoga County, 1: 4 (Cleveland, 1893). History of the Manx People who Came to

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The genesis of international mass migration

America, compiled by Mildred Steed (Lake County Genealogical Society, gathered in 1950 by members of the Greater Ohio Manx Society). 20 Manx Advertiser, 15 Feb. 1827, cited in Stead, History of the Manx People, p. 129. 21 William Tear, 18 Nov. 1826, to Friends and Relations in the Isle of Man, in ‘Manxmen come to the Lake County’. Quoted in History of the Manx People who Came to America. 22 Recollections of Thomas Tear (17 April 1888), quoted in ibid., p. 91. 23 Darlene E Kelley, ‘Manx Settlers in Ohio’, Historical Collections of Ohio (2002). 24 See below, chapter 16. 25 See A.W. Moore, History of the Isle of Man, 2 vols. (Douglas, 1992 reprint [London: T.F. Unwin, 1900]). 26 Manx Advertiser 15 Feb. 1827. 27 In a paper given in 1999, published on a website edited by Frances Coakley, A Manx Notebook, www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/. 28 Manx Sun, 19 March 1842. 29 See W.S. Kelly, Remembered Days (Adelaide: Rigby, 1964); C.R. Kelly, Merrindie: A Family’s Farm (Adelaide: C.R. Kelly, 1988). 30 A great deal of primary data is collected on the website edited by Frances Coakley, A Manx Notebook, from which some of this information is drawn. 31 See Coakley, Manx Notebook. 32 Manx Sun, 19 March 1842. 33 Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe overseas’. The immigrants established flourishing communities near Mineral Point in Wisconsin, associated inevitably with Welsh and Cornish miners attracted by similar conditions. 34 Frank Kermode, Not Entitled: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), pp. 261–2. 35 Jeremy Burchardt, ‘Agricultural history, rural history, or countryside history’, Historical Journal 50: 2 (2007), p. 470. 36 The elimination of small farms after 1815 was reported in the Manx Advertiser, quoted in Derek Winterbottom, ‘Economic History’, 211. 37 Ibid. 38 See, for instance, John Tregenza, Le Messuriers of Port Adelaide: Five Generations of Enterprise in Transport and Timber (Port Adelaide: Le Messurier Timber Co., 1991); David W. Kreckler, Guernsey Emigrants to Australia, 1828–1899 (Peter Port: La Société Guernesiaise, 1996). Channel Islanders, probably favoured by their maritime connections, were well represented in the incoming population of Australia as shown in the censuses of the early twentieth century. 39 Quoted in Rose-Marie Crossan, Guernsey 1814–1914: Migration and Modernisation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). For listings, see Kreckler, Guernsey Emigrants. 40 Van Vugt, British Immigration to the United States 1776–1914, vol. 2 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), pp. 87–90. 41 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, p. 16. 42 The Channel Islands experienced complicated patterns of migration. Jersey, for instance, received refugees from Europe and a number of Irish paupers – as reported in the Jersey Times in March 1851 – the ‘greater part were women and children,

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without money and without luggage. The husbands will doubtless come in a few weeks when their wives and progeny shall have explored the land’. Three years later J.S. Mill visited Jersey and reported that many islanders were emigrating, much attracted by the advertising of the Australian colonies. See Channel Islands Family History Society, The 1851 Census of Jersey (1990), pp. 12–13. 43 Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). 44 Bruce Elliott, ‘Regional patterns of English immigration and settlement in Upper Canada’, in Barbara Messamore (ed.), Canadian Migration Patterns: From Britain and North America (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004), quoted in Elizabeth and Jane Errington, Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 178, fn 11. 45 See Malcolm Bangor-Jones, ‘History File’, in Am Bratach, April and May 2009.

3

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

British origins The beginnings of mass emigration, we contend, were located in the British Isles in the 1820s, but the scale of the discontinuity requires a measure of the circumstances before the change. Was mass emigration a gradual progression or a bolt from the blue? The answer will relate to the likely causes, critical in the present quest. A radical shift in the velocity and volume of general mobility was a sine qua non of mass emigration. The mobility of the population was significant for many reasons – especially in the adaptability of labour to the needs of the economy and to the general vitality and interchange of society, to the selection of spouses and the interaction and integration of regions. The movement of people across the country also reflected levels of upheaval and dissatisfaction with the status quo. It may be that the population at large became more moveable before it could rise to new levels of outward migration, and ultimately to spread unrestrainedly across the world. It is clear enough that, despite precursors and precedents, the scale and reach of British emigration jumped upwards by the second quarter of the nineteenth century – it was a new world of emigration. This probably related to changes in internal migration and its mechanisms. Modern mass mobility erupted in the western world in the early nineteenth century, especially in Victorian times. Migration became a key expression of accelerating modernity. Tracking migrants along their widening and hastening radii produces a historical illusion – the notion that the entire world quite suddenly became a seething mass of mobility, a restless turmoil of humanity responding to the demands and opportunities of the modernising economies as they expanded within their original lands, and then burst out into the New Worlds. And there is considerable basis for this perception – mobility in Europe and outwards undoubtedly increased after 1780 and then accelerated and further

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

39

encompassed more of the population than ever before. But migrants, at any given moment, were always in a minority, and most of the population, in any year, remained in their birth places, literally unmoved. Mobility has many faces, changing chronologies, shifting causes, and consequences. In different times and places, the propensities and the precipitants, and the actual forms of mobility, evidently alter and are transformed by specific circumstances. Making sense of these shifts, discovering their patterns, dimensions and moods, and documenting their realities for actual migrants, is a central task for historians, demographers and planners. The significance of the discontinuity depends on the situation before the change. Early modern England has attracted detailed and ambitious efforts to measure the prevailing levels of mobility and the changes over historical time.1 There are, however, monumental problems of gauging such matters in the pre-census era, mostly relating to the unavoidable reliance on imperfect parish registers used to measure population trends. The measurement of mobility derived from such fragmentary documentation is fraught with the problem of absentees from the parishional record. In the conventional church data, i.e. the parish registry of births, deaths and marriages, there are crucial omissions – notably the dissenters and the people who moved out of the parish (including emigrants). The latter are, of course, the very people at the centre of the present investigation. Nevertheless, from the fragmentary data available, David Souden finds that commonly there was a decline in movement during times of low population growth (e.g. at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the next). The opposite demographic conditions were associated with heightened mobility: Rapid population growth in the countryside would produce too many people competing for local economic opportunity, and thus more would be squeezed out of the local economic environment or into alternative forms of employment; population equilibrium or decline would undoubtedly lessen these pressures.

In the late seventeenth century a greater proportion of the population stayed put in one place for longer; having married and settled, many remained in, or returned to, their birthplaces. Such conclusions suggest ‘the ways in which a local population responded to its economic and social environment’.2 The population and the economy were stagnating and mobility was restricted: in the late seventeenth century there was a decreasing frequency of movement, fewer vagrants, and the Laws of Settlement were more thoroughly codified. A regime of stagnant or falling population tended to hold the community in statu quo, mobility limited and controlled. Hence the picture emerges of a pre-industrial population generally held back in times of economic and demographic recession. In the long

40

The genesis of international mass migration

history of population trends, these phases of demographic recession were intermittent and not incompatible with local population turnover, perhaps temporarily reduced in radius.3 This world was restrained until greater changes began to stir in the 1750s and thereafter. Earlier mobility The historian of la longue durée, Fernand Braudel, was perfectly clear about the general state of the world, including the British Isles, before modern times: ‘For whole centuries economic activity was dependent on demographically fragile populations, as was demonstrated by the great decline in population from 1350 to 1450, and of course from 1630 to 1730’. It was a world constrained in every way, but most of all by its demographic condition.4 It was a fragile and relatively immobile state of existence. There are conflicting visions of this distant past. Climatic factors were probably critical in the population experience of most of western Europe in the late seventeenth century, which shaped the basic foundations of life. The so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ was a climatic crisis probably caused by a global cooling of perhaps two degrees centigrade which, in 1708 and 1709, resulted in the worst winters for half a millennium. Disease, starvation and sheer cold caused the death of at least a million people in France from 1691 to 1701, and even worse mortality rates in 1708–9. The awful consequences damaged not only crops and land uses but the entire rural economy of France.5 The climatic conditions in the British Isles may have been less calamitous but demographic and economic recovery was not fulfilled for more than half a century and affected every aspect of life, including the inclination to migrate. For pre-industrial England the ‘myth of the relatively isolated, self-contained and static rural community’ has been countered by the modern findings from intricate detailed research, based on the evidence from parish records, with much attention to the recurrence or disappearance of surnames. It is now generally accepted that the population of England in the seventeenth century was surprisingly mobile: ‘a startling finding of recent social history’.6 But the primary form of mobility was circumscribed, mainly a turning-over of the populations within a narrow compass.7 The turnover of communities was real enough – most surnames typically disappeared from any particular parish register in the course of a century. From the parish of Cogenhoe, in Northamptonshire, for instance, half of the population was apparently replaced within a single decade. Most went to adjacent parishes or villages. It was a churning of the local population and most notable among adolescent servants who moved out of their home villages in their early teens, on yearly contracts. This was the life of farm servants, and ‘such mobility was a temporary phase of the life cycle, curtailed in adulthood’. Once the young adults married and established families, they settled. The least mobile were the

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

41

middling groups, especially the yeomen farmers, and the husbandmen, the stable base of local communities. Labouring families were more mobile, and the most restless were the vagrant poor – the people who constituted the substantial minority of ‘the casualties of social change’. This ‘steady turnover of population’, restricted in scale, was the main characteristic of this society.8 Thus the picture of the world as immobile before the great transformation associated with industrialisation has been much modified. Generally the outcome of demographic and family studies has been to emphasise the unfixedness of the old rural population. The record of short-distance circulation demonstrates that the old economy was surprisingly responsive to opportunities and imperatives. We are also made aware of longer-distance mobility in times of distress, and especially among professional people. As well, there were rare and exceptional large-scale migrations of people within the British Isles: large numbers of Scots and English planters in the seventeenth century were entering Ireland, often in aggravated circumstances, long before industrialisation. The impression is that land acquisition was a recurrent but discontinuous propelling force, as well as sheer poverty and desperation, causing people to move considerable distances. There were certainly clear signs of poverty and distress – indeed of hunger – driving people out and across the country. This was a society afflicted by what historians have labelled ‘mortality crises’, a world clasped in primitive levels of subsistence, and pawns to the weather. Poverty, rising rents and also a suggestion of some religious unrest, were evidently creating turmoil in the community in parts of Scotland: William Brereton remarked in 1635 that ‘their swarming in Ireland is so much taken notice of and disliked’ and that efforts were being made to control it.9 Vicissitudes of demography and inheritance affected every stratum of life, even its upper reaches. Younger sons were always at a disadvantage in a world ruled by primogeniture, and the plight of second and later sons (and daughters) was hugely exacerbated when, in the late eighteenth century, the population increased unprecedentedly and created far more younger offspring than ever before.10 The population surge after 1750 meant eventually that many more sons and daughters were surviving. This inevitably created pressure for the provision on the land: it heightened consciousness about the welfare of the future generation, a recurrent theme in emigrants’ letters both then and later. The substantial growth of towns presented the clearest evidence of significant internal migration. The towns generally consumed their people, their mortality rates higher than their birth rates. Yet towns such as Norwich, Plymouth and Bristol all grew in the late sixteenth century, and York and Exeter expanded by 50 per cent in less than a century; Leicester grew by two-thirds, and Worcester doubled its population between 1563 and 1646. Most of all, London expanded from about 55,000 in the 1520s to 400,000 by 1650. None of this urban expansion could have happened without substantial immigration from the rest

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The genesis of international mass migration

of England and beyond, which demonstrated that internal sources of mobility were already able to supply the changing needs of the economy. There was significant regional re-distribution of population within England, for instance, into the Fenlands where new settlements were established by people looking for employment and common land. Moreover these shiftings of the population were paralleled by the initial peopling of the American colonies, all fed by the population growth of late Tudor and early Stuart England.11 It may have been a rehearsal (though curtailed after about 1660 for several decades) for the greater discontinuity of emigration in the late eighteenth century and the next. In the decades of demographic recession (from the 1650s) the numbers of people returning to England from the first American colonies were greater than the numbers of actual emigrants outwards.12 In the 1670s there were other symptoms of demographic nervousness: it was a time when propaganda was circulated intending to encourage the increase of population. Tax benefits were advocated to persuade people to marry earlier and to produce more children; there were ideas to promote immigration and even to legalise bigamy, which John Locke thought would make the population greater, healthier and stronger.13 This was obviously a mentality unfavourable to emigration. Even so, there were exceptions in these years, witnessed by the success of Penn’s ventures, by the ill-fated Darien venture in the late 1690s, and by the substantial emigrations from Ulster. There were other challenges which dislocated such people in the seventeenth century – war and religion gripped people’s lives and prospects in direct ways. The changes in the rural world, in certain localities, sometimes suddenly altered the bases of existence. The most momentous for rural people were the recurring alterations in land use which became institutionalised into the ‘Enclosures’, literally dislocating rural communities across many parts of England, mainly ahead of agricultural readjustments in the rest of the British Isles. Their impact on the mobility and distribution of the population was never easily accounted; but it was likely to have been seriously disruptive. Shifts in land use always had deep social consequences, and enclosures recurred in every decade. Enclosure was fundamental and followed a simple line. As defined by Joan Thirsk, it was: ‘The appropriation to one person of land which had previously been at the disposal of the whole community throughout the year’.14 This was the cause of the most profound disquiet in all rural communities across several centuries. It is unimaginable that enclosure ever failed to discombobulate the entire rural community: as Heather Falvey points out, ‘sometimes overnight, fences were erected, ditches dug or hedges set, to demarcate land that was to longer accessible to manorial tenants or other inhabitants’.15 The disruptive effects of enclosure, sometimes down-played by historians, have been strongly reasserted by Jeanette Neeson.16 She declares that it was ‘the final blow to peasants

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

43

in common field England’. It entailed the long and discontinuous proletarianisation of the English peasantry. This readjustment of land use, and the way in which it was disposed, was the most fundamental factor in the lives of pre-industrial communities. When they came to be disturbed they provoked the strongest emotions and reactions. Such changes were repeated throughout the national story: it was a recurring theme in the rural history of modernising Britain and Ireland, though it varied greatly in its timing and local impact. Undoubtedly there were times of accelerated change and fundamental structural upheaval. It is likely that such times were associated with greater dislodgment and consequent mobility. The most disruptive changes were associated with the displacement of arable cultivation by pastoral development; these changes recurred over three centuries, affecting most parts of the British Isles at one time or another. Wherever entire communities were suddenly evicted en masse, the consequences were traumatic. Localised mobility English historians have long identified an array of categories of mobility in the pre-modern population, some long-distance, some seasonal, some local and circulatory. A composite picture has emerged which emphasises the essential fluidity of the population before industrialisation – of people in localised motion and perhaps increasingly so. The notion of ancient immobility had been jettisoned; mobility may have been restricted by problems of transport and institutional factors such as the residency regulations governing Poor Law entitlements between parishes. But there was widespread flexibility in the population, mainly of short-distance circulatory interchanges but relatively unconstrained; additionally, there were larger seasonal movements from Ireland – to harvest in central Scotland and in parts of England. Most of all was the perennial movement of people into London which acted as a magnet to immigrants across the islands (and also consumed them with its high mortality rates). As industrialisation gained its grip on the economy, movements into the towns quickened and towns grew faster even than the unprecedented population growth at large after 1760. Urbanisation seems to have acted as a galvaniser of population mobility, a universal attractive force which was sustained for more than two centuries, first in London but then in radically new places further north and west of the capital. This vision of accelerating and widening mobility has been extrapolated further to encompass the process of emigration itself. When Bernard Bailyn began to wrestle with the problems of understanding the character of the earlier upsurge of emigration to British North America in the late eighteenth century, he discovered teeming movements of people across the entire Atlantic basin,

44

The genesis of international mass migration

increasingly connected by swelling flows of international migrants. He was looking for patterns in this ostensibly new world of mobility, and employed a striking phrase: it was ‘an entire world in motion’. Bailyn found a remarkable British data set for the years 1773–76, which recorded individually the reasons given by several thousand emigrants for their departures to the American colonies. This vivid documentation described the precise circumstances of expatriation and allowed Bailyn to ‘catch on the wing as it were, one phase of the overall peopling process’, thereby providing ‘a base line for the story as a whole’.17 And the more Bailyn pursued the migrants back to their origins, the more he discovered a world of mobility within their British and European homelands. The emigrants were spilling out of a context already alive and awash with moving humanity. They were a people readied and prepared for expatriation. Bailyn was exposing a scale and dimension of pre-emigration mobility little known to observers of the pre-industrial world. This perception has now become conventional wisdom and affects our understanding of the rise of mass migration out of Europe over the following century. Atlantic exoduses are thus depicted as spin-offs or extrapolations from the centrifugal forces of internal mobility – that the system had become increasingly excited to the point at which people were flying off the revolving and accelerating mechanism – that emigration was the natural extension of the internal energy already demonstrated by the mobility. The ultimate cause of this energy, the outward dynamism, is never explicit – mobility and emigration were evident symptoms of which Bailyn speaks mysteriously as ‘latent forces’ beyond the comprehension of contemporaries.18 Here then was the context for both labour migration and mobility (internal and external). Manifestations of both were recorded with increasing documentation through the course of the late eighteenth century, often accompanied by expressions of concern, alarm and intervention regarding the free flow of people within and beyond the British Isles. Transitional moves It is likely that the established and widening patterns of local mobility were converted into larger shifts consistent with the needs of urbanisation and industrialisation in the latter part of the eighteenth century. How this was activated in practice is a central question, together with the nature of the propelling forces which drove the change. A mass of detailed local examples are vividly descriptive, but also disconcerting. Historians inevitably seek overarching notions of the basic phenomena in operation. For example, V.G. Kiernan offered the standard Marxian view (indeed prominent enough in Das Capital) that much of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution was drawn directly from the ‘large reservoir in the Celtic regions’ of

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

45

the British Isles, which supplied the unskilled labour for new industry, mainly out of Scotland and Ireland. The flows had developed in the eighteenth century and swelled more thoroughly in the following century – these, according to Kiernan, were people ‘coerced by social oppression or natural calamity’ and induced into the great folk-wanderings of those times. He cited the movement of Welsh workers into the textile mills of Lancashire, and the recruitment of Highlanders into the Clydesdale industries, the latter being especially attractive to employers because they were deemed docile, as already shown by their submission to the Highland Clearances. They were all part of ‘the hungry inrush’ to the towns from the Highlands and Islands as well as from Ireland. Rough manual labour, Kiernan says, was Ireland’s main contribution to the Industrial Revolution, in ‘the toil … especially for its infrastructure of canals and railways’. The extruded Irish were thus migrant labour at the bottom of the market, ‘painfully uprooted peasants’ herded into Irish enclaves in the industrialising economy.19 In the resilient Marxist version, brutal forces were at work by these times, disruptive new elements inserted into the traditional circulations of population in the old economy. But these sweeping propositions, except in dramatic episodes of large scale evictions, are extremely difficult to verify in the actual record of migration. The lives of individual migrants suggest a more gradual process. Thus for example the case of Alexander Somerville in Scotland provides a standard pattern for mobility in the transitional age. He was born in 1811 in an East Lothian village, and began his working career as a farm labourer: he began to shift between jobs, gravitating to Edinburgh but recurrently retreating to his rural origins when depression descended. Ultimately he graduated into the army, which probably facilitated the wider horizon of his ultimate emigration to Canada.20 Glimpses of the mobilisation of labour can similarly be witnessed in the new nascent industry in the north of England. Individual stories suggest a peripatetic pattern. One narrative, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, began with the career of a weaver, Joseph Shaw in rural Garside, his family committed to the old domestic industry village. Apprenticed at the age of nine Joseph Shaw’s life trajectory was a series of many short moves, related to marriage and the employment he found in various villages and hamlets. Benjamin Shaw, a son born in 1772, was recruited by a Dolphinstone mill owner fifty miles distant, an employer who specifically sought big families. Exigencies of family, and contretemps with the employer, caused further movements out and back again, but all within this range. Shaw moved between local villages which were semiindustrialised, making many moves which seem to have served as stepping stones in his localised progression, always constrained by the needs of his growing family. Thirty-nine movements of the Shaw family between 1760 and 1830 were tracked by the historians Pooley and D’Cruze: this story of family mobility was

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The genesis of international mass migration

played out in a well-defined area, bounded by the weaving trade, set amid a clearly structured network of urban and rural settlements, circular and focused on the nuclear family. The story gives no hint of a way out of the radial limits, but it was a story of well activated local mobility nevertheless.21 Where local industry suddenly expanded in any remote district (which tended to be the norm in much eighteenth-century development) one of the first priorities was the recruitment of a new labour force, often beyond the capacity of the immediate locality. A famous example was Coalbrookdale, deep in rural Shropshire, where a new iron industry sprang forth in the 1750s.22 Even earlier, in 1734, local entrepreneurs (Ford and Darby) had negotiated their lease for their Coalbrookdale ironworks with a significant clause – namely that they undertook to maintain any people falling into poverty – being ‘outsiders brought in to work in the foundry’. Mostly the Darbys recruited from the immediate locality and they may have encouraged reproduction in the process. But eventually they were drawing their labour from distant places, notably in the 1790s.23 It was all part of what T.C. Smout describes as ‘the long and bumpy road through industrialisation’.24 Early textile mill owners in central Scotland recruited labour far into the distant Highlands. The quantitative economic historian Jeffrey G. Williamson offers evidence to rebut the older view of Arthur Redford that the rural counties were full of ‘a vast, inert mass of redundant labour’ who were fully immobile. Williamson by contrast believes that they were impressively mobile and easily flocked into the cities. He calculates that between 1776 and 1811, 60 per cent of city growth in Britain came from migration, and even in the years 1846 to 1871 it was as high as 40 per cent. There were higher rates of natural increase in rural areas than in the cities and a serious mismatch between the two zones which ‘placed an unusually heavy burden on labour market adjustments’. This was achieved by enhanced migration out of rural zones: ‘The cities were absorbing immigrants at a more rapid rate in the late eighteenth century than they were in the mid-nineteenth century, and immigrants tended to be young adults’ and therefore boosted the rate of urban reproduction very effectively.25 Urbanisation was the reciprocal of rural decline, the fastest rate being in the years between 1821 and 1841 which coincided with the acceleration of emigration. This strongly suggests a nexus between internal and external mobility. Pressures building in the 1770s The picture emerging in late eighteenth-century Britain is one of rising mobility, of a population activated towards the towns and fuelling the disproportionate growth of urban places. This was set in a context of rising population largely uncomprehended by contemporaries (even by Malthus until the results of the first censuses revealed the demographic realities of the age). It is a picture of

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

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growing movement, perhaps of turmoil while the nation developed new patterns of industry and agriculture, and also prepared for war. The position of emigration within this broad panorama of movement is less clear but it was probably a coterminous phenomenon, both in scale and chronology, internal and external migration operating in tandem. Emigration was not new and there had been substantial movements from various parts of the British Isles at different moments in the eighteenth century, especially from northern Ireland and parts of Scotland to the American colonies. But the scale magnified in the 1770s and we can trace this upsurge in several ways. Newspaper reports of the early 1770s present telling evidence of the pressure of land hunger across wide swathes of the country.26 This pressure in the countryside was manifested most obviously in complaints about rent inflation and the pressing demands made by landlords, mainly on the great estates. These accounts were often explicit on the connection between this perceived pressure experienced by the tenantry and the decisions of many of them to leave the country for North America. There were signs of a changing matrix of circumstances in many localities. As the population rose the pressure was being transmitted into the long rise in food prices and rents through to 1813. This pressure was undoubtedly exacerbated by seasonal factors and weather conditions. But the wider context shows that the farmers and their employees were being squeezed. In this phase of resurgent emigration the exodus was led by farmers, not by the industrialised workers or a displaced proletariat. There was pressure to increase productivity, pushed along by rising rents, and this pressed farmers outwards – men and their families who were not prepared to accept the cost to themselves, who were looking for better lives under more favourable conditions. Another stream comprised traditional indentured labour, apparently more diverse and from many parts of the country. In effect the pressure was directly expressed in emigration: the newspapers offered ample and explicit testimony: the reports of sporadic emigration were all connected with episodes of local pressure, and derived from difficulties in the farming sectors of the respective districts from which the migrants issued. Thus in Lancashire, the completion of the Bridgewater Canal in 1761 was reported in conjunction with a spate of emigration. Meantime the richer local farmers were engrossing corn crops and causing high bread prices: Whilst this engrossing shall be suffered, there can be no hopes of bread at such reasonable prices as may enable the poor to purchase it, and if a stop is not soon put to it, the emigration of the lower classes of people will certainly increase to the degree as to oblige the higher ranks to hold the plough themselves.27

The intensity of these circumstances was highly variable and created disequilibria in the rural communities. Thus high and rising food prices gave many

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The genesis of international mass migration

farmers improved returns and opportunities. But the concomitant increase in competition for land drove up rents, often in spectacular fashion, and the benefits inevitably accrued in the direction of the landlords. Pressure was thus transmitted across the entire rural community, but favoured the biggest and the most efficient farmers and their landlords. Reports in 1773 from Scotland and Ireland were already causing alarm. Excited publicity attended the sailing of 200 Highlanders aboard the Hector in 1773 and similar sailings from Ireland. The government became agitated about the drain of men from the land: ‘it was considered that the country [became] the weaker for every emigrant who left her shores’. The scale and volume of the outcry against these exoduses indicated that the emigration phenomenon was alarming and that the context was changing. A law was passed to prevent skilled artisans leaving the country – ‘and later a proclamation was issued in Ireland forbidding anyone, no matter what his occupation, to leave the country without first obtaining permission from the Privy Council’.28 In northern Ireland in 1773 there was a report of a group of 200 passengers leaving Newry to settle in Charleston, who were following another group who had left Larne the previous month: It seems the people of Ireland did not know that orders had been given for putting a stop to the granting of lands in America, nor does the spirit of emigration from the Kingdom appear to be abated … the people there are in general highly dissatisfied with their landlords, who are now truly alarmed at their tenants continuing to desert their lands.29

From Scotland, in the autumn of 1773 there were further reports of increasing emigration. In late autumn 1773 a gentleman in Strathspey wrote to a friend in Aberdeen: I am thoroughly convinced that the emigration will soon be general in this country. Two hundred and fifty emigrants sailed the other day from Fort George, and 308 of the McDonalds of Glengarry, in the neighbouring districts of Fort William. No less than eight or ten vessels are hired this season to carry off emigrants. Eight hundred and forty people sailed from the island of Lewes in July.30

One of the landlords, ‘Lord F’, had come down from London five weeks previously to ‘treat with his tenants’. ‘What are the terms they asked of him, think you?’ ‘The land at the old rents, the augmentation paid for three years backward, to be refunded, and his factor to be immediately dismissed’. I have not yet learned whether he has agreed to these terms; but he must soon, or his lands must be left an uninhabited waste’.31 It was already common in the Highlands for the tenantry to employ the threat of emigration to squeeze more favourable

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

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rental terms from their landlords, in effect bargaining by emigration in a context of rising land hunger and rent increases. Migration and emigration, according to contemporary reports, was a vivid expression of the rising pressures on the land. In Scotland the reorganisation of agriculture prompted migration, especially because rural improvement was labour-saving by design: innovations in the eighteenth century were designed to improve labour productivity. For instance Small’s plough reduced the need for large teams of oxen and men; Meikle’s threshing machine reduced labour requirements; enclosure removed the need to herd and this also reduced labour; harvest was then the only seasonal need.32 The bothy system (in which farm workers, usually unmarried men, were housed together in rough steadings where they could cook, dine and sleep) was introduced to meet these new patterns of labour use. Contemporaries connected such developments with greater emigration from as early as 1760, followed by the ‘epidemical’ manifestations of the 1770s. Already, therefore, in the 1770s there were visible and large leakages of people out of Scotland and northern Ireland in particular, and they were giving rise to serious apprehensions regarding the loss of population, landlords being most anxious about any likely diminution of rental income as a consequence. The practical outcome was the urgent intervention of government to inquire into the causes of the exodus – the enquiry in 1773 which produced some of the best testimony of the century. The emigrants were questioned about their motives as they departed for America, almost invariably stressing their economic plight (with far less reference to their religious or cultural circumstances).33 The emigrations towards the end of the eighteenth century created considerable public stirrings, mainly because the government had been dragged into action by landlord pressure groups. One consequence was a series of official inquiries into the problem. The landlord apprehensions had become vociferous in the 1790s but began two decades earlier: in the early 1770s the government had instituted a systematic programme of interviews among all the departing Scottish emigrants. The purpose of these inquiries was to discover the motivations of the emigrants. But it remains extremely rare to hear the distinct voices of such emigrants. These testimonies, as we have seen, were outspoken, unambiguous and virtually unanimous in citing land scarcity and rental pressure as the precipitant of their decisions to leave the country. They testified to the fact that the landlords were screwing up rents and creating outward pressures from which they then sought to escape. But government intervention was swiftly rendered unnecessary by the more effective barrier created by the American Revolution and the associated War and gave respite to the landlords’ fears about the loss of tenants: war (from 1776 to 1783) in the colonies put an effective stop to the highly publicised and visible upsurge of emigration, itself a signal that fundamental conditions on both sides of the Atlantic had been transformed.

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The genesis of international mass migration Official resistance

The same consequences were repeated in the long French Wars, starting in 1793: as soon as peace returned (though briefly) for a few months in 1803, emigration surged rapidly, immediately rekindling the landlords’ apprehensions. The government was again urged to take action to staunch and even block the outflows. This interlude clearly exposed the rising inclination to emigrate, especially in rural areas. It was a strong indication that a deep-seated propensity for emigration had been created, which had been frustrated and held back during the war years. The alarm over emigration was registered even before the short peace had returned. In both Ireland and Scotland in 1801 people were applying for permission to leave the country: ‘The Governor General by the thousand and more applications for leave to emigrate lying before the Privy Council, that he communicated his alarm to the Home Office. The Lord Advocate of Scotland did the same’. The official response was to apply a clever but Machiavellian focus upon conditions aboard the emigrant ships of the time. Overcrowding and mortality aboard the ships was well known in 1801. Parliamentary inquiries indeed exposed the awful shipboard conditions and described ‘circumstances of suffering and distress … shocking to humanity’ in the emigration trade.34 Overcrowding on Scottish ships had been known since the 1770s, when it was claimed that conditions were much worse than on the slave voyages.35 Already new regulations had been introduced which determined much more stringent conditions; in principle they required the imposition of a new and much more ‘generous’ formula which ensured a shipping space of seven tons for each emigrant. It was proclaimed as a ‘kindly impulse’, but this legislation had been widely ignored and there was ambiguity about its legal standing. Now, under the inspiration of the Lord Advocate and Edinburgh MP, Charles Hope, the new and much more stringent Passenger Act (of 1803) was passed. The campaign of government intervention was presented as a humanitarian success, designed to ensure the safety and comfort of the poor, benighted emigrants. In reality it was cynically calculated to block emigration and to safeguard the rents of the landlords, especially in Ireland and Scotland. It achieved this end by inflating the costs of the Atlantic passage to levels beyond the reach of many intending emigrants. In the proceedings of the Committee of the Highland Society the true motivations of the Emigration Acts were transparent: It cannot be denied that even to prevent the horrors of the Passage must, by every friend of humanity be a step of the highest and most beneficial consequence – but if the measures which the Committee are for that end to suggest promise also a tendency indirectly to check the evil of Emigration itself they will with submission be entitled to a double share of approbation.36

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According to the Scots Magazine the English had also caught the emigration infection.37 Most of the emigrants of this time continued to complain about the high rents which were driving them from the land.38 The antagonism which opposed all emigration at the turn of the century, as we shall see, was soon to be rapidly overturned within a decade: emigration was transformed in the public mind into a solution, a safety valve, for the problems of the new age. The new context The back story to these events had become clear; at some point in the late eighteenth century, perhaps in the 1770s, parts of the English and Scottish economies accelerated toward modern rates of economic growth. The production of English and Scottish lowland farms and manufactories now grew at unprecedented rates, probably outpacing the simultaneous growth of its population (itself greater than anything ever seen before). The infrastructure of the economy, notably in transport and urbanisation, also underwent a surge in pace, reinforcing and facilitating the expansion of the economy. These were shifts in the structures of life, eventually absorbing the energy and focus of the entire nation. But there were always complicating factors at work – such as war and the weather, not to mention erratic fluctuations in political life. Many consequences flowed from these changes in the bedrock of British life and it seems improbable that the phenomenon of emigration was unconnected with the forces below the surface of everyday existence. And it related ultimately to the disposition of labour and population, all encompassed in the process which galvanised resources and people in service to the dynamism of the awakened economy. A glimpse of the changes is found in Scottish mobility patterns. R.A. Houston argues that the Scots were more mobile than the French or Germans and cites a lowland case – thus ‘two-thirds of the families listed for the village of Kippen in Stirlingshire in 1789 were not there in 1793’. Mostly the movement was over short distances: ‘Population turnover was rapid and concentrated in those stages of the life-cycle between puberty, when young men and women first went into service outside their parental household, and marriage, when they set their own family unit’. Houston suggests that mobility had increased, notably seasonal migration, which accelerated in the late eighteenth century. He points out that in Scotland the structure of landholding and ownership made subdivision very difficult and the widespread tendency towards larger and fewer farms ‘meant that the people had to accept a lower-status occupation in the community (cottar, servant or labourer instead of tenant farmer) or move to another farm, or pull up roots and head for the towns in periods of population growth. The proletarianisation of many rural dwellers and the growth of nonagricultural occupations made mobility increasingly common, especially in the

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Lowlands’.39 Houston connects increased mobility to rural restructuring in a direct fashion. For women the effects were even more serious. As Ann Kussmaul pointed out, households were traditionally places of work and encompassed the entire family in production. During industrialisation this fundamental pattern was generally undermined and dispersed, and underemployment on the land became endemic. This probably influenced the propensity to emigrate.40 Farm servants were replaced by day labourers, who were wholly unemployed in the slack season. Loss of common rights exacerbated the problem. The pre-existing shape of labour mobilities set the context for the emergence of mass emigration. The British population was mobilised for the emergent needs of the economy and the aspirations of the people, the migrants. But the overarching factor was the continuing (but barely comprehended) population revolution which ran parallel to (and also inter connected with) the changes in the economy and its labour forces. These are large structural questions which are best pursued in specific contexts, such as West Sussex deep in the rural south of England. Notes 1 See the useful summary in David Souden, ‘Movers and stayers in family reconstitution populations’, Local Population Studies 33 (1984), 11ff. More generally, see Peter Clark and David Souden, Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 2 Ibid., 23. 3 There was a persistent notion that labour in the early eighteenth-century economy was not responsive to opportunities or to higher rewards. It showed features of the backward-sloping supply curve of labour – workers declining to work more as income rose. These were attitudes unsatisfactory to a system in the early throes of growth. See, for instance, A.W. Coats, ‘Changing attitudes to labour in the mid-eighteenth century’, Economic History Review 11 (1958), 35–51. 4 F. Braudel, ‘History and the social sciences: the longue durée’, in On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 32. 5 See Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 6 This is based on Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1982), pp. 40–5. 7 The extent of pre-industrial mobility in England is best known from the seventeenthcentury account of the remote Shropshire parish of Myddle, which confirms the prevailing stability of the community despite some remarkable but unusual connections with faraway London. See David Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974). 8 Wrightson, English Society, p. 50.

Before the discontinuity and the start of modern times

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9 P. Hume Brown (ed.), Early Travellers in Scotland (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1891, reprint 1970), p. 154. 10 See the example of Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, cited in George Pratt Insh, Historian’s Odyssey (Edinburgh: Moray Press, 1938), p. 135. 11 Wrightson, English Society, pp. 126–9. 12 See Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 2–4. 13 See Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 14 Joan Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1500–1640, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 201. 15 See Heather Falvey, ‘Voices and faces in the rioting crowd: identifying seventeenthcentury enclosure rioters’, Local Historian 39: 2 (2009), 137–51. 16 See J.M. Neeson, ‘Parliamentary enclosure and the disappearance of the English peasantry, revisited’, in Agrarian Organisation in the Century of Industrialisation: Europe, Russian and North America, Research in Economic History, Supplement 5 (1989). 17 Bailyn, Preface to Voyagers to the West, p. xx. 18 Bailyn, Sometimes an Art, p. 56. Nicholas Canny had made similar claims for the transatlantic migrations of the early seventeenth century, which he saw as ‘a logical extension of the long -distance travel and migratory movements of medieval Europeans’. See J.H. Elliott, ‘Atlantic horizons’, in Brian MacCuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700: Colonization and its Consequences (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), p. 350. 19 V.G. Kiernan, ‘Britons old and new’, in Colin Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), pp. 44–5. 20 Elizabeth Waterston, ‘Somerville, Alexander’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 21 Colin G. Pooley and Shani D’Cruze, ‘Migration and urbanisation in north-west England, 1760–1830’, Social History 19 (1994), p. 347. Colin G. Pooley and Jean Turnbull, in Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London: UCL Press, 1998), looked at 16,091 life stories across a period of 240 years – a remarkable saga of proletarian movement (though they excluded the Irish). They concluded that the frequency and distance of migration increased only slowly over 200 years – and that fertility was more important than migration in urban population growth. 22 See below, chapter 7. 23 See Barrie Trinder, The Industrial Revolution in Shropshire (London: Phillimore, 1973), chap. 16. 24 T.C. Smout, ‘The strange intervention of Edward Twistleton: Paisley in depression, 1841–3’, in T.C. Smout (ed.), The Search for Wealth and Stability (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 218. 25 From Jeffrey Williamson, ‘Coping with city growth’, in R. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (eds), Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1994), chap. 13: pp. 332–56, esp. p. 339.

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26 Derived from the Gale Digital Collection – the Burney Collection of Newspapers from the Rev Charles Burney (1757–1817) which contains 1270 titles. 27 London Chronicle, 12 Oct. 1773. 28 Kathleen A. Walpole, ‘Emigration to British North America under the early Passenger Acts’ (MA thesis, University of London, 1929), p. 2. 29 Craftsman or Sey’s Weekly Journal, 9 Oct. 1773, issue 792. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 The acceleration of agricultural change in Scotland is heavily underscored by T.M. Devine in The Transformation of Scotland: The Economy since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 165–6. 33 See Bailyn, Voyagers, passim. 34 Select Committee on the Survey of the Coasts and Central Highlands of Scotland: First Report (Emigration), British Parliamentary Papers 80 (1802–3), Appendix, p. 7. 35 J.M. Bumsted, The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North America, 1770–1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), pp. 63, 99–104. 36 Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances, vol. 2: Emigration, Protest, Reasons (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 212. 37 Scots Magazine 36 (1774), 161. 38 I.H. Adam, ‘The agricultural revolution in Scotland’, in Arena, pp. 198–205. Whyte also says there was a dramatic change: Migration and Society. 39 R.A. Houston, ‘The demographic regime’, in T.M. Devine and R. Mitchison (eds), People and Society in Scotland, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), pp. 20–4. 40 Ann Kussmaul, ‘The pattern of work as the eighteenth century began’, in Floud and McCloskey (eds), Economic History of Britain since 1700, pp. 2–4, 8.

4

West Sussex and the rural south

Turmoil in Sussex The Isle of Man was close to the sea-lanes of the British World, but received relatively little direct effect from its industrial and commercial powerhouses. West Sussex was much closer to the centres of the expansionary economy in the new age. Though only fifty miles south of London, nevertheless much of West Sussex, slipped further into rural isolation and poverty in the early nineteenth century. It gained scant benefit from the explosion of economic development to the north. Instead it became an area renowned for its rural deprivation. These decades saw the most rapid population growth ever recorded in Britain: London grew rapidly and the county population of Sussex increased astonishingly by 71 per cent between 1801 and 1831. But this demographic upsurge did little for West Sussex, which was reconfirmed in its rural dilapidation. West Sussex was a classic zone on the receiving end of the increasing economic divisions in the national story: this region can indeed stand as proxy for much of the agrarian experience of southern England in these decades, decades of poverty and turmoil which shook the foundations of English polity especially in the late 1820s. The ‘Captain Swing’ disturbances, entailing the destruction of threshing machines, brought violence and retribution to the countryside of West Sussex. In this fraught context the role of mobility and migration affected all elements in a community which eventually became a prolific supplier of emigrants, not only to North America but also to Australia.1 Turmoil in rural Sussex had been rife at the turn of the century, marked by harvest failures, disorder and protest about food monopolies and inflated prices; tithes were high on the list of complaints. At the end of the French Wars all financial confidence evaporated: banks were foreclosing, poor rates mounting and farmers were discharging their employees. After the expansion of wartime there was a rapid consolidation and rationalisation of farms: bankruptcies, forced

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sales, and dispossession followed in rapid succession. These were hard times for all in rural Sussex – but most of all for the agricultural labourers whose numbers rose as employment contracted.2 The district was well documented, most penetratingly by the agricultural reporter Arthur Young, who toured Sussex in 1813 when farmers were still reaping good inflated wartime prices. But he was already observing widespread poverty among the labouring classes, though not yet in catastrophic proportions. Young registered the critical transition, but slightly ahead of its deepest crisis, as it affected rural districts such as Sussex. The definitive consequences of the population growth were not yet clear, and underemployment in the agricultural sector was masked by enhanced wartime demand for foodstuffs, the countryside protected by tariffs and the blocking of foreign imports. Nature, in the form of human reproduction, was infamously prodigal across the British Isles: numbers rose everywhere regardless of the capacity of farmers or industrialists to employ and feed the demographic increment. Nature also brought severe weather fluctuations, most notably in the very bad times of 1817. Arthur Young made the point in the bluntest terms: ‘the people in this county are very rapidly multiplying, and increase faster than they are able to feed themselves’.3 They were also outgrowing employment opportunities in rural Sussex. For the farmers and the gentry of West Sussex (the worst-off part of the county) there was a looming local crisis: they were burdened by tithes while the expense of keeping and maintaining the poor was ever more burdensome.4 In 1813 – long before the crisis had become fully manifest – Arthur Young was already observing near destitution among the labourers of West Sussex: this class of people is … inferior to what every humane person would wish, and much below that condition which they may reasonably expect in so wealthy a community … Too many of their houses are the residences of filth and vermin; their dress insufficient, their minds uneducated, uninstructed; and their children from insufficiency of earnings, trained to vice.5

A decade later the radical journalist William Cobbett also toured the region and reported the worsened state of the poor and the region at large. There was a gathering crisis, some of which was expressed in signals of enhanced mobility. Later in the century one of the working people looked back on the condition of the typical Sussex labourer and his family: Talk about ever tasting butcher’s meat! It was out of the question. Cabbage and bacon all the year round, and sometimes very little of that. We children did most of the work on the farm, so were indulged with a taste of roast beef about once a month, and on Sunday, on which day we had a cup of tea. Other days we had broth and skim milk.6

West Sussex and the rural south

57 New options

When conditions worsened after the end of the French Wars the challenging circumstances of West Sussex were not confined to the rural labourers. Farmers, workers and gentry faced much lowered prices and shrinking horizons: and, for some, the experiences of the war itself had turned their minds to alternative prospects. One option was emigration, mainly to North America and especially to Canada. But a few also emigrated to Australia – people who were affected by a new ‘settler psychology’, a search for land and for better pastures, all enhanced by the diminished local returns after Waterloo. It affected some of the proprietor classes: one of the most adventurous and risk-taking versions was that of the Henty family of Tarring in West Sussex who, at the end of the 1820s, headed for the extremely remote and improbable new colony of Swan River in Western Australia. They moved towards Australia rather ahead of the main bodies of capitalist migrants who were drawn by the easy availability of land until 1831. Small parties of other Sussex migrants also reached Swan River in these years. The standard biography of the Hentys paints a picture of rural depression in Sussex in which all parts of the old community were looking for escape, most of all the middling landowners (like the Hentys) and the rural work force.7 The lot of the ‘landless peasant had long been one of utter misery’; gone were ‘the peasant’s age-old rights to graze a cow and a few geese and cut turves from waste lands’, and gone also was their self-respect and their security from hunger. When Thomas Henty decided to emigrate he had no anxiety about a supply of labour in the new land – ‘He knew that, if and when the time came for him and his family to migrate, his shepherds and stockmen and servants would thankfully go with him to a new life in a new land’. This is, of course, pure speculation by the biographer after the event, but Henty was certainly able to take with him a large entourage including his own labour force.8 This may have been a measure of the social solidarity of the old paternalist regime in rural Sussex. One of Thomas Henty’s key advantages in terms of labour was his own family of seven sons and a daughter. Henty had been in the army in the French Wars and owned a substantial property in Sussex. He was one of a special category of former military personnel who found conditions of post-war farming deeply unattractive; many of this class emigrated, including a surprising flow to Australia.9 Henty made approaches, without satisfaction, first to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land and instead reached towards the new Swan River colony. He sold his property in West Sussex and had command of at least £10,000 for his great migration in 1828. As emigrants, the Hentys were thinking of the entire family and their longterm futures. They sought a land grant and contemplated the prospect of

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multiplying their capital in ten years. In his calculations Henty made comparisons with their alternative chances in India. He believed he would succeed twice as well in Australia. The Hentys eventually sailed for Swan River in June 1829. They hired the Caroline, ‘taking a number of artificers and their families, and stores for the future settlements’. They were entitled to 84,000 acres. But, in the outcome, the West Australian experiment was not successful and soon they looked eastwards and became pioneers in Portland in the Port Phillip District, and elsewhere, and did remarkably well. By the late 1830s they were great whalers and breeders of sheep and horses. In 1837 Thomas Henty told his third son, William, still in Sussex, that he ‘would be a blockhead not to emigrate’. In the event all but one of the Henty sons emigrated, with varying success, part of a great dynasty in colonial Australia.10 Much more common in the years before 1830 were certain initiatives taken to promote the emigration of poor people from Sussex, mainly to Canada and the United States. These schemes were led by local philanthropists and landowners seeking to diminish the burdens of poor relief. They knew that the pressure on poor rates would ease if enough people left their parishes, even to emigrate. The schemes entailed subsidies from local parish funds. These reactions were unambiguous expressions of the tightening circumstances circling about the agrarian community. One of the most effective methods of persuading the poor and the insecure to emigrate was the publication of letters from emigrants who had gone before. Such documents were always dubious in their authenticity, and also in the manner in which they were edited by their publishers. Nevertheless they contain some of the best available evidence directly from the people who actually emigrated. These letters exposed their personal experiences about their extraordinary act of emigration. Although they speak less directly about the mechanisms that prompted them to leave Sussex and other places in these years, such documents are the closest we are likely to get to the ground-level particulars of emigration and of the ultimate propellants among individuals.11 In 1832 letters from West Sussex people transmitted back from Swan River and the United States were published in a slim volume which circulated throughout the district.12 The emigrants’ letters, it was claimed, had not been altered in any way except for spelling errors. They were clearly part of an effort to stimulate further emigration. Their publication indicated that West Sussex was focusing on its rural problem and there was a concerted push to encourage migration. From Michigan came letters which described job opportunities for young men and women: ‘the girls in this country are not called servants but hired help, and have a great many privileges … It is very pleasant and everything is very cheap … we are about 4000 miles from home’. These were the words of George Grevatt who had ‘sold his furniture and went from Sullington at his own expense’.13

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A party of 60 emigrants had left Aldingbourne in 1831–32 for New York, composed of several families, some with nine children, some with five or six children. William Isted of Lindfield had sold his house and garden in exchange for a passage with his wife and six children: he had made an agreement with the local Vestry by which, in return for help with the passage money, he ‘did give up all that his Messuage or Cottage Garden and Premises … to the church Wardens … for Ever’. One of the Sussex writers exposed the central priorities in the minds of these people. Thus he had been asked specifically about the treatment of poor people in the United States – ‘is there is any relief for distressed families’ in Michigan? He responded in the clearest terms: ‘they are taken care of here, as well as they are there’. Another prominent preoccupation in the minds of the emigrants was access to land, which was probably the greatest single incentive propelling the emigrations. The Sussex emigrant in Michigan reported that: The land that we buy is our own, and our heirs’ for ever … the land is good, but very hard to clear, there is so much large timber on it of every sort, but when it is cleared it will bring crops of any kind, wheat, oats, barley, rye, potatoes, or Indian corn … Land can bought be for six shillings sterling an acre … We have a deed of the land to us and our heirs for ever.

Religion and accessibility were also high on the list of priorities: We have churches of several kinds, baptists, methodists, episcopalians, and Presbyterians, and universalists, and roman catholics. … you can come all the way by water.

The advice from Michigan was blunt and practical: If you want to live, come here, for I can have meat three times a day now, where I could not get a little piece for a Sunday’s dinner … you must not mind what people say, about letters being forged, for it is no use of your thinking to come here to live without work.14

The letters were generally encouraging, exercises in persuasion engineered to urge the common people of Sussex to migrate for everyone’s benefit. One of the emigrants recollected that he had arrived in America with only two shillings and sixpence. After little more than a year he owned a cow and hogs, ‘and a house well furnished and is now very comfortable … for here is plenty to eat … Be sure not to send any lazy folks as this is not a country for lazy folks’.

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Another correspondent was alert to the problem of providing for the cost of shipping for poor people. This was always a serious barrier for prospective emigrants: I am sure that you would get a better living, and easier … Dear friends, do you know of anyone coming to America? If you do, you try to get them to pay your passage over, and I will pay them at its cost, as soon as you get to my house, and I will pay double interest if anyone will do you the kindness … you will be much better off, if you can get here.

Sometimes a local Sussex parish intervened and provided assistance to poor emigrants, in effect to paupers. The expected reduction in the burden on the poor rates was a powerful incentive to local property interests. One of the American emigrants had been sent from Storrington with the help of the parish. He was astonished at the radical differences in social behaviour between farmers and working people in America. He reported back to Sussex: we all sat at one table together … for the labouring man was the salt of the earth. You all thought we should have not parish [assistance], nor there is not, nor do we want any without sickness, but if we are sick, there is a house for us; or if a man dies and leaves their families, they are sent to the house, and taken care of if any man ill uses his child, they will take it away from him, and send it to the house.15

It is clear from these letters that the simple wage differential between Sussex and the destination of the migrants was the prime engine of emigration, but this was much reinforced and modified by less measurable considerations, many of them deep in the psychic and social fabric of the sending districts. The general tone of the letters, the publication of which was designed to lure prospective migrants from Sussex, was captured in a few words by one of the earliest of those who departed for America: ‘This is a very fine country, plenty of everything that is needful for body and soul’. Writers of these letters were wary of causing too much expectation and they added their own caveats. Typically one emigrant from Sussex insisted that he did ‘not want to persuade you to come, but come if you like, and stop if you like; I know who has got the best home … I like America best; for here is plenty to eat and drink … We have each got us a pair of boots, and we feel happy as two lords’.16 Another migrant reported from New York that ‘any man that is handy at such work will do well by his labour and be as independent as a farmer … for this country is free’. In February 1833, John Harvey wrote from Lysander to Aldinbourn near Chichester, again revealing a clear set of priorities: the Master and Mistress and all the family is all at one table, and if there is not room at the table for the whole family to sit down, their children sit by till

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workmen were served; there is no distinction between the workman and his master, they would as soon shake hands with a workman as they would with a gentleman … I thank God my wife and I never found ourselves so comfortable in England as we do here, we have food, a comfortable house to live in, and a good cow for our use, and plenty of firing without buying fuel, we don’t go to bed with a hungery belly.

The use of unorthodox spelling or idiomatic forms added a sense of authenticity to some of these epistles: thus one concluded, ‘If people knowed what America was, they never [would] stay in old England’.17 Authenticated and credible information about America, the provision of subsidised passages, and the near-certainty of economic betterment, were powerful propellants of rural emigration from Sussex. They were factors evidently much enhanced by assurances of social and religious benefits which America seemed to offer. Even Australia Emigration from Sussex to remote Australia was riskier. In the late 1820s convict migration to the Australian colonies was augmented by a new flow of free migrants. The reports from Swan River, a colony which came very close to total failure in its early years, were more mixed. One letter back to Sussex reported the severe difficulties that had faced the migrants who arrived from Sullington, in Sussex, in 1829. They found an awful lack of accommodation and were soon caught in an epidemic of typhus fever in which their children had died. They almost starved too, but also reported: ‘The natives are little black men, the women not so black, they are very sensible, they are not so troublesome as they were at first, since some of them have been shot, they are the greatest thieves I ever saw’. Another, less critical, letter from Fremantle in 1831 confirmed that there was indeed distress at first and some idle people went back to England and gave the new colony a bad name. But there was ‘now no more distress. The Gallop family [from Sussex] … are doing very well’. The Duke of Richmond, noting the findings of the Poor Law Commission, was unusually clear minded about the prospects of emigration to Australia: ‘emigration has its friends … Australia can take any number; the difficulty will be raising the money … the Wages are enormous and the necessities of life very cheap [Women much wanted]’.18 By the late 1830s, opportunities for emigration in Australia widened, especially with the creation of new settlements and the expansion of the antipodean economy which outgrew the labour supply provided by the convict system which had been dominant since 1788. Now the respectability of emigration was proclaimed: the new province of South Australia (1836) explicitly excluded all

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convicts and sought the best of British emigrant stock. Most critically, however, this new colony was able to finance assisted passages to working emigrants, deriving its revenues from land sales which were channelled into a fund for emigration.19 West Sussex was evidently alive to these openings in the mid-1830s. One of the notable early pioneers in the new colony of South Australia was John Barton Hack (1805–84) who emigrated from Chichester in 1837.20 He was a wealthy Quaker and his health problems may have been part of his motivation towards Australia. Therapeutic health considerations were an added element in the calculation of the basic differential between home and destination for many such emigrants. The publicity in Sussex for emigration also showed the extraordinary mix of pressures and advocacy. Henry Watson’s lectures in Chichester on behalf of South Australia acknowledged the deep and prevailing scepticism towards emigration in the country. Emigration was only one of many current solutions to the problem of rural poverty in the district and across the nation.21 Watson scoffed at ‘the recommenders of spade cultivation’ and the repealers of the corn laws; he was particularly critical of the economists, especially Malthus who said (against the biblical injunction to replenish the earth) that ‘it is necessary forsooth, to restrain the inclinations of young men and maidens … lest we should become so numerous as to eat up each other, or to shoulder each other into the sea’. But Watson was aware of the awful poverty all about him, when the labourer was in a situation of extreme competition for employment: so great that he has to submit to low wages, labour being all that he has to give in exchange for food and raiment: he had therefore to work harder for less remuneration, and his condition is one of painful and degrading poverty – that he is badly clothed, scantily fed, and his house indifferently furnished.

Capitalists, manufacturers, farmers and tradesmen also faced their own problems: the competition is so great that their spirits are lowered … A man who has capital is puzzled to know where he can invest it without losses, another who wishes to apprentice his son, is perplexed by finding all trades equally overstocked.22

Emigration was the best solution but it was a solution which required great planning and careful organisation on the best principles. The central aspiration was the acquisition of land and a release from the poverty, burdens and lack of opportunity in the home county. The letters and propaganda emanating from Sussex in these years gave voice to an enhanced suggestibility, driven in the last resort by conditions in southern agriculture in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Suggestibility, however, did not mean that the people fully

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comprehended the ongoing changes in the framework of life which had brought them to this pass – they did not necessarily understand that they stood in the very middle of a great transition, indeed a ‘discontinuity’ which was overtaking the entire rural economy. Philanthropy intervenes The emigrant letters, together with worsening conditions in Sussex, concentrated attention on the possibility of using emigration as a major solution to the rural crisis. Local interests girded themselves to engineer a communal response: the biggest and best co-ordinated organisation was known as the Petworth Project. This was a scheme of the early 1830s, under the aegis of George Wyndham, Earl of Egremont (1751–1837), the well-known and immensely wealthy philanthropist, designed to create a flowing channel of migration from West Sussex to Canada. It was an initiative which coincided with the crisis in rural southern England, not long after the Captain Swing events which brought conditions in the region into close focus and alarmed the nation at large. Fifty-two of the Sussex protestors were brought to court, three were sentenced to death, and seventeen were given enforced emigration by transportation to New South Wales.23 The Swing crisis in West Sussex gave intense urgency to all efforts to reduce local pressures. The condition of the rural labourer was at the centre of the trouble, and the Petworth enterprise was a specific response to these circumstances. The Petworth scheme extended over the years 1832–37 (though its origins were earlier), and eventually involved about 1,800 people.24 These were plebeian emigrations and once more associated with the publication of letters back from North America which captured some of the circumstances of their emigration. The emigration solution had been rife, especially in the years at the end of the 1820s. The Rev. Sockett was distressed by the burden of poor rates levied on his tithe and told the Earl of Egremont in 1831 at Petworth: ‘my lord, these labourers have eaten me up … and they will soon eat your lordship up, if something is not done to stop it’. Egremont indeed promoted both working men’s allotments and emigration to Canada. A supporter later said, bluntly enough, that this came ‘from a selfish motive, to get rid of them, not to benefit the poor creatures; they were so badly off that they wished to go, and we were glad to get rid of them.’25 These were strategies used in tandem in Sussex in the difficult post-war times when both ‘emigration and allotments were complementary, not contradictory means of confronting the labour surplus’.26 Egremont launched his major scheme for emigration to Canada on this basis. Charlotte Erickson’s detailed research into emigration rates in 1831 and 1841 suggests that Sussex and Kent granted more parish assistance than most other agricultural counties and that these two counties showed higher rates of uptake

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of subsidised emigration to Australia in 1841. The rural people of Sussex and Kent were perhaps more acclimatised to the idea of emigration than most of rural England – indeed most of the poorer agricultural counties did not respond to the opportunities at that time (when the rate of emigration was much increased at large). The special response of Sussex and Kent, argues Erickson, was probably the result of better information – these folk knew more about emigration and free passages – rather than ‘unique distress’.27 Emigration was uneven, and poverty alone was not a precipitant of expatriation. Conditions in rural Sussex, despite substantial out-migration, remained dismal in the coming decades. Thus forty years later local newspapers were still urging emigration as the remedy for ‘deep-rooted distress’ among the working people. As the Mayor of Reigate declared in 1870, ‘Emigrating was much needed at the present day, and owing to the power of steam, it was not like banishment from home and kindred, for emigrants would be in easy reach of their friends’.28 Indeed, despite the progress of industrialisation, and even rising living standards, the rate of British emigration was rising. The constraints of poverty Conditions in other parts of rural England echoed the problems of West Sussex. There were many instances of a similar resort to emigration as a panacea for rural poverty and structural unemployment. Sometimes the local response turned to both violence and emigration. Thus in Dorking, in the neighbouring county of Surrey, rural destitution was connected to serious bouts of social protest at the time of the Swing Riots. There were attacks on a meeting at the Red Lion Inn and several farms suffered from incendiarism in 1830. The local parish vestry girded itself to tackle the root cause of the problem. Unemployment was high in Dorking and the general assumption was that the best solution was to reduce the rural population by emigration, as opposed to the idea of creating employment within the parish. The Chairman of the Vestry, Charles Barclay, proposed: the numbers of labourers in this parish has for many years far exceeded the number required for the cultivation of the land and for other purposes, that the overseers have to be constantly under the necessity of employing a great many upon public works at a very considerable expense beyond the value of the labour.

The best answer to this problem was regarded as emigration and in February 1832 the Vestry meeting agreed to ‘encourage the emigration of persons receiving relief from the parish’. Consequently it was moved that there is no prospect of any improvement in the condition of these supernumerary labourers from any future increase in employment in this parish, the only mode

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of affording them permanent relief is by giving encouragement to such of them as are willing to emigrate with their families to our colonies in North America’.29

Since the costs of emigration were normally beyond the resources of the poor, the Vestry instituted a scheme to assist those willing to emigrate. Several other parishes adopted the same system in the 1830s and facilitated a minor flow in the emerging phase of mass emigration. Emigration agents, in quick response, were soon offering their services. The Dorking scheme in 1832 was larger than most and was explicitly designed to reduce the burden on the parish rates. There was little doubt about the demand for labour in Canada – for instance in September 1835 local newspapers reported that 5,000 labours were sought for government projects in Upper Canada. About forty to fifty of the parishioners left for Canada under the scheme. The costs were high – and this was acknowledged as a critical impediment in the grand scheme of evacuation.30 Cost indeed was the essential limitation of the emigration panacea – it was simply too expensive to make a sufficient dent in the underlying problem of rural poverty. In the long record of nineteenth-century English emigration, parish-assisted emigration played a relatively small role.31 In some ways the parish schemes were more significant in exposing the fundamental problem of the rural sector and the accumulating congestion of the population caught in the underlying and continuing transformation of the countryside. Emigration, at least in the short run, was unable to reach the neediest. Much more common was the individual ousting, to which paupers were especially vulnerable.32 For them emigration was rarely an option. Insecurity of tenure was the bane of life at all levels. Eviction at the whim of a landlord was commonplace at all times and when it took a collective form, as in a clearance or as a slum demolition scheme, it might suddenly rouse public concern. Rural crises Despite several well organised and co-ordinated emigration schemes, West Sussex and Dorking continued to be heavily burdened by pauperism and much more so than in the manufacturing districts, even in the troubled 1840s. The ambitious and well-intentioned Petworth scheme produced meagre results. The substantial emigration subsidised under the Earl of Egremont had envisaged large-scale outflows. Emigration was regarded as an arm of the general exercise of paternalism. Yet when examined by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, Petworth remained full of paupers and there was much continuing evidence of the demoralised state of the labouring poor. None of the nostrums were equal to the needs of the rural community. Even the best sort of paternalism had failed. The migratory adjustment was not enough.33 Rural deprivation was a national problem and West Sussex was merely one small corner of the rural world and its challenges in the early nineteenth century.

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When William Cobbett toured the district in the late 1820s he typically made many unguarded claims about the causes of poverty among the labouring poor. One concerned the migration of industry out of the rural districts of Sussex. He asserted that the ‘power of congregating manufactures’ in towns and cities had had ‘fatal effects’ on the countryside, whose conditions he chronicled so vividly: ‘The country people lose part of their natural employment. The women and children, who ought to provide part of the raiment, have nothing to do’. Their employment was lost, ‘and yet you hear the jolterheads congratulating one another upon the increase of Manchester, and such places!’34 It was all part of the degradation of the old rural world so beloved by Cobbett. The loss of rural industry was a recurring theme throughout the nineteenth century: it was indeed the reverse side of the coin of industrialisation. Cobbett, writing of Ryall in Worcestershire, drew a contrast with the continuing vitality of the glove makers of rural Worcestershire. This was a variant on the Sussex case and offers further exposure of the problems facing substantial rural districts in that age. Glove-making in the Worcester region was conducted mainly by women, whose work had not been industrialised, essentially because machinery was not yet available. Cobbett claimed that they had survived simply because glovemaking could not be carried on by fire or by wind or by water, and which is, therefore, carried on by the hands of human beings. It gives work to women and children as well as to men; and that work is, by a great part of the women and children, done in their cottages, and amidst the fields and hop-gardens where the husbands and sons must live, in order to raise the food and the drink and the wool. This is a great thing for the land. If this glove-making were to cease, many of these women and children, now not upon the parish, must instantly be upon the parish.

And therefore there was ‘no horrible misery here, as at Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Paisley and other Hell-Holes of 84 degrees of heat … [where] Mere misery walks abroad in skin, bone and nakedness’. Cobbett believed that the ideal rural situation (as, for example, in Sussex and Worcester) was one in which manufacturing is mixed with agriculture, where the wife and daughters are at the needle or the wheel, while the men and boys are at the plough, and where the manufacturing, of which one or two towns are the centres, is spread over the whole country round about, and particularly where it is, in a very great part, performed by females at their own homes, and where the earnings come in aid of the man’s wages; in such case the misery cannot be so great; and, accordingly, while there is an absolute destruction of the life going on in the hell-holes, there is no visible misery at, or near, Worcester; and I cannot take my leave of this country, without observing, that I do not recollect to have seen one miserable object in it.35

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This was a classic description of the old system and Cobbett was perceptive about the general danger to female labour presented by industrialisation, which generally relocated handicraft activity into urban factories.36 But, in the outcome, Cobbett’s choice of glove making as a benign example was unlucky. Glove-making had expanded rapidly when French glove imports were banned in 1790. In the wartime boom some 30,000 were employed around Worcester and Yeovil, rising to perhaps 65,000 in 1826, mainly women. Glove-making was labour intensive and skilled, and it depended on imported raw materials of leather and silk in a small-scale, craft-based industry which was difficult to mechanise. Glove-sewing was women’s work, crucial in the old rural labour force and the outwork was mainly done on a piecework basis. After the war, in the 1820s, Huskisson at the Board of Trade moved to reduce and then abolish the import restrictions. The effect was devastating and the industry fell into cataclysmic decline.37 During the course of this decline many people moved out of the industry; many manufacturers around Worcester were bankrupted or voluntarily moved out of the glove trade; the local population growth rapidly decelerated and out-migration was recorded in the following censuses. It was a story much repeated across the industrial sectors of Britain’s rural world.38 Often, the rural communities were situated on fragile agricultural and industrial plinths. Worcester and West Sussex were parallel examples of the essential problem. It is unrecorded whether either crisis was transmitted directly into emigration. But it is clear that eventually rural population growth was minimised and then reversed. Mid-century migrants West Sussex and Worcestershire exemplified the perils of rapid population growth dependent on an economic system which faced the paradoxical consequences of rapid gains in productivity and intensifying competition. The adjustment by means of migration was rarely prompt enough to avert immediate suffering. By mid-century, emigration from Sussex had become decidedly more habituated, though still difficult for most poor families in the countryside. The frontiers in North America and Australia remained hazardous undertakings. In 1855 there was substantial emigration out of Clavering in Essex, in one of the poorest parts of England. The local schoolmaster, it was reported, ‘encouraged the poor to leave, seeing there was nothing for them here – he very likely helped them to fill out the forms etc’. From Clavering, George Kemp was already in New South Wales. Between 1848 and 1858 twelve of his cousins, all young Piggotts (from twelve to thirty-three years of age) emigrated to Sydney in Australia. This was a fine example of elaborate chain migration, the mechanism

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employed by many emigrants, often in conjunction with colonial assistance schemes.39 The Piggotts were part of a group of 375 English rural immigrants, mainly agricultural labourers and mechanics recruited in 1855 for Australia, departing aboard the Constitution in February of that year. The Agent for Immigration’s report in August 1855 said, ‘They principally consisted of a fine body of Farm Labourers selected from Agricultural Counties in England as well as a few Mechanics such as Carpenters and Stone Masons as a class most admirably suited to the present wants of the Colony’. The females had also been well selected and would be useful as servants. The immigrants were mostly Church of England and many of the adults were illiterate and mostly agricultural labourers. They came from the southern counties of Hertfordshire, Cambridge, Middlesex, Suffolk, Kent, Devon, Essex, Sussex and London. There were fourteen deaths and seven births on the voyage; smallpox was rife, showing forty-five cases; the surgeon’s report was very negative. The rate of emigration responded to diverse conditions but most certainly to the pulse of economic activity in the places of destination, now reported home with greater accuracy and immediacy than ever before. Eventually the rural sector fell into absolute decline and, by the 1870s, most British emigration was becoming urban in origin. Emigration had played a part in the great and continuing adjustment and now the propulsion of emigration seemed to respond to new forces in urban Britain. The class most afflicted by the turmoil in agrarian Britain in these years – the agricultural labourer – is the most difficult to identify among the departees and among the letter writers whose correspondence enlivens the subject. In part this may be caused by the relatively low rate of migration by such classes – except, as we have seen, in the locally assisted groups such as those helped by the Petworth Scheme. Emigration favoured those who had the basic means and it also favoured those with a degree of literacy. Agricultural labourers were disadvantaged on both scores – yet they were in high demand in the places of destination. Australia made extraordinary efforts for their recruitment – some from Sussex as we have seen. It would be extremely difficult to demonstrate an exact correlation between rural underemployment and actual emigration – neither is properly measureable. Yet there is ample evidence that West Sussex witnessed the pressures of local circumstance in full force, the response of local landowners and the mentalities of the emigrants, from paupers to exiting local landowners. It becomes an essentially local story, a Sussex narrative.40 Nevertheless beyond the special local features, there were underlying structures which were shifting the foundations of life, manifestations of a much larger discontinuity re-shaping most of rural Britain.

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By 1861 the rural population of England and Wales had reached its peak and was thereafter in absolute as well as relative decline. Most of the departing villagers migrated less than ten miles in the first instance and usually into towns – it was mostly a rural-to-urban movement though the radii increased during the century. Moreover, as we have seen, others were making a much bigger leap, to the United States and the colonies.41 The exact figures for neither internal nor external migration are well recorded but the emigration current was much smaller than the primary exit within Britain. Women were more likely to migrate out of such communities as West Sussex and Kent. London of course was the most likely destination but this did not preclude the reality of emigration feeding the upsurge of populations across the globe. As for the Sussex emigrants depicted in this chapter their connection with the rural crisis is straightforward: the Hentys were explicit in their motivation and spoke for others in their class; the poor who went to the United States were funded by their charitable parishes. It is clear that they could not have emigrated without this assistance, which suggests that the propensity to emigrate was impeded by the costs of passages overseas. Emigration therefore was only intermittently a measure of economic conditions and would have been greater had the entry cost been lower. West Sussex had exhibited classic symptoms of a rural community in the grip of a crisis of excess labour at a time when forces conspired to shrink employment opportunities. Cyclical downturns were overlaid on the structural transformation beneath. The convergence of population growth and diminishing labour market and rural malaise produced clear symptoms of stress – in social disorder verging on sporadic violence, of widespread desperation and hunger, of out-migration, subsidised adjustments in the Poor Law and emigration. These conditions continued until mid-century.42 They were symptoms of underlying changes which were also expressed in a decisive discontinuity in the propensity to emigrate which was signalled in the 1820s. Notes 1 Sussex convicts, including machine breakers, petty thieves and poachers, figured in the lists of those transported to Australia. See Alison McCann (ed.), Emigrants and Transportees from West Sussex, 1675–1889 (Chichester: West Sussex County Council, 2nd edn, 1984). 2 See J.P. Dodd, ‘Agriculture in Sussex and the Corn Law lobby’, Southern History 11 (1989), esp. 53–8; also J. Chapman, ‘The parliamentary enclosures of West Sussex’, Southern History 2 (1980).

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3 Arthur Young, A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Sussex (London, 1813), p. 402. 4 Rural change in Sussex is outlined in Brian M. Short, ‘The changing rural society and economy of Sussex, 1750–1945’, in Sussex: Environment, Landscape and Society (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), pp. 157–61. 5 Quoted by David Thomas, ‘The extent to which the West Sussex labourer and his family improved themselves by emigration to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century’ (Chichester: West Sussex Record Office, 1983, p. 1). Thomas argues that rural people in Sussex were in an awful condition which caused emigration: it was a ‘a background of misery’ (Ibid., p. 1). 6 Mrs Jane Cobden Unwin, The Hungry Forties (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), p. 155. 7 Marnie Bassett, The Hentys: An Australian Colonial Tapestry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 1–2. 8 Ibid. 9 See, for example, Christine Wright, Wellington’s Men in Australia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 10 M. Bassett, ‘Henty, Thomas 1775–1839’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1 (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1966). 11 The impact of letters sent homewards at this time is discussed by Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, pp. 33–4. For a fascinating contemporaneous reaction to the publication of the Sussex letters see The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave: Life in a Yorkshire Village 1812–1837, edited by J.E. and P.A. Crowther (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1997), pp. 220ff. 12 Letters and Extracts of Letters from Settlers at the Swan River and in the United States to their Friends in the Western part of Sussex (Petworth: J. Phillips, 1832). 13 Ibid., p. 7. 14 Ibid., p. 9. 15 Ibid., p. 16. 16 Ibid., p. 18. 17 First Report from the Commissioners on the Poor Laws, Appendix C, PP 1834, 157–8. 18 Quoted from papers in the West Sussex Record Office by Elizabeth Rushen and Perry McIntyre, The Merchant’s Women (Spit Junction, NSW: Anchor Books Australia, 2008), p. 7. 19 See below, chapter 11. Hampshire Telegraph, 27 July 1835. 20 See Brighton Patriot, 6 June 1837, 5 Feb. 1837. See also the family history: Iola Hack Mathews and Chris Durrant, Chequered Lives: John Barton Hack and Stephen Hack and the Early Days of South Australia (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2013); this suggested significant Quaker connections through to the Wakefield family, and also the importance of tuberculosis in the emigration decision. 21 See Brighton Patriot, 3 May 1836; Morning Chronicle, 24 Nov. 1838; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 29 Nov. 1838. 22 A Lecture on South Australia … by Henry Watson (London: Office of the Colonization Commissioners for South Australia, 3rd edn, 1838).

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23 See E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 111ff, 309. On the complicated social and demographic circumstance across the county at the time of Captain Swing, see the debate summarised in Dennis R. Mills and Brian M. Short, ‘Social change and social conflict in nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Peasant Studies 10 (July 1983). 24 West Sussex Record Office, Chichester: material relating to the emigration to Canada 1832–37. Much of this has been published in Wendy Cameron, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project, 1832–1837 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), and English Immigrant Voices: Labourers’ Letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000). See Hampshire Telegraph, 20 Sept. 1835; 24 April 1837. 25 Thomas Sockett before Select Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act, P.P. vol. 17 (1837), p. 3. 26 See below, chapter 6. 27 Erickson, Leaving England, pp. 189ff. 28 Quoted in William E. Van Vugt (ed.), British Immigration to the United States 1776–1914. Volume 4: Civil War and Industry, 1860–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 283–4. 29 Judith Hill, ‘The immediate reaction to the Swing Riots in Surrey, 1832–4’, Southern History 30 (2008), 195–6. 30 Hampshire Telegraph, 28 Sept. 1835. Positive reports of the Petworth emigrants were circulated at a time of local adversity in Sussex; lecturers travelled among the distressed agricultural labourers, seeking recruits for the colonies. Brighton Patriot, 3 May 1836, 6 June 1837; Hampshire Telegraph, 26 March 1838. 31 See Robin Haines, Emigration and the Labouring Poor: Australian Recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831–60 (London: Macmillan, 1997). 32 See, for instance, the pauper letters quoted in Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Accommodating Poverty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 33 See David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 128, and chap. 4 (generally on Sussex). 34 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 117–18. Emphasis in original. 35 Cobbett, Rural Rides, pp. 394–5. 36 On the role of women in the industrialising economy see Eric Richards, ‘Women in the British economy since about 1700: an interpretation’, History 59 (October 1974), 337–57. This is challenged by reverse arguments in Nigel Goose (ed.), Women’s Work in Industrial England (Hatfield: Local Population Studies, 2007). Given this disunity, it is difficult to assess the impact of women’s work trends on the question of the propensity to migrate or emigrate. 37 William Pitt, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Worcester (London, 1813), p. 277; Richard Coopey, ‘The British glove industry, 1750–1970: the advantages and vulnerability of a regional industry’, in J.F. Wilson and A. Popp (eds), Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks in England, 1750–1970 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 174ff . Outworking continued into the twentieth century – there

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were still 10,000 in 1907. See also J.H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 183–4, vol. 2, pp. 132–3, 249. 38 Conditions in the nearby Gloucestershire woollen mills, in steep decline, were not dissimilar: volatility and competition from the more effectively industrialised mills in Yorkshire produced great distress, especially among women. It was reported in the 1830s that there was ‘a great desire for emigration among the working classes in Gloucestershire but unfortunately for the weavers they are not a class of persons in request’. See Jennifer Tann, Gloucestershire Woollen Mills, p. 60. Nevertheless it is clear that several hundred local people made their way to Canada and Australia in the 1830s. Tann, Gloucestershire Woollen Mills, pp. 56–60. See also Maurice A. King, Bisley Migration and the Voyage of the ‘Layton’ 1837 (NSW: M.A. King, 2012). 39 Humin Hopes: The 1855 Diary of Charles Moore, English Immigrant to Australia on the Constitution, edited by Rob Wills (Port Lookout, Queensland: Pigface Press, 2005). 40 Within Sussex there were still more local variations and exceptions. This endangers any attempt to draw broad propositions from the account. See, for instance, the emphasis on local variations in Nicola Verdon, ‘Hay, hops and harvest: women’s work in agriculture in nineteenth-century Sussex’, in Goose (ed.), Women’s Work, pp. 76–96. 41 See, for instance, Dennis Mills (ed.), Victorians on the Move: Research in the Census Enumerator’s Books, 1851–1881 (Oxford: Mills Historical Computing, 1984). 42 The changes were never unidirectional and migration itself was ambiguous: the flows of migrants out of Sussex in the direction of London were partly countered by reverse movements into Sussex. W.A. Armstrong, ‘Some counter-currents of migration: London and the South in the mid-nineteenth century’, Southern History 12 (1990), 100.

5

The discontinuity

Continuity? The Isle of Man and West Sussex stories were minuscule pieces of the intricate jigsaw puzzle of international migration that stretched across centuries and continents. The Manx and Sussex people who left Britain in the 1820s had particular local reasons and special circumstances, often deeply personal states of mind. They are frequently fascinating individual narratives. Yet these emigrants were not unique, and their similarities with people on the move from the rest of the British Isles, perhaps from Europe in general, is striking and inescapable. They belong in certain rural categories of economic migration which constitute very large components of the greater jigsaw. They were also intrinsic to the broader transformations of rural life which eventually brought people together in the great diasporas of their times. They were part of a widespread experience of economic change, of which they themselves, like most of their fellow migrants, were barely conscious. These people were at the opening stage in the eventual rise of mass migration out of western Europe and also in the search for a general explanation of a greatly heightened external mobility among the peoples of the British Isles in particular. This involves a historical ‘discontinuity’ which can be observed in the experience of many regions of the British Isles. History generally abhors ‘discontinuities’ – social and economic change is usually continuous, sequential and gradual, with origins always receding deeply into the distant past. The notion of a specific new ‘genesis’ sounds improbably theological and mildly histrionic. Alfred Marshall, the economist, was adamant that ‘Nature does not make a leap’.1 And such is surely the case with migration, a universal tendency in all human existence. In the British case the origins of emigration can easily be pushed backwards almost indefinitely, indeed long before Columbus opened the Atlantic prospect and gave entirely new opportunities, notably to the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ voyaging to New England in the 1620s.

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There were many exoduses out of the British Isles from the end of the sixteenth century, but most significantly from the 1620s. In the following century there were repeated movements from various parts of the islands which, taken together, created the foundation populations of the American colonies. (There were, of course, parallel movements of Iberian peoples into south and central America.) By 1776 the reproductive achievements of these expatriates were the marvel of the demographic world. Adam Smith remarked that the population of British colonies in North America doubled within two decades, compared with five hundred years in Europe: ‘Nor’, Smith added, ‘is this increase principally owing to the continual importation of new inhabitants, but to the multiplication of the species’.2 Indeed Atlantic emigration in 1776 was in free-fall, severely disrupted by the American Revolution. There were many harbingers of mass emigration – not only the Pilgrims but many other contingents in the following century: thousands of the German redemptioners, many Scots, Ulster Irish and Cornish; but these were not sustained movements on the scale achieved at the end of eighteenth century and after. There had been a preliminary upsurge in the late 1760s, notably from Ulster which was most likely an expression of land pressure. As J.C. Beckett remarked, ‘it is impossible to suppose that so many thousands would have cut their roots and faced the hazardous Atlantic crossing if they had not been profoundly dissatisfied with conditions at home’. Rent increases and insecurity of tenure were central in this reaction to the times. The refusal to renew a lease on acceptable terms was the cause of deep umbrage – ‘Nothing created so much bitterness as an attempt by the landlord or his agent to turn a tenant out of his holding’.3 Whether this was merely a minor resurgence, or alternatively an entirely new start and a new scale in emigration from various parts of the British Isles, remains unclear. The years 1768 to 1776 may have marked an earlier fundamental discontinuity in emigration but the evidence is ambiguous. There was evidently an acceleration and the efflux generated serious public alarm in many places across the kingdom.4 The American War of Independence and then the French Wars seriously interrupted the emigration flows, though there was a further paroxysm of public anxiety in 1801 when there were thousands of applications to leave, creating alarm in the Home Office. The government responded duplicitously, introducing the Passenger Act of 1803, ostensibly to provide humanitarian protection to emigrants, but in reality to make emigration much too expensive for most intending migrants.5 The earlier emigrations from parts of the British Isles before the 1790s were localised and sporadic, driven by particular connections and special local conditions. Later, in the 1820s, the phenomenon seemed to coalesce into a much more generalised and systematic outward movement, partly articulated by greatly improved transport and better streams of information. But the underlying determinants were themselves becoming more broadly based across the nation,

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encouraging the joining together of many parts of the country. Nevertheless the outflows remained uneven and subject to particular prompts – such as the intervention of migration agents and the spread of propaganda, and then the circular reinforcement of chain migration. In the 1820s emigration from the British Isles resumed its course and then expanded into an astonishing new scale and intensity; the character of the emigration had also been transformed. This was the rapid and total decline of indenturing as the primary vehicle which had carried the majority of emigrants across the Atlantic in the previous two centuries. In somewhat clouded circumstances, the British ceased to emigrate under contract, mortgaging themselves to American employers for temporary servitude. They now emigrated, in much larger numbers than ever before, as free emigrants, mainly paying their own way, in one way or another. The recruitment pattern, the very flow, had changed in character.6 This shift out of indentured emigration happened between 1770 and 1810, probably earlier than later. It is very likely that the swift transition was part of a wider discontinuity. It signalled a changed propensity to emigrate: people were no longer indenturing themselves, they were leaving under quite different conditions, in a different framework, and it was a mystifying evolution. Bernard Bailyn was most adamant about the discontinuity in the Atlantic: ‘The magnitudes of the peopling, or re-peopling, process in the borderlands of the early British empire exceed anything of the kind that had occurred before in Western history’. The transfer of peoples to populate Britain’s peripheries ‘dwarfs anything attempted by the Romans, Spain, France, the Habsburgs and far outstripped the others’. He added that ‘Without a general knowledge of how this movement of people came about and what forces or desires impelled or drew these people from one continent to another, little can be understood of the history of any one of the settlements: North America, the Caribbean or, I believe, Australia’.7 There was a shift in the levels of mobility which now created major flows of people out of rural places in Britain, some of them reaching overseas. The first colonisation of Australia and the new trans-Atlantic surge happened in the middle of this transition: the sudden flow to Australia from 1788 was a premature expression, by way of criminal crises, artificially set in motion by government intervention.8 But the discontinuity was an overwhelmingly North American phenomenon By the 1820s the entire engine of Atlantic expatriation shifted into a higher gear, eventually into overdrive. Here was the strongest indication of a break in the long narrative: emigration from the British Isles expanded from 274,000 in the decade 1821–31, to 788,000 in the 1830s, and then doubled again in the decade 1841–51. The expansion was uneven across the British Isles and some regions contributed disproportionately to the outflow of emigrants; consequently the effects were especially pronounced in such places. Individual parishes might witness a sudden outflow – for example, at Benenden in Kent where in 1825–26

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there had been up to ninety day labourers commonly out of employ: in 1831 an assisted parish scheme caused fifty-six of the poor to emigrate from Benenden.9 This, however, was highly unusual and a tiny component of the emerging emigrant flows across the country. Strong support for the discontinuity thesis comes from the quantitative historians Hatton and Williamson. They see a clear discontinuity in the decades after 1820 when, they claim, ‘global migrations changed dramatically’. There was ‘a regime change in world migrations’ – in scale, composition and freedom. Mass emigration was now increasingly made up of single people in a ‘spectacular transition’. Before 1820 most migration had been slaves, convicts and servants.10 The transformed emigration was a manifestation of a new freely adjusting world of international labour. The discontinuity converted a trickle into a flood and then constituted ‘an amazing transition’. Hatton and Williamson posit three key changes – first the reduction of trans-Atlantic transport costs (which had been stable from 1688 to 1820, and then fell rapidly); second, the intervention of government subsidisation schemes, and third, the expulsive consequences of the great European famine of the 1840s, after which market forces became crucial and all contained in the context of laissez-faire.11 The American scholar Raymond Cohn has also provided emphatic reinforcement to the claim of ‘discontinuity’ in the later 1820s when, he declares, that ‘mass migration began’. He says there was a break in trend in Atlantic migration between 1827 and 1831 – so that by 1832 the immigrant volumes jumped to more than 50,000 per annum, at least five times its historical yearly average. It was ‘the first time the volume of immigration [into the United States] became large’. Moreover, the discontinuity occurred long before the Great Famine, and Cohn connects the ‘jump’ in emigration to the cheapening of transport costs and the pressures of population growth. The idiosyncratic aspect of Cohn’s contribution is his insistence that it derived from a sudden increase in transatlantic migration, essentially from northern Ireland and south-west Germany, with little augmentation from either Scotland or England, which he specifically discounts as sources of the new mass emigration. The Irish, he asserts, had suddenly leapfrogged the rest of the emigrants. These findings, given the slipperiness of emigrant statistics, are difficult to verify and stand in diametric opposition to the work on similar fragmentary sources employed by Charlotte Erickson. The only concurrence is that of the discontinuity.12 There is, however, ample remaining contention among the migration scholars, and the views of the historical geographer Ian Whyte are typical of modern scepticism about the notion of any fundamental discontinuity in the long narrative of mobility.13 He opposed the traditional interpretations of Ravenstein and Zelinsky (who had earlier proposed a fundamental shift in the rate and scale of mobility in the process of modernisation), and pointed out that ‘Studies

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spanning the early phases of industrialisation … and the mature phase of industrialisation (the late nineteenth century) have demonstrated that there was no marked increase in the volume of movement nor any major changes in the overall pattern of mobility’. The British, Whyte claimed, had always been mobile and there was little change: ‘Migration was ubiquitous within British society’ – internal migration declined only when the rural supplies of migrants fell into absolute decline at the end of the nineteenth century. The pattern was stable but most movement was short distance and within regions. Only a few regions, such as west Wales and the Scottish Highlands, had persistent net losses. There was little change to rural isolation until the end of the nineteenth century: it was still a world of constrained mobility. The rise of a seasonal harvest labour created longer-distance migration and ‘the earnings … were used to shore up [the] tottering economy at home’, helping to maintain the traditional peasant economy.14 During industrialisation most movements of people remained small distances in scope and range, though some factory owners conducted recruiting drives ‘to attract workers to their new factory schemes’. These, however, were exceptional. Moves of more than fifty kilometres accounted for a mere fifth of all migration in the nineteenth century. Moreover Whyte believes that emigration was ‘often a direct continuation of internal movements’.15 These notions gnaw away at the idea of sudden breaks in the historical continuity and the gradualism of human behaviour. The contention of this book, however, is that there was indeed a decisive shift of scale, a change of pace, which heralded and propelled the rise of modern emigration from the 1820s. There was a vital discontinuity in the story, not overnight but effective within a generation. Identifying this disjunction is much entangled in competing interpretations of the patchy historical record. Vocabularies of mobility The British case is also part of a bigger picture, though we contend that it was a new prototype for the modern world. Migration in history is indeed a matter of scale, stretching from local cases to continent-wide transfers of large numbers of humanity. Linking the two ends is a ticklish problem. There are also other camps of historians at work: historians armed with statistical ambition and calculators, who seek long trends in the story of human movement, some operating on a global scale. They quest after patterns and trends, especially for breaks in trend. Theorists of migration typically corral large numbers of migrants into statistical groupings. They are arranged into categories according to their characteristics, origins and destinations, lined up and correlated to expose likely relationships. Thus migrants are organised into statistically based collectivities, generalised systems of mobility that can be connected even to the Manx and Sussex experience.

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Inevitably these exercises generate new vocabularies to categorise the people involved in the myriad forms of mobility. The shifting tides of humanity over historical time have always produced special words – most widely the notions of ‘diasporas’ and ‘exoduses’, which long ago entered the English language. Sudden eruptions of collective migration certainly caused contemporaries to dramatise the disturbing new mentality which seemed to grip such a society. Prospective emigrants were often depicted as possessed by a ‘frenzy’ to leave their homeland, their village, and their community – as though they had been consumed by some collective enthusiasm, a madness even. This, for example, was said of remote communities in the north-west of Scotland in the 1770s and was famously recorded by Boswell and Johnson on their grand tour of the Hebrides and West Highlands. At that precise time emigration suddenly became very popular among people who had previously resisted the idea of exile with considerable passion. Now, instead, emigration had become an enthusiasm, even an exultation among people seized by ‘an epidemical fury’; there was a raging outrush to America, and the departing migrants celebrated with ‘a dance called America’.16 Similarly those departing Guernsey in 1843 were thought to be in the midst of an emigration ‘epidemic’. Migrants from Scotland to the new British settlements in New Zealand in the 1840s were described as ‘seeping’ and ‘oozing’ out of the homeland in their thousands17 – metaphors of migration are often hydraulic. The vocabulary of emigration is full of such terms – manias, humours, frenzies, deluges, mass delusions, suggesting odd and compulsive psychic states which take hold of entire communities prior to emigration. Yet in the nineteenth century, landed interests in many parts of Britain and Europe also complained of the opposite psychology, namely the immovable inertia among the rural population and their refusal to respond to the obvious benefits and incentives of emigration. Evidently therefore, the propensity to migrate had been highly variable, even volatile. Nevertheless the universality of migration suggests that it is a fact of life, a historical constant found in all societies. Ever since humanity evolved in Africa, it has been on the move, stretching to all corners of the earth, filling the continents under the colonising or migrating impulse. The story of the past few centuries is seen simply as a latter-day epilogue to a much longer drama. Against this narrative of ceaseless continuity of restless movement is the polar opposite version. This is the model of human stasis, generally inert and grounded for very long periods of history, caught in a rural simplicity, bounded by tradition, rooted in the soil. This still panorama of human existence was most influentially envisioned by Marx in his blunt impatience with ‘rural idiocy’ – immoveable human masses paralysed in the world of feudalism, of static, backward-looking resistance to the necessary revolutions of social change. The notion, that most of the world was static before being convulsed by modernisation or industrialisation or imperialism or revolution, was a widely

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diffused assumption in historiography until, as we have registered, historians began to take measures of mobility in pre-modern societies. The gentle evolution of mobility now seems improbable because we can identify unprecedented jumps into modern mobility within the past two centuries. Social historians and demographers reaching back at least to the sixteenth century have found populations churning away, exhibiting surprising levels of movements, even longdistance shifting. More common, however, were localised movements. All this is part of the search for the origins of the modern world, which tends towards an emphasis on continuities in history. Yet historians are drawn to discontinuities, ruptures, revolutions. Continuities in history are drab by contrast, even though this is most of history: turning and tipping points are more attractive phenomena, giving drama and shape (as well as periodicity) to the past. But cumulative, gradual, slow-moving change over the long run may be truer of the past than its short-term excitations. In the history of migration, at least in Atlantic-centred history, the tendency has been to elevate the mid-nineteenth century as ‘The Age of Migration’ – the time of laissez-faire mass migration across the Atlantic, the great uprooting, activating people from across Europe to the call of America. Certainly the numbers involved reached an unprecedented scale from the 1830s onwards. Long perspectives Along the longer timetables of migration history, the most heroic in scale are those of Patrick Manning, who scans global migrations covering 80,000 years. These cover the great pre-historic shifts of homo sapiens as they stretched and redistributed themselves from their African origins across the continents, during those numberless millennia. Manning’s associates in the study of long-distance migration have adopted shorter time-frames, though still covering many centuries. For the modern period the most critical innovation has been the work of Adam McKeown who, by switching the focus much further eastwards and away from the Atlantic, has redrawn the map of global migration during the century after 1846. He speculates that Asian migration, mainly out of China and India, accounted for as many millions of migrants as the much better known Atlantic emigrations.18 Accounting international migration is a hazardous and ambitious activity but the rounded numbers have been assayed. Over the century from 1840 to 1945 McKeown calculates that the Americas received about 55–58 million emigrants from Europe (with an extra 2.5 million from India, China, Japan and Africa). Over the same period, destinations in South East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific received about 48–52 million from India and southern China (with 4 million extra from Africa, Europe and Middle East and north-east Asia). Meanwhile, in the same century, territories in Manchuria, Siberia, central Asia and Japan received 46–51 million migrants from north-east Asia and Russia. On

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this basis the Atlantic story takes on a different aspect, possibly relegated below the Asian ‘behemoth’.19 The tendency of this macro-statistical reconstruction work has been to identify the critical turning points which may be common to societies over la longue durée, following different chronologies in different places, but nevertheless passing through into recognisably modern expectations of mobility. The common factor in this new scale of research into the widest parameters of mobility is the identification of a critical transition in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the European context it is claimed that there was a ratcheting upwards of the rates of mobility, certainly by 1850. The Lucassens find that continent-wide mobility accelerated in the mid-nineteenth century, especially after 1850, and that ‘migration in the early modern period was higher than once thought, but it still paled beside what was to come’.20 This proposition was reinforced by the discovery of substantial internal movements within Europe: as Emmer points out, migration to cities in Europe in the decades 1830–60 tripled; meanwhile parallel migration into villages doubled.21 While identifying the timetables and disjunctions of past mobilities, these historians have tried to avoid the idea of a mechanical procession of change. They eschew the notion of accelerated mobility simply as an automatic consequence of modernisation, contending that there were multiple factors contributing to the change. Thus Leslie Page Moch insists that the jump in migration rates is to be explained not only by the nineteenth-century transport revolution but also by the general demographic transition, which led to unprecedented population growth in Europe: migration and emigration offered a solution. She says that this coincided with a general shift in mentality, ‘a belief that one could have a better existence’.22 This echoes other constructions of the mentality of mobility – namely the notion of ‘betterment migration’ (associated with the work of the English historians Peter Clark and Paul Slack) and the ‘secularisation of hope’ (in Hoerder’s term). The latter interpretation regards emigration as fostering democratic aspirations and creating the impetus towards a more meritocratic society on the other side of the Atlantic. This is, therefore, a psychological interpretation of migration behaviour connected with the acceleration of international mobility.23 In such a light, emigration begins to possess a quasirevolutionary role in historical change. The new trend The thrust of these large-scale ideas has been to bring a new understanding of the whole story of international migration, to see it as ‘a structural aspect of human life since its very beginnings’. This indeed has required ‘a more global perspective’, specifically designed to counteract ‘the splendid isolation of migration

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history’.24 One advance in this context has been the reintegration of west and east in the story of modern migration, especially the above outlined revelations regarding the scale of internal and external Asian migration.25 Another advance has been the erosion of the distinction between different types of migration, especially the division between free and forced migrations, which is said to encourage ‘academic Balkanisation’. Thus the analytical segregation of refugees is greatly reduced since ‘all refugees combine political and economic motives’. In a nutshell, ‘most migration has both voluntary and coercive elements which are difficult if not impossible to disentangle’.26 Eltis has specifically called for the end to the unproductive dichotomy between free and unfree migrations.27 Thus migration history has responded to the urgency of globalisation perspectives, echoing the earlier seminal work of Frank Thistlethwaite who famously advocated the removal of the ‘salt-water curtain’ that, in the 1960s, separated scholars of migration on each side of the Atlantic and gave little attention or importance to the European origins of migration.28 Thistlethwaite talked of ‘cells’ of migration and ‘honeycombs’ of origins which were converted into migration flows. He urged historians to avoid a focus on a single country; to avoid also the exclusive focus on West European or Atlantic migration. Recent historians have indeed begun to incorporate the great Asian migrations into the general account and also to extend the perspective beyond the past 500 years. The quest is for universalising tendencies and to determine what ‘is specific and what can be regarded as the universal human pattern’.29 The contention of the present account is that the discontinuity in modern emigration history was first registered in the British Isles early in the nineteenth century. Recurrent warnings against cultural specificity may make the concentration on the British case a dubious proposition; but the direction of the present study is not to argue the uniqueness or even the specialness of Britain as a case of mobility. Rather (and still contentiously) it maintains that Britain was the prototype, the original exemplar. The discontinuity, as we have seen, is itself difficult to pin down – though ideally it should be demonstrable in the statistics of mobility. William Cobbett hated unpalatable facts and rejected the census figures when they showed a 40 per cent increase in the population of England between 1801 and 1821: ‘A man that can suck that in will believe, literally believe, that the moon is made of green cheese’, he fulminated.30 Cobbett was misguided and perverse but migration numbers are certainly more dubious than those of the census; there were few reliable counts before the nineteenth century, and the registration of migrants, both internally and externally, has never been exact. The crudest estimates produce rates of external migration which indeed suggest substantial variations between 1600 and 1760 and then a marked general rise into the nineteenth century, though punctuated by large short-term fluctuations with apparent cyclical characteristics. The number of emigrants recorded

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as departing the British Isles was worryingly different from those entering the receiving countries. Annual emigration itself was always a small proportion of the national population, usually in the range of 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the total, which was subject to rapid increases throughout the period of alleged discontinuity.31 Nevertheless the most incontrovertible evidence of mobility was the rapid and differential growth of the towns in Britain (which was of course also propelled by natural increase of the urban population) and in the numbers of British people arriving at overseas destinations. There were, for example, more than 4 million British-born people living overseas in 1881, the cumulative result of the rapid rise over the previous sixty years. But these increases were derived from a total population which was growing as never before – and therefore the pool of potential migrants was much larger. The propensity to migrate did not necessarily rise – this would require the average rate of migration (per thousand of the population per annum) to increase faster than overall population. The internal migratory rate most probably rose in the late eighteenth century; and crude measures of emigration suggest upward movement in the same period, but especially in the 1820s. Exogenous factors were at work in these broad trends – wartime conditions before Waterloo had greatly curtailed emigration, and a pent-up demand was suddenly released in the years after 1815.32 This would have accentuated the suggested discontinuity and there were other short-term factors in operation too. Yet the underlying trend is clear enough – the total numbers of emigrants rose rapidly from the 1770s on a broken upward trend, and by the 1830s a new continuous level of exodus was achieved which lasted for more than a century and fed the requirements of the destination countries. Explosive mobility The New Zealand historian James Belich intervened boldly in the story of mobility. He too believed that there was a monumental shift in emigration in the mid-nineteenth century and he too searched for the axes of change in the broad history of mobility. His main quest, however, was the conjunction of mobility with the other great propellants of colonisation (with Imperialism lurking in the background). He argued that there was a transformation in the very culture of migration in Victorian times. The psychology of ordinary folk was altered: this entailed their attitudes to the idea, the practicality and the actual respectability of migration. This, said Belich, exerted practical consequences of a very large order – it produced the so-called ‘Settler Revolution’. This was an ‘explosive dynamic’ which drove forward the development of new societies in America and Australasia in the nineteenth century. It produced ‘a Boom mentality’, a kind of mania, a revolution in the heads of people who became the mass

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migrants and the driving force of European expansion, most of all to the United States. In essence Belich attempts to explain why the British in particular were the most ‘eruptive’ of people in the nineteenth century and why they were different, and with what consequences.33 Amid Belich’s panorama of ‘settlerism’ was the identification of a critical discontinuity – the settler ‘explosion’ – the causes of which ultimately reside within ‘the inside of people’s heads’. He celebrates the infectious exuberance, the sheer ‘animal spirits’ of the relatively young people who were in the vanguard of colonisation. The dynamic British ‘settlers’ were driven by a folk utopianism of the new age of migration: it was an ideology which ‘transformed emigration from an act of fear to an act of hope, and potential destinations from hells to heavens. This ideology, intersecting with various forms of mass transfer, actually caused the Settler Revolution’.34 At bottom, therefore, was the alleged shift in collective behaviour patterns which emerged by the mid-nineteenth century. Belich ascribed this ‘ideology’ to the information and propaganda revolution in the print industry of the new age, powerful new methods of persuasion which galvanised ordinary people and produced the waves of emigration out of Victorian Britain. ‘Boosterism’ certainly excited the public mind and the impact of the advertising machine is undeniable. Yet though advertising can generate demand (in this case for mass emigration), it may equally be a response to pre-existing and ongoing shifts in the urgency of demand. The supply and demand of emigrants were evidently entangled and it is unlikely that the propaganda machine was the first cause of the new scale and urgency of mass emigration. The information revolution was more likely to be a response than an original cause of the great expansion of emigration. Thus a shift in psychology may have been a powerful variable in the story, but it simply sets the explanation back a further step: why indeed did people, the British in the first instance, become so much more suggestible? What in the foundations of British society was working to transform the psychology of the prospective migrant? In common with much of the discussion of emigration is the absence of any convincing explanation of the actual mechanism which activated the movements of the very people who made up the trends. The ultimate propellants of these emigrations remain mysterious. Proximate causes In summary, therefore, the scale and chronology of mobility around the world has become a swirling debate among historians. The tendency to emphasise continuity over historical time has faded: the weight of evidence and opinion currently favours the older construction of the mobility question, that is the idea that there was indeed a ‘discontinuity’ in great movements across the globe from the eighteenth century through to the twentieth century. There was, in effect, a

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marked quickening of movement and the emergence of the main diasporas and exoduses out of Europe (though we must now acknowledge, eventually paralleled by Asian movements of comparable dimensions). Establishing the precise systematic evidence of the scale and timing of this transition in mobility is inherently problematic. The approach adopted in this book is to search for proximate causes, for the roots or the springs of migration, within the localities which yielded the people for the ‘Settler Revolution’. This astonishing variety of humanity, this frenetic dispersal of peoples out of Britain and beyond, is the essence of the story and any attempt to impose pattern and regularity is fraught with exceptions. This nevertheless is the challenge, namely to explain ‘the discontinuity’. We seek to exhume the stories of the emigrant masses and the essential promptings of their mobility. The first and the largest numbers went to North America. Notes 1 ‘Natura non facit saltum’, epigraph in Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890), title page. 2 Quoted in J.J. Spengler, ‘Adam Smith on population’, Population Studies 24 (1970), 383. 3 J.C. Beckett, in W.H. Crawford and B. Trainor (eds), Aspects of Irish Social History, 1750–1800 (Belfast: HMSO, 1969), pp. xi–xii. There is a good selection of reports on Ulster emigration of the 1760s and 1770s in Belfast News Letter, e.g. 31 Jan. 1761, 31 March 1771. 4 This is well documented in Walpole, ‘Emigration to British North America’. 5 Ibid. 6 See below, chapter 10. 7 Bailyn, Sometimes an Art, pp. 194–5, 196. 8 See below, chapter 6. 9 W.A. Armstrong, ‘Labour I: Rural population growth, systems of employment, incomes’, in G.E. Mingay and Joan Thirsk (eds), The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1750–1850, vol. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 712. 10 T.J. Hatton and J.G. Williamson, Global Migration and the World Economy (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005); Raymond L. Cohn, Mass Migration under Sail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On timing see also Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2nd edn, 2004), p. 252. 11 Hatton and Williamson, Global Migration, p. 32. 12 Cohn, Mass Migration, pp. xiii, 1, 6, 15, 43 and Table 2; Cohn discusses the data problems, pp. 18–23 and 226. Data on pre-famine Irish emigration is discussed by Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), chap. 8; Erickson’s opposing opinions are set out in Leaving England, p. 136, fn 22 and p. 185. The conflicting numbers are shown in Erickson’s tables 18.1 and 18.2 in her ‘The uses of passenger lists for the study of British and Irish emigration’, in Ira Glazier

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and Luigi de Rosa (eds), Migration Across Time and Nations (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), p. 324. It is worth noting that, in the long run, Britain (from a much larger population base) supplied 11.4 million emigrants in the years 1815–1930, while Ireland sent 7.3 million and Germany 4.8 million. Baines, Mature Economy, p. 9. 13 Ian Whyte, ‘Migration and settlement’, in Chris Williams (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 274, and also Ian D. Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain, 1550–1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 14 Whyte, ‘Migration and settlement’, pp. 277–8. 15 Ibid., p. 281. 16 Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited by R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), pp. 345–6; see also pp. 33, 85–6, 295–6. 17 W. Cargill, Free Church Colony at Otago in New Zealand: In a Letter from Capt. Cargill to Dr Aldcorn (London, 1847), in W.D. McIntyre and W.J. Gardner (eds), Speeches and Documents on New Zealand History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 24–6. 18 Adam McKeown’s work connects with the more Euro-oriented efforts of the Lucassen brothers in Holland. They join forces in seeking the comparative role of migrations (in their various categories) in China and Europe over many centuries. They have devised extraordinary estimates of total migration rates over long periods for Europe and Asia as a whole: these are quantitative exercises on a continental scale, which they call the ‘macro’ approach. Ultimately they seek to re-establish the older idea of a mobility transition – that is, a jump in mobility occurring in various parts of the globe as modernisation takes hold. See Adam McKeown et al., ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History 15: 2 (2004), 155–89. 19 See Adam McKeown, ‘Migration history: multidisciplinary approaches’, in Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Patrick Manning (eds), Migration History in World History (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 3. The scope and consequences of many of these exoduses is given prominence by C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 132–4. Hatton and Williamson insist that the Asian emigrations were less significant because they were less permanent, with high return rates, and from sending populations which were much greater. See Hatton and Williamson, Global Migration, pp. 22–3. See also Sunel S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 4–19. 20 Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 150. 21 Emmer and Morner (ed.), European Expansion and Migration, p. 2. 22 Moch, Moving Europeans, p. 25. 23 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘From mobility transition to comparative global migration history’, Journal of Global History 6 (2011), 299–307; D. Hoerder and H. Rossler, Distant Magnets (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993). See also Lucassen, Lucassen and Manning (eds), Migration History in World History. 24 Lucassen, Lucassen and Manning, Migration History, p. 6.

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25 Ibid., p. 12. 26 Ibid., p. 10. 27 David Eltis, ‘Seventeenth-century migration and the slave trade: the English case in comparative perspective’, Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (eds), Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 87–107. 28 Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe overseas’. 29 Ibid., p. 30. 30 Quoted by George Woodcock, Introduction to William Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 13. 31 See Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004; Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 151–5. 32 See Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp. 91–116. Further evidence of such pent-up demand for emigration in the Irish context is suggested by Peter Robinson’s recruitments in 1823–25: see James S. Donnelly, Jnr, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 323–36. 33 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloWorld, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 414, 202, 558. 34 James Belich, ‘Response: a cultural history of economics?’, Victorian Studies 53: 1 (2010), 120.

6

The North American theatre

The pioneers North America was the earliest and the greatest theatre of oceanic emigration in which the methods of mass migration were pioneered. The activation of the transatlantic human transfusions was a vast project and many of its origins remain a mystery. But it began as a largely English venture. Mostly, the story of the peopling of America is told as variants on the theme of the dispeopling of old Europe: it is told conventionally as the ‘uprooting’ or the ‘transplanting’ of Europe’s poor and wretched. This fits in well with an image of the dislocation of Europe and the desperate mission of so many of its peoples to get out, to escape to the haven of ‘the American Dream’. One problem is that many of the emigrants were clearly not desperate; many of them were simply the adventurous and the opportunistic, even insouciant in their transatlantic migrations. What was the relationship between the great colonisation of North America and the disposition of its immigrant sources on the other side of the Atlantic, and more specifically the circumstances in the British Isles? The imperial thrust of the colonising European powers was the necessary framework. As well as the political dimension, and its administrative and military structures, there were the more down-to-earth matters, of people emigrating eventually in their millions, and appearing to have a dynamic energy and purpose almost independently of those political structures. It is this layer of the question that is sought in the present approach to the peopling of North America and its connection with the circumstances in the European homelands. This was Frank Thistlethwaite’s original quest in 1960, his attempt to wrench the question of emigration out of the America-oriented obsession and to break through the implied ‘salt water curtain’ which separated the grand immigrants’ story from the worlds whence they came.1 Linking the two sides of the curtain is indeed the prior requirement of any explanation of the underlying causes involved in the transmission of tens

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of millions of people from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and the return of many of them as well. Continental-scale migrations were not unprecedented in European history. In the High Middle Ages, in the long phase before the cataclysm of the Black Death, c. 1347–52, Europe at large had witnessed a similar epoch of population growth, the expansion of the cultivated area, of urbanisation, and commercial expansion, associated with a widespread restructuring of economic and social life. It was a time of development and intensification of settlement and the reorganisation of western and central Europe, by ‘internal expansion’ – but also with the establishment of states by conquests and the peopling of distant territories by immigrants along the peripheries of the continent. There was a new frontier to life derived from the ‘expansionary power of the civilisation which sprang from its centres’. It was a an era when ‘Recruiting agents travelled in the overpeopled parts of Europe collecting emigrants; wagons full of anxious new settlers, creaked their way across the continent; busy ports sent off ships full of colonists to alien and distant destinations’. This was Europe in the twelfth century but it might, in a pre-echo, have described North America or Australia in the nineteenth century.2 The common factor may have been population growth and the creative and expansionary reaction which it seemed to generate. Atlantic origins The pursuit of a general view of the emigrational relationship between the two sides of the Atlantic is strewn with difficulties of interpretation. David Fischer characterises the incoming population of colonial America as mainly poor farmers and labourers, some yeomen, skilled craftsmen, people usually escaping low wages, taxation, short-term leases, and higher rents.3 Another broad-brush version was provided by Douglass C. North and R.P. Thomas: they give priority to the need of the early colonies to attract ‘labour and capital from Europe in the amounts needed to ensure a viable economy’. To do this, ‘the colonies had to be able to offer for each factor of production a higher reward than it could earn in Europe’. The standard of living had to be higher and this depended on the productivity of the emergent export staples in the colonies.4 Even more broadly, North and Thomas argued that North American colonisation was ‘a direct outgrowth of the significant changes in Europe that historians call the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism’. Early modern Europe was moving away from localism towards trade on a greater scale, and was also embroiled in the ‘violent ferment in religion and political views’. There was an ideological climate: ‘One of the manifestations of the new spirit of capitalism was the expansion of world trade and, almost as an accident, the rediscovery of America’.5

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From the start the colonies were selective of their migrants. A pamphlet of 1609 promoted Virginia and trumpeted its excellent opportunities for ‘planting’, but the fledgling colony required the right type of English settler: I doe not meane, that none but such unsound members, and such poore as want their bread, are fittest for this imployment for we intend to have of every trade and profession, both honest, wise and painefull men, whereof our land and Citie is able to spare, and furnish many … which will be glad to goe, and plant themselves so happily, and their children after them.

Despite extremely high mortality rates, and appalling risks, as many as 100,000 English people had emigrated by the 1630s, ‘people whose aspiration for basic political, religious and social freedoms made them willing to bear the risks of migration’.6 But David Cressy is sceptical of the level of intelligent knowledge guiding these emigrant decisions, declaring that ‘many of the people who went to New England did so on the basis of inadequate information … and their motives were by no means clear-cut’.7 The religious character of the early emigrants to America from England in the great emigration of the 1630s is well known and they emigrated from areas in ‘England in which religious tensions were highest’. Less well known is their high return rates, especially in the 1640s, which suggests a remarkable mobility and response to changing political and religious conditions back in England. It is likely that ‘In the decades after 1640, far more people left New England each year than went there. Perhaps as many as one in four settlers returned home’ and ‘their life-stories show how America could be a stage in a journey, not an end in itself ’.8 This suggests the sheer mobility of these people and their volatile mental worlds. Expulsive factors in the sending country are stressed by North and Thomas who quote Winthrop as witness to the early seventeenth-century outward propulsion from England: ‘The Land grows weary of her Inhabitants … all townes complaine of the burthen of their poore … if they be poore, [they] are compted the greatest burthens’. Overpopulation, in this view, provided the outward urgency, but one seconded by the lure of land – land was used to induce migration.9 It was still the motivating force in 1776 when Adam Smith divined the essential migratory incentives as cheap land, high wages, independence and early marriage, all in contrast to conditions in the homelands where the ‘superior orders of people’ oppressed those below.10 The growing trade and interdependence of the parts of the Atlantic economy was related to the extraordinary natural increase of the American population in the late eighteenth century. Subsequently the rates of immigration increased sensationally, as reflected in the passenger figures, which show it rising from

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8,000 per annum in 1820 to 300,000 by 1860.11 This was the other American Revolution and evidently there had been a great change in the dynamics of the human exchange across the Atlantic. Coexisting systems of migration The European re-peopling of America stretched over four centuries from the earliest years of the seventeenth century but for the first 200 years it was dominated by emigrants from the British Isles (and growing proportions of northern Irish, Scots and Germans). Nevertheless in the first 200 years the colonies passed through several phases of recruitment, exhibiting quite different forms of immigration, different systems which overlapped and evolved, sometimes in competition. These included the pioneer migrations at the very start, but soon associated with indenturing, convict migration, slavery and finally free self-financing mass migration, which became overwhelmingly the primary mode by the 1820s. Since North America was the most significant, and by far the largest destination of British emigrants, it looms largest over the question of the rise and causes of such migration. The flows issuing across the Atlantic bore a certain reciprocating relationship with conditions within the British Isles – which was, we contend, the progenitor of the subsequent mass migrations and ultimately involved tens of millions of people. The American colonies improvised a sequence of solutions to their labour needs. The principal patterns are not easily summarised since the immigrants did not conform to type and contained many erratics, like all other migrant flows. At the beginning the earliest pioneers were a mixture of people with capital who were persuaded that a new start could be made in the colonies, organised with families and servants. When new economic opportunities emerged – headed by the staples of tobacco and sugar – the labour needs soon outstretched the available supplies or indeed the reproductive power of the early colonial communities. The response took many forms – indenturing was one way of getting people across the Atlantic and this remained a central mechanism for 200 years – enabling poor strata of British (and German) societies to reach across the Atlantic. This was supplemented by another crucial stratagem – the importation of convicts on consignment through commercial channels to the colonies. The convicts included political prisoners, but most were common-or-garden felons who overflowed the penal facilities in Britain. It was a method used by other European powers – colonisation on the cheap, and a double solution. It accounted for perhaps 60,000 of the newcomers to the American colonies before Independence. Hugely more significant was the mobilisation of coerced migration out of Africa to serve the labour needs of the American colonies. This remained vital from about 1670 to the mid-nineteenth century and represented the overlapping

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of the north and south Atlantic migration systems, complementing each other as the facilities became fully articulated, primarily in response to the growth of international trading systems across the ocean by the mid-eighteenth century. Evidently, therefore, the role of ordinary British migration through these phases was complicated and ran in parallel with other streams – the indentured, the capitalists, Germans, convicts and slaves. Each category had functions to perform in the migration spectrum. The question here is how the British element was connected with the general shape of the American theatre of migration. Of the several attempts to characterise the incoming British immigrants the most influential was that of David Fischer, who identified persistent connections from certain parts of the country which became ‘folkways’, many of them Scotch/ Irish, and from certain regions of England, escaping out of negative conditions.12 E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield confirm the quick rise of English emigration in the 1620s to the 1660s and then of its rapid decline.13 Two-thirds of the emigrants went to the West Indies and one tenth to New England and the Mid-Atlantic settlements, the remainder to the southern plantations. Indentured emigrants comprised 50 per cent of the annual flow of the 1650s and greater still in subsequent decades. There were, however, high return rates and the upward tendency was broken temporarily in the 1640s when the net flow of people probably reversed, though resuming at a lower level after the Civil Wars in England.14 The scale of the flows is not easily charted, and there are competing calculations.15 Thus Gemery estimates that 380,000 English emigrants reached North America in the years 1630–1700. They fluctuated by the decade: for instance, 69,000 emigrated in the 1630s and 1640s, 42,000 in the 1660s and a mere 30,000 in the 1690s. The figures for the following century are no more secure but suggest relatively modest tendencies. Potter suggests 350,000 for the period 1700 to 1790, comprising one-third Ulster Scots, and a quarter of German origin; but Fogel calculated a figure of 663,000; meanwhile Gemery thinks it was 400,000. This is obviously unsatisfactory and unresolved and there is no agreed historical record: Gemery speaks of the ‘mosaic of movement that is at once fascinating and baffling’.16 From these rough estimates it is likely that eighteenth-century emigration to North America was no greater than that of the previous century. As Adam Smith points out, reproduction was much more important than net immigration in the demographic consolidation of the colonies.17 Moreover, from these fragmentary reconstructions, it is obvious that there was a phenomenal change in scale of emigration at the end of the eighteenth century. In broad terms it is clear that indenturing and slavery occupied a dominant role for most of the eighteenth century. The key change was the transition from indenture to free mass emigration late in the eighteenth century and ultimately the termination of slavery in the following century.

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There was clearly a major upsurge in immigration at the end of the eighteenth century and by the mid-nineteenth century various new patterns had emerged in British emigration. In the decades 1840 to 1914, 60 per cent of emigrants were male and now mostly urbanites. They were increasingly professional and skilled. But the destination of British emigrants shifted: in 1850, 72 per cent went to the United States and 26 per cent to the Empire; in 1913, 27 per cent went to the United States and 65 per cent to the Empire.18 The main engine propelling these migrations is conventionally assumed to be the difference in wage levels across the Atlantic. The differential was very large for the whole of the eighteenth century and must have been a dominant factor, even in the context of indenture arrangements. The access to land was even more telling for all people from an agrarian background. Christensen highlighted the crucial differential: ‘it took just over a week of work in the United States to earn the purchase price of an acre of land in 1790 compared to a year of work in Britain, less than one fiftieth the labor time’. By 1859 James Caird found that 30 times as much work was required in England to buy land compared with the United States.19 At some time in these long timetables there was a discontinuity, a sharp shift upwards in the sheer scale of emigration, first of all from the British Isles. Demographic propulsions Behind these broad long-term trends in the transatlantic story were structural forces governing the outflows from the British Isles. David Souden concludes that the first North American migrations from England were essentially demographic phenomena: they were a direct and accurate reflection of the population conditions in England and the response to labour requirements in the colonies. In the early seventeenth century, the time of Shakespeare’s later plays and the Pilgrim Fathers, there was a common upward demographic and economic force ‘impelling much movement’ inside and beyond England which was ‘a considerable outward impulse’ derived from specific demographic imperatives prevailing in England in those years. Souden is emphatic that ‘this was not simply an extension of already conditioned mobility’.20 People were on the move because of population build-up and because of the necessity to move in order to relieve local difficulties. ‘Without the efflux of labour from England’ there would have been some kind of forced check on the growing population. Thus the relationship between England and America was clear: emigration was a relief valve, an escape, a quasi-Malthusian response by way of emigration.21 Souden stresses the localised character of much movement within England, added to which were some longer-distance movements, especially to London. Rapid population growth in the decades between 1550 and 1640 created

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pressure and caused ‘considerable structural difficulty in the economy’, inducing certain internal migration flows from the north and west to the south and east. There were broad similarities between internal and external movements: ‘the important part of emigration may represent an extension of the ‘margin of migration’. Pressure had built up in seventeenth-century England, marked by ‘subsistence-derived’ peaks of adversity in the home population and was expressed also in a considerable outward impetus.22 The demographic history of England suggests that this migrational imperative weakened between 1680 and 1740: Reynell, in the 1670s, complained of the depletion of England’s population by the Civil War, by the outflow to the Irish plantations, by increased sickness and by emigration. But in the decades from the 1670s to the 1730s falling population numbers and rising wages reduced pressure; there was less mobility and less emigration. Thus, for Souden, emigration was directly correlated to ‘populations at the source end in England’. Economic and demographic conditions in England ‘undoubtedly produced a rapidly changing pool of available labour ready and willing to be tapped for employment in the colonies’.23 Emigration was fundamentally an expression of demographic conditions which had shifted decisively over the time span. Labour demands in the Caribbean were crucial at the start because tobacco and sugar were highly labour-intensive and lucrative. The vagrant poor were prominent among the emigrants at the start, but soon indentured labour became the primary response to the growing labour demands. In the early sugar boom white indentured labour was the mainstay, but was then superseded by African slavery. Barbados was deserted by whites as the shift to slavery began. It was increasingly difficult to get indentured labour in the 1670s. The relative costs of indentured and slave labour determined the choice, even though the streams were made more diverse by the incorporation of English convicts into the emigrant flows as well as new supplies of indentured labour from Europe. After 1740 there was a turnabout and the population in England grew at unprecedented rates, with emigration rates increasing significantly by the 1760s. The indentured trade remained at the centre of the migrant influx even though its recruits were often regarded as unsatisfactory: the contracted labouring people, for instance, were described as ‘vicious and destitute of means to live at home’. Many were indeed from the underbelly of the towns, though generally much more variegated than their reputations indicated.24 Indenturing through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the primary vehicle of British and Rhineland emigration to North America. In the English case the indentured emigrants were not necessarily the poorest. The contract trade was always an extension of the apprenticeship system in England and consequently a natural mode of recruitment. Colonial demand called the tune – stimulating or deterring by its promises and its provisions: colonial conditions determined ‘the intensity with which indentured servants were sought’.25

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Souden examined the role of indentured labour in the colonies – especially seeking ‘the point of view of the sending economy and the likely interrelationships with structures of demand for labour’.26 Indenturing was a form of assisted migration, but accompanied by rigorously off-putting conditions.27 There were degrees of substitution between the systems of migration – indenturing preceded slavery but operated in parallel and then, in some places, was replaced by slavery. It is probable that the supply of indentured labour from the British Isles was often insufficient – perhaps because of conditions in Britain – and slavery emerged to fill the gap. Souden declares explicitly, ‘A changing English supply of labour and changing differential colonial demands for labour shaped the institution [i.e. indenturing], its meteoric rise and its equally impressive decline’.28 Disjunctions of emigrant supplies The central question is how the renewed flows of free emigrants from the British Isles to North America were activated. Bernard Bailyn pursued the emigrants back to their origins and reached into the internal mobility systems already at work in the British Isles (see above, chapter 3).29 He then widened the panorama of mobility to identify other systems in motion – in the German states all the way down the Rhine, and then into Africa and the mobilisation of populations for America. Indeed Bailyn encompassed all the categories of migration – free, assisted, forced, slave, indentured, family and individual. He also exposed the agencies and channels which facilitated the flows, mainly capitalistic and invested with ‘a powerful self-intensifying impetus’.30 Land speculation ‘helped propel the migrations forward’ with many networks of emigration agents busily in operation.31 In 1767 the British parliament disallowed an Act passed in the Georgia legislature to subsidise immigration and resettlement of British subjects. This suggests an urgent colonial demand for immigrants and an equally powerful resistance in official Britain.32 It was part of the pressure, which was manifest in the often controversial activities of American emigration agents operating in Britain. Bailyn calls them the ‘entrepreneurs of migration’ who ‘served the needs of land speculators in every region of British North America’.33 They were the instruments directly involved in siphoning off rural folk from particular places. The system did not operate in a free-flowing fashion and was subject to blockages and widespread anxieties. Indenture was a symptom of the failure of free immigrants in sufficient numbers to come forward without special inducements and assistance. These stratagems on each side of the North Atlantic demonstrated clearly enough that the emigration system had not yet sprung into full vigour, into enough life. The conditions for mass emigration had not yet matured to the point where it was connecting positively the conditions at each side of the

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Atlantic. It also suggests that the requisite conditions emerged only in the following half century, the time of the maturation of the fully functioning and free-flowing migratory reciprocation in the Atlantic world. Indenturing puzzles Indenture systems had been widespread in the recruitment of eighteenth-century emigrants. In northern Ireland, for example, there was a clear intersection of supply and demand. Thus in January 1761 advertising was directed to indenture candidates ‘that will go on redemption or as a servant’. In 1771 the colonists sought skilled people to go to North Carolina for four or five years; they were offered full passage and the needs of the voyage. The concurrent advertising for Nova Scotia was precise: such people would be free of tithes, ‘and their civil and religious liberties fully secured’.34 It is easier to explain the uses of indenturing than the final demission of the system, which came abruptly at the end of the eighteenth century. Charlotte Erickson considers the puzzling termination of indenturing and labour contracting in America in the early nineteenth century. She points out that, as early as the 1770s, German and Irish redemptioners had become more important than the indentured British. Moreover it was becoming increasingly difficult to enforce the indenture arrangements. Indenturing, of course, entailed a voluntary curtailment of an individual’s freedom, but the decline of indenturing, continuous from the 1790s, was not connected with any new ideology or sentiment related to the American Revolution, even though the question of liberty was at its centre. The indenturing system disappeared by 1819, the time of the last shipment of contracted servants. Legislation, surprisingly, was not involved in this quiet transition – the system was evidently and simply overtaken by the growth of the Americanborn population and by the advent of ‘massive and self-financed immigration’.35 The decline of the indenturing system remains a mystery, though it clearly coincided with the emergence of mass self-financing emigration to North America by the 1820s. Indenturing in reality had been a form of inducement, a subsidy, a lure, an enabling mechanism to recruit poor labourers, a special enhancement to prime the flow. The ending of indenturing was essentially connected to the great change in the supply and demand circumstances underlying the evolving emigration systems. By 1820 conditions had changed so much that the flow of free emigration had become self-sustaining – and this meant that the underlying conditions regarding indenturing had been deleted, suggesting powerfully that some form of ‘discontinuity’ had intervened. Transport costs fell in the 1820s as more immigrants were able to afford to finance their own migration, and the supply of self-financed immigrants ‘rose spectacularly from 1816 onwards’.36 But people were less disposed to be

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indentured in any case. Erickson argued that there was no diminution of demand for labour in the United States economy in the nineteenth century – instead the supply of self-funding immigration simply overshot the prevailing needs of employers (except in a minority of cases). This then indicates that emigration had changed in its character – and somehow even the relatively poor were now willing and able to cross the Atlantic by their own funding.37 The received explanation of the critical transition has several components. First there was ‘the massive growth of voluntary and self-financed immigration’ into the United States and somehow it was self-generated. Second, ‘As more immigrants were able to afford to finance their own emigration, the supply of self-financed immigrants rose secularly from 1816 onwards’.38 Third, it was increasingly difficult to retain servants against their will. Fourth was the emergence of mass immigration, so that ‘Long before the Great Famine, the Irish were finding their way to construction sites without having become contract labourers’. Fifth, it was clear that ‘Immigrants with limited means found their way to the western regions of settlement’, partly because they were assured of income. In addition, companies were prepared to pay passages without debts being incurred: the inducements were heavy and advertisements and assistance were bountiful. And thus ‘The scale of this voluntary, largely family-financed immigration (much of it through the cash earnings of earlier immigrants, a method not possible for indentured workers) and the temporary willingness of recent immigrants, indeed the spur of necessity and ambition, to take disagreeable jobs spurned by natives, is a proximate answer to the question why contract labour did not work in America’.39 Moreover American wages were high and offered a sufficient incentive to enable immigrants to obtain loans for their passages.40 In all these propositions there is assumed a radical transition in the scale and character of the free emigration systems emerging in the second decade of the nineteenth century, towards identifiably modern mass migration. Central to the transition was the emergence of a much enhanced suggestibility among the receptive populations in the British Isles. They were much sought in North America: for instance, A.C. Buchanan, chief Emigration Officer in Quebec in the years 1828 to 1838, summed up the typical or best type of emigrant – not someone destitute but a ‘small farmer who has a large family, and perhaps an unexpired lease’, in effect someone who could raise money for the voyage and have a bit left over to help him get started in Canada. Such a person ‘disposes of his interest, by which he raises a little money, and added to his little stock of other useful articles, perhaps a web or two of coarse linen, and a thread of their own make … and provisions of his own raising, off he goes to America’.41 Canada experienced a rapid increase in immigration between 1818 and 1830 and was sometimes the favoured destination of British emigrants, notably to Ontario in those years.42 Alan Armstrong noted that many British emigrants were fairly

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humble rural folk: ‘There were few landowning yeomen in England, and the prospect of becoming landowners in America was an undoubted attraction to many agriculturalists’.43 The new surge in emigration from the British Isles was almost entirely in the form of unadulterated free enterprise. It was a variant of laissez-faire, a spontaneous movement of ordinary people managing to cross the Atlantic with minimal governmental intervention. Very few of the great emigrations from Britain to North America were subject to organised schemes such as the Petworth system (see above, chapter 4) or indeed the product of anything like official purpose. Mass British emigration was one of the great achievements of the Victorian Age and virtually coterminous with that era. Yet it was not unorganised because, in reality, it entailed complicated planning, funding, information and practical arrangements, which were mainly undertaken within family systems or by individual initiatives. They were supported by a panoply of infrastructures but these were mainly privately achieved, especially in the North American theatre. Before 1840, the progenitors of the movement were predominantly British and mostly from rural backgrounds – though the trend towards urban origins was already well established by mid-century. There were many who sought land with a passion and an obsession that was still a feasible idea at that stage, probably less so later on. Subsequently there was a trend towards labour migration, often outside the confines of the family. In 1975 Colin Newbury declared that ‘most of Europe’s 50 million emigrants were labour recruits, destined for positions as wage-earners in the small towns and cities of the New World, rather than as prairie homesteaders or out-back sheep farmers’. The dominance of this form of migration was restricted until 1850: before that emigration was mixed and was more likely to be family-based and rural in origin and, indeed, British and Irish. The lure of land Land was at the centre of the activation of family-based emigration from Britain and it was a rural phenomenon. The late eighteenth-century departees’ accounts of their emigration are full of explicit reference to the question of land availability and its costs. Thus in 1761 a grand scheme was launched to recruit 500 Ulster families who were to be offered precise terms with grants of 200 acres with fifty acres for each child, rent free for ten years.44 Land, for many decades, was at the centre of the recruitment systems, at the core of the relationship between the sending and receiving ends of the system. In his detailed study of British emigrants in mid-nineteenth-century Ohio, William Van Vugt re-affirmed the quest for land ‘as a widespread motivating force’: the British immigrants assimilated well and were ‘more similar to the native-born Buckeyes than different’. The averageness of the immigrants, and their similarities with previous intakes, rendered them ‘mostly invisible’ in their new home in Ohio.45 Land

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dominated the migrant exchanges well into the nineteenth century, though it eventually faded as the complexion of the incoming British immigrants changed permanently. The travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote of the great movements westward in North America of the incoming European peoples. He wondered about their mentalities and concluded that typically: ‘Villagers did not pack up and travel in steerage in emigrant ships in order to become villagers in America. They wanted land of their own. So landowners were often lonely. But there was an enviable dignity in their proprietorial solitude’.46 Land was a lure and, as Ian Whyte says, in the early nineteenth century the typical American immigrant ‘moved as part of a family and went into agriculture’.47 The obsession with land was perhaps an extension of the yearning within the dislocated rural communities in the British Isles in which employment and access to land declined as the population continued to rise. The inheritors of the emerging industrial/urban world being forged in the early decades of the nineteenth century were the generation from which issued the first mass emigrants. Yet the extent to which British or Irish working folk quested after land is much debated. The question hinges on two elements in the early Victorian age. One was the loss of land by the proletarianised rural population clinging on to what they had by custom, and their desire to regain their lost world. This was part of the politics of land reform but also of the allotment movement, often regarded as a better option than emigration.48 Labour historians have suggested that the desire for land survived among a cross-section of countryside communities, including agricultural labourers: they had not lost their emotional, perhaps atavistic, attachment to the soil.49 On the other side of the rural contest were the owners of the land and the farming community, who began to favour both emigration and allotments as ways of minimising poor rates – means by which people were levered off the land to become more self-reliant. At the dawn of the age of mass migration, in the 1820s, many landlords were beginning to promote emigration as the most effective solution to the increasingly obvious imbalance and crisis in the rural world – its excess labour supply, rising underemployment, falling prices and profits, and the rapidly increasing burden of poor relief. In all parts of the kingdom there emerged schemes to export the problem, first to Canada and then to other destinations, even to Australia, captured in the despised phrase ‘shovelling out paupers’. This was the juncture at which the structural upheavals in the rural world (as depicted in the accompanying chapters) began to manifest in the outwards surge of rural people, namely, of course, to the nearest best prospects of urban employment, but also to America and beyond. The emigration solution was more vocal, at least for a few years at the end of the 1820s. A tense debate was played out in many parts of the country, even voices in Parliament advocating the return of land to the labourer classes, as

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opposed to emigration. William Cobbett supported such dreams and once denounced all emigration as places where ‘people would either die speedily or … lead the most degraded and miserable lives’.50 Peopling the United States The long nineteenth century became the Age of Migration, dominated by the great intakes into the United States which received about 35 million in all. The great surge in immigration greatly boosted the growth of the United States population even though the rate of natural increase remained paramount.51 John Bodnar scanned the main interpretations placed upon this vast phenomenon by American historians. One version sees the immigrants as essentially ‘the children of capitalism’ who were responding to ‘The imperatives of capitalism [which] must be served’. Another version sees them as ‘desperate individuals fleeing poverty and disorder’ who were off-loaded out of Europe and into the inhospitable urban ghettoes of the new American economy. More positive is the image of the American immigrants as ‘humble newcomers bearing the proud, longestablished traditions’ which they used to cope with the cities as successful newcomers. They were aspiring individuals who cut their ties with their homelands and sought new opportunities, transforming themselves from peasants into acquisitive modern individuals.52 Similarly Dirk Hoerder takes a functional view of emigration in the American sphere with labour migration serving the capitalist economy of the United States which was the great beneficiary, helped by the ‘skilfully developed … cultural mystiques of unlimited opportunities’ for ‘success, freedom and equality, and absence of discrimination’. The start of industrialisation in the United States, by 1860 (and also in Germany) presented a new phase in the history of the displacement of labour. Hoerder outlines five stages, of which the last is ‘the migration of unskilled labour and domestics … connected with the population pressures in agrarian areas and the abolition of serfdom in the nineteenth century’. But ‘plebeian mass migration’ emerged mostly in the 1880s, the unskilled and underemployed, usually of peasant origins, moving to industrial jobs in the United States.53 The problem with these categories is that the immigrant host was so vast and heterogeneous that every version was represented; the inflows of migrants did not fall into pigeon-holes in any consistent way. Mostly they resembled the general population from which they departed: systematic selectivity was unusual and difficult to verify. By the mid-nineteenth century the flows of emigrants from Britain to North America reflected the emergence of huge labour demands and opportunities in America and a great widening of the income-differential that activated these great flows of humanity across the Atlantic. The process was extremely variegated and

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subject to an infinity of localised and personal circumstances. But, when all such variations are taken into account (and they are stressed by Charlotte Erickson), there remains the larger phenomenon. Erickson herself repeatedly declared that emigration was an expression of ‘structural changes’: ‘Migration was a means of dealing with structural dislocations in the early phases of industrialisation in Europe and at the same time helped to provide the donors with cheaper food and raw materials for cheaper consumer goods’.54 Thus among the emigrants to the United States in 1831were ‘those who feared or disliked industrializing Britain and took a dim view of its future, though many of them may have been beneficiaries of its economic growth’. Emigration was ‘part of the repertoire of dealing with change’. Moreover people were leaving ‘traditional crafts who even outnumbered male emigrants from agriculture, and they outnumbered those leaving modern industries’. Thus handloom workers were over-represented among those of the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s.55 One of Erickson’s own propositions, based on the intricate analysis of shipping lists and literary sources, is that until mid-century, English emigration was mainly rural and only later did the outflow became much more urban in character. ‘It now seems clear that by the 1880s nearly all of them [English emigrants] were migrating from towns and cities’. Before that time the agricultural labourers were more prominent and were often accompanied by the sons of farmers.56 The theme of so much of Erickson’s view is that there was more volition and variability in the emigrants’ choices than the more mechanical explanations allow. Thus she emphasises the importance of village-level analysis and description. She stresses such factors as the frequency of emigration after the death of a spouse or parent, or emigration as connected with the desire to end a marriage, family scandal, or some personal dissipation. Added to this is the importance of chain migration, which was usually conveyed by the vehicle of family migration. But, Erickson insists, ‘the obstacles to discovering who the emigrants were, as compared with those who stayed behind, and the networks by which they moved to and adapted to their new homes are enormous’.57 It is extremely difficult to deduce general systematic correlations about individual or even regional behaviour. At the same time she is especially critical, with Baines, of any explanation of the nineteenth-century mass overseas movement as a mechanical response ‘to population growth and industrialisation’ which ran the ‘risk of oversimplifying an intricate and complex process’.58 Nevertheless, Erickson is forthright in declaring that the structural determinants reigned clearly enough – it was more a matter of the great variability within the general responses to the changes.59 In the North American case the immigrants from Britain were, until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, primarily rural folk and their families. They were likely to have been slightly above average in income, capital and education, though responsible for more offspring with worsening prospects in Britain. When the Irish emigrated in large numbers they were undoubtedly rural people and supplied much of the muscle power for the development of the rising

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American economy in the 1840s and after. Beyond mid-century, though Britain continued to industrialise, its levels of migration continued to increase: the emigrants from Britain were drawn by the positive income differential, which itself was a consequence of the rapid growth of the United States economy and its industrialisation, now emulating Britain itself and able to recruit industrial labour from Britain’s own industrial workforce. American historian of ethnic migration, David Gerber, claims that ‘emigrants to [North America] are not confused, rootless people who are hostages to forces beyond their control’. Rather they were much more self-transplanted; similarly John Bodnar says they were essentially ‘pragmatic’ people, with a flexible, risktaking, modern state of mind: ‘a typical immigrant mentality had been that of a venturesome conservative, who employs new strategies in pursuit of recognizably traditional aspirations’.60 Gerber also stresses the idea of European peasantries seeking rational betterment and renewal: ‘International migration was a strategy for avoiding proletarianisation and might fill multiple practical needs: permanent resettlement; temporary work abroad while earning money to be brought back to the homeland to ensure stability in the new economy; and earning money to provide remittances sent to family at home’.61 The avoidance of proletarianisation may have been the grail of emigrants, yet most of them became wage-earners in a modernising and industrialising economy. These population intakes into the United States bore a particular relationship to the Industrial Revolution occurring on the other side of the globe. There may have been systematic but unidentified uniformities in the recruitments, possibly a tendency towards pre-industrial throwbacks; they certainly coincided with extraordinary changes in the British Isles. The United States was receiving its great intakes of immigrants at the advent of mass emigration out of western Europe, waves of people who had been disengaged from the old rural world, some more obviously expelled by adversity, many yearning for the lost rural dream; often unsettled and restless people. The peopling of colonial America and the new United States had passed through a sequence of phases which bore a complicated and shifting relationship with conditions in the homelands of Britain and Europe. The detailed patterning in the recruitments is elusive; the social psychology of the emigrants was highly variegated and probably contained atavistic aspirations for pre-industrial ways of life. Their migrations responded to the extraordinary changes occurring in the British Isles, notably in the centre of industrialising England, our next site of exit. Notes 1 See Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe overseas’. 2 This is based on Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Civilization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 1–3. I am grateful to David Soskice for the reference.

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3 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: (Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 Douglass C. North and R.P. Thomas, The Growth of the American Economy to 1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 7. 5 Ibid., p. 5. 6 Ibid., pp. 27, 39. 7 David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 292. 8 Susan Hardman Moore, Introduction to Abandoning America: Life-stories from Early New England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), and Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 1, 3, 4, 145. 9 North and Thomas, American Economy, p. 47. 10 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, n.d.), pp. 531–3. 11 North and Thomas, American Economy, 227–8. 12 Fischer, Albion’s Seed. 13 E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London: Arnold, 1981; with new Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 14 See Hardman Moore, Introduction to Abandoning America. 15 See Susan B. Carter et al. (eds), Historical Statistics of the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 1, Table Ad 1–2. 16 Henry A. Gemery, ‘European emigration to North America, 1700–1820: numbers and quasi-numbers’, Perspectives in American History, new series, 1, 283–342. 17 Confirmed by Henry A. Gemery, ‘The white population of the colonial United States’, in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (eds), A Population History of North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Nutritional levels in the colonies were much superior to those in Europe; see pp. 15, 175, 179. 18 See Richards, Britannia’s Children, chap. 10. 19 P.P. Christensen, ‘Land abundance and cheap horsepower in the mechanization of the antebellum United States economy’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 18 (1981), 312. 20 Marks and Richardson, Introduction to Marks and Richardson, International Labour Migration, pp. 6–7. 21 Ibid. 22 D. Souden, ‘English indentured servants and the trans-Atlantic colonial economy’, in Marks and Richardson, International Labour Migration, p. 28. 23 Ibid., p. 32. 24 Ibid., p. 33. 25 Ibid., p. 8. 26 Ibid., p. 235, fn 6. 27 Ibid., ‘Introduction’. 28 Ibid., p. 20. 29 Bailyn, Voyagers, p. xx. 30 Bailyn, Sometimes an Art, p. 205.

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31 Ibid., p. 211. 32 Bailyn, Voyagers, p. 53. 33 Ibid. p. 355. 34 Belfast News-Letter, Jan. 1761; 31 March 1771. 35 Charlotte Erickson, ‘Why did contract labour not work in nineteenth-century United States?’, in Marks and Richardson, International Labour Migration, p. 35. 36 Ibid., p. 40. 37 See the close analysis by James Boyd, ‘The Rhine exodus of 1816/17 within the developing German Atlantic world’, Historical Journal (Oct. 2015), 1–25. 38 Erickson, ‘Why did contract labour not work in nineteenth-century United States?’, p. 40. 39 Ibid. p. 48. 40 On the question of the gap between American and English wage rates see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘American colonial incomes, 1650–1774’, Economic History Review 69 (2016), 54–77. 41 A.C. Buchanan, letter to Wilmot Horton, 23 May 1827, in British Parliamentary Papers: Emigration vol. 2 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968), p. 435. 42 See Marvin Macinnis, ‘The population of Canada in the nineteenth century’, in Haines and Steckel, Population History, pp. 371–83. 43 W. Allan Armstrong in Adams (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Victorian Era, vol. 2. The special propensity of the Irish emigrants at large to stay the cities is specifically rejected by D.H. Akenson in Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Protestants 1815–1922: An International Perspective (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), p. 66. 44 Belfast Newsletter, Jan. 1761; 31 March 1771; see 2013 notes 19–20. 45 Van Vugt, British Buckeyes, pp. 219, 221. 46 J. Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance (London: Picador, 1996), p. 127. 47 Ian Whyte, ‘Migration and settlement’, in Chris Williams (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 281. 48 On allotment movements see Jeremy Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873 (Woodbridge: Boydell for the Royal Historical Society, 2002). 49 See Roger Wells, ‘Historical trajectories: English social welfare systems, rural riots, popular politics, agrarian trade unions, and allotment provision, 1793–1896’, Southern History 25 (2003), 86–7. 50 Cobbett, Rural Rides, p. 301. 51 See Michael R. Haines, ‘The white population of the United States, 1790–1920’, in Haines and Steckel, Population History, p. 316. 52 John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. xv–xvi. 53 Dirk Hoerder (ed.), Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 2, 4, 6. 54 Erickson, Leaving England, see pp. 23 and 33; p. 3. 55 Ibid., p. 166. 56 Ibid., p. 28. 57 Ibid., p. 11.

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58 Ibid., p. 15. 59 For a re-assertion of the priority of the economic motivation of most American immigration see Max Paul Friedman, ‘Beyond “voting with their feet”: towards a conceptual history of “America” in European migrant sending communities, 1860s to 1914’, Journal of Social History (Spring, 2007). 60 Bodnar, The Transplanted, pp. xv–xvi. 61 David Gerber, American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 71, 79.

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Migration in Shropshire and the English Midlands

Inland beginnings Landlocked Shropshire experienced some of the earliest phases of British industrialisation, notably in the Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale district, deep inland on the River Severn. Precocious industrialisation came to Shropshire by the 1770s and performed its dynamic and disruptive functions in classic but localised form. Shropshire and the Midlands provide instructive examples of mobility induced by rapid economic and demographic change, redistributing and dislocating its population in certain key districts. Here, far from the ports of emigration, began the sudden growth of the modern iron industry in the mid- and late eighteenth century. Shropshire had been an essentially rural county: its own agriculture followed the national patterns of increasing commercialisation and rising productivity, performed by a relatively stable labour force. Within this context there quickly emerged large pockets of new industry in Shropshire, located between rural Wales in the west and, later, to the east, the rising mammoth of nineteenth-century industry in the Black Country. Movements of people shifted and changed as the regions of Britain altered their alignments over the following century of fluctuating industrialisation. Shropshire’s distance from the ports made it less likely to yield emigrants; nevertheless there were significant movements of people, some of whom eventually became emigrants. Incipient industrialisation By the last decades of the eighteenth century, the new industries of Shropshire – coal mines, ironworks and potteries – were, despite population growth, stretching against the limits of local labour supplies. The expanding industrial villages were soon absorbing migrating labour from adjacent counties and local parishes,

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usually from within fifty miles but also from more distant parts of rural midWales. Unskilled labour tended to come from the nearer localities, skilled labour drawn more distantly. The actual movements, often quite small, were mesmerising: the common sequence was for incoming migrants first to take jobs in local farms which served the expanding coalfields: for instance, some of the incoming people from Bala in North Wales became horse drovers along the Severn Gorge. They were the forward recruits for industry – their sons and grandsons were more likely to find work in the mines, ironworks and potteries, all in the same industrial zone. The growth of industry required an expansion also in new local housing stock, though many of the incoming population began their new life as squatters. The growth of the new industrial communities required a doubling of the housing stock within a generation. Similar pressure was also placed on food supplies for the new industrial population, providing a stimulus to local agriculture. Rural wages were buoyant and this factor probably stemmed any incipient outflow of population from the sector. War and poor seasons helped to sustain the inflated prices for farmers through to 1813–15. There were severe local food shortages in the 1790s, indeed fears of famine, attended also by the outbreak of food riots in 1794. During this phase local farming expanded and even exported food from Shropshire during some of the war years. Industrialisation had complicated consequences for the local communities and this was demonstrated in the mobility of the people. The census of 1851 revealed considerable numbers of non-local people living in the old industrial parishes of Shropshire, people born in the counties of Montgomery and Radnor, but also substantial numbers from Ireland, especially Counties Clare and Mayo, people who had arrived here many years before the Great Famine. Amongst these incomers were erratic additions, even a few Poles, Italians and a Prussian jeweller – demonstrating the apparently random centripetal motion of labour towards Salopian employment opportunities. At the same time there were some identifiable outward movements, notably of young women who migrated temporarily or permanently to work in London gardens or into domestic service. Even so, they were more likely to take work nearer home – plenty were employed from a very young age picking ironstone at the pit head.1 In the midst of these reciprocating movements there had been an ongoing expansion of total population numbers, complicating the story of the supply and demand for new labour. In Madeley parish, for instance, the population had expanded from 2,690 in 1782 to 4,758 in 1801, and almost a third were incomers. The clear income differential between industry and the countryside was the vital magnet until the 1820s. By then the industrial Black Country had finally caught up with, and overtaken, the Salopian pioneers. In the following decades Shropshire wages were already falling behind those in adjacent regions.

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Thus the original meteoric growth was not sustained and this trajectory explains the resulting pattern of migration. In the 1780s Salop produced 40 per cent of the nation’s iron output but this was soon overtaken by other regions: by 1805 it was down to 22 per cent, then 10 per cent in 1830, and a mere 2 per cent in 1869. Inevitably the old magnet for labour had become de-sensitised in these years even though its aggregate output rose: the region began to shed some of its skilled labour.2 There was therefore an ongoing and reversing structural change in the Shropshire community which created special pressures and opportunities upon its inhabitants. From the 1770s the population had been in flux, due to changes in industry and agriculture, but eventually both reduced their demands for labour, and the county became a sending community. Rural turbulence Farmers and the rural community in Shropshire had faced turbulent times as parts of the county experienced the impact of industrial growth and then relative decline. At the start they had responded effectively to the demands of industrial and population growth. But the severe oscillation of food prices after the French Wars was extremely difficult for the entire rural sector and eventually led to a slow evacuation, as in West Sussex and the Isle of Man in the same years. Farm product prices halved between 1812 and 1815, and then fluctuated wildly. Agricultural growth had encouraged a greater scale of production and the consolidation of farms, but by 1816 many of the now oversized farms were no longer able to retain or find tenants: farmers were quitting and landlords were reducing rents by 10–20 per cent. Farmers also cut back on labour, shaking out population in the process: it was reported bleakly that ‘Many labourers were in distress for want of work’.3 Land had become overvalued: the entire sector in Salop had found easy credit during the inflationary times; now loans were being called in, and farmers found themselves overcommitted. As J.P. Dodd described it, the essential mechanism was thus: Many could not stand the shock and such defaulters jeopardised the stability of country bankers who were themselves obliged to suspend payments … [as a result of ] the inability of farmers to meet all kinds of liabilities, they turned off every farm servant that could possibly be spared, male and female alike.

In essence, cyclical change was loaded on top of the long-term structural transition which had caused great increases in rural productivity. The big new farms were full of underemployed people, probably because the landlords’ revolution had been extremely labour-saving. This created redundancy at the very time when the rural population was increasing at an unprecedented rate – thereby

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exacerbating the entire problem. These conditions now left much of the rural population high and dry. The fate of these off-loaded people is not known, but ‘some of the smaller farmers themselves became parish paupers’. Prices fell further by 1827, and took long to recover. Here was the national rural story in miniature.4 Another symptom of the distress in Shropshire – which was both industrial and agricultural – was the outbreak of ‘Captain Swing’ episodes in several locations in 1830. At Whitchurch for instance the Swing rioters threatened farmers with the declaration that ‘Your blood will be demanded’. In the outcome some of the rioters were prosecuted: one was transported and two were hanged.5 The case of Highley At some distance from those parishes which had hosted the first stages of infant industrialisation in Shropshire was a perimeter of less-directly affected communities – one of which was Highley, a small, mainly rural parish in mid-Shropshire, just south of Bridgnorth on the river Severn. The 1780s had witnessed the exploitation of mineral resources in the parish, which was associated with the doubling of population to the mid-nineteenth century, natural growth, and an inflow of migrants – miners coming in from longer distances, others from within ten miles, serving the coalpits and quarries. The industrial development sustained the local population growth until mining fell into decline in the 1860s.6 The parallel story in the rural life of Highley was quite different: the rural population increased in the eighteenth century, especially among the landless labourers, some of whom were absorbed by local industry. The disposition of land in the parish had moved decisively: by the nineteenth century one large farm occupied a third of the parish, and most of the rest was divided into five farms. ‘Engrossment’ was a continuing pressure which had been at work since the seventeenth century and by 1871 two big farms were in total dominance. As Gwyneth Nair puts it, ‘social advancement became even more difficult. The acquisition of land became a near impossibility’. The incentive or compulsion to migrate was clear to all the sons of labourers. In the mid-nineteenth century Highley was a remote rural community responding to the twin effects of structural change in agriculture and also to the short-term cyclical shifts in the nearby industrialising economy. The demography of the parish of Highley has been studied in great detail, drawing on the Mormons’ computerisation of the census data of 1881: this has enabled analysts to investigate all the people who were born in Highley – those who had stayed in the parish as well as those who had settled elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The indexed versions of the 1871 and 1881 censuses expose in detail the internal mobility of the population of the previous decades: virtually

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all people who left their birthplaces and settled elsewhere in the country have been traced in closely disaggregated detail (though not, unfortunately, those who left the country altogether).7 The population of Highley fell from 409 in 1861 to 193 in 1871, then began to recover when a local mine was reopened. The agricultural population had declined most rapidly – just like other rural parishes in the county. Thus an identified total of 254 left the parish and relocated elsewhere in the country. The out-migrants were primarily the young, who seem to have left mostly in their late teens; they resettled mainly within sixteen miles of the parish; and they mainly moved eastwards.8 Mostly they departed to the nearest market town where they gained employment in rural-related jobs (as wagoners, draymen, blacksmiths and gardeners); less than a third went to the big towns. The paradox is that, despite the limited radius of such rural movement, the great new cities, even as early as 1851, had derived 50 per cent of their populations from elsewhere, definitive proof of the scale of internal migration. The absolute decline of rural populations in south Shropshire finally set in only in the later nineteenth century. Highley was a middling rural parish losing a large proportion of its people, mostly young folk, who migrated short distances; they were predominantly male, and followed the decline of agriculture and its reduced use of labour. It was essentially a rural community shrinking in an expanding world of growth. There was a grand adjustment occurring here, even though it appears undramatic in the censuses. Most young women were still following the old pattern: they were going into service. In general the outcome suggests a series of responses to reduced opportunities in agriculture, propelling the people of Highley outward. It was not simply a matter of ‘a flight from the land’, but short-distance relocation, a pattern extending through the nineteenth century. A Canadian odyssey Neither census data, nor any other, provide detailed nominal information about actual emigration as opposed to internal migration. From Highley, for example, we have no idea if, or how many, people went abroad either directly or by some subsequent movement, whether permanent or temporary. We cannot say if internal mobility was a rehearsal for emigration. We have recourse to individual cases but examples of actual emigration in any detail are rare and, possibly, atypical. Even so, most cases offer glimpses of the context which prompted such movements. Adjustments working in the local economy operated over the long term, and some Shropshire examples conformed to the idea of ‘induced migration’ from the county, often mediated by ‘cultural’ considerations. One solitary instance was that of William Farmer (1794–1880) from Sutton Maddock, six miles north of Bridgnorth, who emigrated to Canada. He was

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from a Shropshire farming family, described as ‘lesser gentry, well-to-do’ and derived from generations of farmers. He had experienced the fluctuating fortunes of farming in the 1820s but the exact precipitants of his emigration to Canada early in 1834 are elusive. William Farmer had married for the second time in 1830 and the family were prosperous folk, but apparently discombobulated by the times.9 It was much later remarked of Farmer that he had been a man of considerable industry but conservative in outlook and the political changes taking place in England in the 1830s greatly disturbed him. With Parliamentary and Municipal Reform Acts and the abolition of the Corn Laws he saw danger signals to the strata of society to which he and his family belonged and he decided the best course would be to emigrate to Canada and start a new life there.10

This was a retrospectively constructed version of the emigration story and lacking detail: for example, the Corn Laws were not repealed until long after Farmer’s emigration. William Farmer’s emigration was unusual because he chartered a vessel for the departure (an echo of the Hentys’ transit from Sussex to Swan River a little earlier). The emigration was opposed by some members of his wife’s family, which led to subsequent inheritance controversies. Farmer had disposed of a very considerable estate in Shropshire in March 1834: he sold off the farms which had sustained a continuous family connection for 250 years – this ancient connection was now severed. The Farmers travelled from Sutton Maddock by a large and roomy coach, drawn by four fine grey horses, to Birkenhead to embark on the Kingston, a sailing ship of 430 tons. Travelling in comparative comfort, Farmer was accompanied by his family, together with a general house servant, a maid and a nurse. As well, there were ten other families – forty-five people including a lawyer, tutor, journeymen and craftsmen, mason, gardeners, blacksmith, millwright, waiter, wheelwright and a sawyer. In all Farmer took fifty-five people with him. It was a migration which carried a perfect sample of the old rural community, held together by traditional paternalism and dependence, and replanted in eastern Canada. The transatlantic voyage lasted fifty-one days and was reported in the Canadian papers. On arrival Farmer bore all the expenses of the party, including the renting of houses. He took over 2,400 acres of land at Gatineau, where he resettled on the Gatineau River near the Rapids that bore his name.11 He built a huge house to accommodate everybody in the party. In 1835 he erected a sawmill and also flour and grist mills and engaged about 100 employees in addition to his own immigrants. In 1843 he constructed a dam on the river. But

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in 1846 Farmer sold out and moved to a place near Hamilton: he became prominent in the Ottawa district and had places named after him.12 Evidently, therefore, Farmer was a very considerable capitalist emigrant, a family emigrant with a large entourage and much ready capital. People like Farmer were probably made suggestible to emigration by the complicated circumstances at home and the exposure of opportunities in Canada. But he was a hard-headed, decisive person, with options, deciding on better chances in Canada. He was out of the upper echelons of Shropshire life, but also part of the self-initiating drift outwards. The impact of letters extolling the possibilities of emigration was evidently important in many cases. One such Salopian correspondent was Henry Richards of Bridgnorth who went to New Zealand in 1850. He himself wrote letters encouraging people to emigrate – even those without capital – people who ‘will work and those who have small capital not sufficient for England to come out’. In New Zealand they would be able to make money if they were industrious. He spoke of ‘ten men of different trades shrewd and cautious who came here 3 years ago from Wellington [Shropshire] without £10 between them. Each has now at least £500’.13 John Griffiths (28) and his wife Margaret (23), together with his brotherin-law, emigrated to America from a village near Oswestry in north Shropshire in 1840. Their emigration may have been prompted by a connection with the Mormons, in whose midst they settled in Hancock County, Illinois. They were from modest labouring stock without much means, but evidently not destitute. The new immigrants were successful: by 1847 Griffiths had bought an eightyacre farm which was soon expanded with plenty of livestock and equipment. Their few surviving letters back to Shropshire ‘emanate a spirit of contentment and satisfaction’ with their circumstances in Illinois. They extolled not only their better living standards but also the democratic values, religious tolerance and extraordinary opportunities America offered, though they were greatly disturbed by the violence of the Civil War. As they said, ‘this is a good country for a man as a chance to become independent if he has his health’. The Griffiths were prepared to help the passages of their kinsfolk to Illinois –in 1865 a second-class cabin fare cost $35. In 1870 their township had six English-born fellow farmers, and there were 359 natives from England and Wales in the County.14 They were of course part of the flows derived from across the British Isles, never easy to categorise. Direct testimony from emigrants tends to be shy of the conditions which prompted the emigration decision: it rarely touches upon the actual decision and its back-story.15 But such correspondence, often by implication only, made comparisons with the differences to home – most notably in prices and living standards; they were indeed a straight recital of such comparisons. They relate

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not only to the quintessential ‘differential’ between home and away, but also strongly suggest the most obvious reason for their expatriation. Clearly there were many different circumstances under which some people were able to opt out of Salopian life in these decades – poverty and reduced prospects prominent among them. Some of the emigrants were wealthy, some not so. Only rarely did any of the strain of circumstances express itself unequivocally in migration, still less directly in emigration. Poverty was the cause of, and also the impediment to, movement. There was a case in Madeley in 1881: William Potts, with his wife and three children, made a request to the parochial authorities for help to emigrate to Queensland. In this instance the Madeley Union of Parishes agreed to find £5 from its common fund – a refined piece of lubrication in the long rusty machinery of adjustment. It is not certain that Potts was a farming figure, for this was a time when miners were leaving in numbers to the United States.16 Contiguous Staffordshire In adjacent Staffordshire there were parallel developments, though the course of industrialisation was more comprehensive and cumulative than in Shropshire. Before industrialisation, Staffordshire had been a thinly populated county, relatively infertile, with poor transport and facilities. A network of early towns had evolved by the seventeenth century but they were restricted in terms of their function and willingness to absorb incoming migrants. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a total transformation associated with the advent of the Potteries and ‘the Black Country’. Staffordshire became a powerful attraction for any mobile population, tapping and absorbing people from a large belt of predominantly rural counties in midland and southern England. The iron trade was central in the new economy over many decades, but was subject to severe fluctuations; eventually it fell into decline which induced long-distance outmigration from Staffordshire.17 Within this context of industrialisation the old rural sector of Staffordshire faced relative and absolute decline, which affected ancillary rural trades. One single example involved a family in the saddler trade, namely the Buxtons of Ellastone, located between Stoke and Derby, four miles from Ashbourne. Their emigration story encapsulated the problem of rural trades in an industrial context. Partly it was a question of geography and scale. Thus an individual saddler was engaged in a rural craft which typically required a population threshold of 500–600: when it fell below this level the trade became unsustainable. The Buxtons of Ellastone were caught exactly in this equation and the consequences were translated into rational emigration. Ellastone, a rural parish, had lost population after 1831 until by 1861 the population was 1,230, only enough to support two saddlers. The Buxtons were aware of the declining

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population and the tightening competition from other saddlers: they began to search for greener pastures. They also felt insecure because they were tenants: they did not own their land and possessed consequently no guarantee of either home or livelihood. The Buxtons’ family historian explains that ‘After centuries of rural passivity the family began to move away from Ellastone in the 1850s. These initial migrations to urban destinations were to be followed by overseas emigration’.18 One brother had gone to Walsall in 1836. The family became aware of wider possibilities: ‘New Zealand offered the prospect of their own land and freedom from the landlord’s influence on family decisions, which would have been important to a family of Methodist Independents’. The first Buxtons sailed from Gravesend for New Zealand in 1857 – the eldest son and his new wife, who paid their own second-class passages. In 1859 two further sisters arrived from Walsall; then the rest of the family arrived in 1862, including the parents and four children, now in receipt of colonial assisted passages: ‘With father as a rural craftsman and the majority of his offspring as prospective domestic servants and potential marriage partners for single male colonists they had no difficulty in meeting the [colonial] requirements’. There was a further wave of emigrating Buxtons to New Zealand in 1886. One of the Buxtons became a prominent New Zealand landscape gardener after the turn of the century.19 The Buxton story exemplifies a particular tendency at work on the margins of rural change throughout Britain: that is, the impact on the smaller crafts and supplier trades, like saddlery, though there were many others. They were part of a mechanism of decline in rural zones, a widespread aspect of rural Britain in mid-century.20 Shropshire and Staffordshire do not appear to have sent many families with capital and farming experience to Australia. But the call was certainly heard. A lecturer on emigration in Walsall in 1849 referred to some of the earlier manifestations: about ten years ago, a class of persons was induced to emigrate, who had hitherto never thought of casting their lot out of England: a mania for the pastoral life in the Antipodes similar to the ‘Yellow Fever’; which is now raging in New York. [i.e. of gold.]21

The lecturer felt obliged to reassure intending emigrants about the Aborigines they would encounter in Australia: ‘The Blacks do not so much retire, they appear to wear out and seem to vanish from the face of the earth’. He expected them to become extinct within a few years: ‘I will not say exterminated, but they will be extinct’.22 In all the annals of migration, little was said with such incriminating clarity about one of the critical negative consequences of the outward reach of the British in the Age of Migration.

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There is evidently a problem in determining which Shropshire and Staffordshire people decided to emigrate and why, and distinguishing this category of people from the rest of the staying population. More than anyone, Charlotte Erickson has pinpointed the essential problem in the patterns of emigrant selection, namely the characteristics which distinguished emigrants from the rest of the population, that is the non-emigrants. If we could identify the common elements in those emigrating we might be able to show the essential springs which prompted their acts of expatriation. This task is extraordinarily difficult. Erickson has undertaken intricate research to discover the characteristics of the emigrants leaving England in the nineteenth century, using the very fragmentary data contained in the shipping lists of immigrants arriving in New York in 1831 and 1841. Her findings suggest that these emigrants were not necessarily the victims of economic change – either related to industrialisation or to agricultural depression. She concludes that they were too heterogeneous for such an interpretation: mostly this category tended to exclude the obvious losers in the processes of economic change. This places the whole question in limbo, suggesting that emigration had little systematic relationship with events in the British Isles. Erickson declares that ‘No crude explanations drawn from the adverse effects of industrialisation or agricultural depression will do’. Industrialisation did not directly expel these people as the losers in the process: there was no correlation to connect the consequences of industrialisation directly with emigration propensities. The emigrants simply will not be regimented in this fashion: ‘The English who chose to emigrate to the United States were probably not people expelled by need or absolute hardship but people able to make rational and conscious choices’.23 Despite these minimal results there were some more positive elements left over in Erickson’s fragile data. Thus she confirmed that there was a great increase in emigration between 1829 and 1832 from England (27,174 to 99,211) and that this was part of ‘the secular rising emigration from Britain and Ireland’ observable long before the Great Famine, though the trends were subject to erratic fluctuations. She confirmed also that there was a shift over the century from family to labour migration (which was also mirrored in the experience of Scandinavia and Germany). There was a great change in the composition of English emigrations from the 1820s to the 1880s: the proportion of single males increased very greatly.24 The shipping data of 1831 do not show any disproportionate number of farmers and farm labourers: already there were, more than proportionally, industrial and urban people, mainly crafts people and semi-skilled, but no special propensities could be identified. The emigrants seemed to be people who could

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afford to emigrate, and their origins were more likely to be higher-wage districts. They were not generally the conspicuous losers in the march of industrialisation. Moreover these emigrants seem to have been different from the general type of internal migrant: there were fewer females, fewer singles, and a narrower age spread – in effect they possessed a different profile which may suggest that external migration affected a different lot of people. Yet Erickson also concludes that these people were in search of something lost in the changes – i.e. they were in some way gripped by ‘the agrarian myth’. They were presumably trying to stem the change and to recreate their vanishing world overseas.25 Thus, despite Erickson’s dismissal of the standard claims – for instance Berthoff’’s notion that America tended to attract industrial workers while the agricultural labourers went to the colonies, or Shepperson’s view that the colonies got the extremes of poverty-stricken agricultural labourers and gentry – she nevertheless clings to the likelihood that the emigrants were activated by the changes associated with the agrarian myth and gives credit to the proposition of E.G. Wakefield that emigration appealed most of all to the ‘uneasy classes’, the people who feared falling status, anxious for their children most of all. It was not a matter of sheer hardship: ‘an agrarian myth lay behind much of the emigration from the country with the most industrialised economy in the world at the time’.26 Such considerations would best be discovered in the direct testimonies of the emigrants themselves. Poor rural families Contemporary perceptions emphasised the common reluctance of rural folk to migrate, and still more to emigrate. There seemed to be an ingrained resistance to leave poverty for a better future and many landlords and commentators expressed frustration at this locational conservatism which lay at the root of persistent rural squalor in many parts of the British Isles. Emigration, for most people in Bedfordshire, Staffordshire or Shropshire, was an unlikely option among many migratory possibilities, not least due to simple inertia. Bedfordshire was one of the poorest rural counties in Victorian England and had the lowest rates of literacy. Yet, as Agar declares, ‘the most obvious way to improve one’s lot in Victorian rural England was to leave it’. In 1836 James Kay, M.P., pointed out that Bedfordshire labourers were very reluctant to go to the industrial north. He was, however, able to cite the case of Philip Peddor of Cranfield, aged thirty-nine with wife and six children who, against convention, had migrated to Mellor in Derbyshire. Such men were welcomed by local employers because they were docile and good workers. Moreover, said Kay, they were much better off than ‘the half-starved labourers in Beds’. He quoted Philip Peddor as saying that he ‘would rather cross the sea than go back to Bedfordshire’:

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he had ‘written back to induce friends to migrate and expects twelve of them to come over soon … If they would not come, they deserved to be starved in Bedfordshire’. As Agar reports, ‘most of those leaving Bedfordshire villages left for local towns or London’.27 Some well-documented Bedfordshire labourers were recruited to the Australian colonies in 1841.28 Most of the poor agricultural labourers of Salop, Staffordshire and southern England were not able to give much voice to their plight or to escape overseas. There was, however, a striking and atypical example from Wiltshire, namely Jacob Baker, who was the epitome of rural deprivation, a remnant of the old rural world. He was a farm labourer and carter from Hodson near Swindon and, with his family, part of an emigration of 258 people to South Australia and Victoria in the spring of 1851, promoted with the aid of Poor Law funds by the Wiltshire Emigration Society under the leadership of Earl Bruce. Baker, described as a skilled and versatile labourer who was often unemployed in the winter months, emigrated with his pregnant wife and eight children, some of whom had reached working age. The Bakers were, indeed, members of a classic depressed group in British society, that is, from the underemployed agricultural labouring stratum in southern England. Baker, in 1851, had been a farm labourer for twenty-five years, hardly able to feed his own children, trapped in a region of rural decline. By his own account he had been unable to command regular work or income and, in winter particularly, would sit at his table with his wife and young children ‘four days in a week and not have bread and potatoes enough, and the other three days upon not half enough boiled swedes, and with but little fire to cook them with’. He remarked how it was indeed possible to go into the Poor House but that ‘thousands would [rather] rob or starve than go to the house’.29 Baker was witness to his own emigration and wrote a letter home in September 1852, reproduced in newspapers in its original semi-phonetic form. It was addressed to his friends and neighbours back in Hodson and described the voyage and the settlement of his family. They were all now in employment, and his wife Anne ‘can now get 1 shillen a day with her nidel’. Baker went on to express all the doubts, aspirations and vagueness of an agricultural labourer adrift in a new world. He declared: I could not think how it was for labren men to get a farm, but now I can see how it is. I can save money enofe in one week for to buy one aker of land; so it plese God we have got our health, by the time this year is out I think of getting a little land; if I do not buy some I can rent some at 5s per acre, and buy it for one pound later.

Here was clear evidence of the land-centred thinking of many immigrants, obsessed with the idea of rural independence, even where the returns to labour from urban life were probably greater.

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Baker was also concerned about the ultimate security of his large family. He urged his friends and kinsfolk to migrate to South Australia on specific grounds. ‘The longer the journey the better’, he explained: All my children can make their own fortune if I should die tomorrow. Mary and Anne have got the refuse of 2 young farmers now, and there is another farmer and his wif who have got a farm of their own and only one daughter, and this daughter and her mother is very struck over our Fred, and all they have got is for their daughter. This is the country, my boys.30

Baker offered other implicit comparisons with England which echo through so many other emigrant letters of this period. Thus he reported, ‘I have bought a dog for shooting. Tim and me can take our guns and a dog and go out and shoot all we can without licences’. Living conditions, of course, loomed large in his account: Baker quoted wages and prices but he mainly conveyed the prevailing plenitude by examples – by the fact that the Bakers now ate fresh meat every day of the week, and by the fact that ‘we do not put tea in the pot with a tea spoon but with the hand’. It would be a mistake to depict Baker simply as a crass materialist, as the emigrant labourer on the make. Much of his letter, like so many others, was devoted to spiritual matters and to his own outdoor preaching in the colony. His case, and the testimonies of some of the Shropshire migrants, give credence to Keith Snell’s contention that ‘family ties, access to land, and the quality of social relations were more significant in English labourers’ assessment of the quality of life than wages and the cost of living’.31 But Baker had been intensely aware of his own sheer poverty, which was the prime propellant out of England. The case of Jacob Baker represents one way in which a poor rural family was able to negotiate the barriers to emigration, in this case, as far as Australia. He and the others in this chapter were mirrors of agrarian change in England, the propulsive character of which is explored in the next chapter. Notes 1 See Barrie Trinder, Industrial Revolution in Shropshire (Chichester: Phillimore, 3rd edn, 2000), pp. 156, 158, 170, 169. 2 Ibid., p. 155. 3 J.P. Dodd, ‘The state of agriculture in Shropshire, 1775–1825’, Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society 55 (1954), 6. 4 Ibid. 5 John E. Andrew, ‘Shropshire Swing Riots in 1830’, Shropshire Magazine, Jan. 1972. See also Eric Richards, ‘Captain Swing in the West Midlands’, International Review of Social History 19 (1974), 86–99.

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6 Gwyneth Nair, Highley: The Development of a Community, 1550–1880 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 252–3. 7 Gwyneth Nair and David Poyner, ‘Emigration from Highley, 1841–1881: a flight from the land?’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society 79. See also Nair, Highley. 8 Gwyneth Nair and David Poynter, ‘The flight from the land? Rural migration in south-east Shropshire in the late nineteenth century’, Rural History 17 (2006), 167–86. 9 Shropshire County Record Office, Shrewsbury: a substantial file on the Farmer case researched in the 1990s and published as a note. 10 Shropshire County Record Office, Shrewsbury: letter from the National Archives of Canada in response to an inquiry about Farmer. 11 Farmer is mentioned in Lucille Campey, Seeking a Better Future: English Pioneers of Ontario and Quebec (Toronto: Dundum, 2012), pp. 107–10. 12 N.W. Tildesley, ‘William Farmer’s emigration to Canada’, Shropshire News Letter of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, no. 40 (June 1971). 13 See Jennifer Quérée, Set Sail for Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury Museum, 2002), p. 27. 14 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, pp. 195–202. 15 Marks and Richardson pointedly asked, ‘Are the explanations which the emigrants gave for their movement acceptable as bases for a satisfactory historical explanation of the general phenomenon of mobility?’ They quote E.P. Thompson’s remark regarding ‘the crucial ambivalence of our human presence in our own history, part subjects, part objects, the voluntary agents of our involuntary determinations’. Introduction to Marks and Richardson, International Labour Migration, p. 5. 16 See Ken Jones, Pit Men, Poachers and Preachers: Life and the Poor Law in the Madeley Union of Parishes, 1700–1930 (Ludlow: Dog Rose Press, 2009), pp. 127, 147. In 1886 many miners from nearby Dawley emigrated to the Americas following the closure of the mine works. 17 See Christopher Dyer, ‘The urbanizing of Staffordshire: the first phases’. Staffordshire Studies 15 (2002); R. Lawton, ‘Population migration into and from Staffordshire and Warwickshire, 1841–1901’ (MA thesis, University of Liverpool, 1950). 18 Rupert Tipples, ‘The Buxtons of Ellastone – Victorian migrants to New Zealand’, Staffordshire History (1991), 19. 19 Ibid., 18–27. 20 See below, chapter 16. 21 Arthur Hodgson, A Lecture on Colonization and Emigration … at Walsall, Staffordshire, 20 March, 1849 (Walsall, 1840), p. 27. 22 Ibid., p. 5. 23 Erickson, Leaving England, p. 157. She specifically warned against the ‘hardy tradition of immigrant historiography to cite groups in the population with particular problems and to infer that these were the emigrants’, p. 130. 24 Ibid., p. 143. 25 Note that Erickson’s use of shipping lists was a continuing controversy with Raymond Cohn: see above, chapter 5.

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26 Erickson, Leaving England, p. 165. 27 Nigel E. Agar, The Bedfordshire Farm Worker in the Nineteenth Century (Bedford: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 60, 1981), p. 129. 28 See Eric Richards, ‘An Australian map of British and Irish literacy in 1841’, Population Studies 53 (Nov. 1999), 345–59. 29 Baker’s letter was published in the Devizes Gazette (July 22, 1852) and also in Scotsman (September 15, 1852). 30 Ibid. 31 As reported by Erickson, Leaving England, p. 15.

8

Agrarian turmoil and the activation of mass mobility

The road to emigration The search for the deepest roots of modern international migration leads back inexorably to late eighteenth-century Europe and, most generically, to the British Isles. The case depends on the weight and impressions derived from contemporary evidence, but the lines of causation are faint. The beginnings of modern mobility were essentially rural – the origins are found in country cottages and villages, and along the very long and tortuous paths which, for a minority, led to the emigration ships. Only later – after the mid-nineteenth century – did mass emigration become an overwhelmingly urban and industrial phenomenon. Until then the migrants derived from the fields and rural communities which were subject to new circumstances. The Isle of Man, Guernsey, Shropshire, Staffordshire, West Sussex and Wiltshire each yielded migrants, internally and externally: each saw new levels of change and mobility. They responded to some new turmoil, some torque within the system, which was expressed in the dislocation and re-distribution of the people near and far. Why, by 1830, were there vastly more people in the villages and towns of Britain, why were there far more in the gaols, and why were so many more embarking on emigrant ships? The overarching question here is how circumstances in the foundations of rural life were ultimately translated into the global dispersion which we associate with mass emigration. It is evidently a tangled and perplexing matter, partly because the main actors, the emigrants, were mostly unforthcoming about their own decisions, their own motivations. Eventually the roads stretched to the main destinations of emigrants – mainly in North America, but even to the most distant new homelands in Australasia. And, it is contended, the outflows were pioneered mainly in the British Isles and were, in reality, ‘rehearsals’ for the even greater, but later, evacuations from across continental Europe. The latter emerged by the late nineteenth century in apparently independent diasporas, following their own timetables.

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These diasporas can be treated as separate entities, with their own conditions and particularities, and indeed with their own narratives and explanations. But they also possessed common features, certain general propulsions behind these outward stretchings. It was in late eighteenth-century Britain that such structural forces were first displayed. Structural change on the land The question – the rise of modern emigration – overlaps into the controversial and unresolved questions about the great turmoil gripping English society in the late eighteenth century. This turmoil was, in the final resort, about the control and transformation of the soil, of agrarian society at large. This related, in contentious ways, to the release or expulsion or displacement, of large numbers of people from the land. How indeed did the rural population fare during the unprecedented changes in English society which were entangled with the simultaneous demographic and economic revolutions? And how did the population come to be rapidly urbanised? What happened to that proportion of the rural population who were apparently stranded and made quasi-redundant when British agriculture became the most productive in the world? Within these puzzles there are seriously unsettled questions among historians, which have tormented the profession since the time of Adam Smith. Seeking the springs of emigration out of this unsatisfactory story is an extra challenge. But some of the elements are clear and generally agreed. Thus we know that, by 1800, in most parts of the British Isles (though not all) there had emerged a three-decked rural structure: the land was mainly possessed by a relatively few large landowners (some enormously large) who let out their lands on rental to large tenant-farmers who in turn farmed the land with the labour of the largest class – the landless labourers (a rural proletariat). This became the classic format of British agriculture – in contrast with peasant formations typical in other parts of Europe (and some westerly parts of the British Isles) or with any communal version of landholding. Peasants and small independent holders of the land (e.g. the yeomen) in England had mainly ceased to exist. The system was becoming fully capitalistic and extremely efficient. Meanwhile the population on the land greatly increased – as part of the demographic revolution of the eighteenth century. Some of this increment was successively skimmed away into newly urbanising centres. In effect agriculture used a smaller proportion of the population to produce a greater output than ever before – which then fed and clothed (and also supplied with raw materials) the much faster growing non-agricultural population of the country as it industrialised.

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The corollary of these great changes, which had been in preparation for a very long time and which continued deep into the nineteenth century, was the situation in which the rural sector released labour and people in large numbers – the essential ‘discontinuity’ at the centre of this narrative.1 When and how this disengagement of people happened, and with what consequences, is a central and still highly contentious question. The most significant fact is that the rural sector was in widespread turmoil throughout the decades in which emigration rose out of Britain and began to spread across the globe. The roles of migration The idea that migration receives its original impetus from rural turmoil may be deceptive. It seems to imply an extrusion of population under pressure, an involuntary evacuation of the countryside. There were certainly cases of aggravated clearance in several regions over two centuries. In the British Isles, though, there was serious and prolonged dislocation in the countryside over many decades, and it is difficult to identify and pin down such direct effects on many particular emigrants. Yet, as we have already seen, there were identifiable groups responding to negative conditions in several of our zones of exit, and there will be more examples in the following chapters. In reality the underlying changes in rural Britain were mostly gradual, almost subterranean, cumulative and sometimes barely visible. But the consequence, over the duration of the long transformation, was the disengagement of most of the rural population from the land and their relocation elsewhere, even overseas, which is our primary concern. This relatively gradual character of most of this rural change inevitably obscures the question of whether the relocation of the population was coerced or free, induced or voluntary. There are several broad interpretations of the history of mobility. The first is the well-known general theory called ‘the mobility transition’, associated with Wilbur Zelinsky, who proposed that there is typically a shift in the levels of mobility during modernisation – notably during industrialisation. Once the bonds of traditional rurality have been weakened, people move about much more actively. All modernising societies become more mobile during such phases and this is associated with major flows of people off the land. This idea of an acceleration of mobility is elaborated and accorded empirical reinforcement on a European scale, by the brothers Lucassen.2 It is not a large step to say that the surge of emigration to Atlantic destinations and Australia happened to occur in the middle of the mobility transition: mass emigration was a major manifestation, perhaps a ‘spin-off’, from the transition. A second proposition pictures emigration as a ‘safety valve to skim off a significant proportion of the surplus … the escape-hatch function [which] also probably averted social discontent’. In this scenario the emigrants were escaping

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the intensifying ‘lack of land, oppressive landlords, hunger, [and] hopelessness’.3 Thus Europe disgorged its surplus population to the overseas destinations: eventually the emigrants became agents in the rapid expansion in the overseas production of food which, by the late nineteenth century, was feeding Europe’s home populations. A third variant of these broad generalisations interprets modern labour migration across the globe as linking and diminishing the ‘development gaps’ between countries and regions.4 This is the common argument that emigration was a product of, and response to, the exposure of differential rewards and opportunities in the international economy, especially as it evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Population imperatives Over these debates about the activation of migration in modern times, Robert Malthus casts his ghostly shadow and indeed the relationship of migration to population growth is critical in the British prototype, but the arguments are not fully settled. Certain elements in the account are uncontested. At some time in the mideighteenth century, across the British Isles, population began to increase cumulatively at an unprecedented rate. Over a similar time-span the productivity of agriculture passed into a growth pattern of rapid improvement, which continued without check for many decades. The impact of these two fundamental facts of life in Britain influenced the outward movement of people from the land. The demographer R.S. Schofield examined the rural origins of change, seeking the ‘long-term accommodation between population and the economy’ achieved in England. Sudden population growth produces immediate intergenerational problems for such a society. As Schofield puts it, when population grows families inevitably produce ‘a surplus of surviving sons … the intergenerational problem becomes that of finding enough land for the younger generation’. Population growth is therefore a key issue for the disposition of land and of younger children. He points out that when population grew, the problem of finding a holding to inherit intensified, which is ‘in marked contrast to when the population growth was zero’. The case of England between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is a perfect exemplar. The normal social and economic equation became undone and required solutions, often answers improvised within families. The demographic history of England (and very likely the rest of the British Isles) was curious: the population had been growing quite quickly from 1541 to 1650, but it then stopped growing and shrank between 1650 and 1730 when it began a second period of growth until it reached its maximum rate in about 1810–20, which persisted to about 1871. And it seems most likely that fertility was the greater

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variable: in Malthus’ words, the ‘prudential restraint’ on marriage had somehow been released. The constraints on family formation seem to have been loosened in mideighteenth-century England.5 This was registered critically in a fall in the average age of marriage. In Europe, by contrast, late marriages appear to have remained in general, still operating on the old restraints which had ceased to work in England. Schofield adds into the account features which were special to England. He is emphatic that England had lost its peasantry, which was already proletarianised; its rural people had become mainly wage-earners and employees, a trend even greater in the towns. Moreover the growth of the English population was much greater than elsewhere, and its rate of urbanisation also far in advance.6 In Schofield’s account, therefore, one of the critical consequences of population increase was the creation of a much larger pool of sons and daughters for whom there could not be enough land unless there was subdivision of holdings. If societies (such as those of the west of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands) retained many of these sons and daughters they created large local accumulations of populations which were beyond the capacity of the land to maintain.7 Inheritance is at the centre of these ideas about population constraints operating in traditional societies: the rate of marriage was the controlling mechanism and this was responsive to cultural norms. Malthus himself gave emphasis to the preventative checks for the regulation of population growth – that is, by means of the manipulation of marriage age and the rates of marriage.8 The crucial consequence was the variation and regulation of the number of ‘surplus sons’. In pre-industrial societies this containment of marriage was an extremely sensitive marker, and restricted further population growth. Hence if the population rate rises ‘the number of sons around and needing a plot will rise very quickly’. A relatively small change in the population growth rate was rapidly translated into large surpluses of young people with very restricted horizons, not to mention frustrations. These constraints did not apply in England in the eighteenth century (and this may be true of many parts of the British Isles9). It was not constrained within the restrictive and controlled inheritance framework prevailing in so much of continental Europe. This was a vital determinant of continuing population growth, and the great changes after 1740 seem to have been mostly related to changes in fertility – not to systematic changes in mortality rates. The gravamen of this version of English demographic history is that there was an increasing pool of sons (and indeed daughters) unprovided for in the rural world; and the possibilities of marriage and reproduction were seriously constrained by the reduced chances of obtaining land and employment (especially after 1815). It was ultimately from these pools that many emigrants were derived – single men and people just married or on the brink of marriage – together with more substantial farming families with multiple children and diminishing

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prospects for the future generation. The latter were prominent among the emigrants to North America at the end of the eighteenth century. It seems very likely that marriage rates and mobility moved in tandem. It is well known that young people often emigrated in order to marry and vice-versa. The contracting of so many marriages just before emigration fits well into this pattern. The exit of labour Conditions in the eighteenth century are made cloudy by the lack of precise data relating to the key variables: this was a pre-census world in which even Malthus had little conception of the actual size of the British population or its rate of growth. These facts suddenly became alarmingly visible as soon as the results of the first three censuses (1801, 1811, and 1821) were published: these were the decades of the most rapid demographic growth in all British history. The state of mobility and the transfer of labour out of rural England was becoming much clearer by mid-Victorian times. Dennis Mills captured the story thus: Massive natural increases in rural population could not be sustained by the economy of the countryside. There was a limit to the amount of labour which farming could absorb once the heaths and moors, fens and marshes had been reclaimed. After the wars against France arable farming went through a quarter of a century of depression and about the middle of the century labour-saving machines began to have some effect on the demand for labour. Meanwhile many rural crafts and industries were being put out of business by urban mills and factories.

The net result was that by 1861 or before, the rural populations of England and Wales had reached their peaks and were thereafter in absolute as well as relative decline: ‘Victorian villagers, then, went in their thousands to the towns, while others left for the United States and the colonies’.10 Rural regions were passing through immense changes which ultimately required the evacuation of a large proportion of the people – eventually leading to a common diminution of the rural population everywhere in the British Isles. Most of the initial movements out of agriculture were of small distances, usually less than twenty miles from rural parishes; possibly only 15 per cent of these migratory folk moved more than ten miles, especially the domestic servants and labourers.11 There was a tendency for these distances to increase over later decades. Where the population was declining, as in rural Kent for instance, female migration from rural places was particularly high. The census figures, however, are unable to account for emigration out of the system, though the

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work of D.E. Baines deduced net emigration from the aggregate changes between counties.12 It is also the case that the rigour and the pace of the changes were highly variable. The experience of, for example, Lancashire and West Cork obviously differed because of local factors; the West Highland cottar was in different circumstances from the rural labourer in Lanarkshire. But in the end, they all experienced a relative, and then an absolute, decline of the rural population, even though the national population continued to rise. The towns were not obviously hospitable. Liverpool, for instance, despite many decades of growth and great prosperity was highly unhealthy to live in. By the 1840s, 100,000 were packed into one square mile of its mean streets and fever-haunted alleys. Robert Southey had noted, ‘the poor as in Manchester, live mostly in cellars underground’. In the early 1840s more than half of all Liverpool children died before their tenth birthday. Lancashire and Middlesex were the most densely populated counties, with the most unsanitary urban areas and the highest death rates, yet rural folk flocked in from near and far. A visitor to Lancashire in 1842 (an especially difficult year) reported: there had been several instances of death by sheer starvation. On asking why application had not been made to the parish for relief, I was informed that they were persons from agricultural districts, who, on committing an act of vagrancy, would be sent to their parishes, and that they had rather endure anything in the hope of some manufacturing revival than return to the condition of farm labourers from which they had emerged.13

Such conditions need to be accounted for when the influence of the positive differential in living standards is considered. The price of progress That economic and demographic change induced an outflow of population from rural locations across the country is not in contention. But the relationship of such changes to emigration beyond the country is less clear. Moreover the degree of coercion and thrust out of rural places was varied and subject to dispute. The mechanisms of, and more particularly the necessity of, the process has long been in argument. The conventionally positive view of agricultural improvement in the eighteenth century generally celebrated the remarkable advances in productivity – which enabled the nation to feed its greatly augmented and its increasingly urbanised numbers – and insisted that the social cost paid in the process was necessary and minimal for the sake of progress. Enclosures in particular were unavoidable and contributed to the success of the improvement movement. Peter

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Mathias represented such a view, asserting that ‘The break-up of the peasantry was the price England paid for her increased supplies of corn and meat to feed her growing population’.14 In the late eighteenth century the influential improver Arthur Young was the main authority for this view. Adam Smith had poured scorn on the ‘peasant’ cultivator who, he declared, had always feared and resisted agricultural progress. The positive interpretation maintained that English agriculture had indeed advanced with great vigour; it fed many more mouths, it reformed its field systems, and it retained a larger rural labour force than ever before. The economic benefits had been prodigious and the social costs minimal. These ‘optimists’ insisted that the new agriculture and enclosures increased labour requirements and did not drive people off the land. They pointed out that population growth was the source of the ultimate flow of people to the towns (and overseas presumably). Indeed it is not difficult to demonstrate that the rural population increased to its historic maxima as late as 1841. And thus ‘the manufacturing work-force was the result of the “natural” drive to reproduce rather than of social changes like enclosure or large farms’.15 It was primarily a demographic phenomenon. The opposing, mainly Marxist, view asserted that the expulsion of labour from agriculture supplied the towns with the labour for industry. The most notable of these opponents were E.P. Thompson, who declared that ‘enclosure was a plain enough case of class robbery’, and Jeanette Neeson, who argued that the loss of the commons was a disaster for the peasant class. The enclosures caused the outflow of population and this obviously implies an acceleration of mobility as a consequence. Earlier the Hammonds had asserted that the poor ‘were sacrificed and needlessly sacrificed’.16 This central argument in economic history is crucial for the story of migration and emigration. Agricultural transformation, in one way or another, clearly affected the mass of the rural population. It created a mechanism of exit for tens of thousands of people over perhaps six generations. But the form of the propulsion behind the process remains contested. The negative interpretation has been powerfully reinforced by the economic historian R.C. Allen, though he concedes that output per head in English agriculture had indeed greatly improved: by 1800, British agriculture was the most productive in the world and 50 per cent higher per worker than anywhere else in Europe. But the new agriculture was exceptionally unequal: ‘property ownership was highly concentrated; rents had risen while wages stagnated. By the 19th century, the landlord’s mansion was lavish, the farmer’s house modest, the labourer’s cottage a hovel’.17 Allen insists that this inequality was the product of systematic theft: the landlords had stolen the credit for the extraordinary achievement, and had expropriated the productivity gains at the expense of the rural people of England who had previously enjoyed good access to the land and relatively high wages too.

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The burden of Allen’s work is that the landlords’ revolution ‘made little contribution to economic development’, but decidedly ‘it made them rich’. Most of the increase in agricultural productivity came from the traditional yeomanry and the increased labour productivity of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. After that came enclosures, farm amalgamations and the concentration of property ownership: ‘This revolution made only a small contribution to the growth in output, but it did release labour. Unfortunately, the redundant workers were not re-employed in industry, but remained unemployed … As a result, the income gains for the agricultural revolution accrued to the landowners’.18 Moreover the new agriculture demanded economies in the use of labour, rendering redundant much of the available work force, but especially women and boys. Labour productivity rose rapidly, and labour-shedding proceeded inexorably.19 The outcome for rural life at large was often severe: In a labour-surplus economy with a tight-fisted and directive poor law, individuals could be detached of relatives and friends and driven to seek work in new and strange surroundings, the families left behind torn and reconfigured into shapes and sizes that were more acceptable to overseers or more consistent with independence.20

By the early nineteenth century, the agricultural revolution was producing paupers – not proletarians. The decline in labour demand increased unemployment, lowered labour income and induced out-migration. According to Allen the new rural scene was full of underemployed people – mainly because the landlords’ revolution had been radically labour-saving. This created redundancy at the very time when the rural population was naturally increasing at an unprecedented rate – thereby exacerbating the entire problem.21 Clearly in this interpretation of the changes imposed on the rural world, the numbers of rural people displaced from the land must have increased greatly, reduced to poverty and searching for alternatives. They were Marx’s ‘factory fodder’; it is equally likely that these dislodged people, reduced in status and security, were increasingly suggestible to the calls of migration and emigration. Rural transformation had done its work for internal and overseas destinations. According to Allen, rural change caused a profoundly negative redistribution of land and wealth away from the labouring people of the land – creating misery and a lack of hope for an ever increasing proportion of England’s rural population. It is a deeply pessimistic picture which corresponds with all the negative versions of the condition of the British people at this time. Even if these diagnoses of the state of the rural population are correct, the poor were still a long way from the emigrant ships. Nevertheless it suggests that there was a reservoir of redundant labour (and the increased number of off-spring) in the countryside which had nowhere to go – consequently the idea of emigration would have

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been exceedingly attractive, though largely unattainable. The expulsion thesis is heavily revived in this scenario. And it is little surprise that so many of these people divorced from the countryside yearned for land, for a new world of rural independence. It is only a little surprising that many of their urban successors, in the mid-nineteenth century, were also seeking a rural sanctuary, which in England had become a distant folk-memory. The most important implication of this highly pessimistic account of agrarian change in eighteenth-century England is that the expulsive forces at work were greatly heightened beyond even those diagnosed by Marxist and the later socialist historians. If we are looking for the attractions of emigration, and the widening of the differentials, Allen provides the most unambiguous answer, offering an explanation for the widening and propulsive differential between the English rural classes and the availability of a new start in the New World. By 1831, according to Allen, half the agricultural labour force was employed for only half the year and only 8 per cent of males were employed in industry of any sort.22 That many people remained reluctant to leave the land was an ironic dimension of the implacable forces in operation. The condition of England unresolved These findings have powerful implications for the welfare and plight of the rural populations of the British Isles at large, but they have been hotly contested.23 Much of the response has been to re-assert the great achievements of the new agriculture, which was able to feed the nation through its transformations in the late eighteenth century and into the next. Part of the debate revolves around the question of the revolutionary character of the changes, which had substantial consequences for our understanding of the mentality of the people dislocated by those changes. The yearning for stability, or escape, and for a piece of land may have been enhanced by these changes.24 Allotments were sometimes advocated as an alternative to emigration. The debate on the condition of the working people of England has generally shifted towards the pessimists’ version of the story. Quantitative historians (who are particularly interested in evidence regarding trends in heights among the population) now conclude that average British living standards were falling through to the 1830s, ‘results [which] may reflect deteriorations in the environment, i.e. the quality of life’. Declining standards of living would have strengthened the extrusive factor in migration.25 Moreover regional disparities within the British Isles probably increased during the acceleration of industrialisation – advances in some areas seemed to impel the decline of other regions. Herbert Heaton long ago suggested that the Industrial Revolution could be better understood ‘if written from the point of view of those who failed’.26 Declining zones, at various times, evidently yielded streams of emigrants: but it is also true

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that, apart from the Irish case, there is no unambiguous correlation between economic decline and emigration. The revolution on the land had reduced the old yeoman class, who had occupied a third of the English countryside in 1688, down to about 10 per cent in 1873.27 This was the result of two centuries of consolidation The reduction of so many in the rural community to wage-labouring may have removed the incentive to delay marriage in order to serve an apprenticeship or to acquire a few animals – further releasing the brakes on population control. The emergence of industry in some rural areas ‘weakened constraints on the formation of families which were imposed by the need to acquire a holding’. The polarisation of rural society and ownership was widespread. Cobbett, in the Lothians, talked of the ‘people studiously swept from the land’.28 The market forces all favoured the landlords, who did well on rising prices and rents. The crucial question for our present purposes is whether this turmoil in the rural foundations of British society was translated into migration and thereby offers the key to the mystery of mass emigration in that age. The emerging picture is one of a polarised society characterised by an increased propensity to migrate both internally and externally. Society had been made more fluid; there was a loosening of the population. How did this affect prospective emigrants? Supplying the labour force at home and abroad The emigration question was interconnected with the way in which the labour supply for the industrialisation of the British economy was achieved. Creating the workforce for the vast new industries of the new economy was a much greater task than supplying the human resources for overseas migration. It is possible that emigration drew on the same streams of labour as for industry; emigration may have been a side-stream or it may have competed for labour with the home demands. The conventional view is that labour was in general surplus in the critical decades of industrialisation.29 At the centre of the equation was agriculture: as Sidney Pollard put the matter, British agriculture after 1815 was not only able to supply the food requirements of the country but was expanding so fast that there was a crisis of overproduction in the majority of the years to 1834 and beyond. Pollard quoted Arthur Young: The hands, it is said, leave certain villages, and go to towns. Why? Because there is not employment in one case, and there is in another … They go, because they are demanded; that demand it is true takes, but then it feeds them … [Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield increase in population] Why, by emigrations from the country.30

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Labour came from the endemic disguised unemployment in the traditional sector – in agriculture: ‘the agricultural population thus displaced had to turn to industry for survival in the early stages of industrialisation’. The motive force was therefore push rather than pull. At the time of the emigration debate in the mid-1820s Wilmot Horton was adamant that the labour supply was out-reaching demand; Marx of course believed that there was a ‘reserve army of labour to feed industry and the colonies’.31 Migration may have been the conduit for the supply of the industrialising towns but it was not consistent: Adam Smith remarked ‘that of all men the most difficult of transport is an agricultural labourer’. Pollard claimed that mobility in the south of England did not feed the northern factories – out-movement tended to be localised or directed to London or overseas: ‘When the southern villager finally decided to migrate, he was more likely to turn his steps to the United States or Canada than to Lancashire’.32 Very few regarded the northern industries as possible destinations.33 In Scotland labour was probably more flexible, unrestrained by laws of settlement.34 But the Irish constituted the greatest migrant group and were ‘a crucial element in the response of labour to the industrial revolution’. There were large numbers of Irish migrant harvesters in both England and Scotland – 22,000 in 1810; 63,400 in 1840; and 75,000 in 1845. In the new industries the Irish migrants were: the mobile shock troops of the industrial revolution, whose role consisted in allowing the key areas to grow without distorting the labour market unduly, and in keeping down the marginal return to labour at critical points in place and time, particularly at the top of booms.35

The Irish migrants were the products of unemployment in Irish agriculture.36 Their Scottish counterparts were ‘the expelled Highlanders’. Yet it is easy to exaggerate the role of migration in the supply of labour to industry and the cities: the actual outflow from agriculture was probably little more than 200,000 between 1750 and 1801 when the non-agricultural working population increased by 1.1 million. Over the entire period 1750–1850 the flow out of rural zones was about 1.1 million, compared with the actual increase of non-agrarian employment of 5.6 million. Thus only one-fifth of the additional working force was derived from direct transfer out of agriculture.37 This analysis is derived from imputed migration from agriculture – which between 1811 and 1841 which was moving at more than 100,000 per decade. This exodus fed the towns though not necessarily directly, and led also towards emigrant destinations. Agriculture was still increasing its own labour force over this period: from 1.5 million in 1750 to 1.7 million in 1800; and 2.1 million in 1851. Agriculture may have been the ‘main internal reservoir of labour’ but it accounted for only

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one-fifth of the rapidly expanding labour force of industry. There was a lot of interim mobility among the migratory people to the towns – often returning to their villages in the recessions, and living in temporary accommodation at the best of times – thus boarding houses became extraordinarily important. It was an insecure existence and the labour force remained highly mobile.38 The natural increase of the population was therefore much more important in the long run than migration. The population factor was pre-eminent and this is likely to apply just as much to emigration. The economist J.R. Hicks stated that the 200 years of industrialisation had ‘been nothing but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the unparalleled rise in population’.39 For our purposes it is striking that the fastest rate of urbanisation (the reciprocal of rural decline) was in the years 1821–40, coinciding with the emergence of mass emigration. Structural change in the rural world was a pervasive reality, yet it rarely surfaced in emigrant testimonies. It is indeed most likely that emigration occurred at more than one remove from the original causes: it was a delayed and somewhat distant response to the changes, and probably took at least a generation to become manifest in the actual expatriation of the people affected by the rural changes discussed in this chapter. The census of 1851 showed that for England and Wales 80 per cent of the population was resident in their county of origin; the main losses by migration included the counties of Salop, Wiltshire, Hereford, Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk. The primary immigrant-receiving counties were London, Lancashire, Durham and Warwick. Almost half of the population of London and the main towns were born outside. London was home to 30,402 Scots; 108,548 Irish, 452 Australians, and 10,237 Germans. But the balance of migration and reproduction was shifting decisively: the birth rate in the cities had become more important than immigration, even as early as 1851. As the census put it: ‘henceforward the great cities will not be like camps – or the fields on which the people of other places exercise their energies and industry – but the birthplaces of a large part of the British race’.40 The turmoil in the agrarian and demographic foundations of life reached across the British archipelago. They were on display most critically in Ireland where, in 1821, the population was more than half that of England and three times greater than Scotland’s, and also growing very rapidly. Notes 1 The strongest modern statement of the ‘discontinuity’ is made by Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy, pp. 2–3, 214, 243–4. 2 See Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘From mobility transition to comparative global migration history’, Journal of Global History 6 (2011), 299–307; and Adam McKeown, ‘Different transitions: comparing China and Europe, 1600–1900’, in ibid., 309–19.

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3 Colin Newbury, ‘Labour migration in the imperial phase: an essay in interpretation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 3 (1975). 4 Russell King, ‘Migration in a world historical perspective’, in Julien van den Broeck (ed.), The Economics of Labour Migration (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996). 5 Roger Schofield, ‘Family structure, demographic behaviour and economic growth’, in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6 E.A. Wrigley points out that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England was less urbanised than the Low Countries or Rhine areas, but by 1800 it was the most urbanised area in Europe. See R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 88. 7 Roger Schofield, ‘Through a glass darkly’, Social Science History 22 (1998), 117–30. 8 See Schofield, ‘Family structure’, 285. 9 The sheer geographic reach of the demographic revolution poses some challenge in the search for a generalised cause. Thus, for instance, the population of Shetland, far off the north coast of mainland Scotland, followed the full pattern – i.e. doubling between 1750 and 1840 and declining only after 1871. See William P.L. Thomson, ‘Population and depopulation’, in Donald Withrington (ed.), Shetland and the Outside World, 1469–1969 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the University of Aberdeen, 1983). 10 See Dennis Mills (ed.), Victorians on the Move: Research in the Census Enumerator’s Books, 1851–1881 (Oxford: Mills Historical Computing, 1984), passim. 11 Most migrants to towns came from the surrounding countryside. In Preston in 1851 48 per cent of the people had been born in Preston; of the rest 60 per cent were immigrants from within thirty miles and another 14 per cent were from Ireland, the only long-distance incomers. See R.J. Morris, ‘The industrial town’, in Philip J. Waller (ed.), The English Urban Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 183. 12 D.E. Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 13 Quoted in Hugh Gault, The Quirky Dr Fay (Cambridge: Gretton Books, 2011), p. 19. 14 Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Revolution (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 60–1. 15 Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 7. This study is primarily based on the case of the south Midlands. 16 Jeanette Neeson documented the losses of informal benefits with the removal of common access associated with the enclosures. See Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 17 Allen, Enclosure, p. 1. 18 Allen says that ‘the idea that there is a trade-off between growth and inequality is one of the most entrenched ideas of Agrarian Fundamentalism’ – the idea that ‘inequality is the necessary price of growth’ – which became a sort of universal model drawn from the English experience. Allen, Enclosure, p. 310. The current state of the debate

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on enclosures is well summarised by W.R. Wordie in David Loades (ed.), Readers’ Guide to British History (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), pp. 456–8. 19 Allen, Enclosure, p. 231. 20 See Jane Humphries and K.D.M. Snell, ‘Introduction’, in P. Lane, N. Raven and K.D.M. Snell (eds), Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), p. 13. 21 Allen, Enclosure, p. 237. 22 Essential to Allen’s version is the proposition that urban growth was the primary driving force in economic growth and that agriculture responded under the impulse of higher demand and prices. Note that this reverses the direction of causation in much of the literature. He makes this point most forcefully in R.C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 79. 23 For a summary of the state of play see Tom Williamson, The Transformation of Rural England (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), chap. one, and also Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 24 See F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Changing perceptions of land tenures in Britain, 1750–1914’, in D. Winch and P.K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of the British Historical Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2002), pp. 132–3. For a consideration of the condition and psychology of rural labour in late Victorian England, see Richard Heath, The Victorian Peasant, edited by Keith Dockray (Gloucester: Sutton, 1989). 25 Crafts, ‘The new economic history’, in P. Mathias and J.A. Davis (eds), The First Industrial Revolutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 42. 26 Quoted in J. Barzun and H.F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt Brace, 4th edn,, 1985), p. 232, fn. 27 M. Daunton, Progress and Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 61. 28 Ibid., p. 81. 29 This section draws on Sidney Pollard, ‘Labour in Great Britain’, in Peter Mathias and M.M. Postan (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 7, The Industrial Economies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 105–15. 30 Ibid., pp. 105–6. 31 Ibid., p. 102. 32 Ibid., p. 107. 33 Ibid., p. 108. 34 Ibid., p. 109. The persistence of excess labour in agrarian districts over the decades 1770 to 1850 is often attributed to inadequate adjustment, e.g. the slow outmigration. See E.J.T. Collins, The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1850–1914, vol. 7, part II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See E.H. Hunt and S.J. Pam, ‘Essex agriculture in the “Golden Age” 1850–1873’, Agricultural History Review 43: 2 (1995), 160–77. Many of these internal movements are documented in John Saville, ‘Internal migration in England and Wales during the past hundred years’, in Jean Sutter (ed.), Les déplacements humains (Monaco: Hachette, 1962), pp. 2, 9–10, 13. 35 Pollard, ‘Labour’, pp. 112–13.

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36 Ibid., p. 115. 37 Ibid., p. 141. 38 N.L. Tranter says, ‘By far the greatest part of the growth of the labour force came from the increase … in the size of the native-born population’. Inter-county movements doubled in the period 1700–1800 and then increased by 40 per cent in the early nineteenth century. Mobility increased greatly in industrialisation. N.L. Tranter, ‘The labour supply 1780–1860’, in Floud and McCloskey, The Cambridge Economic History of Britain, pp. 211–12, 217. Jeffrey Williamson rebuts Redford’s claim that the rural counties were full of ‘a vast, inert mass of redundant labour’. On the contrary, he claims, they were impressively mobile in seeking the cities. He asks the key question, ‘Did English cities grow more by natural increase than by migration?’ See J. Williamson, ‘Coping with city growth’, p. 334. 39 John Hicks, Value and Capital (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1946), p. 302, fn. 40 Census of 1851, p. cviii.

9

West Cork and North Tipperary

The Irish exemplar In the early Victorian years there were times when the flow of emigrants from the British Isles was entirely inadequate to the needs of Britain’s expanding colonial world. In 1840 T.F. Elliot, who was orchestrating a new system of assisted emigration, told James Stephen in the Colonial Office that the only people willing to emigrate were unskilled labourers from Scotland and Ireland and that ‘it is upon these two kingdoms only that the colony can rely for any constant supply of agricultural labour’.1 In reality people were migrating from all across the British Isles, but the Irish were moving outwards faster. By the 1830s, Ireland was already becoming a primary supplier of emigrants to the great and insatiable needs of the United States. The higher propensity of the Irish to emigrate was already apparent: the Irish (mainly from the north) had been departing for more than a century, but the scale was now rapidly expanded and reached new levels of exodus in the decades before, during and after the Great Famine of 1846–51. This was the emergence of mass emigration of a new character in the Irish account. Much of the outflow looked like a straightforward evacuation under rising forces of expulsion (by way of recurrent famine, land scarcity and landlord policies). Some of the twists and determinants in the Irish story were witnessed in two zones in these years: the counties of Cork and Tipperary, both prominent in the great Irish exoduses. West Cork was an outstanding and clear-cut version of the wider Irish experience, before and after the Famine. All the main lines of the Irish demographic and economic drama were played out in West Cork, which provides a welldocumented capsule of the basic conditions of early and mid-nineteenth-century Ireland: here rural change, population growth and emigration were each well-recorded. Over much of Ireland, population pressures operated on local circumstances, in which there were few mechanisms to accommodate the expanding population.

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The failure of industrialisation in most of Ireland became a central theme in the migration narrative. Equally vital was the character of agricultural change, which induced severely rational economic adjustment, leaving a high proportion of the expanded population ostensibly redundant and also hungry. It was the making of a first-class tragedy.2 Emigration from south-west Ireland in the decades between 1770 and 1830 followed a clear sequence in the rural transformation. First came the amassment of population without any appreciable relief by migration. The population accumulated simultaneously with an intensification of farming operations, cultivation increasingly pushing into marginal land which was being extended within the semi-subsistence agriculture. This meant that the population was bottled-up in worsening conditions while employment possibilities were further exacerbated by de-industrialisation across the region. Meanwhile population continued to rise cumulatively. At the same time, there was an extension of general tillage, for example in the production of wheat and oats, and pasture – supplying a commercial market, notably that of England. This greatly exacerbated the pressure on land availability. Higher levels of emigration began to emerge by the late 1820s, encouraged and eased by reduced trans-Atlantic passenger fares. Famine and rising pressure There were parts of West Cork which confronted the worst conditions of rural decay and population overload and these places have become infamous in the annals of the impending Irish tragedy. One was the Mizen Peninsula, a thick pencil of land sticking out into the Atlantic, comprising the four parishes of Kilmoe, Schull, Kilcoe and Aughadown. It was a district also containing the towns of Skibbereen and Baltimore, places of destitution, the names of which are seared on the national memory from the awful days of 1847–48.3 There was, however, a considerable pre-history to the story of the Famine years. A century earlier, in 1740–41, much of Ireland, and Cork in particular, was devastated by a similarly infamous famine. There had been at least ten major famines in Ireland in the previous five hundred years before 1845, almost all before the advent of the potato. The disaster of 1739–41 was associated with severe weather and crop failures, worst of all in the south and west of Ireland, and possibly more awful than in the 1840s, though the crisis itself lasted for only two years rather than six.4 Less well recorded, and worse in its death rates than its mid-nineteenthcentury successor, 1741 ranks as one of the most devastating of the pre-industrial mortality crises. Such recurrent peaks of mortality were already in permanent decline on the mainland of the British Isles. In Ireland (and in some parts of the West Highlands and Islands of Scotland) such crises continued to recur into the next century.

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The famine of 1741 in County Cork was appalling but recovery was rapid and associated with the adoption of potatoes in the local diet (by the 1750s) and in the mode of land use.5 Population resurged over many decades but especially in the 1810s and after. Now clearly exposed were local tensions derived from population expansion, especially in land use in the competition between tillage and pasturage. An increasing number, and probably an increasing proportion of the population, was descending into insecurity. There was a general tightening of the ratio of land to population, and a swelling in the numbers of the destitute and the very poor. In the years after Waterloo: ‘Those evicted “fell into the ranks of the labourers”, [and] took to the roads as beggars or emigrated to America’.6 In the Poor Inquiry of 1833 extreme poverty was revealed among the masses in County Cork, the conditions being especially severe in the Schull Parish. Recurring famine conditions were now clearly associated with emigration. After another severe famine in 1831, out of a parish population of 13,668 there were records of the emigration of ninety families departing in 1831; forty families in 1832, and a further twelve families in 1833. These fragments of information about migration from the parish of Schull were amplified further by data regarding the selectivity of the emigration. Good evidence shows that ‘they were, with few exceptions, Protestants, and in comfortable circumstances’. Emigration was limited to the better off strata of the local population. Father James Barry, the local priest, reported that the emigrants were ‘tradesmen, hardy labourers, and farmers with 20 to 60 pounds capital, [but] few of the last class’. Notter of Goleen said that ‘the emigrants were ‘of a better description’; in fact, ‘most the people here who could afford to emigrate would do so’.7 The expansion of emigration from this part of Ireland was becoming relatively easier in these fraught years, partly because the rise of the Canadian timber trade had helped to reduce transatlantic passenger fares down to thirty shillings for an adult by 1830.8 Even so, for most of the population emigration remained unattainable. Daniel Corkery reported of Cork, and the people of West Cork in general, that ‘the natives being home-keeping to a fault, they seem not only tied to the country, but almost to the parish in which their ancestors lived’. Arthur Young, the agricultural reporter of wide experience, claimed that the Catholics ‘had not learned to emigrate’. Among them they had a proverb, that ‘The hearth is a good anchor’.9 The impression is that the Catholics were the poorer element in the population and were the least likely to be among the emigrants. Emigration remained a sieve which allowed through only the better off. But there were other factors affecting the mechanisms of emigration. For instance, emigration was facilitated by better roads: Ruth Ann Harris discovered that ‘a particularly high number [of Irish emigrants to Boston] have come from districts which had been provided with good road-systems’. A road

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building programme had been instituted in response to another incidence of famine in 1822, which produced four months of crisis. But roads had perverse consequences for local industry: better transport arrangements made it easier and cheaper to import ‘Manchester goods’ and the English language, both of which opened up the local community to competition and new possibilities of exit. Recurrent destitution and land hunger travelled in tandem with social disorder and political anxieties in West Cork. In 1823 Peter Robinson (planning an experimental emigration scheme to Canada) told Wilmot Horton in London of the good prospects of recruiting emigrants from the disturbed baronies in the County of Cork which are in a very distracted state … I had been frequently told that much opposition might be expected from the Roman Catholic priests … But so far was that from being the case that … instead of giving unfavourable impressions of the plan, they most generally gave it their support.

Robinson claimed that his plan was popular with the very poor and would help to reduce their numbers, but it would, more significantly, also diminish the ‘fiery spirits’ in the district.10 In the outcome his plan had small impact on either the government or south-west Ireland. Canada, however, had become the focus of emigrants by this time and the Canadian timber trade was clearly pivotal. But there were also changes in the composition of emigration, less and less dominated by the Protestant minority. Thus, ‘By the 1830s, Catholics exceeded Protestants in the trans-Atlantic migration from Ireland for the first time since 1700’.11 The Select Committee on the Poor Law (1833–36) exposed some of the underlying circumstances that were shaking the Mizen Peninsula and the Inquiry yielded good evidence of the types of emigrants going at different times. Thus Father Michael Collins told the Inquiry that ‘The landed proprietors have taken up the opinion latterly that the cause of their distress is the over-stocking of land with people; and as the leases fall in, they get rid of the surplus population by turning them out entirely from their lands’. He knew of an estate of 500 acres previously accommodating 40 families, of whom 30 had been evicted.12 Nothing is known of the fate of these people: they probably entered the ranks of the mobile internal migrants of rural Cork, perhaps leading eventually to the villages and towns and then perhaps overseas, to England, to Canada or to the United States. What is not in doubt is the pressure on the land itself and the ejection of the people; the system was being shaken more vigorously than ever before. The population of the parish of Schull in 1822 was 14,000 and less impoverished than it became on the eve of the Great Famine in 1847, by which time

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its numbers had risen to 18,000. James Donnelly Jnr, the main authority on the experience of Cork in the nineteenth century, remarks of the local history of the parish of Schull during the Famine of the 1840s that it ‘serves to underline the murderous deficiencies of British “relief ” policies in the poorest areas of a country where more than a third of the entire population were very poor when the Great Famine struck’.13 The perils of ‘improvement’ The operations of the large estates and their administrations had large consequences for rural Ireland, most notably for the dislocation and migration of its people. The Benn-Walsh estate in Cork was a case in point: Sir John Benn-Walsh, who lived mostly in England, owned estates in many places, including 8,900 acres in County Kerry. He regarded his estates as commercial enterprises, but until 1829, middlemen controlled his Kerry estates, which therefore remained unimproved. Long leases had encouraged subletting: as Donnelly says, ‘the great and continually growing mass of casually employed labourers were being crushed under the weight of the increase in their own numbers and represented the most critical aspect of the population problem after 1815’. Benn-Walsh visited his estates seventeen times between 1821 and 1864; he regarded himself as a great rationaliser and improver, and evicted wherever he deemed necessary.14 Improvement and consolidation required the displacement of small tenants and this fed the channels of migration. In the years 1816–41 there were fourteen total or partial failures of the potato crop, associated with what Donnelly calls the ‘staggering underdevelopment’ in the south west which comprised ‘intense population pressure, fragmented holdings, dwindling overseas markets, and depressed prices’. But this was not necessarily the road to unrelieved misery: ‘Tillage output, especially production of corn crops, greatly expanded, and the trade in live cattle and sheep grew rapidly, and important improvements in farming techniques were adopted’. The growth of dairying exacerbated the pressure on land availability.15 The administration of estates, such as those of Benn-Walsh, became more efficient as the older middlemen system was displaced by direct management, which itself depended on the introduction of more professionalised land agents, a generally unloved cadre in rural Ireland. But the course of improvement, according to Donnelly, was impeded by peasant resistance to consolidation; widespread landlord indebtedness also blocked the way of modern advances in agriculture. The key changes were, in reality, accelerated by the Great Famine and its aftermath, with ‘often bruising momentum’. The Famine, by way of exodus and reorganisation, was the great precipitant of modernisation in the Irish countryside. It coincided with massive migration and emigration, to a greater degree than anywhere else in the British

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Isles, or indeed Europe. The crisis was the critical moment for the revolution in the control and distribution of the land in Ireland: For in the economic crisis of these years, pauperized tenants, bankrupt middlemen and insolvent proprietors were uprooted and cast adrift. Thus, out of the predicted and predictable Malthusian catastrophe in the late 1840s, at a terrible human cost, emerged a stronger agricultural economy and a reinvigorated system of estate administration.16

West Cork exhibited all the key variables of rapid population growth, subdivision and consolidation, gripped by adverse conditions upon which were visited the devastation of Famine. The subsequent adjustment in the region entailed migration under extreme expulsive pressure until the population fell radically in the 1850s and after. The population of County Cork declined 24 per cent between 1841 and 1851; little of the rural decline was absorbed internally; the population of Cork City increased by only 3.1 per cent. Over the longer run the decline was radical: between 1841 and 1891 the number of 50,000 labourers fell to 34,000 and the number of Cork farmers was reduced from 41,000 to 29,000. Landlords used every inducement to encourage emigration. Donnelly declares that emigration enabled the conversion to grassland farming, which became the basis of prosperity in Cork: ‘While the number and price of cattle rose steeply, population fell sharply’. Emigration reduced competition for land, and smallholdings were largely erased. Eventually, even in the 1860s, farmers were complaining about the shortages of labour and the associated increase in wage rates. Emigration was very effective in making agriculture profitable.17 It was also a social revolution in which the old reluctance to emigrate seemed to evaporate. It was part of the great dispersal of the people of rural Ireland, feeding the unequalled outflows of emigrants. Migration intensity in North Tipperary Tipperary was another variant of the Irish account, a county noted for its ‘rich farming lands’.18 The most precise and fully focused analysis of local Tipperary conditions and the ensuing emigration has been undertaken by the Canadian historian Bruce Elliott. He focused a scholarly spotlight on 775 Protestant families in North Tipperary who emigrated to Canada in the early nineteenth century: Elliot exposes not only the sequencing of outward migration from the region but also the underlying structural shifts which precipitated the selective outflows. The evolution of large-scale emigration from Tipperary followed an identifiable pattern of exodus, in which sections of the community, in a series of stages, were somehow mobilised for evacuation.19 Elliott emphasises the pre-existing

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mobility of the Tipperary population, which was later replicated in North America: he points out that transiency was widespread and that ‘fully 60 per cent … left every ten years and were replaced by other people coming in’. Thus the population was already mobile before the onset of mass emigration, the beginnings of which Elliott traces to the immediate post-Waterloo years and to certain short-lived schemes offering government assistance to emigrants to Upper Canada. In Tipperary the first response came from Francis Evans in 1815, who wrote that his emigration was undertaken ‘with a view of bettering their [the family’s] condition, or to avoid apprehended changes in their circumstances, to which most persons in the middle and lower classes of society are subject in the united kingdoms’.20 The Evans’ initiative was a group migration which came unstuck, however, in somewhat obscure circumstances. Much more significant was the emigration of Richard Talbot in 1818 from Tipperary to Upper Canada. This is regarded as the beginning of Protestant chain migration from the district. His emigrant party came from a very particular stratum of local society – they were emphatically minor Protestant gentry facing deteriorating status after the French Wars.21 Talbot and a few others were attracted by the tentative and short-lived assistance offered by the Colonial Office, and most especially by the availability of land grants in Canada. Talbot was part of the original government scheme, which was designed to concentrate and favour Protestant and Loyalist emigration to Canada, mainly for strategic purposes, and land was the magnet.22 This scheme also soon petered out and thereafter it was extraordinarily difficult to rouse any further British government support for assisted emigration on any level. Though government assistance evaporated, the Talbot undertaking of 1818 had much more lasting consequences for emigration out of Tipperary, mainly due to the composition and solidarity of the Protestant emigration. These Tipperary people were ‘mostly farmers facing declining fortunes’, and they departed in family groups: they were people of means. The earliest of these emigrants became a foundational population which sustained continuing chain migration thereafter.23 Elliott maintains that ‘the major factor was the realization that the mania for emigration was sufficiently intense … to make large numbers of those wanting to go to the Canadas scrape together the passage money without drawing upon the public purse’: By the early 1820s it was apparent that the Colonial Office had realised that subsidization of emigration was largely unnecessary as substantial numbers of people had proved that they were able to make their way to the colonies without government assistance.24

This suggests a secular shift in the propensity to emigrate. The critical question is why there existed this ‘mania for emigration’ in this part of North

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Tipperary and why it was located amongst such a closely defined segment of the population. Basic conditions in North Tipperary In the absence of direct testimony from the Tipperary emigrants, the explanation of the motives and activation of emigration inevitably falls back upon informal inferences drawn from the circumstances from which they departed. Wartime inflation had imposed substantial changes for Tipperary farmers over two decades. Thus the very high prices obtaining during the Napoleonic Wars had led to widespread conversion to tillage: there was prosperity even among the smallholders and this led to earlier marriage and then to the greater subdivision of holdings. Subdivision had not been a problem before 1801: one instance was Clonlisk where 3,000 acres had been under pasture in four farms until 1801; there followed a swift series of subdivisions in response to high war-time prices and rising local population levels. Clonlisk was broken into 100 distinct holdings, a common Irish reaction to the times. After 1815 prices fell rapidly and continuously, with ruinous effects on the small farmers who were often reduced to the status of labourers. By 1830 the situation became alarming: subdivision had become almost unstoppable: ‘tenants [were] giving portions of their farms to some members of their families who could not get ground elsewhere’. The most fundamental symptom of this new crisis was the increased number of children requiring sustenance and employment. Subdivision was the nearest option but it carried severe implications for the general level of social welfare: subdivision eventually subverted the basis of law and order in the locality. It was virtually impossible to prevent subdivision and the associated early marriages, and thus the intensification of subdivision proceeded in worsening economic circumstances: farm sizes diminished, including those of the minority of Protestants. Shorter tenancies and rising rents prevailed. It was a prelude to a transformation in the structure of landholding and the generation of extreme social discord, some of which was ultimately manifested in emigration to Canada. There was a clear differentiation among the emigrants. The effects of population growth were critical and by 1820 ‘land available for colonisation was fast running out’. It was ultimately a blunt matter of the ratio of population and land, and the limits were now being reached. Protestants from Clonisk in North Tipperary were departing at a much higher rate that the rest of the community. The essential context was a great and growing rift between the Catholics and the Protestants – moreover the Catholic population was rising much faster than that of the Protestants, the latter actually declining amid the general increases. The Protestants were thus being outbred and emigrating at a much greater rate.25

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Their dilemma was expressed also in the serious economic problems and social disturbances of the 1830s and 1840s, and most of all in the increasing assertiveness of the Catholic population.26 Deteriorating conditions in North Tipperary now produced serious dislocation, various forms of social violence, and also emigration of people with means. The structure of the land occupation in North Tipperary was simple enough: at the base of the society were its large owners, leasing to big farmers and then to a hierarchy of small men and increasing bodies of labourers. Here there was also a very high dependence on the potato; conacre (land sublet in tiny patches for a single season) was rife and was associated with the highest rents per acre. There was already a gross surplus of agricultural labour by 1825, and there was simply no alternative employment: there were too many impoverished smallholders and labourers. Pressure was building up on all parts of this structure, but especially in the 1830s. Even more fundamentally, the collapse of agricultural prices had shifted the essential returns from the land – in the direction of pasture farming which had a further devastating and mounting impact on the local community – ultimately leading to evictions. ‘The small gentry of moderate means felt compelled to enclose their farms and convert to pasture’.27 The diagnosis had become crystal clear. Large pastoral farms were at a premium but were created at the direct expense of the small producers and the cottars who were being pushed outwards. It was becoming a polarised society: increased subdivision was extruding the cottars out onto ever more marginal land. It was severe land scarcity exacerbated by price changes The small and middling farmers were caught in the middle, many of them soon looking to emigrate to Canada to escape the squeeze and also the turbulence. It is clear that the resident gentry with a large command over areas of demesne or leases to large farmers did very well; they were not overcrowded, nor impoverished. Their relative affluence accentuated the contrast with the remainder of Tipperary society. The peasantry huddled on the small plots lived in totally different circumstances and their plight became a growing provocation: a collision was evidently impending. The ongoing shift towards grazing production directly engendered renewed severities of congestion, establishing a worsening contrast. The poor and the extruded of this society were being pushed onto ever more marginal lands: the creation of larger farms meant inevitably that the poorest were being crowded onto boggy terrain. Meantime the pastoral economy was becoming much more profitable. The consequence was eviction and the redistribution of the local populations, the rationalisation of landholdings and the ejectment of the lowest strata of Tipperary life. Even before the 1840s, there were more ejectments in Tipperary than anywhere else in Ireland and this record continued after the Famine. The effect was to induce great turmoil in the local

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population. North Tipperary was not the most famine-ravaged part of Ireland, but it became the most turbulent. When Clearances were implemented on any particular estate one immediate consequence was the overflow of these congested people, thrust onto adjacent estates: there were sudden exchanges of population between parishes. The perverse effect was clearance in one place which then induced yet more consolidation and subdivision on the nearby estates. It was a dire recipe for conflict and suffering. As Elliott reports, ‘population densities generally increased in an inverse relationship to the quality of the land’.28 In effect there was a renewed colonisation of marginal land, pushing up the mountain sides, here concertinaed into a couple of decades – it was the sort of transformation which, in other parts of Britain, had been normally spread across more than a century and usually with far more local options for their future sustenance. There emerged amid this dislocation a range of ‘potentially explosive demographic imbalances’. Rents were ‘bid up to unrealistic levels because of the scarcity of land’ – provoking violence which became widespread by the 1840s. These were often wild areas, full of bandits and defiance of the law: a rich humus for ‘faction fighting, semi-ritualised, feud-like combinations of territorialism, grievance resolution, [and] recreational violence’.29 An alternative destination was the drift of the dispossessed and disgruntled into small towns and villages, though there was little chance of advancement. The displaced rural poor could find no alternative employments – no manufacturing and no viable cottage industry had been able to survive the mechanised competition of the widening market of industrialising Britain. All extractive and weaving employment had been extinguished and the local market was too small for textile producers. The evictees simply swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Some of the small farmers had enough resources to fund their own emigration, but the bulk of the people lacked capital to emigrate. These primitive realities defined the context of emigration and its components and the context of the Great Famine in North Tipperary in the late 1840s. Bruce Elliott remarks that ‘the old Malthusian argument came close to realisation’. Population growth was bringing this society to the brink of a multiple crisis. But it affected North Tipperary society in stratified ways. The poorest became most desperate: their plight was expressed in their frantic efforts to defend their ‘rights’ to the land, and in repeated eruption of ‘outrages’. It was out of these fraught conditions that selective and sequential emigration to Canada began to issue after 1815. The emigration was first dominated by the Protestants of the region. They were the middling modest farmers who possessed enough assets to fund their exit. It was fundamentally a matter of land scarcity, which eventually expressed itself in emigration, biased in the outcome by sectarian rifts in the community of North Tipperary. It was so marked, even in 1818,

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that a local landlord feared that ‘the day is not far off, when they [Protestants] will be wanting in this country more than in Canada.’30 The Protestants were evidently not only more suggestible to the idea of emigration but also better able to afford the costs of uprooting to Canada. The ‘taut political atmosphere’ of the district was a significant precipitant.31 The social and political circumstances of North Tipperary rendered the Protestants increasingly anxious for their immediate security and their long term futures – they were the ‘middling freehold farmers’ who typically feared the mobs. They emigrated partly ‘because of the growing belligerence of the Catholics, as well as for economic reasons’.32 The differential outflow of Protestants, usually in family formation, of middling freehold farmers, was sustained for more than two decades and became ‘self-generating’.33 Protestant emigration continued but also widened to Australia and New Zealand. The outflow was sustained until mid-century, by which time it began to peter out;34 thereafter the emigration of Protestants discontinued. Meanwhile poorer Catholics were departing as individuals to the United States in much larger numbers. The Great Famine in North Tipperary was particularly awful. There were many deaths in the Poor Houses, though conditions were not as bad as in Clare and Galway. The general population fell by a third in the decade 1841 to 1851, but in some districts the decline was much greater. The intensity of social disturbances increased as renewed evictions soared. It was reported in 1847 that 8 per cent of the population was homeless: in one place 567 people were evicted in a single day.35 The labouring poor were worst affected. Thus in the Famine and after, the earlier structural shiftings were intensified and extended: now evictions and emigration ‘allowed the consolidation of farms to proceed at a pace unimagined in the 1840s’. The increase of farm size was a progressive and irresistible process. ‘Because the farmers saw new opportunities opening to them at home, by the end of the 1850s there was less incentive for members of this class … to emigrate’.36 After 1854 most emigrants were no longer the farmers but the Roman Catholic labourers and smallholders who had suffered evictions. Eviction was propelling the process of emigration, more than mere indigence would have accounted for. It was mainly directed to Canada in the years 1845–54.37 With the Famine and the much increased Catholic emigration, the population was decisively thinned out and the region readjusted and, as noted above, Protestant emigration virtually ceased. Family resemblances Elliott’s superb analysis identifies the precise patterns, composition, sequences and timetables of the North Tipperary emigrations. He discovers the pathways

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and passages to America of the Protestant emigrants: using methods of family reconstruction and historical biography, he connects both ends of the ‘migration corridors’. The North Tipperary evidence shows the build-up of population which was manifested in raw land pressure: this generated social turmoil and selective emigration. And clearly the yeoman farmers and the Protestants were first to evacuate. Elliott declares that ‘Ireland was different from England in that this rise in population was neither caused nor accompanied by industrialisation’.38 The growth was not exclusive to Tipperary or Ireland – it was European in scope but was probably even earlier and faster in Tipperary and Ireland. Adjustments were already being made in the 1820s and 1830s, though less so in the westerly zones of Ireland. Cork and Tipperary were classic cases of rapid population growth; the Catholics increased faster than the Protestants in these areas. While establishing these wider constraints and frameworks, Elliott is careful to define his focus; he explains: I chose to skim over such macro considerations as the economics and politics of British imperialism which explain more than just Tipperary emigration, to focus on what was unobserved and unexplained in terms of individual and family decision-making on a micro level.

He suggests that individual people often circumvented ‘structural constraints’ such as emigration policies, land policies and intestacy laws, pursuing their emigrations on behalf of their family’s particular advantages.39 Applying his fine focus to the Protestant emigrants of North Tipperary, Elliott is emphatic that they were not categorically different from the Catholic emigrants: he specifically denies Kerby Miller’s influential view that chain migration was a method particular to the impoverished of Catholic Ireland, rooted in their communalism. Elliott sees the Protestants as equally chain bound, and dismisses the dichotomy.40 Emigration was the natural but induced solution to the problems faced by these people.41 They had been set off by the original government invention in 1818. It was an alternative to partible inheritance. They were aspirational and mobile – a fifth of the North Tipperary emigrants settled in Ottawa Valley, others moved in line with new opportunities. Here emigration was operating almost as a hydraulic machine, equalising conditions from one side of the Atlantic to the other, in an optimising equation. In both West Cork and North Tipperary there was clear evidence of the great structural changes that shook the foundations of these rural societies. Galvanic shifts convulsed the bases of life and were expressed in both the intensification of rural production, and in the urgency to migrate, to evacuate. Such responses had epic consequences across the globe, certainly in Australia, but more still in

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England and America. These mechanisms were Irish examples of a generic pattern. Notes 1 Elliot to Stephen, 17 Jan. 1840, British Parliamentary Papers: Colonies: Australia, vol. 6 (Shannon: Irish Universities Press, 1970), p. 22. 2 See, most of all, James S. Donnelly, Jnr, The Land and People of Nineteenth-Century Cork (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). 3 Patrick Hickey, Famine in West Cork: The Mizen Peninsula, Land and People, 1800–1852 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2002). 4 See Michael Drake, ‘The Irish demographic crisis of 1740–1’, in T.W. Moody (ed.), Historical Studies, vi (London: Routledge, 1968), pp. 101–24; and David Dickson, ‘The other Great Irish Famine’, in Cathal Póirtéir (ed.), The Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1995). 5 Hickey, Famine in West Cork, p. 18. 6 Ibid., p. 116. 7 Ibid., p. 133. 8 Margaret E. Fitzgerald and Joseph A. King, The Uncounted Irish in Canada and America (Toronto: P.D. Meany Publishers, 1990). The influence of the timber trade on emigration costs was attested also in Scotland. See letter dated 15 August 1843, in R.C. Macdonald, Sketches of the Highlanders (St Johns, New Brunswick, 1843). 9 Hickey, Famine in West Cork, p. 132. 10 Peter Robinson to Wilmot Horton, in Richard M. Reid (ed.), The Upper Ottawa Valley to 1855 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), p. 24. 11 Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 101. 12 Poor Inquiry … Final Report (1836), p. 117. 13 James S. Donnelly, Jnr, cover endorsement of Hickey, Famine in West Cork. 14 James S. Donnelly, Jnr, ‘The journals of Sir John Benn-Walsh relating to the management of his estates, 1823–64’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 81 (1975), 86ff. 15 Donnelly, ‘Journals of Benn-Walsh’, p. 21. 16 Ibid. 17 Donnelly, Land and People of Nineteenth-Century Cork, pp. 233–6. 18 See N. Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 77. 19 Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2nd edn, 2004), p. 247. 20 Ibid., p. 62. 21 Ibid., p. 61. 22 Ibid., p. 76. 23 Ibid., pp. 251–2. 24 Ibid., pp. 71, 93. 25 Ibid., p. 34.

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26 Bruce Elliott, ‘Emigration from South Leinster to eastern Upper Canada’, in D.H. Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 8 (Gananoque, Ontario: Langdale Press, 1992), vol. 8, 282–5. 27 Elliott, Irish Migrants, p. 36. 28 Ibid., p. 49. 29 Ibid., p. 56. 30 Ibid., p. 83. 31 Ibid., p. 99. 32 Elliott, ‘Emigration from South Leinster’, pp. 282–5. 33 Elliott, Irish Migrants, p. 114. 34 Ibid., p. 106. 35 Ibid., p. 101. 36 Ibid., p. 110. 37 Ibid., p. 114. 38 Ibid., p. 31. 39 Ibid., p. 269. 40 Elliott is particularly critical of the stereotype of the Irish emigrant as ‘a failure, a belligerent rebel, and a fundamentally emotional and irrational soul’, ill-equipped for the life of pioneering. Ibid., p. 6. 41 Ibid., p. 234.

10

The Australasian case

A new theatre of British emigration The transition to mass emigration by the 1830s coincided with the extension of the British emigrant flows to their furthest extremity, the Antipodes. Australia became a new theatre of migration which reflected the new circumstances of expatriation. It was colonised from the British Isles in two distinct phases – from the 1780s by convicts and then, in new free mode, in the 1830s. These distinctive flows coincided with decisive changes in Britain itself, exposing the mechanisms and propensities as they evolved in the home country. Who did the Australasian colonies recruit? A ship called the Planter carried 200 assisted emigrants to South Australia in 1839, passages paid out of the new colony’s land sales. This was a capsule of mass British emigration and the passengers in steerage were described in a shipboard diary by a highly critical young Scottish school teacher. He regarded them as ‘poor people with their families who [had been] induced [to emigrate] by poverty at home and a belief that there is more of the world’s good to be acquired in the distant colony of S Australia’. However he roundly condemned the Emigration Commissioners for their ‘culpable’ selection of emigrants – they were no better than convicts – and this was his worst condemnation. They were a motley lot, and ‘cloven-footed’: ‘I am sorry to say there are some among them with whom I must find fault’, especially among ‘the wretched female Emigrants’, allegedly prostitutes who were bound to defile the new colony. He was sarcastic about ‘the Cabin Gentry’ who were utterly ignorant of farming, which was the main purpose of the new colony. He spoke favourably only of some decent Highland Scots, migrating as shepherds.1 Random and uncontrolled factors were at work even in the best regulated emigrant systems. Such poor selections continued. Nevertheless the Australian migration system was generally successful, delivering tens of thousands of working people across the globe with continuously improving standards of shipboard health and welfare, providing the bone and muscle of colonial

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development for more than a century. Exactly how the motley community aboard the Planter en route to Australia in 1839 related to circumstances in the British Isles is problematic. The remote penitentiary The Australian case was famously different from, and began more than a century later than, the great transatlantic migrations from the British Isles. The Australasian colonies eventually developed unusual systems of migration and operated uniquely long-distance transfers of large numbers of British migrants. The articulation of emigration to the Australian colonies required much larger state intervention to initiate and maintain the flows of people to the other side of the globe. Its improbability as a destination for British emigrants was increased by a simple geographical fact, that much larger bodies of population existed much more closely to the north and west of Australia, in ‘teeming Asia’. Despite the peculiarities of the Australian case, its recruitment of migrants was begun and reached maturity during the critical decades of British industrialisation. The rise of mass emigration was exactly coincident with the rapid emergence of Australia’s urgent appetite for working migrants, notably during the mid-1830s and thereafter. In the larger account, the Australian theatre was essentially a subset of the changing mobility patterns in the British Isles. The Australian immigration story was improbable from the start when, in 1788, it began as an extremely remote penitentiary for outcasts from British gaols. It was an immense distance from any other British settlement and extremely difficult to reach, which was part of its official design. It was not meant to be an emigrant destination. There are, however, countervailing arguments about the real meaning of the Botany Bay project as more than a replacement for the American repository for British convicts lost in 1776. There were considerations regarding naval strategy and general imperial security in the Far East: Australia was a new source of vital naval supplies, most notably timber for masts and flax for sails and cordage. British imperialism entertained political calculations: notably in the form of pre-emptive moves against rival imperial powers. Commercial motivations also intruded, since there were serious implications regarding the entire trading systems of the Orient, most notably for the East India Company monopoly. Australia was more than simply a dumping ground for Britain’s convicts.2 Yet, whatever the first origins of the colonial sites in Australia, in the outcome its primary function was indeed that of a remote penitentiary; this continued to be its predominant role into the 1830s and persisted as an increasingly despised system even as late as 1867. Civil emigration grew out of this context and these parallel emigrants were the people who subsequently dominated the very longdistance relationship with the British Isles.

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The penal origins were modest in scale, and very slow to interconnect with the emerging flows of mass emigration. In 1788, 1,000 convicts arrived at Botany Bay in New South Wales. Numbers rose slowly, impeded by initial problems in the colony, the costs to the imperial government, and the hazards of long-distance transportation in wartime, through to 1815. By 1800 the population of the new colony was 7,500. In a census of 1828 it was 36,598 – almost all convict stock, with only 4,500 free immigrants in Australia. This was the pre-history of Australian immigration. In the first fifty years of colonisation the Australian colonies were peopled from British prisons – which, on the face of it, had little to do with rural transformation in the home territories. The eventual despatch of 160,000 convicts to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1867 barely merited the name of an emigration system. The convicts were chosen on account of their crimes and selected by some the best judges in Britain: allegedly they were the expelled ‘dross’ of the ‘Sceptred Isles’. And they were sent away as far as could be achieved and for good.3 The colonies (principally in New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and Moreton Bay) had little to do with the main currents of international migration or its structural origins. They were not truly volitional emigrants, any more than slaves, and they were not part of the generic mechanisms of expatriation. The convicts were, however, meant to be the foundation of a productive colonisation, a self-supporting society with wider potentiality. The convicts were selected not so much for their criminality and dispensability, but for their skills as appropriate to the needs of such a nascent society and economy. And many of the convicts were extraordinarily well-documented, so we have good knowledge of their origins, skills, literacy and numeracy, bodily condition and markings, heights and their prior movements in Britain. Taken together, these characteristics suggest that they were a positive selection of recruits, a designed population for colonial self-sufficiency; moreover their subsequent careers and trajectories in the colonies suggest that, on average, they fared relatively well, especially in terms of health, height, reproduction, nutrition and longevity.4 The convicts, and crime in general, were commonly connected with currents at work in Britain in the 1770s and beyond. The loss of the American colonies was an obvious source of political and practical difficulty for the British government: it needed a substitute destination for its criminal surplus. But the problem of crime was assuming new and dangerous dimensions. Population was growing but crime, as measured at the time, was growing faster, and it was also increasingly urbanised, concentrated in the towns. This created the basis of ‘moral panics’ in the 1770s and 1780s and is well documented. In essence convictism in Britain mirrored some of the key sources of general mobility (and indeed of extrusion).

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Criminality in later eighteenth-century Britain was expanded by several connecting currents. One flowed from Ireland into the towns of England and into some rural regions also; the Irish were over-represented among those who came as convicts (and later as migrants) to Australia. The flow of people to the towns, beyond the Irish intakes, reflected the shifting shape of social movements and perhaps, ultimately, crime was a response to the dislocations occurring in the economy at large. We know that crime and social protest were aligned with economic fluctuations. It is plausible to regard crime as an adjunct of social and economic change, part of which was expressed in the outflow of 160,000 convicts to the Australian colonies. The criminal justice system operated as a mechanism to extrude part of the population to the colonies: it translated internal mobility into coerced emigration. Whether it was a precursor to free emigration to Australia is a moot question but news of the positive benefits of Australian living conditions in the 1820s, even for the convict population, induced others to think of emigrating, and even to commit crime to qualify for transportation. Convictism lost some of its horror: in 1825 Lord MacKenzie, sentencing a prisoner to life, found it necessary to warn against the erroneous impression that transportation to the Australian colonies ‘was little else than an opportunity afforded of pushing one’s fortune in another country’.5 The differential was decisively shifting in favour of the colonies, following the example of the Americas. The deterrent was reversing. Information pertaining to the convicts is so rich that historians have pressed the data much further – indeed to the point at which the convicts have become virtually a cross-section of the home population, a convenient representation of British labour at the time of industrialisation. They may have been convicted felons but crime was so commonplace and so pervasive that they were almost perfectly ordinary folk, of which many of the best were sent to Australia. Thus, the argument goes, it is reasonable to extrapolate backwards from the convicts (about whom so much is known) to the population at large in Britain itself. In particular the prior lives of these people – their actual mobility between birth and transportation – depicts a society in motion in the critical decades of industrial change. The convict data expose a world of mobility in which people were driven to crime that propelled them to the convict colonies. From systematic information relating to nearly 20,000 convicts who were transported to New South Wales between 1817 and 1840 it is clear that they had already been a remarkably mobile population: at least 38 per cent of them had moved county before transportation and 60 per cent of them had moved between 30 and 110 miles from their homes. Their mobility was related to their skills and education: their pre-transportation mobility was part of their effort ‘to seek economic opportunity for their skills’.6 Whether convicts can stand as proxies for ordinary emigrants is questionable, but the case is strong. They reflected the general state of British workers in these critical decades of industrialisation and,

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if their prior mobility fitted them well for the stresses of emigration,7 then the same may be true of their non-convict counterparts who were the free emigrants. A new system of emigration The North American colonies, over the previous 180 years, had long pioneered the basic modes of migration and labour recruitment which might have provided models for the new territories in the Antipodes. The American colonies, apart from the founding fathers and their successors, employed three main types of introduced labour supply – namely convicts, slaves and indentured labour. In the outcome, the Australian colonies adopted only convictism. Australia set its face against slavery – the timing of its initial settlement coincided with Britain’s withdrawal from the slave trade; its recruitments were set in radically different times. Indenturing was more feasible, but failed to take hold in the Antipodes. Convicts were the overwhelming supply of labour until the late 1830s when civilian immigration at last emerged. Until the 1830s little encouragement had been given to free immigration (apart from a few capitalist settlers). The Australian colonies were generally opposed to contract migration, with the main exception of the Chinese on the goldfields of the 1850s and the Pacific Island Kanaka system in the Queensland sugar industry from the 1870s. In Australia, freedom of contract was a cardinal principle and its immigrants were completely free once they arrived. Indenturing would have created an unwanted extra disincentive to prospective immigrants. When the Australian colonies eventually sought free emigrants they entered the existing supply zones of British emigration. They faced large resistance for many reasons, but mostly the taint of convictism and the extreme distances entailed in antipodean destinations. The most unlikely project was to create a fully reproductive and selfsustaining British population in the Antipodes Australia needed special mechanisms to induce migration and engage with the motions of migration in Britain, particularly in the face of a growing repugnance felt in the colonies towards the institution of convictism which was almost over by the mid-century. Before 1830 the Australian colonies attracted only a sprinkling of free immigrants: they were mainly military personnel connected with the operations of the prisons, a few commercial men who saw opportunities in whaling, sealing and trading, and some agriculturalists lured by free land grants – men who could show capital standing enough to employ freed or assigned convicts. By the late 1820s the colonies were emerging with effective economic systems far beyond their original penitentiary functions and were beginning to show potential for staple exports, especially for the production of wheat and wool and, eventually, certain tradeable minerals. Immigrants would soon be required but distance and cost were prohibitive in the first four decades of the colonial experience.

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Overcoming these obstacles were the systems devised to service the immigrant needs of the Australian colonies. So successful were these solutions that a substantial flow of the migrant streams out of the British Isles was diverted to the south Pacific by the late 1830s: it a was a state-operated system which was novel, intricate, well designed, practical and ultimately safer than the laissez-faire standards of the much larger trans-Atlantic transfers of humanity. The Australian system was simple in conception: instead of giving away land, the colonial authorities now put a price on land acquisition and sold the land to capitalistic incomers. The revenue thus achieved was channelled to the funding the passages of large numbers of labouring immigrants – the Immigration Fund. It was a state-financed system, sometimes operating in tandem with private interests, but essentially state-designed. In principle this was a system which generated and lubricated Australian and New Zealand immigration for one and half centuries, until the 1970s. It channelled colonial revenues to meet the priorities of immigration which sought also to synchronise the flow of capital with that of labour and with the actual use of land. It had a grand theoretic base, originally designed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, which controlled and regulated the supply of settlers for the new continent. In the nineteenth century it accounted for 50 per cent of all immigrations, half of the 1.6 million brought from the British Isles in the nineteenth century.8 This, therefore, was an intervention into the normal spontaneous flows of British migrants, given vital incentives by the free passages on offer and the emerging promise of economic betterment in the Antipodes. Overcoming negative preconceptions was a serious problem at the start. The first consignments of free immigrants were generally poor women induced to emigrate from destitute localities in London, Dublin and Cork; they probably included a number of prostitutes whose selection was dubiously related to the imbalance of sexes in the existing colonial population. Some historians categorised the immigrants as the ‘dross’, the ‘shovelled-out paupers’, and the ‘detritus’ of urbanising Britain. A more sympathetic analysis shows that the labouring immigrants were in reality well-selected, volitional and self-determined folk, above average in literacy and skill, and well-adapted to the needs of the colonies.9 Australasian priorities For most of the nineteenth century the assistance systems were indispensable, the primary way in which emigrants from Britain could be recruited. The colonial requirements were stringent. The provision of passages was generous enough to produce a flow of emigrants, though it was never entirely predictable. There were enough suggestible people prepared to respond to the inducement and the realistic promise of betterment. When the differential decreased or reversed, the flow was terminated promptly. But there were other important

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moments, certain years, when the flow swelled beyond the assistance system, when the differential widened so rapidly as to produce an astonishing expansion of self-funded emigrants. The Gold Rushes to Victoria in the early 1850s showed conclusively just how quickly the footloose youth of the British Isles (and beyond) could be attracted. But these were atypical conditions: assistance schemes were almost always necessary, as were the facilities and infrastructures to effect the great oceanic migrations. The colonists sought agricultural labourers and domestic servants in the reproductive and productive age groups. They oriented the selections towards rural Britain, and many of the earliest were drawn from southern England – where the suggestibility levels among the quasi-redundant rural workforce were probably most easily aroused. They were also closest to the centre of colonial organisation, London. Agents perambulated these counties in the late 1830s with considerable success, as seen in the composition of the migrants reaching the colonial ports. Some were labouring families who had skirted the Poor Law system, though most were free from those constraints. They were difficult to categorise, and there were many erratics among those ostensibly carefully chosen. Moreover Australia’s inflows of immigrants were difficult to synchronise: information about the needs was often out of phase – emigrants arriving in the colonial labour market finding that it had become overstocked in the interim. There were many times in the recruitment of colonial migrants when the recruiters found it difficult to raise interest in the main target populations. This then revealed the different degrees of suggestibility and availability in the British system. Thus in the mid-1830s (and again in the early 1850s) there was recourse to a closely focused recruitment of Highlanders in the north of Scotland, organised by agents of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission and local bodies keen to promote such an outflow from the region. The propulsion came from the idea of connecting ‘surpluses’ of rural people, recurrently famished and rendered redundant by landlord policies, to the sharpening needs of the Australian colonists. Colonial funds were directed to the Highlands which became a particularly productive recruiting zone for two brief periods of critical labour shortage. In this case the Australian focus was perfectly consistent with the perceived rural transformation of the Highlands (see below, chapter 13). The Australian colonies were transformed into export producers as staples emerged to propel rapid expansion, wool production in the first instance. The civilian economy broadened and expanded, creating large appetites for labour, which was supplied as assisted immigrants. The expansion was punctuated by severe fluctuations (e.g. in the early 1840s and in the 1890s) and by rising competition from other destinations (mainly from across the Atlantic). Resistance in Britain to the idea of emigrating to Australia and New Zealand diminished as colonial living standards rose; the deterrent of distance and cost was well compensated by generous assistance schemes. But as emigration became more

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respectable and habituated, the contributions of privately funded migration also rose.10 Australian requirements – for rural labour and domestic servants – were not easily achieved though most of the effort was successful. Women in England were not readily recruited; agricultural labourers were increasingly scarce after the mid-century. Though tens of thousands of emigrants in England and Scotland were gathered there were recurrent shortfalls: filling the quotas was frequently frustrated and costly. Eventually a rising proportion of urban migrants was recruited, sometimes those chosen having masked their true origins with false descriptions of their occupational and geographic origins. The new colony of Queensland made vigorous efforts to attract immigrants in the 1860s and an inrush of 14,000 immigrants arrived in two years which created problems including negative publicity from disappointed immigrants who decried the land of ‘the wild kangaroos and wilder aboriginal’. The Queensland labour market was hungry for new recruits and the colonial government was eager to sell land to new settlers. The outcome was a typically heterogeneous inflow of people from Britain and Ireland. They included large contingents of distressed ‘cotton operatives’, victims of the ‘cotton famine’ in Lancashire. The colonial government employed agents in the British Isles and offered not only assisted passages but special lures regarding land: capitalists were able to get very good land orders if they paid their own passages and there was almost ‘an inexhaustible supply of land for use’. Another device was a new scheme, called the ‘Lien on Crops Bill’, which allowed small farmers to raise money on the security of their future crops, and was intended as a boost for small producers.11 Competition for emigrants from other destinations in Australasia and North America was intense but Queensland was able to entice 35,000 immigrants who arrived in four years. By this time the competing colonies were reaching into a diminishing pool of rural population in Britain and especially in England, which was yielding a lower per capita supply than other parts of the Isles. But the primary resort of the colonial recruiters was Ireland (and this despite the prevailing colonial prejudice against both Irish and Catholics). Ireland made up the recruiting shortfalls, especially of rural labour and domestic servants – they were more recruitable and suggestible, and generally very successful labour recruits for Australian needs. In the first instance the colonies recruited among the Irish orphanages and poor houses in Cork and Dublin, and recurred in this mode even in the mid-century (at the time of the Famine). But recruitment was broadened into the general Irish populations, and shippers operating in English and Scottish ports were able to make up their shortfalls in quotas by picking up Irish immigrants, many of whom had been shipped cheaply to Plymouth or Liverpool already. In the receiving colonies there was anxiety about the over-proportion of Irish and Catholics. In 1841 the Select Committee on Emigration in New South

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Wales complained of the excess of Irish which ‘was not in accordance with the respective numbers of the religious persuasions in this colony’.12 The vociferous Presbyterian J.D. Lang accused Caroline Chisholm of flooding the colony with Roman Catholics to ‘Tipperarify the moral atmosphere of New South Wales’.13 In his opinion the Irish peasantry were ‘the most ignorant, the most superstitious and the very lowest in the scale of European civilisation’. Lang lost the contest and Australia became decidedly Irish and indeed literate and civilised. In reality, the colonies could not rely on labouring emigrants from England and were compelled to look to Ireland (and Scotland to a lesser extent) where the propensity to migrate was clearly greater.14 Irish emigration to Australia and New Zealand fitted colonial criteria very effectively and was sometimes primed by Church and philanthropic bodies. But the flows were also reinforced more effectively by the self-propelling nature of so much of Irish emigration. Family and kinship groups were able to use colonial schemes advantageously to expedite chains of migrations, even over extremely long distances to the Antipodes: a great deal of Irish migration was connected by kinship ties and the knowledge of neighbouring migrants. It is likely that the Irish required less persuasion than others in the British Isles. Persuading English agricultural labourers to emigrate was highly variable, but generally increasingly difficult after 1850. Consequently the sweep for emigrants extended increasingly to Ireland, despite certain colonial reservations, while in Ireland the culture was fully attuned to emigration.15 The Australasian colonies, in consequence, became decidedly more Irish places than any other nineteenthcentury destination. Even in Ireland, as the country slowly recovered from the horrors of the Famine, recruitment demanded greater efforts by the 1870s and the work of recruiting agents was redoubled. Disruptive gold The Australian colonies interlocked with British and Irish migratory systems in mixed ways, especially in the recruitment of women, where Irish women were strikingly prominent. Sudden extreme labour shortages in Australia were recurrent, exacerbated by the problems of distance. Thus in early 1849 a letter back to Scotland reported the great shortage of male and female servants and shepherds: ‘800 Government immigrants came to port in one week, but next week there was none to be found’.16 By the 1860s and beyond, regardless of generous subsidisation, the complexion of the inflows shifted towards the towns and cities, despite cries of dismay among the colonial opinion of the day. The most dynamic shifts of supply happened under the irresistible influence of the Gold Rushes of the 1850s. This was a wild moment which caused a chaotic flooding to the Australian immigrant market – overwhelming the previous systems of recruitment. This (and other mineral bonanzas notably in South

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Island, New Zealand in the 1860s) demonstrated conclusively that the magnet of sudden gold rushes could overcome all resistance to distance and to cost for a few frenetic years – before it returned to its normal default soon thereafter. In the 1850s Australia attracted more unassisted immigrants than all the other decades of the century together. But there was parallel flow from another source: namely the indentured Chinese gold-finders, 60,000 of them, channelled to the Australian colonies by agents operating from Canton. They, too, proved that the British migrant reservoir was not capable of meeting the sudden needs of the gold fields. After the gold rushes – mainly in decline by 1856 – the colonies reverted to their general dependence on subsidised immigration. This enabled the colonies to recruit according to their needs, which remained fundamentally rural-based for the rest of the century, though urbanisation was emerging vigorously. The colonies ramped up their recruitments in phases of expansion and switched the tap off during recessions (e.g. in the 1890s when immigration ran into negative numbers). Reliance on Ireland did not diminish and fresh recruitment drives were necessary during these decades, especially as competition from North America increased as Atlantic fares were reduced. Two factors favoured Australia: the first was the rising familiarity and acceptance of the idea of emigration in Britain – which rose even when British living standards improved. The second factor was yet more decisive: the essential differential created by the generally higher living standards in Australia for most of the time (indeed into the twentieth century).17 This differential was the most effective motor of migration between Britain and Australia. The spectrum of emigration Victorian emigrants from Britain and Ireland were an unwieldy body of people, not only on account of their sheer numbers – perhaps 10 million to all destinations – but also in their extreme diversity, from paupers to aristocrats, from atheistic socialists to standard-issue bishops, from convicts to missionaries. The most renowned image of the emigrant was Ford Madox Brown’s picture ‘The Last of England’, the portrait of the sensitive recently married couple departing for Australia in mid-century. They were depicted in the moment of departure, one evidently clouded with melancholy and apprehension, a picture of exile, loss and reluctance. They were bourgeois Londoners huddled against the wind and spray off the cliffs of Dover, huddled also against their callow fellow emigrants, clearly of the lower classes. Just visible in the picture is a fragile infant beneath the young mother’s cape – the next generation, upon whose behalf departing emigrants commonly justified their extraordinary act of emigration.18 The Australian colonies thus intervened into the British emigration fields with schemes that subsidised migration and channelled the labour availabilities

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– using recruiting agencies (and premiums) to stimulate flows in their direction. The schemes worked in tandem with private initiatives which also helped to activate special responses. But these were secondary to the general shifts of population which eventually prompted millions of people towards the ports, mostly to America. Australia was successful in diverting several hundred thousand away from the prevailing streams by special mechanisms specifically invented to solve its problem of distance. And there were also certain private initiatives by British landlords and organisations to take advantage of the Australian regulations. This caused some agitation in the colonies about the fear of ‘shovelling paupers’ onto the colonies and also allegations of being in league with evicting landlords. In the event it was a minor part of the antipodean recruitments. Australia received several batches of displaced people: for instance groups of unemployed and distressed weavers; the colonies also received people displaced from the land – some directly evicted, as from County Donegal to Queensland and New South Wales in the post-famine decades;19 and people in distress in the Scottish Highlands were given passages by charities and the colonial governments. But such ‘refugees’ were a small portion of the total. Synchronising the inflows with local needs was never easy and there were periodic over-supplies and sudden shortages. Much emphasis was given to the introduction of single female immigrants to serve as domestic servants and in early years this recruitment was channelled by way of English and Irish workhouses. There were many different types of distressed females from philanthropic bodies, including the National Benevolent Society. In 1850 the London Females Colonization Society sent 400 girls from Holborn and Westminster to South Australia. The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society was involved in 1852–53. The recruitment methods were able to tap into specific reservoirs of redundant labour in Britain. Thus unemployed railway workers arrived after working in Belgium and France and there was a special intake of unemployed lacemakers from Calais, fleeing revolution, workers who had previously migrated from the depressed Nottingham industry.20 The mechanisms of recruitment were clearly being used to explore the most likely sources of migrants across the British Isles. In Australia the colonial-born began to outnumber the immigrants by the 1860s. Local rates of reproduction did not rival those of the early American colonies but the growth was prodigious. There were some remarkable cases, such as that of Donald Cameron, a native of Ardnamurchan in the Scottish Highlands, who arrived in Sydney in 1838 with his family and settled as a farmer in the Hunter Valley. He married twice and fathered fifteen children, eleven still alive in the colony when he died in 1867 aged ninety; but there were also sixty-six grandchildren and fifty-five great grandchildren – a total in 1867 of 106 living descendants.21

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Most of all, because of remoteness and the use of subsidies, the Australian colonies possessed an almost unique capacity to control the composition and levels of immigration. Even into the twentieth century Australasian governments were able to determine most of the selection and timing of their immigrant intakes. This was the basis for ‘White Australia’ (and ‘White New Zealand’), its most defining reputation until the 1970s. It was also a system which produced sudden peaks of immigration. A statistician later dramatised this pattern in a famous metaphor: it resembled the feeding habits of the boa constrictor: Australia was in the habit of ‘bolting’ its immigrants, over say ten years – then, sated, fell into a period of abstinence perhaps for ten or twenty years in a phase of digestion, until the appetite (or the labour market) revived.22 Colonial rivalries Like the other Australasian colonies, New Zealand conducted its own assisted immigration policies: many of its immigrants indeed came via Australia, especially during the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s. But most of its immigrants were of the same variety as Australia’s. The work of Rollo Arnold on emigration to New Zealand in the 1870s showed that the intensity and range of recruiting agencies was a major factor in the distribution of origins.23 The New Zealand government introduced 101,000 immigrants in the 1870s, 50 per cent being Irish and Scots, 50 per cent English. Arnold analysed in detail the conditions in various counties from which most of the English were drawn, looking at the turmoil among the agricultural labourers at that time, but most of all the role of the recruiting agencies.24 New Zealand assisted an even larger proportion of its settlers than Australia and also conducted vigorous recruitment drives; similarly it received special selections of migrants from particular sources in Britain, thus skewing the intakes in well-known ways. For instance the number of recruiting agents was very high in Scotland – in 1872, 72 out of 116 agents in the British Isles. The Irish were somewhat underrepresented and received fewer assisted passages. Up until 1852 the English were slightly over-represented in New Zealand, but thereafter their ranking faltered and became a lower intake than their home share for the rest of the century. They came primarily from the Home Counties around London, and also from Cornwall, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Later in the century, the north of England began to contribute a larger proportion. The composition and origins of the New Zealand incoming population was complicated by the large role of trans-Tasman migration throughout the colonial period. The biases in the recruitment seemed to reflect the proximity to the ports of departure and the work of agents, whose activity can be traced in the applications as they were distributed. Chain migrations tended to reinforce earlier biases in

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recruitment and thus traditions of sending out were established and the system of nominations strengthened regional concentrations. One of the most interesting findings is that, despite the targeting of rural migrants and a strong representation of such people in the flows to New Zealand, no more than two-fifths of migrants were from agricultural backgrounds. The actual recruitment was only slightly more rural than the prevailing proportion of rural people in England and Scotland.25 Some of the keenest observations of the state of the British labour market and the propensities of the rural population to emigrate were recorded by the men sent to recruit emigrants to New South Wales. In 1861 Henry Parkes and Willam Dalley toured many districts in search of migrants. In one letter they reported that ‘the inhabitants of New South Wales, consisting of only 350,553 souls, could not possibly find the money necessary for the removal of the tens of thousands in England who would gladly emigrate, if they could do so without cost to themselves’. They believed that ‘English statesmen [were] blind to the national importance of turning this torrent of emigrants to the British colonies’. ‘They are afraid of “stimulating” emigration, they tell you, for it is the best class of people who emigrate’. There were even signs of labour shortages in England: ‘There can be no doubt that in the agricultural counties of England, labour is at present by no means in excess of their requirements by employers’. Farmers and landed proprietors were beginning to express a ‘strong feeling of opposition to emigration’, and ‘this adverse feeling extends to the newspaper press, which of course largely depends on the moneyed classes’. Added difficulty came from the competition for emigrants from Canada and the other Australian colonies: Parkes and Dalley bemoaned the fact that ‘We find ourselves in the midst of a keen competition for the outflowing population of the Mother Country, in which “free grants of land” are offered as prizes’.26 Antipodean differentials The relationship by emigration between Britain and Australasia was, therefore, shaped by distance and the systems adopted by the receiving colonies. The flow was relatively well documented and cast some prismatic light on the origins, the recruitability and the selectivity of the intakes. From the late 1830s the colonies were able to gather people above average in literacy, skills and age composition – even though searching for people low in the occupational hierarchy.27 The colonies sought rural people in zones of high rural unemployment and the searching was relatively successful in the early years – but was soon found to be insufficient and recourse was made to Ireland. Urban emigration emerged by the end of the century. Most fundamentally, Australia began recruiting in the British Isles at a time when rising productivity in British agriculture (among other factors) was pressing

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down on wage rates. This coincided with a long period in which wage rates in Australasia were rising dramatically. The differential widened and was later magnified when rural output overseas increased overseas wages while depressing incomes in Britain. The basic rationality of emigration, even to the Antipodes, was irresistible. The question at the centre is how all this was converted into oceanic migration, of which Australasia was a special case, and artificially confined within the British Diaspora until 1947, long after Canada and the United States had liberated themselves and diverted their human recruitment to continental Europe. None of the account is precise enough to pin down the exact propensities contained within the 2 million Australasian immigrants. Much credit has to be accorded to the system which eased the way of the emigrants. Australian and New Zealand living standards were high enough to bridge the problem of distance. When all of these factors are taken into account, it is clear that the Australian colonies siphoned people out of zones suffering decline, disruption, cyclical unemployment, famine and generalised frustration among the younger generation. It seems likely that these people – from, for instance, the Scottish Highlands, the West of Ireland, Calais, Cornwall and London – had a higher suggestibility than most and they made their way across the world under the auspices of assistance schemes. Eventually, by the end of the nineteenth century, emigration was more widely available to a world now more habituated to the idea – ascending to unprecedented heights by 1912. Notes 1 See Eric Richards, ‘Colonial misfits of the 1830s: three stories of migration’, Agora [Melbourne], 49: 1 (2014), 30–9. 2 See especially Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), and more generally Ged Martin (ed.), The Founding of Australia (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1978) and Frost, Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994). Frost points out that the initial cost of transporting convicts was more than twice the average cost of incarceration in Britain. Alan Frost, Botany Bay: The Real Story (Collingwood: Black Inc, 2011), p. 231. 3 Other extreme options were tried: see Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4 See Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); R. Haines, D. Oxley, M. Kleinig and E. Richards, ‘Migration and opportunity: an antipodean perspective’, International Review of Social History 43 (1998), 235–63. 5 Dundee, Perth and Cupar Advertiser, Sept. 1825. 6 Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 8, 46, 54, 57–8.

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7 Ibid., p. 58. 8 See generally, Robin Haines, Emigration and the Labouring Poor (London: Macmillan, 1997). 9 See Haines et al., ‘Migration and opportunity’, 235–63. 10 In the nineteenth century almost half of Australia’s immigrants were self-funded, but a disproportionate share of these was accounted for by the gold rushes in a few years of the 1850s. 11 Letters from Emigrants to Queensland, 1863–1885 (Oxley Library, Brisbane). 12 NSW Legislative Council, Votes & Proceedings, 27 July 1841. 13 J.D. Lang, letter in Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 1848. 14 See T.F. Elliott, letter to James Stephen, in British Parliamentary Papers: Colonies: Australia vol. 6 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970), p. 22. 15 See below, chapter 12. 16 Ken McConnell (ed.), Tay Valley People in Australia, 1788–1988 (Dundee: Tay Valley Historical Society, 1988), p. 17. 17 Wages were much higher in Australia – see, for instance, Ross Duncan, ‘Case studies in emigration: Cornwall, Gloucestershire and New South Wales, 1877–1886’, Economic History Review n.s. 16 (1963), 273–4; on the causes of such high Australian living standards, see Ian W. McLean, Why Australia Prospered (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 56–60. 18 F.M. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green, 1896); F.M. Brown, Exhibition of ‘Work’ and Other Paintings … at the Gallery, 191 Piccadilly (London: McCorquodale, 1865), quoted in Tate Gallery, The PreRaphaelites (London: The Tate Gallery and Penguin Books, 1984). 19 See, for instance, W.E. Vaughan, Sin, Sheep and Scotsmen: John George Adair and the Derryveagh Evictions, 1861 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1983), pp. 47, 63. 20 Nottingham Review, 7 April 1848. 21 See obituary of Donald Cameron in the Sydney Empire, 27 May 1867, in Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML Doc 2587. 22 This comparison was first employed by C.H. Wickens, ‘Australian population: its nature and growth’, Economic Record 1 (1925), 5. 23 W. Alan Armstrong, in Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, edited by James Eli Adams (Danbury, Conn: Grolier Academic, 2004), vol. 2. 24 Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1981). 25 See Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland, 1800–1945 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008), chap. 3. See also Rebecca Lenihan, From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots Migrants, 1840–1920 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015). 26 NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes & Proceedings, 1861–62, vol. 2, pp. 77ff. 27 See Richards, ‘Australian map of British and Irish literacy’.

11

Upland adjustments: west Wales and Swaledale and the sequences of migration

Localised variants The underlying conditions which precipitated emigration across the globe stretched to every corner of the British Isles, from Shetland to Cornwall, from Sligo to Boston. There were always significant regional variations in timing, direction, velocity and scale; the Australian experience had mirrored these shifting propensities. Wales, in common with many locations in the British Isles, had a mixed career during the economic and demographic upheavals of the late eighteenth century. Parts of the country were deeply involved in industrialisation and some drew immigrants not only from the rest of Wales but also from districts in England and Ireland. Other parts of Wales became regional concentrations of specialised production for a wider market. And there were also districts which lapsed into rural retrogression. Not surprisingly, these permutations gave rise to confusing lines of mobility, the least publicised of which were the quiet seepages into and out of each region. The best known, and probably the least representative, migrations were those which took Welsh people abroad. Early emigration from Wales, in the eighteenth century, demonstrated special combinations of stimuli, often difficult to disentangle. Religion figured prominently, agitating people’s minds in the direction of new beginnings in America, acting as a precipitant – as it did famously in Cornwall, East Anglia and the Scottish Highlands. But there were other potent forces at work, disturbing communities and generating outward flows. Some of these emigrations possessed strikingly communal characteristics, suggesting special local and social origins.1 Rural west Wales was especially prominent in the emigration account; it also vividly manifested some of the classic conditions making for mobility. According to Welsh historian, Geraint Jenkins, by the late eighteenth century ‘many landed estates had fallen into the hands of landlords who, if they were not already English, simply adopted metropolitan values and distanced themselves from the

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native culture and the tongue spoken by the vast majority’. There was a widening social distance ‘especially as hard-hearted stewards and agents violated the traditional code of conduct which had previously bound the social groups together’. He quotes William Jones of the Wynnstay Estate in Montgomeryshire, referring to estate agents as ‘these rapacious cormorants’.2 Central Wales in the mid-eighteenth century was becoming a reservoir of labour flowing in several directions (one of them was towards industrialising Shropshire, as we have already seen). Howell stresses the importance of farmer status in Wales with its predominance of small farms. He notes the rapid growth of population and the excess of labour which by 1815 ‘could neither be absorbed by alternative employment nor by the traditional subsistence agricultural economy’, and thus the retrenchment of labour.3 Seasonal movements of labour from upland Wales to the Vale of Glamorgan and to the English Midlands helped to supplement local income and employment. Thus reapers from Cardigan went to harvests in Herefordshire and returned to deal with slightly later harvest requirements in their home county. Welsh pickers travelled to the Kent hop fields in the 1790s, a movement which grew during the labour shortages of wartime – for example, extending to the more distant Lincolnshire harvests in 1800. Women from west Wales, as domestic servants, were drawn to London and Bristol; they were usually the wives of day labourers and some even those of farmers.4 David Jones charted seasonal migration from the west Wales coast to the English border counties, and Welsh workers were drawn to London and the Home Counties for potato and fruit harvests; they were also found in Merioneth and Derbyshire, notably people from Montgomeryshire moving to the east with their livestock for the winter markets.5 Short-distance migrations were commonplace and may have shaded into permanent relocation, not significantly before 1750, but increasingly thereafter. Increased mobility in rural Wales was marked also by particular episodes of emigration which entered the folk memory. One was the district of Llanbrynmair in Montgomeryshire, which witnessed substantial and persistent emigration to America from the 1790s. These emigrations were prompted first by the local ministers, who took the lead in inspiring and encouraging emigration. The migrants were mainly leaving hill farms in Montgomeryshire and hundreds of them departed and settled mainly together – some went to Tennessee and some to Ohio. They were predominantly of farming stock, and evidently not of the most desperate strata of the home society.6 The departures from the Llanbrynmair area followed in a sequence and continued for a generation, thus the hill farms were effectively emptied ‘as the community resettled itself again in the United States’.7 The historian Clare Taylor associates this continuing drain of people from the hills with a particular psychology which was infused with ideas of popular liberty and libertarian idealism – indeed a ‘Romantic’ inspiration. Even more

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fundamental, she contends, was a theological motivation: these were a deeply Calvinistic people and they expressed their religious solidarity in their collective resettlement. Economic conditions provided the background but centre stage was occupied by spiritual factors: poor farming conditions in Montgomeryshire, worsened by rack-renting and the Enclosure Acts, were matched in the 1830s and beyond by better opportunities in America. Powerful though such conditions were, they alone did not explain why people were emigrating from Wales to America, ‘sometimes at the rate of fifty a month’. As Taylor says, ‘The Llanbrynmair folk kept in close touch with each other, especially through their pastors, and the radical heritage in the United States clearly appealed’.8 The social psychology of such departures was much affected by local economic conditions and the persuasions of ministers and earlier migrants. In 1800, for instance, the incursions of a press gang created a furore in Carmarthen where a crowd of 3,000 amassed to prevent its activities. There was a degree of collective hysteria, which probably accentuated a desire to get to America. A few years later letters were being sent back to Llanbrynmair from the Ebensburg settlement in Pennsylvania (in Cambria County). The Ebensburg settlement had begun there under the leadership of the Congregational minister Rhees Lloyd in 1796 with a body of twenty Welsh migrants. One remarkable epistle of May 1805, captured many of the social reverberations that surrounded the emigration decisions of this community: The Welsh in this settlement often appear to be satisfied with the situation in which they find themselves – more than I ever saw before … I am more and more inclined not to give any encouragement [to emigrate] to farmers who are fairly comfortably off and who are able to pay their way reasonably without worry to give up all they have to come to America. Most of them spend most of what they have if not all of it before they establish a comfortable living for themselves. But my views are quite different in relation to those who have to live entirely by their day’s work. I do not think I have seen any of them, apart from one old servant to a gentleman, dissatisfied with things … I have seen many who live comfortably in the old country … who are completely quiet and content in their minds though their possessions have diminished and who testify quite simply that they have never slept so easy in their beds – some shopkeepers, freeholders and doctors among these last mentioned but I have seen few of their wives who are content.9

Such letters were emphatically Welsh, and suffused with religious sentiment amid the eloquent outcry against the rising pressure of landlords on the people of Llanbrynmair – of people being evicted and having to retreat from the land, and reduced to the status of cottagers. Such letters demonstrated that economic prospects were uppermost, though not exclusive, in the minds of the emigrants – they were intensely conscious of the economic ‘differential’ without which the emigration was improbable. The Welsh letters hint at the generalised pressure

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on the rural community, transmitted through landlord demands, precipitating broad collective shifts, the solidarity of which was heavily reinforced by their shared religious faith. In the many letters back and forth between Ohio and Montgomeryshire there was little direct report of conditions back in Wales.10 An exception was Evan Roberts, writing to Ebensburg, in October 1812 about recent events in Tan y Ffordd. His letter exhaled a sense of insecurity, of the plight of the family under threat from their evicting landlord. He wrote of their fear and the possibility of a temporary breathing space: We … have been sent from Dolgadlan Mill as the result of much oppression and injustice. Our landowner intended to do us much harm but thanks to Him who holds the hearts of Kings in his hand we were not turned out til half way through the Spring and paid until May 1st – they now have a cottage.11

Such anxious circumstances, in all their permutations, were part of the context of emigration. The immediate precipitants of emigration loomed larger than the broad context. In the correspondence between Ohio and west Wales such matters were generally taken for granted or suppressed. The historian Anne Kelly Knowles has stressed the impact of enclosures in Pen Llyn peninsula in the years 1802 to 1812, which was associated with a peak of emigration from that district.12 Similarly land pressure in Cardiganshire induced various responses: for instance, as population grew, the line of settlement pressed further and further up the slopes of Mynydd Bach as people built tai unnos (traditionally houses built in one night), which ‘staked the builder’s claim to traditional squatter’s rights on a small piece of land’. It was difficult for the poorest; emigration was mainly undertaken by ‘mature families’ in a slow and deliberate removal, not in any way feverish.13 By 1850 there were 30,000 Welshborn in the United States but they were increasingly from urban and industrial places. Rural Wales In the background there were radical changes to the foundations of rural life in west Wales. Most of all, there was the demographic dimension: population probably increased by more than 30 per cent between 1750 and 1800.14 And even in west Wales, in Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen, there was a doubling of numbers over the century 1750–1851. The amplitude of the initial population growth in rural districts would have been greater but for migration outwards. The differential growth of towns over the countryside was astonishing: towns with ironworks and local mines, e.g. Merthyr in Glamorgan, increased by 300 per cent in the period 1801 to 1830.15

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Symptoms were exposed which showed that the rural parts of Wales were already under pressure in the late eighteenth century, responding to the impact of population growth and the demands for higher productivity under the rising demand for food and raw materials. As early as 1772 Arthur Young had been critical of the old ways and still thought that South Wales was backward in rural methods in 1813. But there was change in the air – driven by spirited landowners and new land agents leading the charge – inducing rising rents, shortening leases, consolidating farms, and enclosing much so-called ‘unused’ land. These were the signs of rising pressure on the landed community, a turning of the agricultural screws to raise output and induce greater efficiency. This generalised tightening of conditions on the land was reflected in a growing hostility in rural relations – all magnified by population pressure. The latter eventually produced a surplus of labour in central Wales. In 1821 it was reported that ‘the labouring class of Society is too numerous in proportion to the land now under cultivation’. The expropriation of common and waste land was an exacerbating factor. Meanwhile the lower classes had been building smallholdings on the common lands – a clear sign of rising strain on landed resources. The pressure of overpopulation also contributed to land hunger and a rapid rise in rents.16 Population in the rural districts of west Wales continued to rise in the early decades of the nineteenth century, roughly by 50 per cent by mid-century, then lapsing into a decline of the same scale by 1901. During the war years between 1801 and 1814 rents trebled in Cardigan, which was then the most troubled part of Wales. There were sporadic disturbances for three decades across the country including Montgomeryshire, all part of the rising tensions in rural society springing from pressure to increase productivity. At the end of the war the long depression of prices was unmatched by reductions in rents. Thus many farmers in 1830 found that ‘holding land was not only more expensive but less secure than it had been in 1793’. Leases had become shorter, shifting towards one-year contracts.17 There were aggressive landlord moves to force on with enclosures – especially against squatters, who themselves were responding to population pressure. The intensification of sheep farming encroaching on common rights, also caused ructions.18 All were signals of mounting stress, leading sometimes to riot and distress and most probably to a greater suggestibility towards migration. The 1841 census reporter referred to substantial emigration from southern Cardigan, North Pembroke and north Carmarthen, and this coincided with the Rebecca Riots of 1839–40 (rural protests directed against taxes, tithes, tolls and poor rates). But there was also a background of unrelieved depression. Some parish vestries helped a few emigrants – for instance allocating up to £30 for a family to get to America. More generally the emigrants appear to have been mainly ‘small farmers and the better sort of peasantry’, in addition to labourers. There were direct sailings from Welsh ports to Quebec and New York.

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Newspapers were advertising passages and ships were instructed to call even at very small ports to take people to Liverpool, often people travelling in groups.19 The entire rural transformation was especially visible in Cardiganshire, where land hunger became intense. It was the product of population growth associated with the ‘multiple occupation of holdings and the trend to permanent farm amalgamations on many of the larger estates’. At an official enquiry in 1896 it was recollected as ‘the great craving for land which we found to be a most marked characteristic of the Welsh in common with other branches of the Celtic Races’.20 The Welsh Land Commission drew attention to the scores of mountain farms of all sizes … with their mud hovels and the defective buildings, where even in the good times, they were able to exist with infinite difficulty, eking out a miserable and laborious life.

The Report concluded that surely there is nothing but the consuming passion, the leech-craving for land, that can account for such a state of things. These men and their families would not persist in prolonging their miserable existence unless they were wholly possessed with the feeling that they must at all costs have a little holding … and that without it, life for them would not be worth living.21

Emigration had its effect but the poorest in the population were, as always, impeded by their lack of means and also by their lack of the English language. Inertia also played its part: one observer, Malkin, in 1807 had said there were many who were: Discontented with their dreary quarters and hard fare, and disposed to emigrate in quest of higher wages and … the comforts of life. But while they are isolated by a tongue of their own, they are tied down by a peculiar necessity to the place that gave them birth’.22

A Welsh emigrant who returned home on a visit in 1801 from Philadelphia reported: I cannot describe to you the conditions of our poor country, thousands of the poor move about the country begging for bread … Myriads would emigrate if they had money … I wish a method was devised to take them over, and let them work at the money after they had got there.

Yet a large Cardiganshire landowner said in 1801 ‘Vast emigrations are going to America from this country; we can but ill spare them’. The impulse to emigrate was particularly strong among these Welsh folk.23

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The sudden expansion of the Canadian timber trade after 1815 made a large difference to the availability of passages (as in Ireland): for instance, the first advertisements for sailing from Carmarthen occurred in 1816 and there was a continuing expansion into the 1830s. Those going to Ohio were described as the ‘upper-middle stratum of agricultural society’. Local people tended to flock to the same destinations and there was a pronounced development of chain migration among the Cardigan emigrants.24 The 1841 census reported emigration as ‘a low but sustained movement overseas’ with occasional surges. But Van Vugt, a historian of these outflows, concluded that that census numbers were seriously defective and did not align with documented departures: the 1841 census had greatly underestimated the numbers.25 There were curious variations in the regional experiences of out-migration: for instance, from Cardiganshire, unlike most places, the level of female migration was much lower than that of males, which was probably due to the proximity of Glamorganshire coalfields. Cardiganshire was one of the six English and Welsh counties that absolutely lost population 1841–1911, times of extreme Welsh rural poverty, especially in the 1870s.26 There was a great reduction, by 28 per cent, in the number of male farm workers between 1851 and 1891.27 But the relentless competition for tenancies – land hunger – meant that farmers’ sons and farm labourers were ‘often unable to realise their ambitions to have holdings of their own’.28 In 1882 a Cardigan newspaper remarked that ‘Extraordinary facilities offered to emigrants by competing lines of ocean steamers are such that no man or woman need now stay at home … all are invited who have either capital to spend or muscle wherewith to work’.29 Migration was evidently a part of the adjustment to these wider structural changes – mostly expressed in internal migration and, by the 1840s, the total populations of the upland counties of mid-Wales were in permanent decline. In the lengthy adjustment, they had supplied people to the American states and beyond; by 1841 Welsh emigration became increasingly industrial and urban in source, reflecting the earlier transition in the Welsh population, notably the outflow of Welsh miners.30 Even then there were atavistic elements in the migrations. As Van Vugt reports, ‘Land [in Ohio] also drew many from the industrial south east [of Wales], especially those who had originally hailed from rural areas before moving into industry. They could always combine industrial work with farming in Ohio’.31 Van Vugt suggested that ‘The appeal of American farming for some Welsh miners was almost magical’.32 A sample of Welsh emigrants to the United States in 1851 showed the transition to industrial occupations with a rising proportion of single adults and mining workers. Many of these people were ‘emigrating ultimately for agricultural reasons’, in a quest for farmland, even among the miners – a pattern common among some of the Cornish migrants of mid-century in both America and Australasia.33

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The degree of anger created by land changes in Wales is not to be underestimated. Alfred Russel Wallace, the renowned scientific thinker of late Victorian times, was a sharp observer of rural changes in Wales. In his early career he was a land surveyor and with his brother was engaged on work connected with the Tithe Act and the General Enclosure Act. ‘The underlying principles – or lack of principles – outraged Wallace’. The cottagers living on the moors had previously been able to keep a cow and a few sheep but their access was stripped from them. Those who owned land or held tenancies were given the most miserable compensation: it was a case of ‘simple robbery’. Years later, Wallace, still steaming with indignation, described the process as the ‘legalised robbery of the poor for the aggrandisement of the rich, who were the lawmakers’. Such indignation reflected the tensions in many parts of rural Wales, and no doubt coloured emigrants’ mentalities.34 This was Upland Britain in a critical rural transition, in which landlords were pressing for larger pastoral usage of the land, able to squeeze out the small farmers and reduce the paid agricultural population. West Wales was caught in the grip of pincers – a rapidly growing population in a context in which employment was not keeping pace and eventually lapsing into absolute decline. Rural dislocation was marked by protest and by outward mobility. The winners were those with control over the land. The collateral beneficiaries by immigration from this part of Wales were the mid-western American states. But the entire process was coloured, and indeed often led, by Congregational ministers and their fellow travellers. More generally, west Wales exhibited the recurring characteristics of rural districts in the time of emigration: rapid and unsupported demographic increase paralleled by labour-sacrificing agricultural changes which magnified the land hunger which lay behind the tensions and the exits of the time. The attraction of overseas destinations was re-doubled. Swaledale There were, of course, large tracts of England which in the same decades were also divorced from the industrial direction of economic change. Some parts of England were re-instated in their essential rurality. The demographic and economic career of the upland Swaledale region in the North Yorkshire Pennines demonstrates with unusual clarity several typical sequences within the long-term decline of its rural population.35 Swaledale was a classic case of rural change associated with migratory adjustments to demographic and economic pressures, and was a regional variant of the common experience in rural Britain.36 Detailed research devoted to this district exposes the long phases of migration out of the district and the forces of retention also.37 Here we are able to chart the build-up of population and detect the local and distant outlets for its migrants.

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Swaledale was mainly pastoral country with high grassed hills, ‘narrow, steep sided, grand and wild’.38 It was one of many valleys flowing eastwards and had been peopled for many centuries: there had been lead mines in Swaledale since Roman times, which ceased working only in the late nineteenth century. The main market town of Reeth had a population of almost 1500 in 1840: it was a ‘fine town for merchandise, with two cattle farms, and a market on Fridays drew large crowds’.39 The town served not only the farmers but also an industrial community: the lead mines were in full swing, though the local domestic knitting industry had already declined.40 There had been efforts to establish industrial knitting and a mill in 1835, but these were much hampered by the high cost of fuel and the lack of water power, and the mills were closed in 1870. Lead mining had been an important source of employment but the industry declined under the competition of imports in the 1890s. The collapse was part of several local conditions which produced an exodus from Swaledale.41 Consequently families departed for the Durham coalfields, and others to the cotton mills of Lancashire. Some went to the lead mines of Spain, leaving the ruins still to be seen. By the mid-twentieth century the population had fallen to 588. The sequence of departures overseas from Swaledale has also been established. Most migration was internal and generally restricted to a radius of about ten miles. R.P. Hastings calculated a high rate of out-migration after 1780, whereby the region lost more than two-thirds of the natural increase of population before 1840.42 Emigrants recorded in the 1770s were mainly tenants, small landholders and rural craftsmen, responding to advertisements and reacting against higher rents. The York Chronicle on 15 April 1774 reported parish overseers paying the passage costs of poor ‘people [who were] likely to become chargeable and were contented to be transported, in hope of changing their present poverty for better prospects in a different clime’. But mostly the increased emigration occurred after 1817 through the port of Hull. In 1818 it was claimed that ‘the race for emigration’ was unabated and the involvement of the timber ships was already having an effect. In 1829 there were reports that ‘males and females of every age … and class of society’ were leaving through Hull, and by March 1830 ‘the middle classes of whole parishes’ were preparing to leave, as many as 8,000 expected in the coming emigration season from Hull.43 Many people of good property were leaving from ports including Whitby, Stockton, Scarborough and Liverpool. Among the first people to emigrate were farmers and tradesmen, that is to say people with capital.44 The press emphasised the quality of the emigrants, especially good families with many sons to provide for. They were departing for America in the late 1820s and 1830s, their relocation facilitated by the sale of their farms.45 But by 1833 many of the poorer yeomen and small farmers were also beginning to take off for Canada, and ‘if they could afford it, to Australia’.

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Contemporary reports opened a window on the processes at work in the lives of these emigrants. Thus the Select Committee on Agriculture in 1833 had John Merry of Lockton testifying that emigrants from his district had included: former small freeholders who had been compelled to sell out; farmers who were losing money; labourers who had managed to save up £20 or even £30 ‘and others who had fallen on the parish’ who were given parish assistance which was not paid until they were safely aboard the emigrating ship – clearly a way of ridding the parish of paupers.46 Christine Hallas points out that ‘the poorest families, due to lack of capital, generally could not leave unless assisted by the local vestry’. By the 1840s emigration was gathering pace, many taking advantage of free passages to Australia and to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1845 more than fifty Swaledale people left for America, forming settlements in Dubuque in Iowa, a leading mining and pastoral region. Migrants sent home messages that America ‘was the country for the poor labouring man’.47 Emigration operated as a safety valve and there is a suggestion that the ‘pull’ force of opportunity was crucial for the people at the top of the ladder; whereas the ‘push’ factor of adversity was more decisive for those at the bottom of the rural hierarchy. The census sometimes referred to emigration – pointing out that farmers were laying off labourers, and generally employing fewer servants than previously, but they also included lead miners and weavers. People planning to emigrate ‘sold off everything except their bedding’; others were described as setting off with their bundles of clothing, a cask of butter or cheese, and a sack of oatmeal – heading over the hills to Liverpool. The Yorkshire Gazette reported in August 1831 that such emigrants were arriving penniless in Montreal, obliged to sleep ‘like dogs’ on wharves and on the streets.48 The reports varied. In June 1837 the Yorkshire Gazetteer printed a letter from Jonathon Alderston who had left Leadfield for New Biggins in Illinois. He wrote to his brother: ‘We have no Crown, no duty, no Bishops, nor yet have I seen a beggar – no stuarts [i.e. stewards] to bow to, no gentlemen, we are all one as high and independent as each other’. He also declared that there were far too few women in New Biggins and thousands of bachelors who lived ‘like dogs in pig hulls’. The magnetic differential was obviously composed of more than comparative wage rates.49 In the mid-1830s assisted passages were being provided by the Australian colonies, where ‘The most destitute labourer that could be landed was promised land, he could save enough from his first years earnings to buy fifty acres of land clear of timber and ready for ploughing’. But even so there were costs involved and it was still cheaper to get to the United States.50 In 1844 Swaledale people were passing from Hawes to Liverpool and America, 50 people in one batch. Yet emigration was both selective and a minority response. As Hallas says, ‘many chose to accept a lower standard of living rather than leave the area’.51

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Population growth in Swaledale had been extremely rapid in the first two decades of the nineteenth century (in 1811 to 1821 twice as fast as the average for rural England and Wales) and the community took many decades to stabilise its numbers (notably between 1881 and 1901). The function of emigration was both relieving and maintaining the local community in a surprising fashion. It operated as a dampener on population growth, reducing the pressure on local resources: and it is clear that out-migration from Swaledale was not replenished in the Malthusian mode.52 The population surge, which had been at its most vigorous in the years 1801–31, was mitigated and diminished by migration and emigration. The consequence for Swaledale was eventually positive: out-migration seemed to provide scope for the remaining population to persist in their old ways – it gave a breathing space over the following decades. More exactly, it allowed for the ‘continuance of some of the pre-industrial’ forms of local occupation: old ways were able to persist even against the pressures of economic maximisation and rationality.53 The Swaledale economy remained dominated by agriculture, and productivity increases were impressive, especially in dairying. There was a persistence of small-scale production and ownership, helped by the survival of by-employment on the farms. In the late nineteenth century the population fell by a quarter and, despite ‘the hardship to those affected’, the reduced population pressure enabled a better foundation for those who remained. By-employments lasted longer in these districts than elsewhere.54 The process of emigration nevertheless accompanied the relative decline of agricultural employment in the region. Eventually – and notably in the Swaledale district – the population fell by a quarter in the 1880s and by two-thirds over the longer period of 1821–1911; yet even so, the total population was still marginally greater at the end of the nineteenth century than it had been in 1800, which was also true of west Wales. Out-migration therefore had permitted the co-existence of older forms of economic and social life in parallel with the new agriculture. Many of the local farmers coped, but only ‘because most of the population growth was syphoned off during these years … A large part of the natural increase was surplus to local employment requirements’.55 Most of all, ‘local farmers “tightened their belts” and were prepared to accept lower personal incomes because their overriding priority was to remain on the land and to retain the farm as a family possession’.56 They responded to the widening income differentials with less enthusiasm than most places – the local psychology was more akin to that of Highland crofters than most of the rural population of the day.57 Emigration was only one of the outlets – much more was achieved by internal mobility; but in reality many chose to stay put. In nearby Wensleydale, despite significant migration, population growth had created more serious problems: ‘expansion through natural increase at the end

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of the eighteenth century was outstripping the ability of the agricultural economy to support the population’.58 In 1805 Charles Fothergill reported: ‘many of the poor families in this dale [upper Wensleydale] are very numerous … the country is not able to find support for all the inhabitants, insomuch that a great part of the youth when old enough are compelled to migrate’.59 By the 1810s outmigration from Upper Wensleydale was increasing rapidly and continued in surges. Here too the decline of lead mining was decisive, propelling outwards much of the natural population increase each decade. The Poor Law guardians provided some assistance to those departing; special kinship and community connections were welded between people from certain dales and parts of industrial Lancashire. Thus there was a persistent link between generations of people leaving from the Dales and settling in the Brierfield district of Burnley in Lancashire: several streets were colonised by 248 dales-born people and the local chapel was full of Swaledale people.60 Hallas argues that migration was the coping strategy to deal with poverty. ‘As the majority of the migrants were young people, the population profile … was increasingly tilted towards the elderly’.61 Poverty was a ‘basic structural feature of … rural communities’ – but though many departed many also remained, choosing poverty at home over migration.62 Comparable adjustments were experienced across other parts of rural Britain – there had been a phenomenal increase in rural productivity, and eventually employment in agriculture began to fall but the population of rural areas declined more slowly and later.63 In many parts of rural Britain people were choosing to remain on the land despite the fact that their living standards were under the greatest pressure.64 This apparent inertia was the cause of much frustration among landowners and rate-paying farmers, and the ‘emigrationists’ who believed that expatriation benefitted everyone, those who stayed and those who left. Emigration, of course, was merely one part of the general transformation of the rural sector. It was a type of ongoing restructuring which was much more radical and rigorous in Cornwall and the so-called ‘Celtic’ zones. Notes 1 For a useful introduction to Welsh migration questions see W.T. Rees Pryce and David Peate, ‘Introduction’, in John Rowlands (ed.), Welsh Family History: A Guide to Research (Birmingham: Genealogical Pub. Co., 2nd edn 1998). 2 Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 191–2. 3 David W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London: Routledge, 1977), chap. 2, pp. 95–7 and also Howell, The Rural Poor in Eighteenth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 120, which documents cases of leaseholders emigrating just prior to the expiration of their leases in Caernarfonshire in1793, anticipating rising rents and renewed pressure from their landlord.

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4 Howell, Rural Poor, pp. 84–5. 5 David J.V. Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protests in Wales, 1793–1835 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 3. 6 See Van Vugt, British Buckeyes, pp. 33ff. 7 Clare Taylor (ed.), Samuel Roberts and his Circle: Migration from Llanbrynmair, Montgomeryshire to America 1790-1890 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1974), np. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., citing a letter from George and Jane Roberts to Mother and Father, 21 May 1805. 10 See also ‘Extracts from the Tennessee and Pont Dolgadfon papers’, Montgomeryshire Collections, vol. 63. A later migration is documented in Iorwerth C. Peate, ‘An Atlantic voyage in 1848’, Montgomeryshire Collections, vol. 62. 11 Taylor (ed.), Samuel Roberts and his Circle. 12 Anne Kelly Knowles, Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 18. 13 Ibid., p. 98. 14 See Howell, Rural Poor, pp. 84–5. 15 Jones, Before Rebecca, p. 5. 16 Ibid., p. 36. 17 David Williams, The Rebecca Riots (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), pp. 91–2, 115. 18 There was some national sympathy for the plight of the ousted Welsh cottagers and small farmers and severe criticism of the land monopolies of ‘the great Bull-frogs’. See Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave, pp. 103, 137–84. 19 Williams, The Rebecca Riots, pp. 91–2, 115. 20 Kathryn Cooper, Exodus from Cardiganshire (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), quoting D. Ll. Thomas, The Welsh Land Commission: A Digest of its Report (London, 1896), p. 137. 21 Ibid., p. 26. 22 Ibid., p. 186. 23 Ibid., p. 187. 24 See William E. Van Vugt, Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States (Chicago: University of Illinois Press), p. 98. 25 Cooper, Exodus from Cardiganshire, p. 194. 26 Ibid., p. 112. 27 Ibid., pp. 187, 214. 28 Ibid., p. 215. 29 Kathryn Cooper, Exodus from Cardiganshire, p. 200. 30 See, for instance, Van Vugt, British Buckeyes and Britain to America, pp. 99, 154. See also William Jones, quoted in Jenkins, Concise History. 31 Van Vugt, British Buckeyes, p. 73. 32 Van Vugt, Britain to America, p. 105. 33 William E. Van Vugt, ‘Welsh Emigration to the USA during the mid-nineteenth century’, Welsh History Review 15 (1991), 545–61.

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34 Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 17–18. 35 See R. Fieldhouse and B. Jennings, A History of Richmond and Swaledale (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978), pp. 108–9. 36 There is evidence in other parts of Yorkshire of a close relation between ‘surges of out migration’ and the enclosure of commons, waste and fields in surrounding parishes and townships during the eighteenth century. See Steven King, ‘Migration on the margin? Mobility, integration and occupation in the West Riding, 1650–1820’, Journal of Historical Geography 23 (1997), 290–1. 37 See especially Christine S. Hallas, ‘Migration in nineteenth-century Wensleydale and Swaledale’, Northern History 27 (1991), 141–57; Hallas, Rural Responses to Industrialization: The North Yorkshire Pennines, 1790–1914 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999); Hallas, ‘Poverty and pragmatism in the northern uplands of England: the North Yorkshire Pennines, c. 1770–1900’, Social History 25: 1 (2000), 67–84. 38 See M. Hartley and J. Ingilby, The Yorkshire Dales (London: Dent, 1963), p. xiii. 39 Ibid., pp. 252–4. 40 Similar conditions applied in Montgomeryshire; see Van Vugt, British Buckeyes, p. 71. 41 See Hartley and Ingilby, Yorkshire Dales, pp. 252–4. 42 R.P. Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, 1780–1850 (Northallerton: North Yorkshire County Council, 1980), p. 138. 43 Ibid. 44 In 1829 there were reports from North Yorkshire that ‘America and Swan River Mania is very prevalent here at the present’. Farmers were agonising over which destination to choose and some were selling off their property in advance of their departures. The cost of passage was a vital consideration; reports sent home from America and Australia told of very mixed outcomes, thus making further decisions even more agonised. See Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave, p. 235. 45 Sporadic emigration from the North Riding after 1780 is recorded by R.P. Hastings, Poverty and the Poor Law in the North Riding of Yorkshire (York: Borthwick Papers, no. 61, 1982), together with the surprisingly high level of pauperism. Emigration was partly supported by parish contributions. Recurrent poor harvests and severe consequences are accounted in Roger A.E. Wells, Death and Distress in Yorkshire, 1793–1802 (York: Borthwick Papers, no. 52, 1977), pp. 7, 25, 28–9. 46 Hallas, Rural Responses, p. 286. 47 Hallas, ‘Poverty and pragmatism’, 78. 48 Hastings, North Riding History, p. 141. 49 Quoted in Van Vugt, British Immigration, vol. 2, p. xiv. 50 Ibid., p. 143. 51 Hallas, Rural Responses, pp. 286–7, 293–4, 311. 52 See below, chapter 16. 53 Hallas, Rural Responses, chaps 10 and 11, pp. 301–5. 54 Hallas, ‘Poverty and pragmatism’, 75; see also W.A. Armstrong and J.P. Huzel. ‘Food, shelter and self-help, the Poor Law and the position of the labourer in rural society’, in G.E. Mingay and Joan Thirsk (eds), The Agrarian History of England and Wales

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1750–1850, vol. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 794ff., esp. p. 807. 55 Hallas, Rural Responses, chap. 10, pp. 268, 310. 56 Ibid., p. 302. 57 See below, chapter 14. 58 Hallas, ‘Poverty and pragmatism’, 77. 59 Quoted by Hallas, Rural Responses, p. 270. 60 Ibid., p. 280. 61 Hallas, ‘Poverty and pragmatism’, 84. 62 Ibid. Emigration out of Yorkshire, especially through Hull, was complicated by the passage of transient emigrants from Europe, en route for Liverpool. To demonstrate the Europeanisation of Atlantic migration: in six months of 1888 Hull received 41,000 emigrants from Gothenburg, Oslo, Copenhagen and Hamburg, passing through on their way to America. They produced local health and statistical problems, and many stayed on at Hull. See Edward Gillett and Kenneth A. MacMahon, A History of Hull (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the University of Hull, 1989), pp. 381, 317ff. 63 See Peter Dewey, ‘Farm labour in England and Wales 1850–1914’, in E.J.T. Collins, The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1850–1914, vol. 7, part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 851–2 and 856. 64 Hallas, Rural Responses, p. 294.

12

Cornwall, Kent and London

Copper and rationality Unlike the rural variants, the Cornish story seemed to hinge entirely on its insecure dependence on copper mining, which went into steep decline in the Victorian years while the rest of the national economy expanded its industrial bases. Emigration from Cornwall outstripped all other counties in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century: it was at the top of the league table of per capita emigration.1 Here was a straightforward case of emigration operating as a clear response to a specific identifiable extrusive pressure which was reinforced by reciprocal attractions generated abroad (which indeed were directly undermining the local mining economy of Cornwall). The Cornish account – that is, the perfectly rational exchange of migrants from the declining copper industry in England to the other parts of the planet where the same industry was rapidly expanding – was an example of international adjustment by the mechanism of migration, the transfer of Cornish people (and their skills, technology and capital) to new rival copper-producing zones across the world which absorbed the outflows, as if debouching from Cornwall. Cornish emigration was a near-perfect case of global rationalisation in the context of the laissez-faire world of the Pax Britannica. Mining adjustments Skilled labour always was, and still is, one of the principal driving forces in international migration. Skill has been a passport to mobility, adventure and better incomes. Frank Thistlethwaite, father of many of the best organising ideas regarding the history of mass migration, remarked that ‘Skill acts, as it were, as a radioactive tracer in the blood stream of migration’. It provides a way of studying what he calls ‘the inchoate ethnic mass’.2 The Cornish were far from inchoate; many of them were certainly skilled, and in the nineteenth century they possessed a high propensity to emigrate.3

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Cornwall was full of skilled hard-rock miners in its own copper and related industries that unhappily descended into a succession of severe slumps in the mid-nineteenth century. The decline of Cornwall was partly caused by mineral depletion and by technical problems in the local mines, but even more by the spectacular rise of competition for new mining discoveries in many other parts of the world, from Brazil to Arizona, South Africa and Australia. Many of the newly competing overseas mines were pioneered and worked by skilled Cornish emigrants. The Cornish found themselves in every corner of the Anglophone world as well as in South America and New Guinea. This was the intelligent adjustment of international trade which, in effect, required the prompt re-location of Cornish miners to the new operations across the globe. The quest for copper across the globe eventually undermined the old economy in Cornwall and this was one of the clearest ironies of that laissez-faire world. It was an experience by no means exclusive to Cornwall: the farmers of Britain were similarly blazoning new agricultures in far-off places, which eventually also undercut their own rural brethren back home. The evolving world economy generated such a flux of change, such an articulation of distant economies, that virtually all parts were induced to re-adjust. The Cornish were propellants of such changes, and also some of its victims. The international adjustment by the Cornish migrants was framed by the income differential which had decisively widened under the impact of the much more successful copper mining operations overseas. But this somewhat mechanical construction of the story masks the sheer trauma that Cornwall underwent. The Cornish lived through several generations of turmoil, of myriad shifts and uprootings, dramas and tragedies. In 1849 a local Cornish newspaper observed the departure of tearful emigrants who declared ‘they were literally starved out of Cornwall by the evil effects of Free Trade’. In the light of the complicated social cost and benefits of these long-distance exchanges, there was a ‘bittersweet relationship between Cornwall and the new lands’.4 Indeed the entire international copper story was dominated by Cornish mining technology, Cornish capital, Cornish managerial expertise, and most of all, by Cornish miners. The living detail of these human adjustments vividly captures the realities of the massive dislocation that underwrote the expansion of the international economy which fuelled so much mass migration in the modern era. The emigrants were not simply economic automatons jumping to the directives of international capital – though there was no escaping the pressures at work on their economic foundations. In reality the Cornish mining sector probably contributed less than half of the emigrants from Cornwall,5 and the non-mining migrants from Cornwall tend to be submerged in the common anonymity of most emigrants in the nineteenth century, lost in the interminable stacks of statistics.

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Many Cornish took the ‘escape-hatch’ out of the county during the severe crises of the 1860s and 1870s. The reduced pressure of surplus labour by emigration relieved the local economy as part of its generalised adjustment.6 Each new crisis in the Cornish economy produced a further exodus; in the 1870s, mineral prices were especially jittery and ‘The young men are spread over South Africa and Australia, South America and the regions of Klondike; and the old people and young wives and children were left at home dependent for daily bread upon the love of kindred whom they might never see again’, wrote J. Henry Harris at the end of the century. The Census Enumerators’ Books for Cornwall registered wives as dependent on ‘home pay’, perhaps with a ‘husband in Australia’.7 The historian of the emigrating Cornish, Philip Payton, demonstrates clearly that monies remitted by the South African Cornish kept Redruth in good times, some of it used to erect ‘villas by the seaside’ for the returnees.8 Income earned by Cornishmen in, say, Chile, helped to pay for better housing and grand Wesleyan chapels in many towns and villages across Cornwall, and all by means of remittances from overseas. Even India, in the approaching twilight of the Imperial story, sent money for the upkeep of the Cornish homeland. These stories provide the intimate realities of the operations of international capitalism in the nineteenth century, its incentives, its inducements, its implacable coercions. But, just as skill traced the Cornish migrants, so too did the trail of their mortality, too often from diseases specifically associated with the lungs, from deep mining.9 Return migration was probably very high: a report in 1904 indicated that of miners who died in Cornwall 64 per cent had worked abroad.10 Many of the Cornish emigrants were also equipped with highly portable skills. They were among the technicians of industrialisation and international mining systems, setting up and manning new copper operations in the hard-rock centres of the New Worlds. The great internationalisation of the mining system required astonishing mobility among its labour force. William Oates (1859–1935) worked first at Chacewater in Cornwall, then in Peru, followed by a stint in Bolivia before returning to Cornwall to be married. He soon departed again for Uruguay and Argentina with a brief break back in Cornwall, returning then to Peru, followed by work in the Urals, and Matabeleland in Southern Rhodesia – all before he was forty. By 1902 Oates was working in the Santa Fe silver mines in Mexico, then on to County Cork, Peru, Malaya and Argentina once again. He retired to Newquay and died in Lostwithiel, the end of a full circle.11 In these hectic migrations, Cornish miners found themselves working in strikingly exotic conditions. In Cuba, for instance, they worked cheek by jowl with the remnants of slavery in a context of easy corruption. It was a stark juxtaposition, creating an exquisite moral tension for their Methodist consciences. There were 14,000 Cornish in South America in the nineteenth century, a vital

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part of the penetration of ‘informal empire’ by British capital, not a little from Cornwall itself.12 Robert Louis Stevenson, travelling by railroad through Wyoming in 1876, came upon a ‘knot of Cornish miners’. From this encounter he concluded that ‘some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home’.13 The Cornish clung to their ethnicity and assimilated less smoothly than other groups. They were hard-rock miners with special skills and possessed little occupational flexibility. The distinctiveness of the Cornish miners was manifested in their reluctance to engage in unionisation, which generated animosity among fellow rock workers.14 In the Australian theatre of migration, the Cornish were in the South Australian copper mining from its dawn, demonstrating the speed with which they responded to opportunities across the globe even before the more spectacular antipodean discoveries of the 1840s and 1860s were paraded to the world. The Cornish influx was sufficiently concentrated to imprint a special character on at least two generations of development in South Australia, most visibly in its churches. In the 1850s the Bible Christians and Primitive Methodists were responsible for a spectacular burst of church building, including thirty-seven chapels in the colony, part of the comprehensive transmission of Cornish culture, folkways, language and mining methods and also its sports and drinking habits. Cornish emigrants in Australia were identified with ‘a radical ideology’, of departing Cornwall in a certain attitude to the homeland – in their explicit rejection of poverty, tithes, landlords and parsons in Cornwall in favour of the promised freedoms of their destinations. But not all Cornish emigrants were miners and some of them also jumped categories. Thus a Cornish miner could pass himself off as an agricultural labourer to qualify for an assisted passage to the copper-laden colony of South Australia in 1854. This was a moment in the Australian immigrant story when the magnet of the Victorian goldfields caused many agricultural labourers and miners to leave South Australia, thus creating a short-term deficiency in the rural sector and some specific recruitment of agricultural labourers in the British Isles. Migrant labels were blurred. Facets of Cornish migration The Cornish story is in special need of perspective, first because it long predated the precipitous decline in copper in Cornwall. The emigrant trade had been promoted by colonial agents from as early as the 1770s – for instance an outflow to Lake Superior, which established effective conduits for the flows of much later decades. Cornish emigration in the early nineteenth century was related closely to the breakdown of the old rural economy, and closely replicated the general British experience. A serious failure of the potato crop in Cornwall in the 1840s15 produced some very late examples of food riots in a context also troubled by

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social and religious tensions. The quickening of mass migration in the 1840s coincided with greater social changes in the Cornish countryside and rural migration clearly paralleled the exodus of the miners.16 Cornwall evidently passed through a rural transformation similar to so many other parts of the British Isles. The Cornish population increased by 44 per cent between 1801 and 1841, reaching its peak in 1861, followed by a slow decline. The early emigrants to Australia from Cornwall were mostly rural folk, mainly interested in getting land. In 1832 the main emigrants derived from non-mining districts in north Cornwall and this persisted through the decade, probably given a bias by the specific selection of rural folk by the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners.17 Baines observes that Cornwall was the most migrant county in England and Wales and ‘probably an emigration region comparable with any in Europe’.18 Between 1875 and 1900 Cornwall lost 40 per cent of its young adult males and 25 per cent of its females: 118,500 people altogether. Yet, as Sharron P. Schwartz points out, no more than half of these migrants were miners: ‘Cornish emigration would have been substantial without the miners and comparable to that of Devon’. Farmers and local yeomen were departing, especially in the 1830s and 1840s: in an echo of similar thinking among the Manx emigrants, they were ‘seeking to escape a combination of factors from dislike of the status quo, high tithes and rents on farms with marginal soils, and religious freedom’.19 And such rural folk were almost half of the emigration to the United States from Cornish mining parishes in the years before 1850. The decline of the copper industry, therefore, was only one part of the emigration, though it powerfully reinforced the movement. Internal migration was almost equally important: thus for example, in 1866–67, 1,100 miners from Cornwall went to Scotland and the North of England, while 1,625 went to the United States and 670 went to New Zealand and Australia. Within the United Kingdom, men travelled furthest, but women also became more adventurous over time: typically, domestic servants from Cornwall streamed towards Plymouth and London. It was a complicated and ragged dispersal, hardly an orderly readjustment to regular incentives. In the 1870s emigration actually exceeded internal migration, though this was atypical. Cornish emigrants, both miners and farming folk, continued to incubate rural dreams, perhaps atavistic notions of finding a pre-industrial haven. Thus the Cornish miners in South Australia (some of whom were half-rural anyway) tended to seek farms, to escape the mines in their new destination. This inclination was common among British emigrants and possibly activated by a dream of ‘obtaining their own land’, and their ‘willingness to accept … raw land on distant frontiers’. This was an intrinsic part of Belich’s ‘ideology of migration’: a deep-rooted quest for land and independence became one of the great propelling forces across the ‘neo-Britains’ of the ‘Angloworld’.20 There were indeed many examples among Cornish miners who arrived as miners in South Australia in

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the 1870s and 1880s. A classic case of ‘the miner-turned-farmer’ was that of the Goldsworthy family who arrived in the colony in 1847.21 They acquired land at Black Point in Yorke’s Peninsula in 1855 and, despite recurring hard times, they clung on with the help of their large family. They were fleeing not only the depressed copper scene in Cornwall; they sought a rural escape out of mining itself.22 It was a paradoxical strategy since the primary propellant of their migration was, of course, recruitment into the new copper mining industry of the colony. Their yearning for land was a quest for lost rural roots.23 The Cornish emigrants are thus invested with energetic volition, following their own priorities across the globe. These involved collective strategies within the context of the household – especially for women who participated in the migration decision, some of them becoming more independent as a consequence. Pat Hudson pointed out that in the early nineteenth century the Cornish miners were already ‘travelling from a dynamic thrusting industrial region’ and sending out technology and skills optimistically. It was the expression of the expansive global reach of the home economy, of a thrusting industrial economy. Its decline simply extended and extrapolated these already established lines of migratory out-movements.24 Similarly optimistic is the view of the ‘multiplier effects’ of remittances from overseas, which ensured that the consequences of emigration for Cornwall were not all negative or necessarily leading to a dependency culture. Schwartz quotes detailed family letters of ‘instances of Cornish returning migrants bringing with them financial capital used to buy farms, housing and small shops’.25 Remittance capital and returning emigrants became catalysts of new entrepreneurial enterprise in Cornwall. Kentish rurality and the lure of London Cornwall was a special case in which the rural origins of emigration were complicated by the upheavals in the mining sector. Cornwall nevertheless possessed elements in common with the rest of the country. Its emigration story was dominated by the copper miners but operated in tandem with the conventional outflow of migrants from its rural sector adjusting to population growth and labour surpluses. The south-east county of Kent offers a telling juxtaposition. Kent was a more purely rural county, with little mining activity, but adjacent to London. Kent experienced the demographic revolution of the late eighteenth century in stark, decisive terms. In 1603 the population of Kent had been about 130,000, mainly located in small local communities measured in tens and hundreds. Some degree of population pressure had been registered in the early seventeenth century when there was an over-dependence on declining textiles trades. The pressure seems to have been eased by migration, ‘an outward movement of labourers to places as

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far away as Ireland, Europe and the New World’.26 By 1700 the population was perhaps 150,000, but from the 1720s to the mid-eighteenth century there was slow growth, even decades of stagnation. Then began unprecedentedly rapid population growth to 184,000 by 1758; the population of Kent was recorded in the first census of 1801 as 308,000. It was a new phase of greatly accelerated growth in numbers: Kent’s population doubled in the period 1788 to 1831 reaching 479,000.27 Yet Kent remained overwhelmingly rural in outlook and employment and was not at all industrialised. Moreover the population increase in Kent was not associated with any sign of rising prosperity or profitable new employment opportunities: ‘Rather it engendered a large pool of surplus agricultural labour, which was felt especially outside the season of harvest and particularly amongst the female sector of the population’. Demographic pressure, rising unemployment and a falling standard of living after Waterloo led to a level of poverty associated with agricultural depression across rural Kent. This situation was aggravated by the Speenhamland system of poor relief which tended to retain labour at bedrock standards of income. It was a formula for discontent; meanwhile ‘the rate of rural population growth began to move in an upward direction against a background of less rapidly expanding employment opportunities’.28 The underlying causes of this unprecedented situation – which was echoed across the country – are not obvious. The current explanation of the population expansion, as we have seen already, favours the marriage and reproduction variables. Mary Dobson suggests that ‘So critical in Kent was marriage in the demographic and familial regime of early modern England that many historians now believe that fluctuations over time in the age of marriage and the proportions ever marrying may have accounted for almost all of the rise in population numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century’. At this point there was already ‘a trend towards earlier and more universal marriage’. Economic circumstances appear not to have precipitated these momentous shifts in marrying behaviour: we are told that ‘the young men and women of Kent were beginning to respond to a new era of greater sexual freedom and marital choice. As the constraints on marriage and early conception were lifted, so the villages and towns of Kent began to fill up with the ever increasing numbers of infants and children. Expanding numbers created new demands and new opportunities’.29 The incidence of marriage had risen dramatically.30 Quite why the ‘constraints on marriage’ became less rigorous is an unresolved mystery at the heart of the demographic account. This initial effect was greatly reinforced by the subsequent fall in rates for infant mortality (from 180 per thousand down to the present day figure of 7.7); moreover ‘By the early nineteenth century crude death rates were twenty-five compared to thirty-seven per thousand a century earlier’.31

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The relationship of these demographic fundamentals to migration is a central issue in the present narrative. High rates of mobility had long been characteristic of Kent – ‘being born and dying in the same parish in Victorian times was a rarity. There was a restless churning of the population’. Emigration waxed and waned32 – for instance in the 1820s out-migration was sluggish despite serious economic deterioration; in the 1880s emigration was running faster than ever, despite the demise of various forms of assistance from colonial governments. Emigration was evidently irregular and unpredictable. The underlying question for the Kent experience is how its demographic revolution was accommodated and how migration fitted into that equation. William Cobbett famously blamed the landowning oligarchy for the plight of the people of Kent: in his Rural Rides in September 1823 he reported his impressions of the Isle of Thanet and the consequences of rural changes. It was a corn country with rich soils but the labourers had been reduced to misery by ‘the big bull frog’ landlords who had grasped all the land. In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees surround the great farm-houses. All the rest is bare of trees and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down upon … It is impossible to have an idea of anything more miserable than the state of the labourers in this part of the country.33

Looking at the experience of the Kentish farmworkers, Alan Armstrong, concedes that ‘It is not difficult to build up a picture of deprivation, semistarvation, and sullen resentfulness, and the first twenty post-war years (after 1815) are rightly viewed as a time when the condition of the majority of farmworkers sank to a depth unparalleled in modern times’.34 Armstrong argues that between 1815 and 1840 Kent went through a difficult passage: there was a disjunction in the supply and demand for agricultural labour which created a crisis partially expressed in outward migration. Subsequently the internal adjustments were enough to bring improving conditions to the main body of Kentish people.35 In the long-run, of course, the total rural population, as everywhere, was eroded by short- and long-distance migration and by the redeployment of the rural people of Kent. The Poor Law Report of 1834 declared unequivocally that there were districts in Kent where ‘The excess of labourers beyond the actual demand must be taken to be established beyond dispute’. It also reported that parochial emigration schemes had already been ‘satisfactory’ – as at Benenden where expenditures on poor relief had been substantially reduced by out-migration during a four-year

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period. But the Report declared that emigration would not cover the ‘listless in seeking employment’ among those dependent on the poor rates – subsidised emigration removed only the better sorts. Nevertheless, in some contradiction of itself, the Report suggested that the reduction of the poor relief would ‘increase the disposition to emigrate on the part of those whose emigration is to be desired’.36 In reality Poor Law subsidisedemigration was never large enough to have any serious impact on the labour force – and it was popular in neither the sending nor the receiving places. Poor Law emigration tended to give emigration a bad name at a time when ordinary emigration was emerging as a force for change in its own way. It was a relatively small component of the rise of mass emigration in these decades. Kent reflected trends in the national story. Indeed between 1861 and 1911, thirty-five counties showed declining populations in their rural districts. But the story had begun before this: Armstrong identified a crisis in Kent in the decades from 1815 to 1840, a time of turbulence and anxiety, when rapid population growth was little mitigated by external release through migration. By the late nineteenth century Kent had been transformed in terms of the disposition of its people – now they were located in towns and villages whose populations were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands. It was all part of the great urbanisation of Britain. In these later years movement was more vigorous. Mostly, of course, the lure of London, merely fifty miles away, was the primary conduit for Kentish people. Its population doubled between 1801 and 1841 and doubled again by 1881 to reach 4.7 million; London attracted huge numbers by inward-migration. In 1851 there were 109,000 Irish-born in London, many in awful living conditions. At the same time, London complicated all such migration questions. For instance, in the decade 1841–50, 330,000 new in-migrants reached into London – and 17 per cent of the population of the city were migrants. In the next decade there were 286,000 in-migrants who amounted to 12 per cent of the population of the capital. And from 1861 to 1871 the figure was up to 331,000 (and again 12 per cent of the total). But there were simultaneous out-movements from London to other parts of England and Wales – 116,000 in the 1850s and 160,000 in the 1860s. ‘London was in fact the hub of enormous and continuous movements of population’. The inward movements were particularly from the south and east of England, including Kent, and women were in the majority. By the 1860s the radius was widening. There were 250,000 domestic servants in London in 1861, many of them migrants.37 London was thus the great clearing-house of mobility, an engine which generated the massive churning of the population in all directions. A high proportion of all British emigrants either came from or passed through London. It was so large a centre that the specific origins of its own immigrants and emigrants are difficult to distinguish in their vast numbers. Dudley Baines provides good data

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from the later censuses: Londoners, he says, had a high propensity to emigrate. In 1861–1900 about 16 per cent of all British emigrants were born in London, and an even larger proportion, 20 per cent, of all female emigrants. ‘Natives of London were 50 per cent more likely to emigrate than the natives of other counties’. Moreover female emigration from London was exceptionally high in the 1860s and 1870s. These emigrants went especially to Australia – far more than to other destinations – partly because the majority of emigrant ships to Australia were sourced in London itself.38 London was thus a disperser of population (mostly through Gravesend) just as much as its magnet. Baines showed that, between 1861 and 1890, half of all English and Welsh emigrants were born in cities and towns.39 In 1851 half of London’s own population – drawn by its ‘metropolitan magnetism’ – had been born elsewhere, though this proportion began to decline in the following decades. There was a great extent of ‘flux and reflux considerably in excess of the net movement’ of population within England at this time.40 Emigration was increasingly an urban phenomenon and no longer a direct result of the original discontinuity in the long story of emigration.41 The towns were now reproducing at an impressive rate and supplying the emigration machine with most of the candidates for America and Australia. London had always been the irresistible magnet of internal migrants from across the country and it is likely that its role as a channel for emigration had an equally long tradition. Rural responsiveness Cornish emigration showed that the effects of mining decline were written on top of the conventional processes of rural decline as the industrial economy of Britain expanded, sucking away much of the demographic revolution. Emigration operated as an ancillary mechanism in the wider adjustments. Kent, in the orbit of London’s mega-influence, experienced population increase in the context of continuing rural decline and responded by encouraging outflows during the critical decades. Eventually it reached a new equilibrium in which urbanisation eased the pressure that had seemed so urgent in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Cornwall and Kent were two variants of the general responsiveness of rural England to the opportunities of emigration and the imperatives of population shifts. Yet their turmoil pales in comparison with the more severe versions of emigration issuing out of the north and the west of the British Isles. Notes 1 See Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, pp. 150, 157–9. 2 Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe’, 45.

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3 See Philip Payton, The Cornish Overseas (Fowey, Cornwall: Alexander Associates, 1999). 4 Ibid., pp. 105–6. 5 Ibid., p. 22. 6 Ibid., p. 316. 7 Ibid., p. 345. 8 Ibid., p. 347. By 1900 Redruth was said to have been receiving £10,000 per annum from South Africa in the form of remittances, on which it had become reliant. 9 Ibid., p. 363. 10 Bernard Deacon, ‘A Forgotten migration stream: the Cornish movement in England and Wales in the nineteenth century’, Cornish Studies 6 (1998), 97. 11 Payton, Cornish Overseas, pp. 117–18. 12 Ibid., p. 132. 13 Ibid., pp. 316–17. 14 Ibid., p. 331. 15 Deacon, ‘Forgotten migration stream’, 5, 79. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 P. Payton, The Cornish Farmer in Australia (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1987), p. 10. 18 Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, p. 159, cited in Sharron P. Schwartz, ‘Cornish migration studies: an epistemological and paradigmatic critique’, Cornish Studies 10 (2002), 136. 19 Ibid., 136–7, 156; Schwartz, in ‘Cornish migration studies’, cites Dudley Baines. 20 Quoted in Kate Darian-Smith et al., Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2007), p. 6. Belich, Replenishing, pp. 28, 131, 164. 21 Payton points out that many of the incoming Cornish miners had already had experience as part-time agriculturists on smallholdings in Cornwall: Payton, Cornish Farmer in Australia, pp. 77–8. For the Goldsworthys see The Cyclopedia of South Australia, vol. 2 (Adelaide: 1909), pp. 672–73, and Alan Jones, Curramulka 1876–1975 (Adelaide: Published by the Author, 1975). 22 This phenomenon was not confined to the Cornish or to South Australia. Comparable cases in contemporary United States are recorded in William E. Van Vugt (ed.), British Immigration to the United States, 1776–1914. Volume 2: The Age of Jackson: 1829–47 (London: Pickering, 2009), pp. 179ff. 23 This draws on Jan Lokan, ‘From Cornish miner to farmer in nineteenth-century South Australia: a case study’, Cornish Studies 16 (2008), 48–77. Many other examples of the farmer/miners are cited in Payton, Cornish Farmer, especially, 67–84. Douglas Pike celebrated the role of such settlers in ‘The smallholders’ place in the Australian tradition’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association: Papers and Proceedings 10 (December 1962), 28–32. On the mixed occupational background of Cornish emigrants to New Zealand in the 1870s, see Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land, chap. 10. 24 Quoted in Schwartz, ‘Cornish migration studies’, 137. 25 Ibid., 154.

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26 Mary Dobson, ‘Population 1640–1831’, in Alan Armstrong (ed.), The Economy of Kent (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), p. 11. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 15. 29 Ibid., p. 19. 30 Ibid., p. 44. 31 Ibid., p. 29. 32 Ibid., p. 32. 33 Cobbett, Rural Rides, pp. 206–7. 34 Alan Armstrong, Farmworkers in England and Wales (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), p. 78. 35 Ibid., p. 270. 36 S.G. Checkland and E.O.A Checkland (eds), The Poor Law Report of 1834 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 486, 490. 37 Francis Shepppard, London 1808–1870: The Infernal Wen (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), pp. 2–4; Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century (London: J. Cape, 2007), pp. 77, 129–36. 38 Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, pp. 162, 200. 39 There are many examples of families from some of the poorest villages of, for example, Essex, Bedfordshire and Berkshire, who migrated to London before embarking on their emigration to Australia. See, for instance, Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2nd edn, 1967), and Wills, Humin Hopes. In neighbouring Dorset the outward flow was particularly pronounced – in the second half of the nineteenth century between 35 per cent and 51 per cent of the population of its parishes had left the county: only a very small proportion of these went to adjacent counties, and women were more mobile than men. See John Fripp, ‘People on the move: mobility in Victorian Dorset’, in Graham Davis (ed.), In Search of a Better Life (Stroud: The History Press, 2001), pp. 26, 38. On pre-emigration mobility see Duncan, ‘Case-studies in emigration’, 284–5. 40 See H.J. Dyos, ‘Great and Greater London: metropolis and provinces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in D. Cannadine and D. Reeder (eds), Exploring the Urban Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 48–50. 41 See Baines, Mature Economy, p. 57.

13

Remote departures: the Scottish Highlands

Remote yet early The Scottish Highlands and Islands were furthest from London, remote from the trade routes and commerce of the nation, the last region to experience a battle of great military forces. The region was also remote from the norms of British society and relatively slow to adapt its social and agrarian systems to modern modes. Until late in the eighteenth century, it was regarded as barely within the orbit of civil society in Britain. It was seen as half-civilised, still extremely difficult to get to (as Boswell and Johnson famously found in 1773) and not easily governable. Its economy was only marginally connected to the rest of Britain; it was a resolutely peasant economy under the thumb and the protection of the old chieftainly class, a severely hierarchical structure. It was also poor in resources, subject to seasonal deprivation and recurrent famine-like conditions which recurred throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. The Highlands nevertheless were increasingly drawn into the metropolitan and Atlantic economies by the mid-eighteenth century and the region passed through complicated changes over the next hundred years: the growth of new industries and agrarian transformation, rural turmoil, population growth and accelerated social changes. Some of the earliest and most prolific migrations out of the British Isles derived from the remote peripheries of the country, and the Highlands were surprisingly early in sending migrants to the New World. The region provided a case-study in emigration much prized by Malthus himself and he drew upon its story for a vital part of his diagnoses of the conditions determining population processes. Did generic pressures in this region cause the propulsion of people out of the Highlands? Commotion in the Highlands Changes were set afoot mainly after the Battle of Culloden (in 1746), which permanently altered the political foundations of the Highlands; it was then also

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subjected to invasive commercial influences creating pressures to render its productive capacity more responsive to the outside world. Landlords saw opportunities to increase rentals. Certain Highland products became increasingly valuable as exports, notably cattle, wool, kelp and fish, though little else. They provided the basis for increased productivity and investment, but required the re-structuring of the old peasant economy. It was essentially a disruptive change, much reviled by the old society. At the same time the Highlands were exposed to revolutionary population change: the population grew every decade, cumulatively and on shaky foundations. The numbers were captured first of all in the earliest censuses and the Statistical Accounts of the 1790s and 1830s. But the demographic upsurge was far from uniform. Here was a central paradox: part of the new economic structure could absorb the increase – in the labour-intensive sectors of fishing and kelp (as well as military service) – and landlords made serious efforts to retain and redeploy their increased populations in coastal villages, sometimes even developing supplementary and auxiliary enterprise to reinforce the process. They opposed emigration and clearly wanted to induce the people to stay. But, in the commotion, the old economy was dislodged and conveyed to the incoming sheep farmers in a substantial structural change. Then a catastrophe occurred in the middle of the transition: the collapse of the labour-intensive industries of kelp and fishing (as well as military service) in the 1820s. In brief, this left a stranded population reinstated in constricted peasant circumstances without access to land which they had lost to the sheep. They were dependent on potatoes and oats, with an unforgiving climate and poor soils. They were people at risk and unable to retrieve their old lands now redeployed in sheep walks and sporting estates. These changes needed a full century to reveal the full tragedy of the transformation. Emigration occurred in a stuttering and unpredictable fashion but responded to the symptoms of an economy ‘in travail’, as Malcolm Gray put it.1 Extrusion The Highlands present a clear-cut case of emigration as extrusion, of a poor population propelled outwards by force majeure. The new sheep economy rendered the traditional territories of the Highlanders more valuable under sheep than under its previous and growing human population. It was a landlord-driven expulsion of the peasantry, pushed out of the region, even onto emigrant ships. The case has all the advantages of simplicity which have fuelled recrimination and revulsion ever since – a passion directed against landlords, sheep farmers, factors, and the governing classes (conventionally London-based and English). Karl Marx naturally fell upon the Highlands as the perfect instance of landlord capitalistic expropriation.2

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The great export staple of the Highlands became pastoral production, cattle and then sheep for the southern markets. Over many decades this created rising pressure on the land resources – and led landlords and their big tenants to press the subsistence peasants to move to more densely situated crofting spots along the coasts, sometimes in the form of tailor-made villages for their reception.3 Simultaneously there developed a number of sectors in the Highland economy which were conveniently labour-intensive – kelp production along the western coast, fishing in the north and west, and especially potato production, which reinforced the oat/barley foundation of the peasant economy.4 These greatly helped to sustain the population under pressure from the parallel expansion of pastoralism which had little place for most of the people of the region. The rapid expansion of the demand for military service added another dimension to the re-shaped Highland economy5 – dominated throughout by the landlord class, which reaped rising rents from the changes, from both sectors of the economy. The new foundations for the peasantry began to crumble and then collapse: kelp (in the 1820s), fishing (even in the 1810s), military service (after Waterloo) and the potato (intermittently and then appallingly in the years 1846–52). The role of emigration in this concatenation of circumstances varied across the decades and across the wide region. Typically for virtually all districts, emigration out of the Highlands was discontinuous – there were alternating times of alarming outflow and periods of immobility. Sometimes there were local circumstances (most dramatically when landlords acted suddenly to evict their tenants) which accelerated the exodus; at other times the region seemed to be frozen, the phase of outward change brought to a halt. The key problem in the West Highlands was the great build-up of population from 1770 to 1860, and even later in some parts. Even where emigration was substantial the population in many of the most remote places was replenished very quickly and seemed to drag the communities back to the original congestions and vulnerabilities of the past.6 This was the precise Malthusian prediction and Malthus himself drew examples from the Highlands before 1801 to illustrate his most vital propositions – that reproduction and mortality was strictly geared to subsistence and that any vacuum created by out-migration would inevitably be re-filled by renewed reproduction. Barra (as much as Jura and Skye) was a particularly good example where, between 1755 and 1821, the population doubled and continued to grow vigorously despite repeated large-scale emigrations and recurrent destitution.7 The regenerative powers of the Highland population were put to an early test in the Napoleonic Wars, when large numbers of young men were enlisted in the regiments and served abroad for long periods. The population nevertheless grew at unprecedented rates and then redoubled at the end the wars.8 There were large and sporadic migrations before the Clearances; there were less well-documented seepages out of the region over the entire century, mostly

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to the villages and towns on the southern periphery, and mainly to the industrial Lowlands. There were heavily publicised communal emigrations in most decades. Yet until 1841–51 most parts of the Highlands continued to bank up population – demographic expansion exceeded the net migration over many decades. After mid-century the population of most of the region slowly subsided from its maxima, a long slow decline which continued until 2001. In other words the decline of the population was very gradual (especially in comparison with the growth in the earlier decades) and, in some interpretations, too slow to alleviate the prevailing poverty in the old society. Consequently the Highland story is one of broken adjustments and equivocal outflows, a slow narrative often blamed for the continuing impoverishment of the region for far too long. The alternative to out-migration was generally the system of crofting, which was a poor mode of subsistence for the remaining population which clung on with impressive tenacity. Relief by migration The Highland story was punctuated by recurring and dramatic episodes of exodus by emigration, but most of the intermittent and sporadic outflow was within Scotland (though this was sometimes the first part in a sequence of steps towards ultimate emigration). The most effective drain of population was from the Highland districts closest to the Lowlands: from at least the mid-eighteenth century people from the southern and most favoured parts of the Highlands were flowing into the Clyde region, drawn by higher wages and prospects, and also into Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. This was occurring before the Clearances, normally without much goading from landlord expulsions. Highland women were drawn into domestic service in the urbanising Lowlands. The consequence was that relief by migration was restricted mainly to the zones less in need, where the population pressure was much diminished. The main Highland problem was in the recalcitrant north and west where, despite sporadic emigration, the population continued to pile up even to the end of the nineteenth century (in the Isle of Lewis, for example). Seasonal emigration also released several parts of the population, male and female, to the fishing processors and to the southern harvest, even into England in the nineteenth century. This yielded remittances back to the Highlands – a classic mechanism in peasant societies, propping up the family farms/crofts at home. As early as the 1690s, colonial projectors were reaching into the Highlands in search of recruits for the ill-fated Darien expeditions in the 1690s, though only a few were raised at that time. In the 1730s there were several episodes of transatlantic migration featuring substantial bodies of Highlanders: some went to Georgia in 1733; in 1735 eighty families went to the Hudson River, and four

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years later 350 Highlanders went to North Carolina.9 Some landlords were promoting the exoduses, but others were generally reluctant to lose tenants even while rationalising their land uses. This ambivalence among landlords persisted across the Highlands for another eight decades. Middle-ranking elements in the Highlands, notably the tacksmen, whose traditional roles were under pressure, were especially responsive to the attraction of land in America, to achieve a higher status, ‘not unworthy of a Highland chieftain’. It is not possible to establish an exact line of causation in these emigrations, but clearly some of them pre-dated the main turbulence which affected communities by 1790. The British government, as early as 1763, offered generous parcels of colonial land in North America to retired military personnel as an inducement to remain in the colonies and to help to devolve the cost of bringing out settlers. The enticement was the liberal acquisition of land, crops and stock, free of the demands of any landlord. It was the great attraction of transatlantic migration and inevitably subject to speculation. The 1770s were the critical decade in the Highland account. There were major stirrings in the northerly county of Sutherland. Near-famine conditions in 1771–72 were setting people on the roads: there were reports of ‘rascally’ emigration agents in the district offering indentures on condition that a sufficient group of servants would accept their terms; tenants of the great Sutherland estate were also in negotiating mode, telling their landlord that they would emigrate if their rents were increased – it was a form of collective bargaining by threat of departure.10 The more common factor across the Highlands was the inflation of rents and rationalisation of holdings and leases. In South Uist in 1772 there was a case of early clearance, apparently motivated by sectarian considerations: Captain John MacDonald of Glenaladale removed Catholic tenants from his estate and was able to induce them to leave for Prince Edward Island.11 In 1772 the spirit of emigration spread ‘like a contagion’ through Sutherland, Ross and Caithness. In inland Badenoch there was the clearest connection between land pressure and the propensity to emigrate.12 In September 1773 a correspondent of the Aberdeen Journal reported emigration from the West Coast: ‘I am thoroughly convinced that the emigration will soon be general in the country – 250 sailed the other day from Fort George, all 308 of the MacDonald’s GlenGarry and the neighbouring districts of Fort William’.13 As many as ten ships had been hired in the sailing season to carry away emigrants and 840 people had sailed from Lewis in July. Three ships were gathering emigrants in Stromness for New York and other North American ports. These reports were part of the anxiety building up which threatened to precipitate governmental intervention.14 In 1775 Henry Dundas, writing to William Eden, referred to ‘the disease of emigration’, and the extreme difficulty in ‘extirpating’ it, especially in the Highlands because of the behaviour of ‘the gentlemen proprietors’ and their

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‘precipitous and injudicious rise of rent’. But Dundas thought that the causes ran even deeper: the post-Culloden legislation against the Highland chiefs, and the dissolution of clanship, had produced ‘a gloom and damp upon the spirits of their dependents’. Moreover the ‘superfluities in the population had previously seeped into the Lowlands’, but now they went to America instead.15 The activation of emigration was achieved partly by the vigorous and barely legal work of land/emigration agents whose blandishments and advertising became notorious as early as the 1770s. They were in full swing in the 1830s, the most notorious being Archibald MacNiven, who gave the emigrant trade in the Highlands a bad name.16 The link between land hunger/reorganisation and emigration was palpable. On the island of Tiree at the end of the eighteenth century the Duke of Argyll tried to abolish the old runrig arrangements but his tenants refused to accept the new crofts; ‘and declared that they preferred to emigrate’. When the government interceded in 1803 to staunch emigration, the plans of resettlement, which were clearly premised on substantial emigration, were rescinded.17 Melancholy scenes of emigration in the West Highlands alternated with exuberant movements of youthful escapees. At first the commonest form of emigration was to America by means of indentures, which enabled the poorest labourers and servants to gain an Atlantic passage. Highlanders used this mode, but more common were family groupings in larger cohorts. Ships called at remote Highland ports and sometimes there were reports of surprising affluence among some of the emigrants. Thus in 1773 a group of emigrants from the Highlands, sailing for North Carolina, were described as a fine body of settlers carrying with them ‘at least £6,000 sterling in ready cash’.18 These were probably substantial tenants (tacksmen) with their extended families and followers – people who had sold off their assets to pay their passages, possessing capital to establish themselves in the colony. Most likely too, they had read the signs – namely, tightening conditions of land access in the Highlands and better possibilities across the Atlantic. They were stirred by convincing intelligence of favourable circumstances in North America at a time when conditions were deteriorating in the Highlands. The London Evening Post reported that the emigrants ‘complained much of the oppression they laboured under which, they say, obliged them to leave their native country’.19 The numbers emigrating from the West Highlands welled up to thousands per annum. In 1773 Samuel Johnson described memorably ‘an epidemical fury of emigration’ there, prompted, he said, by ‘general discontent’. The main outflows occurred in the early 1770s – before the Revolution in the American colonies – and again in the 1790s. In many parts of the Highlands the landlords were roused into great consternation about the loss of kinsmen and paying tenants. The West Highlands indeed produced some of the best evidence of the circumstances which prompted a particular outflow of emigrants in the year

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1772–73. At that time the government was stirred to a pitch of anxiety, greatly prodded by the northern landowners, regarding the loss of population, notably from the west of Scotland. The departing migrants were closely questioned by customs officials about their motivation. They were united in their declarations that adverse conditions were propelling their expatriations: their testimonies were a collective lament of adversity and anger at the landlords. There were complicated responses to land pressure and shortage – one was voiced by some of the emigrants departing Sutherland, angry that local whisky (Usquebaugh) producers were capturing too much of the local crop for their own commercial benefit rather than the eleemosynary needs of the local people – to such a degree ‘that the inhabitants of this Country from year to year are threatened with famine’.20 All the indicators point to pressure on the landed resources by a rising population and by new competing uses for the lands of the region. In the transition landlords screwed up rents and also reinforced their feudal rights for services and payments in kind. It was a recrudescence of the old system in tandem with the elevation of rents, all of which made the people increasingly suggestible to the idea of emigration. Land pressure Government intervention into the alarming emigrant trade was soon trumped by the outbreak of war with the colonies, and emigration was effectively blocked for a decade, reviving in the mid-1780s. Emigration was sporadic and intermixed with much internal drain of people to the south. At the heart of the matter was competitive pressure on the relatively poor land of the region, pressure derived from the implacable reality of population growth and the sudden expansion of sheep grazing over great swathes of the country previously devoted to cattle, which had been an integral part of the semi-subsistence economy of the peasantry. This was a critical rupture which caused great disgruntlement across the Highlands. The consequences were witnessed by J.L. Buchanan (a missionary of the Church of Scotland) on the Clanranald estates in 1791. He reported the consequences of land competition, of land rents being inflated by the more lucrative gains from sheep farming, which was effectively ousting many of the traditional occupiers, namely the tacksmen. The community was in turmoil and emigration was one result. But the composition of the migration was also revealing: The people turned out of Clanronald’s [sic] estates were substantial farmers, whose spirits were not crushed by extreme poverty, and who, having the means of transporting themselves and their families to other countries, scorned either to truckle to the favourite tacksmen, or to live longer in a land, in which their

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children, if not themselves, must, sooner or later, fall into the humiliating condition of scallags [i.e. landless labourers].21

This was the cry of the downwardly mobile, and the rejection of the inevitable decline for the next generation – it was most basically a response to land -hunger driven by competition and the fear of social decline. Landlord anxiety The outflows continued and there was a greatly heightened anxiety among landlords, many having committed their estates to the booming kelp industry along the north-west beaches – an intensely laborious form of production which required a mass of small tenants.22 Lord Selkirk, a less than universally popular advocate of emigration for the Highlanders, had noted that the main opposition to emigration came from estates with kelp resources. These landlord reactions reached intensity close to hysteria again in 1803–4, when emigrations were in full spate from the west. The concerted agitation now yielded the Emigration Act of 1803, which stemmed the outflow by placing very heavy and precise conditions on shipboard provisions, aiming to increase the cost of emigrant passages beyond the reach of the common Highlander. This legislation was introduced under the cloak of humanitarian concern for the welfare of the emigrants, but it was transparently for the interests of the landlords. The 1803 Passenger Vessels Act effectively doubled the cost of passages to Nova Scotia. Even in wartime, emigration from the Highlands continued, usually associated with landlord policies to rationalise their estates, as in the early Clearances in Sutherland in 1806–7. The end of the war in 1815 brought a more broadly based resurgence of emigration, now less troubled by landlord doubts about the consequences of population losses; the spread of sheep farming and the concomitant collapse of kelping reduced the value of dense populations in the Highlands. The first censuses exposed the scale of the population increases. Emigration was now positively promoted by the Highland landlords. Large bodies of people left the west coast, in addition to the continuing seepages of people to the south. Thus emigration re-emerged in North Uist; and 382 people left Barra, in 1816, for Sydney in Cape Breton Island – organised by an agent, but many others were too poor to go. Large numbers left Wester Ross in the same year, urged on by religious leaders, most notably Norman McLeod who, in 1817, led 400 followers across the Atlantic, in their own ships, first to Pictou, then intended to reach Ohio but settled instead at St Ann’s. Religious zeal, in tandem with land hunger, was a potent mobilising combination, recurring in many instances of communal emigration in the British account.23 A Gaelic poem of the day advised people that if they found life too hard then it was ‘better for you to leave of your own accord, than to be oppressed like serfs’.24

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By the 1820s the attitudes of the landowners had changed, in tune with their manifest economic interests. Economic conditions now favoured a reduced population and large sheep and sporting tenancies. The idea of retaining the swelling population in intensive village/crofting locations, was cast away. The transition was especially clear-cut in the case of Barra. In 1794 the local minister reported ‘the spirit of emigration is now happily and totally suppressed’. But the collapse of kelp income after 1815 created great adversity and the landlord McNeill fell into terminal financial difficulty. He resisted the intrusion of sheep farming and instead subdivided the crofts to raise more rent. McNeill continued to resist. But all his efforts to rescue his finances failed; the estate was finally bankrupted in 1836 and sold to the richest commoner in Scotland. The new owner (1840–58), Col. John Gordon of Cluny, was from a commercial background and brought the finances of his Barra estate into regular order. In the Highland context this meant sheep farming and eviction. There followed clearance, famine and emigration – the corollary of all the previous history of the island. There had been special local and personal elements in the narrative but the underlying transformative forces were no different from those across the Highlands and beyond. After 1815 landlords in the Highlands ceased to resist the operation of quasi-Malthusian forces (these were, in practical terms, poverty, recurring famine and population surges). Now landlords at large facilitated the further dislodgment of the population, readying them for the emigration agents – who were active propellants of the process. The ‘expulsive forces were liberated’ and landlords now co-operated with the ostensible necessities of depopulation.25 Landlords made elaborate efforts to steer, organise and cajole their people to depart, blurring the line between forced and volitional migration. Migration in all its categories continued and there were bouts of concerted emigration from particular estates, though it was never a uniform outflow. The peaks of emigration coincided with adverse conditions (notably in the famines of the mid-1830s and the late 1840s) and the provision of assistance to emigrants – especially the offer of almost free passages to the Australian colonies after 1835. The ‘Highland Problem’ became defined as overpopulation, its solution prescribed in the form of emigration – to reduce the population to sustainable levels in the newly restructured economy of the region. This was the generic rural question of the British Isles, in its most intense form in both Ireland and the Highlands. But the emigration solution was sporadic and was resisted. In some ways the logical adjustment was blocked by the crofters themselves – clinging on to their precarious hold on the edges of the region, re-asserting their possession of the land and pressing their cases before the world at large.

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A generalised dream of regained land was prominent in the psychology of the emigrants. The Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal of March 1834 captured the prospect of the Canadian promise: in Canada ‘the poorest becoming a possessor of the soil, earning competence for himself and comfortably settling his children’. As Jenni Calder says, ‘Only emigration could make this real’.26 The Perthshire Courier in May 1831 reported: the circulation of money is very limited among [the prospective emigrants], and their whole property may be said to consist of a few black cattle and small horses, all of which are made over to the emigrant’s agent at his own price, and which he sends to the south markets at his own risk, – the roof of their huts, their boats, in short, everything they have must be converted into money by him, before the necessary sum for defraying the freight can be realised.27

A year of widespread destitution, 1837 saw several sailings of ships taking emigrants to Australia. The William Nicoll sailed from Skye to Sydney with 321 emigrants from the parish of Strath and the close-by mainland. The embarkation took three days ‘and so many people wanted to emigrate that more people turned up than the ship could actually accommodate’.28 This suggests that there existed a pent-up demand which remained unsatisfied, that some of the poor needed help to emigrate. A knowledgeable observer of immigrant life in the Maritime Provinces in 1843 was a geologist named Gesner. Reviewing the Highlanders’ experience over the previous fifteen years he concluded that: Any industrious man who can obtain 50 acres of land, the cost of which is only £8.5s currency and secure a year’s provisions until the first crop is gathered, is certain to obtain a livelihood, to live comfortably, and under ordinary circumstances, to render himself independent.29

This was the immigrant’s dream, and the difference from home was still wider because there were no tithes or taxes. Returning timber ships brought in thousands of immigrants each year to New Brunswick, many moving on to the United States, though land there was actually dearer.30 Assistance to would-be emigrants, from colonial schemes and some of the landlords, was only recurrently available, adding to the disorderly character of emigration. The take-up of such assistance was also unpredictable – though clearly much more effective during the famine of the 1840s. As governmental and philanthropic assistance began to emerge, the most depressed stratum of Highland society came to dominate the emigrant lists.31 The impact of Clearances on the exodus is not easily calculated. There were a few cases where the evicted were virtually compelled to join the emigrant ships

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but the events were usually more long-drawn out. Contemporary estate records show some of the relocation of tenants as the Clearances proceeded – for instance, in the great Sutherland Clearances of 1819, 3,331 people were ‘removed’, of whom 2,304 were re-settled on the Sutherland Estate; 226 went to adjoining estates; 661 to neighbouring estates; 83 emigrated; while 57 went unaccounted. Thus a third of the cleared people left the estate, even though the estate policy at the time was designed to retain the people. This was a measure of the dislocation caused by the Clearances and its translation into migration even where this was not the landlord’s intention.32 Dislocations such as these clearly induced immediate migration, but this was probably the first step towards greater mobility, a loosening of large numbers of people and their off-spring, who may have reached the emigrant ports some years later. It is a longitudinal story best known to later genealogists. Highland famine and exodus The destruction of the potato crop in the years 1846 to 1851 was most severe in the West Highlands and the Hebrides. In these years evictions increased and so too did emigration – the two were connected, though not always co-extensive. Yet though the danger of starvation was real, and the degree of deprivation unquestionable, relief measures by landlords and philanthropic agencies were generally effective. Mortality rates appear not to have increased during the crisis, even though the crofting population was often reduced to a very low ebb. Landlord insolvencies were rising, cattle prices falling, food prices inflating while wool prices were recovering. There was consequently heavy persuasion for people to leave. There was a deliberate weeding-out of the population, an ‘extermination’, according to Sir Edward Pine-Coffin, eliminating the poor. On Lewis, one of the most congested regions in the west, the landlord, Matheson, of fame in the oriental trade in opium, pushed a policy which captured in a few sentences the equivocation, the subtlety of pressure and, ultimately, the firm arm of an ejecting landlord, however dressed up it was. Matheson thus assured his tenantry in 1851 that ‘None could be called on to emigrate and they need not go unless they please but all who were two years and upwards in arrears could be deprived of their land at Whitsunday … the proprietor can do with his land as he pleases’.33 They faced ‘Hobson’s Choice’. Here, and elsewhere, emigration was being induced in myriad ways but all emanating finally from the pressure on the land. From the lowest strata, worsening conditions (exacerbated by the continuing growth of populations) diminished the reluctance of Highlanders to leave their native lands. But their sheer poverty made it impossible for them to raise the passage money. In this raw conundrum was the root of much continued suffering in the Highlands.34 Emigration was neither sufficiently large nor rapid enough

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to relieve fully the pressure on food resources in the ailing and bifurcated economy of the Highlands. Famine was a conclusive symptom of land hunger and low productivity, vulnerability and a misshapen community – in the 1840s emigration accelerated, urged on by landlord assistance, pressure and coercion, as well as the availability of philanthropic, landlord and colonial assisted passages. After the famine the population of the Highlands (apart for the extreme north-west in Lewis) began at last to fall, slowly eroding decade by decade but never enough to satisfy the urgent advocates of emigration, who regarded this as the only solution of Highland poverty and overpopulation. The slowness of the exodus seemed to express a reluctance among ordinary crofters to accept their allegedly inevitable fate, to dig in their heels and cling to their quasi-peasant holding on the parts of land that they actually had retained. Consequently the outflow was less than might be expected in the late nineteenth century even though there were still recurrent crises and despair about depopulation for another century.35 Accelerated evacuation and resistance By mid-century facilities had been created to expedite emigration from both ends of the connection, but especially by landlords prepared to pay their small tenants to depart; and also by colonies able to pay passages, especially to Australia. The intercontinental exchange was being girded and lubricated. Several thousand Highlanders were conveyed to New South Wales in the late 1830s and again in the early 1850s. In 1849 Gordon of Cluny hired the ship Mount Stuart to transport 400 emigrants from the Uists to Middlesex County in Ontario – only a few of them could speak English and many were ill on arrival. Some of them travelled still further, on to Michigan.36 The Great Famine produced a much accelerated evacuation and the population was reduced by a third between 1841 and 1861.37 But in the following decades there was a general reluctance among the remaining people and classic symptoms of Highland congestion persisted; once more there seemed to be a damming up in the crofter communities. The propensity to emigrate seemed to fall and migration was insufficient to relieve much of the problem. Many clung on, deeply suspicious of landlordly blandishments and threats to press them to emigrate. Despite the crisis, despite the efforts to reduce population, the exodus from the crofts was never enough – for example, the population of Lewis continued to rise in many parts. Even where numbers fell, the pace was never enough to satisfy the rationalists. The Highlands became renowned for its peasant mentality, inhibiting the full adjustment of population to resources, the crofters being willing to accept lower incomes than were obtainable beyond the Highlands: it seems at the end of the day to be a matter of psychological resistance to ‘rationality’.38

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It was a general story much repeated across the Highlands – often in heroic or tragic mode. There was a sense of evacuation – and the fact that some of the emigrants were destitute on arrival was a symptom of desperation in the region. Emigration was frequently a negotiation to obtain the best results for a landlord, whose interest was perceived to be to get rid of as many of his people as possible. Sometimes it took the form of a collective proposition as in Assynt in Sutherland in April 1849 when as many as 300 prospective emigrants petitioned for specific assistance from the Duke of Sutherland. But even with unprecedentedly generous assistance many of the families were unable to raise the remainder of the cost of emigration and were thus excluded despite their unambiguous willingness to depart. The Highland model was an extreme version of the general retentiveness of several such peripheral zones which persisted for many decades. They were characterised by an initial rapid accumulation of population and then a prolonged decline which was never prompt or large enough to satisfy the landlords and the critics. The reluctance to emigrate impeded the convergence of living standards between regions which, very slowly, eventually brought the Highlands towards a rising per capita living standard – the main propellant of which was most probably the actual decline of population. Migrating out of the Highlands was therefore a remote version of the generic story of rural regions conducting their evacuations under the impact of population growth and radical economic re-structuring. Much of the acrimonious debate regarding the depopulation of the Highlands was about apportioning the relative responsibility of the landlords as opposed to the forces of population growth and economic decline and malaise.39 This variability of response does not obscure the underlying direction of change – that is, one of land hunger and a widening gap between conditions in the Highlands and beyond. Living standards in the Highlands fell behind the rest of the world – within and beyond Scotland, and out-migration was the obvious result. The fact that the differential was partly determined by the extremely unequal command of the land does not affect this conclusion. The symptomatology of migration was fully exposed in the Highlands.40 Notes 1 Malcolm Gray, The Highland Economy, 1750–1850 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), chap. five. 2 Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow edition, no date) VI, p. 173. 3 The planned village system and beyond was part of an intensification of settlement and a means of accommodating the expanding and extruded cottar population. See especially Douglas G. Lockhart (ed.), Scottish Planned Villages (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2012), an excellent guide to the planned village schemes in Scotland, of which there were 500 planned (and 800 in Ireland).

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4 Potatoes were probably introduced in the Highlands earlier than previously thought, and certainly by 1741 in the extreme north. See Malcolm Bangor-Jones, Am Bratach, April 2015. 5 See Andrew Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000), p. 236. 6 See Keith Branigan et al., From Clan to Clearance: History and Archaeology on the Isle of Barra c. 850–1850 AD (Oxford: Oxbox Books, 2005), pp. 140ff. 7 The eighteenth-century Hebridean story (c. 1782) was captured by Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, in Letters from an American Farmer (London: Dent, 1912), pp. 66–86, demonstrating the essential mechanism at work on the extreme periphery. 8 See John Mackay, The Reay Fencibles (Glasgow, 1890), and Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’. 9 See Richards, History of Clearances, vol. 2, p. 183. 10 R.J. Adam (ed.), Papers on Sutherland Estate Management, 1802–1816 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1972), pp. xxiv–xxvi. 11 See Margaret MacDonnell, The Emigrant Experience: Songs of Highland Emigrants in North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 10, 14, 4. 12 See David Taylor, The Wild Black Region: Badenoch, 1750–1800 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016); Andrew McKillop, ‘Highland estate change and tenant emigration’, in T.M. Devine and J.R. Young (eds), Eighteenth-Century Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999). 13 Lucille Campey, Fast Sailing and Copper Bottomed (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2002), p. 3. 14 Lucille Campey has evidence of these sailings (1774–75) in Fast Sailing, p. 3. 15 Quoted in C.R. Fay, Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 11. 16 See W.K. Boyd, Some Eighteenth-Century Tracts concerning North Carolina (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1927), p. 15. 17 See Eric Cregeen, ‘The creation of the crofting townships in Tiree’, Northern Scotland: Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 35: 2 (Oct. 2015), 155–88. 18 See Michael Newton (compiler), We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States (Chapel Hill, NC: Saorsa Media, 2001), p. 37. 19 As cited in the Lady’s Magazine, vol. iv, 19 June 1773, p. 389. 20 M. Bangor-Jones in Am Bratach (July, 2015). 21 John Lane Buchanan, Travels in the Western Hebrides, 1782 to 1790, London, 1793, G.G.J. and J. Robinson, p. 28. 22 J.M. Bumsted provides a good example of a landlord highly fearful of loss of tenants by emigration on the Urquhart estate in 1801 – making them counter-offers to retain them and deter emigration. See Bumsted, The People’s Clearance, p. 88. 23 Religion was often the cement of the emigrating communities. But it worked in both directions: many ministers of the Free Church were vehemently opposed to emigration. 24 Quoted in Jenni Calder, Scots in Canada (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2003), p. 9. 25 Richards, History of Clearances, vol. 2, p. 223. 26 Quoted in Calder, Scots in Canada, p. 7.

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27 Quoted in James M. Cameron, ‘The role of shipping from Scottish ports in emigration to the Canadas, 1815–1855’, in D.H. Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 2 (Gananoque, Ontario: Langdale Press, 1980), p. 130. 28 Reported in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, 10 July 1837, cited in John Macaskill (ed.), The Highland Destitution of 1837 (Aberdeen: Scottish History Society, 2013), p. 15, fn 238. 29 R.C. MacDonald, Sketches of Highlanders (St John, NB: H. Chubb, 1843). 30 Ibid. 31 Richards, History of Clearances, vol. 2, p. 246. 32 See Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, p. 208. 33 T.M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 118–20. 34 Ibid., p. 234. 35 Richards, History of Clearances, vol. 2, p. 200, fn 41. 36 MacDonald, Sketches, p. 10. 37 M.W. Flinn, Scottish Population History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 33, 441–54. 38 Richards, History of Clearances, vol. 2, p. 280. On the impact of emigration on the home population see Paul Collier, Exodus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 25ff. 39 Ibid., p. 273. 40 Ian Levitt and T.C. Smout, The State of the Scottish Working Class in 1843 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), p. 169.

14

The Irish case

Ireland to the fore The first crescendo of mass international migration came in the mid-1840s and was disproportionately Irish. Ireland exhibited in the starkest terms the fundamental forces which generated exoduses out of Europe, and therefore Ireland requires particular attention. Moreover by the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland had become a prolific supplier of emigrants to the New Worlds and to the rest of Britain, and remained so for the next half century. It yielded far more emigrants per capita than the other parts of the British Isles, or indeed anywhere else in Europe, until it was overtaken by Italy late in the century. Irish emigration was widely associated with the Great Famine, with the suffering and endless rancour about the causes of both. Famine and the mass evacuation of Ireland scorched the Irish memory, was central in its literature, in its iconography, and shaped its entire political cast. This chapter deals with Ireland’s place in the more generic context of the origins of migration from the British Isles. America and Australasia drew heavily on Ireland: the antipodeans employed special mechanisms to facilitate their inflows of Irish humanity; North America for the most part simply opened its doors and the Irish flooded in and helped to build industrial America. Irish emigration was, ostensibly, the least ambiguous case, the extreme version of the British experience. Here surely was the most obvious case of ‘the uprooted’, the emigrant as ‘the expelled’. The main objection to this line of generalisation is that, like other streams, Irish emigration was extremely varied and included doctors, landowners, clerics, teachers, urbanites, novelists and every other category of Irish life. Nevertheless, the statistical reality is that most Irish emigrants were unequivocally rural people, many of them very poor. The Irish rose to the top of the emigration league table in the 1830s, following a clear build-up of emigration in the previous decade: it was as though emigration had become democratised and spread outwards into the population at large.

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The pre-eminence of the Irish as emigrants lasted until about 1900. The rise and the fall of their ranking in the world of emigration were equally abrupt. Uniquely in the European experience, Ireland lost half of its mid-century population levels. Of all countries and all emigration, the career of the Irish needs special focus and indeed explanation. Why did Ireland have such massive recourse to emigration in the nineteenth century? As always, there were long lines of origins. Population growth, famine and emigration in the Irish case (and, as we have seen, specifically in West Cork and Tipperary) are commonly regarded as tied together inextricably. They marched in lock-step towards the catastrophe of the 1840s and mass emigration. They dominate the story of Ireland, each part explaining the other. The first disentanglement of the issues must recognise that emigration pre-dated and post-dated the Great Famine and that the prior population explosion engulfed every aspect of the Irish predicament. Population in perspective Scarcity and congestion were not necessarily the usual condition of Ireland. In the seventeenth century, land in Ireland was abundant and tenancies easy to obtain. Even in the early eighteenth century ‘there was a general scarcity of tenants and young couples wishing to marry and seeking land as an economic basis to marriage could find it’. This was possibly the early modern status quo in much of Ireland. But between 1600 and 1845 Ireland’s population expanded from 1 million to 8.5 million. Of this increase 4 million was achieved between 1780 and 1845, the decades of accelerating population growth. This extraordinary increase was related to the key variables of food production, land occupancy, famine and emigration. High marital fertility in the eighteenth century increased spectacularly: landless labourers married younger than other groups ‘and this class was becoming much larger in the century before the famine’.1 Dudley Baines points out that the Irish population was increasing at an annual rate of about 1.4 per cent during the 100 years before the Famine – much faster than that of rapidly industrialising Britain.2 By the 1840s it is calculated that 60 per cent of the Irish population lived in poverty – that is, they were at very serious risk after only one year of ‘distress’. The demographic history of Ireland is crucial to all aspects of the ensuing tragedy and also the extraordinary phenomenon of Irish emigration. The Irish case presented the clearest Malthusian characteristics during the period of its most rapid population growth. James Donnelly Jnr, in particular, charts the gathering crises with each of the emergent symptoms – pressure on the land and its progressive sub-division, vulnerability and stress.3 But this did not make migration or emigration inevitable. Moreover, even where there was internal migration, there was no certainty that it could be transmuted into actual emigration – special mechanisms were required to achieve such mobility.

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As Clarkson put it, the population surge simply had to slow down eventually: The supply of cultivatable land was finite, market conditions changed and became unfavourable to the further creation of grain farms, and landlords tried to put a brake on subdivision. In the absence of an expanding industrial sector to absorb the surplus population, Irish men and women emigrated in increasing numbers, in the process tending to remove the most fertile groups from society. And when, finally, the potato failed, uniquely high rates of population growth were followed by a fall in population, on a scale likewise unique among major European countries.4

The demographic experience of Ireland has always been dominated by the Famine and the extraordinary evacuation which occurred in the aftermath of the Famine disaster. Ireland not only experienced an unprecedented Famine (i.e. in terms of intensity and duration), it also lost more people by death and net emigration than any other country. It was an extreme demographic abnormality. The critical question is whether the Irish emigrant experience was indeed unique, atypical and unconnected with that of other countries. Was the Irish case outside the generic framework of most modern migration, indeed sui generis? Population rising Famine was common in virtually all pre-industrial societies, not excluding Ireland. Other parts of the British Isles experienced famine and episodes of crisis mortality as intrinsic expectations in the pre-industrial world. Food shortages and food riots in England and Scotland persisted into the late eighteenth century, and there were still eruptions of localised famine into the 1840s in a few places. But, over most of the British Isles, the reign of famine was on the wane and virtually displaced by 1800, even by 1700 in most places. An exception was the Scottish Highlands, which continued to suffer famine-like conditions in the 1830s and 1840s and even later in some districts. Conditions in the Highlands were nearest to mirroring the more dire situation in Ireland, especially in the south and west of that country. There was a long pre-history of famine in Ireland before the terminal disaster of the 1840s. Climatic aberrations produced sudden mortality crises in the 1720s marked by great suffering and poverty even in the advanced parts of the economy (the more Protestant areas in the north and east). In that decade 15,000 departed for America within ten years. Again in 1739 there was another massive crisis, which worsened over the following two years. In 1741 the population of Ireland was 2.4 million and a large part of them faced an awful combination of severe weather, fevers, famine and great mortality. The intensity and ferocity of the 1741 catastrophe may have been greater than that of a century later, but the crisis lasted only two years and was centred on the south and west. In the 1740s

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emigration was not an option for most of the victims and the death rates were mountainous.5 The subsequent very rapid increase of the Irish population was facilitated most of all by the potato.6 The potato required little processing; it was a root crop which replaced fallow, a winter crop for livestock, and it was extendable into marginal land; its harvesting varied from district to district and was therefore well adapted to the uses of itinerant seasonal labour; and the potato was nutritious, imparting high energy, and palatable. It was ‘a brilliantly ingenious method of absorbing … an unrestricted labour supply’. It soaked up ‘surplus and underemployed labour’. It was highly labour-intensive and prolific.7 These were ripe conditions to provide the most positive inducements to early marriage and, of course, population growth. Clarkson says that potatoes spread swiftly and ‘The increased supply of food permitted a continuing increase of population which, without potatoes, would otherwise have been halted by Malthusian crises or retarded by high rates of emigration’.8 The increased productivity of the land – mainly through the use of potatoes – was thus critically associated with population growth. The equation, however, was running out of control. Clarkson believes that 1815 was the watershed: thereafter ‘Land hunger and the increasing resistance of landlords to subdivision combined to curb natural increase and to raise the levels of emigration out of the country’.9 There were multiple symptoms of the rising pressure on the land. A glimpse was seen in severe shortages in Limerick in the hard years of 1815–16 and in the anti-corn export riots in Galway, where corn mills were attacked. Geary reports other tell-tale signs of destitution and panic: It was a common observation that the numbers tramping the roads of Kerry during 1817–19 were so great that the whole country appeared to be in motion. The indigent from Kenmore and other impoverished areas of the country streamed into north Cork and took up residence wherever they could.10

These were also the decades of astonishingly high population growth: the crisis seemed to magnify in each decade and was expressed most brutally in famine. Mary E. Daly identifies the timetable of famine in the thirty years before the Great Famine, citing the famished years of 1811–17, 1822, 1831, 1835, 1837, 1839 and 1842. The distress was worst in the western districts.11 The astonishing rapidity of population growth in Ireland more than anywhere else presaged a mounting crisis beyond anything already witnessed.12 Potatoes and vulnerability There was, therefore, great turmoil overtaking most of Ireland in the seven or eight decades before the Great Famine. Much of the rural transformation was shaped by the impact of potato cultivation and the associated process of extended

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and intensified internal colonisation. The spread of the potato facilitated economic expansion which included ‘a huge movement of population from east to west with new communities growing up in previously little populated areas’. Most of the change, and the accommodation of the rising population, was contained within the traditional modes of land occupation, a widening of the old rundale and clachan system (a form of collective farming in extended family holdings on joint tenancies).13 Potatoes are accorded the principal role in this great expansion of peasant cultivation and peasant numbers. Most of the expansion was derived from potato-aided reclamation by way of intensive subdivision.14 Cultivation was pressed outwards to the Atlantic edges: rundale operated as a ‘mobile pioneering fringe’. But cultivation was also extended out to the margins, and especially up the hillsides: thus in the mid-seventeenth century the altitude limits of cultivation were 500 feet; by 1840 they were up to 800 feet. This is described as a modern phenomenon – powered by ‘the extensive infiltration of the ecological interloper – the potato’. It was more than a discontinuity – it was an ecological revolution that destroyed the pre-eighteenth-century traditional balance between tillage and pasture. It was becoming a frightening monoculture. Consequently there developed a rapidly expanding agrarian economy founded upon fragile living standards, supporting a rapidly growing population. ‘In a pre-mechanical production system, Irish tillage expanded its output by expanding its labour force’ – proliferating its armies of cottiers on a potato-wage. The potatoes were at the centre of the change – and in the process converting the cottiers into an expanded peasant system to produce an extremely cheap and disciplined labour force – living almost entirely on potatoes.15 The vulnerability of the system was increased by the loss of the herring fisheries after 1810, by the decline of the domestic linen industry, and then by harvest failure too. This was the distressed pre-industrial sector now committed to a volatile and flimsy agricultural framework. And it was all contingent on the potato, which underwrote the expansion in a unique conjunction of forces. Adding immeasurably to the dangerous mix of conditions was the shift of a continuously increasing proportion of the land devoted to pastoral and largescale grain production – to produce cattle and other livestock, mainly for the export market in Britain. The growing demand for meat in Britain effectively elevated Irish meat prices in the late eighteenth century, which had structural consequences for Irish agriculture. In particular it caused a continuing shift to pastoral production, described as ‘one of the longest-run historical forces shaping rural economy and society in Ireland’. The conversion of acreage was evident in the decades 1780–1840 when export demands were rising: the conversion continued after the Famine when imports depressed cereal prices. But this shifting of relative acreage began when the rest of the sector was also under pressure and expanding in the traditional mode: much of the economy remained subsistence-based and,

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as Andy Bielenberg puts it, was not marching to ‘the drumbeat of modernisation’. Farm consumption and semi-subsistence agriculture ‘across much of the country … accounted for a large part of the food supply until the 1840s’.16 There was probably an expansion of both ‘arable output acreages … in tandem with the growth of livestock numbers with a significant increase in labour and capital input … and a far greater utilisation of marginal land’.17 The landlord class was roundly condemned for presiding over and even encouraging the ‘rampant population growth, subdivision of holdings and dependence on potatoes’. After 1815 there was falling demand for cottier labour – pastoralism was growing at the expense of commercial tillage; declining wages set in; and there was a radical redundancy of labourers. Evictions were unconstrained – especially among the smaller landlords – and land was being cleared: ‘those beautiful fields are the sepulchres of the poor’, it was said.18 Potatoes now absorbed the effort to survive: by 1845 3 million people were totally dependent on the potatoes, with immense congestion. The main beneficiaries of these alarming trends were the landlords and the English consumers: corn exports to England from Ireland rose rapidly from the 1790s to the 1830s. ‘The cheap food was made available by the rapid growth of Irish imports, based on the cottier system and the potato’.19 And meanwhile the dependent population was being pushed ‘ever closer to the potato precipice’. It therefore became ‘an emaciated economy squeezed by an inexorable demographic regime’.20 Yet there is an alternative version of this story. Michael Winstanley captures the positive case to argue that, over the critical decades, from 1780 to 1840, Irish farmers and cottiers managed not only to feed themselves but also doubled the population; at the same time they also exported an increasing amount of food to England. This had been facilitated by the Act of Union by which Irish grain was admitted freely into Britain. It created what O’Gráda called ‘hothouse conditions for corn cultivation’.21 In the 1790s Ireland produced 15.5 per cent of British corn imports (oats and wheat); by the mid-1830s they accounted for more than 80 per cent of such imports. Irish farmers were also increasing their exports of cattle, pigs and dairy produce. In the 1840s, 25 per cent of Irish grain was exported and 50 per cent of its livestock. It was producing one-sixth of England’s food supply. This construction of the context yields a different perspective on the Irish economy – opposing the notion of a country ‘racked by subsistence crises and rushing headlong towards famine’.22 These striking facts are not necessarily inconsistent with rising desperation across much of Ireland. The commercialised sector was engrossing more and more of the land, and increasing proportions of the labour force were being divested while their expanded numbers were pushed outwards and reduced to greater dependence on the potato. The Irish population rose while pastoralism also extended: there was a declining demand for labour, ‘there were few places

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left to go to but to the high mountain or wet bog’.23 In 1835 there were tell-tale scenes enacted across the south and west of Ireland – an underclass which had become mobile: ‘they come and they go so fast’, it was reported – wretched squatters and settlers, ‘oozing into the wet deserts of the Bog of Allen’ and pushing up the limits of cultivation to the 1000 feet level.24 These were the unambiguous indicators of intensifying land hunger. In these contexts the more solvent elements were seeking to emigrate; and they were leaving a society structurally weakened. The classic version of the Irish case – the Malthusian version – is summarised by D.A. Coleman, the demographer. Thus Ireland was exceptional: easy potato cultivation, supporting high family reproduction dominated by the partible inheritance system, drove very high rates of natural increase, which from 1753 to 1821 was the highest in Europe (and probably correlated with the spread of the potato). It created new demographic regimes of which emigration became a key component: ‘The famine forced the population into a new regime’.25 Famine and mobility The potato failure in 1846 (and the next four years) produced catastrophic levels of mortality and then massive migration.26 For those not paralysed by hunger, poverty and disease, increased mobility became the main answer to the tragedy. In the famine years, vast numbers of vagrants, mendicants and migrants were on the roads. As O’Gráda says, ‘all famines induce people to move in search of food and in order to escape; there is much movement from rural areas into the towns’.27 But the famine was not the only force inducing accelerated mobility. There was an ongoing rationalisation of landholding which took the form of evictions on a scale, and within a short timetable, unprecedented in British and Irish history. Donnelly estimated that, in the years 1849–54, 250,000 people were evicted formally: this is almost certainly an underestimate.28 The truer figure was probably close to half a million – and mainly in Clare, Mayo, Galway and Kerry. As Donnelly says, Behind the clearances stood the widespread and long-standing landlord desire to modernise Irish agriculture, coupled with a virtual collapse of effective tenant capacity for effective resistance to eviction and the extreme pressure which heavy poor rates and lost rents put on many landlords in districts of deep destitution.29

It was a landscape of destruction – the erasure of very large numbers of cottagers including ‘many thousands of cases of estate-clearing landlords and agents [who] used physical force or heavy-handed pressure to bring about the destruction of cabins which they sought. Many pauper families had their houses

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burned, often quite legally, while they were away in the workhouse’.30 These were the people who had no further escape: the strongest left the tragedy, all except the poorest of the poor, who died in catastrophic numbers. It is almost impossible not to make a direct connection between these events – famine and eviction – with emigration. Emigration siphoned off great numbers during the Famine and then set in for the rest of the century, reducing the Irish population in proportions unequalled in the entire European experience. In the bluntest terms it has been said that ‘It was one of the ironies of the Great Famine that the virtual extirpation of the underclass which harboured illness and infection rendered the future safer for the survivors and their children’.31 The Famine was the cataclysmic accelerant of the evacuation of rural Ireland, which continued in the succeeding decades, associated with very high levels of net emigration and low levels of new reproductivity, reinforcing the astonishing decline of the Irish population. The trends in land-holding, already established before the Famine, were now confirmed and reinforced. The assault on the traditional smallholding system was strengthened by the switch in many parts towards large-scale pastoral farming and towards superior commercial grain production. Ireland was transforming into larger farms which entailed the obliteration of the rundale system. The Land Acts from the 1870s made such transfers easier, leading inexorably to a large-scale grazier tenant system.32 Rundale and grazier farming were simply incompatible: the new system spread across the country as a further version of internal colonisation, but the tendency had been established long before 1847. Even in England there were qualms about the comprehensive devastation visited upon rural Ireland. Sir Charles Trevelyan said that the evacuation by way of emigration was the ‘natives’ solution’ to the problem; The Times announced, ‘In a few years a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan’. Gladstone himself was deeply disturbed, even ashamed, at the processes at work in Ireland. Emigration became the most obvious choice for at least three generations of young Irish people.33 Evacuation The evacuation of rural Ireland eventually issued forth into a flood of emigrants across the Irish Sea and across the Atlantic (and to even further destinations). The antecedents of mass emigration from Ireland reached back into the eighteenth century, but now conditions tightened across rural Ireland and every stratagem was employed. Most people most of the time stayed put for as long as possible, eking out a basic living in poor and deteriorating conditions. Temporary and internal migration was widely practised to maintain the old system wherever possible. There had been widespread belief among landlords and government that the problem of rural ‘saturation’ required ‘radical surgery’34 – by

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the elimination of smallholdings, and the conversion of the small tenantry into landless labourers for whom work would be found. The trouble was that the re-shaped rural world required fewer labourers than before and could not absorb those thus shaken out. It was not a feasible solution. Nor were Irish towns able to do this job – there were no internal cities to soak up the surplus labour. Cork, for instance, did not grow much at all – as one commentator puts it, ‘in effect, Ireland’s urbanization took place overseas’.35 Already by 1815, emigration had become imperative but was subject to a particular progression before the onset of mass evacuation by the time of the Great Famine. The Irish became alert to the distant labour markets in the late eighteenth century and thus ‘large numbers of Irish persons had already shed peasant behaviour prior to deciding to emigrate permanently, behaving as homo economicus in the truest sense in their search for work’.36 Seasonal migration over several decades kept the rising problem of land hunger at bay. But it depended on the potato regime, which freed the small producers to find extra income beyond their own land. This had been the delaying mechanism, but the poor agrarians had at least learned how to become migrants.37 Emigration was increasing rapidly in advance of the Great Famine, especially in the 1830s (as we saw in Cork and Tipperary). There was already an exodus – especially from the provinces of Ulster and Leinster– from which there developed elaborate networks of Irish overseas. O’Gráda says that it is likely that ‘emigration was growing and becoming an increasingly realistic option for thousands in pre-famine Ireland … Had phytophthera infestans stayed away, emigration would have increasingly done service as a preventative check’. He added that ‘The effect of the Famine was to extend massive emigration to every county and parish of Ireland. The habit spread with astonishing rapidity, so that the poorer counties of the western seaboard became the major sources of Famine emigration as well as mortality’. But, as O’Gráda points out, ‘those who emigrated were not a representative sample of the population at large; the great majority were clustered in the biologically productive age-bracket, which must have reduced the birth rate’. But the rate of emigration was lowest in Connaught and Munster, the regions most dramatically damaged in the Famine, and ‘the poorest areas supplied fewest emigrants’.38 One of the worst places in all Ireland in the Famine was Skibbereen, in West Cork, which was inundated with famished people, sinking into the greatest depths of distress and mortality: the Skibbereen Poor House, at the severest moments in the Famine, housed 2,981 inmates from a population of 3,854. It was associated also with panic pauper emigration and there were accusations of ‘shovelling out paupers’.39 But, in reality, the emigration rates were low in the high mortality zones. ‘The destitute simply had no means of emigrating’.40 Emigration, as always, was selective. The extreme circumstances of the Famine caused people to flee Ireland in every possible way, desperation written into the faces of the most pathetic who

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managed to reach Liverpool. The sheer scale of the tragedy overwhelmed the available facilities. There were notable efforts to evacuate particular groups from Ireland – for instance, the colony of New South Wales recruited a number of Protestants with considerable assistance. Some landlords paid or partly paid for the emigration of their tenants: for instance George Wyndham made great efforts to relieve his people; Palmerston and Gore Booth in Sligo assisted 2,000 tenants between them; Vere Foster assisted 1,250 female emigrants to America in 1849 to 1857 at a personal cost of £10,000. Throughout there was always the suspicion of mixed motives or worse in landlord-sponsored emigration schemes. The humanitarian impulse was often connected with simultaneous policies designed to clear estates of dependent populations. On the whole these efforts were marginal to the astonishing numbers of fleeing migrants, during and after the Famine. The least advantaged regions did not supply the highest rates of emigration in the first years of the Famine, which were dominated by the middle-ranking areas: the greatest outflows were out of the northern counties of Sligo, Roscommon, Longford, Cavan, Monaghan and Fermanagh, and from Queen’s County, Kilkenny and Tipperary in the south. Small farmers with about ten acres were the most likely emigrants, possessing the capital to emigrate and less incentive to remain on their farms. But after 1851 there was a critical and decisive change of emigration, now shifting the centre of gravity towards places with a high incidence of pauperism, namely Cork, Clare, parts of Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford.41 O’Gráda argues that emigration now relieved population pressure in Ireland – it worked as a preventative check, leading to a downward spiralling of numbers in the countryside, which precipitated further emigration – the relatively comfortable getting out first.42 In the Famine the Irish at large eventually lost their faith in the land, and emigration became much more desperate – taking paupers and the unemployed in cattle boats from Dublin to Liverpool, people ‘hoping eventually to find money enough for the onward journey across the Atlantic … people of every social origin surged out of Ireland in search of a livelihood’.43 Among the teeming throngs were all sorts – thus, for instance, 4,000 orphaned girls were despatched to New South Wales in 1848–50 (some of them were ‘surprisingly sturdy’, reared on potatoes: one of the migrants weighed fifteen stone). Mostly, however, Irish emigration was facilitated by family connections, remittances and passage tickets: ‘The emigrants created their own informal mechanisms’.44 The culture of emigration The Great Famine therefore quickened the evacuation of rural Ireland by emigration (and reduced birth rates), and the process continued long after the crisis.

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Yet ‘few contemporaries imagined in 1851 that depopulation would continue indefinitely, or that the expatriate population would have grown by a further million in the next two decades’.45 In reality, after the Famine there were radical readjustments throughout Ireland, essentially weeding out the smallholders. Resistance to agrarian change appears to have shrunk46 and the transformation of Irish agriculture now proceeded as though inexorably. Connolly remarks that, ‘In the absence of large-scale industrialisation … it was difficult to envisage any future for the huge body of labouring poor that did not involve mass dispossession and emigration’.47 The long-term victims of the potato blight were the cottiers and smallholders who, by the 1880s, had largely disappeared, rationalised out of rural Ireland.48 Family-operated farms now dominated Ireland and the stratum of causal labourer simply disappeared.49 The shift to pastoral production was reinforced by relative price movements. Emigration, according to Fitzpatrick, was a ‘safety valve, an alternative to starvation, a palliative drug’. The poorest, for instance those in Connaught, had been the most reluctant to leave but they were changing their attitudes. Now ‘long-distance emigration was both feasible and tempting to those economic outcasts whom “modernisation” had left with cash but without a lifeline’. Emigrant streams emerged from the rural regions which had been most severely disrupted. The contraction of tillage became the major determinant of population loss and there was now, despite diversity, an unmistakable relationship between structural changes in rural Ireland and the streams of emigration.50 In the post-Famine phase the ‘strong commercial farmers not only benefitted from the new stability in general terms, they received massive financial remittances from their families abroad, and contributed directly to mass emigration themselves by evicting their subtenants, consolidating their landholdings, and converting their farms from tillage to pasture’. As Kenny puts it, there was a new stability, and also a recognition that Ireland itself had benefitted from emigration.51 Landlords and the government regarded the efflux of emigrants as preordained.52 The process was invested with a dimension of racial inevitability: the notion that the Celts were an inferior and declining race, relegated to service roles in cities and colonies across the Anglo-world. In April 1852 the Illustrated London News reported ‘The exodus of the Celtic Races’: it described it as ‘the flux of the emigrational tide toward the shore of the New World. The quays of Dublin, Cork and Liverpool are crowded with Irish emigrants’, and they were often embittered. Year after year the efflux continues. Strong men that are the very life-blood of the nation, and that will become so to that great kindred nation of America, which is destined in due time to overshadow the world with its power and glory, leave our shores in countless multitudes.53

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The greater the number emigrating in any one year, the larger the amount of funds received in Ireland in the next, to enable friends and relatives to follow to the land of plenty and independence. The same report declared that ‘The potato failure is working a mighty revolution’. It had caused land to change hands and had ‘driven the very flower of the Celtic race across the Atlantic’ and ‘This mighty emigration pays for itself. It seeks no aid from the public purse, but … establishes itself in regions that owe no fealty to the Crown of England’.54 Whatever the ideological assumptions, the readjustment of agriculture in Ireland, especially in the decades of the Famine, was radical and ruthless. Outright evictions were pursued with the greatest vigour and on a scale unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. And even in later decades, sheer poverty, more localised no doubt, continued its association with emigration. For instance, in the 1880s, a Quaker philanthropist was begged by local people to ‘send us anywhere’.55 In Kerry the oral tradition recollected people leaving hurriedly: ‘Often they moved in one night’.56 Chain migration from Ireland enabled some of the poorest to enter the story, ‘a powerful magnetic field’ was created by earlier emigration.57 Massive continuing emigration was now the main response to Ireland’s postfamine predicament, culminating in the absolute decline in its population. This central consequence was reinforced by falling birth rates and by later marriages. Emigration was now built into Irish social behaviour and was the most effective mechanism of readjustment. After the Famine emigration became normal and expected. But it was always contentious: for instance, Horace Plunkett referred to the post-Famine exoduses as these ‘vast unaided emigrations’ – for which he blamed the English.58 J.S. Mill took the view that ‘The land of Ireland, the land of every country, belongs to the people of that country’ and he regarded Irish emigration as a forced expatriation and a denial of the rights of the Irish people.59 Clanricarde and consolidation Local variations in the general Irish story were, of course, legion. One was the Clanricarde estate in Galway. The Marquis of Clanricarde was not the worst of absentee landlords: he visited the Galway estate every year, even though he was much more consumed by his political career in London. He advocated liberal policies for Ireland, but his own estates were in confusion and poorly managed by the resident agents, one of whom held sway for the entire period 1828–60. Such men had long orchestrated a regime of subletting, which served to magnify the severity of the irresistible competition for land.60 Clanricarde’s agents were actively involved in setting up competition among tenants and there was repeated controversy over the use of bribes to secure leases of holdings. This was common practice in many places and a telling symptom of the underlying land hunger. Clanricarde’s agent was given ‘considerable latitude in deciding and

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implementing estate policy’. He was unpopular and became the object of death threats.61 Meanwhile the pre-Famine Clanricarde estate was badly managed and had a poor record in its adoption of improvements. In the 1841 harvest Clanricarde’s agent collected the tenants together and said ‘you cannot live here’. The estate agreed to give forty-nine of them a free passage to America; this exercise was repeated in 1842 when fifty-six tenants were given the same facility. These were years when, in the same district, ‘many tenants were evicted … in the change from tillage to pasture’. Clanricarde meantime urged the government to employ ships bringing American timber to send out emigrants. He told the government: ‘I am sure that £300,000 or £400,000 laid out in promoting emigration would have more effect than half a million expended in any other way’. As always, such pleas for assisted emigration yielded no response from Dublin or London.62 The region was soon thereafter convulsed with poverty and evictions. The Clanricarde estate was ‘relatively lenient in its policies’. Before the Famine single evictions were common enough, but mass eviction became normal from 1846 to 1852. The principal motivation was to rid estates of poor tenants and to modernise by the consolidation of holdings into commercial farms of greater substance and efficiency. There were many severe examples in the district: at Balinlass in Galway the people were prepared to pay their rents but ‘were not only … turned out of their houses but had even … been mercilessly driven from the ditches to which they had betaken themselves for shelter’.63 In 1847 in Roscommon one landowner attempted to clear his estate of tenants by offering them a passage to Canada, ‘but 3,000 of those who refused to go were evicted’.64 That landlord was shot dead. In the Famine there were great numbers of deaths in the poor houses of the district, most of all in 1848. The Devon Commission into conditions in Ireland in 1845 had surveyed in great detail the state of farming and generally recognised that farm consolidation by means of Clearances, together with subsidised emigration and wasteland reclamation, had become economic necessities. But the reputation of Irish landlords was odious and worsened by the events of the Famine and the associated evictions which fed the outflow of emigrants. The Illustrated London News in 1848 declared angrily that a Bill should be passed to ‘protect defenceless tenants from the murderous clearances of tyrannical landlords’.65 Instead the legislation of 1847 gave Irish landowners much greater licence to evict their defaulting tenants and was also responsible for changing the demographic landscape of the west and south of Ireland; thousands of cottiers were displaced, especially in the years 1846–48. The British press ‘vilified Irish landlords for dumping their evicted tenants at English ports and cities to be supported by the English Poor Law system’. The sensation created by assassinations in rural Ireland, targeting landlords, their agents and some of the large tenants, produced

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little sympathy in England. When a Special Powers Act was contemplated by Clarendon to eliminate assassinations, Lord John Russell observed sharply: it is quite true that landlords in England would not like to be shot down like hares or partridges … But neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once, and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the failure. The murders are atrocious, so are the ejectments.66

Clanricarde defended his fellow landlords and the role of Irish emigrants who went to England, pointing out that, in prosperous times, cheap Irish labour had been of ‘great benefit in building up the great towns of England’.67 Generic but extreme This was a narrative of agrarian transformation of the most severe variety and, for most of Ireland, implemented without the absorptive capacity of contiguous industrialisation. By the 1870s, declares Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration had become a massive, relentless and efficiently managed national enterprise’. Within Ireland the centre of gravity of migration had moved to the west and south, but still favoured the more literate and less encumbered of the rural population. Although the scale of emigration from Ireland eventually declined, it remained higher than its European counterparts and, even in the 1890s, was still higher per capita than the Italian rate of exodus.68 The Irish case exposed the most immediate and unambiguous operation of land hunger and expulsive forces propelling emigration. But even here there was a structure and a phasing to the patterns of outflow, with regional variants of the larger forces at work. And meanwhile the great wheel kept turning, yielding the overall shifts of people out of Ireland; emigration from Ireland was unquestionably ‘symptomatic’ of the underlying shifts in the Irish economy.69 The most trenchant interpretation of the impact of the Irish famine is provided by O’Gráda, who notes that poverty prevented the most desperate from emigrating and they perished in large numbers. But Famine emigration helped to remove poverty traps, ‘causing a sustained decline in the Irish population, and a convergence of living standards both within Ireland and between Ireland and the rest of the world’.70 This is a verdict with clear Malthusian implications; moreover it suggests that the extreme Irish case bore a significant relationship to the continuing and less cataclysmic process by which population was drained out of the rest of rural areas of the British Isles over the longer run. It is clear that nowhere in the British Isles could the rural context support the population which grew in their midst after 1750. The paradox was that the rural zones were producing much greater surpluses in most parts of the British Isles, yet the systems of farming had no place for these greatly augmented numbers:

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the rural districts simply could not retain their people. The Irish case was a catastrophic version of this general paradox: in the end virtually every rural zone in the British Isles lost its people; they too were subject to evacuation.71 The post-Famine adjustments and massive emigrations from Ireland were the most rigorous and accelerated version of the generic changes that had occurred in the rest of the British Isles – most of which had been earlier and decidedly more gradual in execution. These gradual and radical versions of this essential pattern were soon replicated in western Europe and eventually beyond. Notes 1 L.A. Clarkson, ‘Irish population revisited, 1687–1821’, in J.M. Goldstrom and L.A. Clarkson (eds), Irish Population, Economy and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 35. 2 D. Baines, review of Akenson, Ireland, Sweden and the Great European Migration (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43: 4 (Spring, 2013), 617–18. 3 Donnelly, Land and People, pp. 19ff. 4 Clarkson, ‘Irish population revisited’, p. 35. 5 See Dickson, ‘The other great Irish Famine’, pp. 47–53; and also Drake, ‘The Irish demographic crisis of 1740–1’. 6 Dickson, ‘Other Famine’, p. 53. 7 Kevin Whelan, ‘Pre- and post-Famine landscape change’, in Póirtéir (ed.), Great Irish Famine, p. 22. 8 Clarkson, ‘Irish population revisited’, p. 31. 9 L.A. Clarkson, ‘A non-Famine history of Ireland?’, History Ireland 10 (2002). 10 Laurence M. Geary, ‘Famine, fever and the bloody flux’, in Póirtéir (ed.), Great Famine, pp. 78–9. 11 Mary E. Daly, ‘The operations of Famine relief, 1845–57’, in Póirtéir (ed.), Great Famine, p. 125. 12 Whether contemporaries ever anticipated the catastrophe is a matter of controversy. Henry Stratford Persse of Galway sent his three sons to America in 1821, and wrote to them letters which described in documentary detail the severity of the famine in 1822. He was filled with fear for the future: ‘To the Land of the Free from this Island of Slaves’: Henry Stratford Persse’s Letters from Galway to America, 1821–32, edited by James L. Pethica and James C. Roy (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), ‘Introduction’, especially pp. 29ff. L.A. Clarkson, however, declares that ‘there was nothing to prepare the country for the fate awaiting it in 1845–9’: ‘Conclusion: famine and Irish history’, in E. Margaret Crawford (ed.), Famine: The Irish Experience, 900–1900 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989), p. 224. 13 Whelan, ‘Pre- and post-Famine landscape change’, p. 11. 14 Ibid., p. 24. 15 See Andy Bielenberg, review of L. Kennedy and P.M. Solar, Irish Agriculture (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), in Journal of Economic History 71 (March 2011), 238–40.

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16 Ibid., 239. 17 L. Kennedy and P.M. Solar, Irish Agriculture (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), p. 99. 18 Whelan, ‘Pre- and post-Famine landscape change’, p. 27. 19 Ibid., p. 20. 20 Ibid., p. 26. 21 Cited in Michael Winstanley, ‘Agriculture and Rural Society’, in Chris Williams (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 208. 22 M. Winstanley, ‘Agriculture and rural society’, in Chris Williams (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 207–8. Donnelly dismisses the idea that Irish living standards were declining before the Famine: ‘Ireland was certainly not careering towards economic and social disaster in the decades before 1845’. They were taller than the English, but he concedes that the poor were getting poorer. James S. Donnelly, Jnr, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2001), p. 11. 23 Whelan, ‘Pre- and post-Famine landscape change’, p. 25. 24 Ibid., p. 26. 25 D.A. Coleman, ‘Demography and migration in Ireland, North and South’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 98 (1999), p. 76; see also Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chap. 10. 26 Margaret Crawford, ‘Food and famine’, in Póirtéir, Great Famine, p. 73; L.A. Clarkson, ‘A non-Famine history’. 27 C. O’Grada, ‘The Great Famine and today’s famines’, in Póirtéir, Great Famine, p. 254. 28 The range of estimates of Irish evictions is accounted in John Crowley, W.J. Smyth, and Michael Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), pp. xiv, 370, 571–9. 29 James S. Donnelly, Jnr, ‘Mass eviction and the Great Famine’, in Póirtéir (ed.), Great Famine, p. 156. 30 Ibid., p. 162. 31 Geary, ‘Famine, fever and the bloody flux’, p. 85. In the Famine, imports of grain dwarfed exports. See O’Grada, ‘The Great Famine and today’s famines’, p. 253. 32 Whelan, ‘Pre- and post-Famine landscape change’, p. 29. 33 Ibid., p. 32. 34 Clarkson, ‘Irish population revisited’, p. 32. 35 Ibid. 36 Ruth-Ann Harris, ‘Seasonal migration between Ireland and England prior to the Famine’, in D.H. Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 7 (Gananoque, Ontario: Langdale Press, 1990), p. 364. 37 Ibid. 38 Cormac O’Grada, ‘Malthus and the pre-famine economy’, in Antoin E. Murphy (ed.), Economists and the Irish Economy from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1984), p. 88.

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39 Patrick Hickey, ‘The Famine in the Skibbereen Union, 1845–51’, in Póirtéir, Great Famine, p. 194. 40 Ibid., p. 197. 41 S.H. Cousens, ‘The regional pattern of emigration during the Great Irish Famine’, in Transactions and Papers of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (1960), 59–60, 41. The attraction of land available overseas to small Irish tenant farmers in the late nineteenth century is caught in the letters from America, quoted in Davis (ed.), In Search of a Better Life, especially pp. 197, 204–8. 42 Cormac O’Gráda and Kevin H. O'Rourke, ‘Migration as disaster relief: lessons from the Great Irish Famine’, European Review of Economic History, 1: 1(April 1997). For a generalised view of the relationship between great poverty and migration, as ‘the often stressful but necessary step in general societal transformation’, see Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988). 43 D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Flight from famine’, in Póirtéir, Great Famine, p. 176. 44 Ibid., p. 178. 45 Ibid., p. 180. 46 S.J. Connolly, ‘The Great Famine and Irish politics’, in Póirtéir, Great Famine, p. 48, suggests that militancy diminished after the famine. 47 Ibid., p. 48. 48 Ibid., p. 49. 49 David Fitzpatrick, ‘The disappearance of the Irish agricultural labourer’, Irish Economic and Social History 7 (1980), 66–92. 50 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Irish emigration in the late nineteenth century’, Irish Historical Studies 22 (1980), 127–8, 129, 132, 133, 138. 51 See Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, p. 100. 52 Gerard Moran, Sending out Ireland’s Poor: Assisted Emigration to North America in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004) canvasses the great debate about emigration in Ireland during and after the famine. 53 Quoted in John Killen (ed.), The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts, 1841–1851 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995), p. 257. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p. 217. 56 Ibid., p. 231. 57 Hatton and Williamson, Global Migration, p. 65. 58 Quoted in Gault, Quirky Dr Fay, p. 174. 59 D.P. O’Brien, The Classical Economists Revisited (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 344. 60 John Joseph Conwell, A Galway Landlord during the Great Famine (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003). 61 Ibid., p. 39. 62 Ibid., p. 47. 63 HL. Deb. 30 March 1846, vol. 85, p. 273. 64 Bishop Browne, ‘The Mahon Evictions,’ Freeman’s Journal, 29 April 1848. 65 Conwell, A Galway Landlord, p. 49. 66 Ibid.

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67 Ibid., p. 50. 68 See D.E. Baines, Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 10. 69 See, for instance, Akenson, Ireland, Sweden, passim; and D. Fitzpatrick review of A. Bielenberg, Irish Diaspora (New York: Longman, 2000), in American Historical Review (Dec 2001), 1760. 70 Cormac O’Grada and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘Migration as disaster relief: lessons from the Great Irish Famine’, European Review of Economic History 1: 1 (April 1997), 3. 71 Cf. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, p. 100.

15

The European extension

Leaving Europeans By the late nineteenth century, emigrants were streaming out of most parts of Europe. The great emigrant ports were fully geared to the trade – they now included Liverpool, Hamburg, Bremen, Antwerp, Riga, Gothenburg, Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Odessa, Trieste, Stavanger and more. Internal transport systems had also been revolutionised, most of all by railways spreading across Europe and also within the destination countries. Shipping lines were established to carry the hundreds of thousands of emigrants. Banking and postal facilities were activated to promote the emigrant trade. The impediments to movement across the oceans were being lowered decade by decade; assistance by colonial governments was available for some of the more distant destinations. Mostly this rising transfer of humanity was achieved by private means, often with elaborate family chains of information, shipping tickets, loans and remittances. These formal and informal infrastructures had been established to effect the massive intercontinental transfer of Europeans from an ever-widening radius across the European continent. Emigration came within the reach of millions more than ever before. It was as if the infrastructure itself was not merely the facilitator of emigration but its actual primary generator. But Europe was also following a prior template. Dudley Baines asked the critical question: ‘In what sense can we think of all European migration as part of a single, although complex, phenomenon?’1 Britain itself was part of Europe and part of the vast exodus at the centre of this study, part of the 60 million who left in the long nineteenth century, an exodus which eventually became less British and more continental. But what was the relationship between the two? It is contended that the British case was the prototype in the emergence of mass overseas emigration. It set and maintained the pace until at least the 1850s. But Britain was joined by other sources of emigrants, out of continental Europe,

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and eventually overtaken; even Ireland outperformed as a source of emigrants. Europeans were emigrating in many directions with a clear acceleration and growth in volume in the mid-nineteenth century. Something had galvanised many parts of Europe in those decades: by the late nineteenth century there were waves of emigrants issuing out of distant parts of Europe, moving the sources eastwards and southwards, pushing further with each decade to penetrate some of the furthest reaches of the old continent. Out of these flows of humanity, amounting to many millions, emerged new ‘diasporas’ from each place – German, Slavic, Scandinavian, through to the Iberian and Italian versions – eventually extending to the Balkans and Greece, and finally eastwards even beyond the Mediterranean. These great movements were not merely a replication of the prior British case. They may have each constituted separate phenomena, propelled by local fuel and ignition. The timetables of the outflows, the local circumstances, the European, national, regional and local characteristics of the exoduses – all these were subject to mesmerising variations. Nevertheless these diverse movements possessed certain common features, a recurring pattern of mobilisation and exit and comprised parts of a greater whole. Certainly this wide range of mobilities issued outwards from complicated and diverse locations across a continent, and they were often highly idiosyncratic and particular in their circumstances. But the overhanging question is whether they possessed also a larger coherence and whether and how they related to the previous British case. The extended mobilisation of so many millions of people to leave the old continent suggests a common origin – its explanation is a test of the proposition that the British case was generic and that the migration phenomena were fundamentally linked across time and place. There is, however, a recurring complaint that the British always regard themselves as special, even unique, or at least sui generis – that they are introverted and insular in many things including their historical sense. The present account is no exception, since it pursues the running claim that the original mass emigration in the modern mould was indeed British, and was a corollary of its agrarian and demographic transformations. Moreover each dimension had very long roots – like industrialisation itself. At issue is the depth of such roots and their particularity. It is significant that the European experience is widely referred to in the singular, that is, as ‘The Great Migration’: the influential Canadian scholar D.H. Akenson concurs in this common usage, suggesting that it is best considered as ‘a wide-frame international phenomenon’. Specifically he asserts that ‘much of what happened in Ireland occurred elsewhere in Europe’.2 The uprooted? Overarching ideas about the great European emigrations of the nineteenth century overlap with that of Bailyn’s epic centrifugal forces of the late eighteenth

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century, which suggested an outward dynamism already affecting the entire western fringe of this continent. Similarly the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell used a striking phrase which hinted at deep mechanisms at work across Europe when he declared that ‘If we want for the future to reduce emigration … we must cease to breed emigrants’. In what sense was Europe ‘breeding emigrants’?3 The Canadian historian Norman Macdonald declared that the great diasporic European phenomenon was a migration with ‘many roots, chiefly the adverse conditions in the Old World and the appeal of the New’. It became ‘a safety valve for the untapped energies in crowded centres of population’. The migrants poured into vacant areas of the New World and formed the framework for future nations.4 With a hint of imperial condescension he credited the emigrants with ‘the social and material development of backward countries [which] was inestimable though often overlooked and discounted’.5 In more robust terms Akenson described the nineteenth-century European emigrations as ‘the extremely effective, if slightly off-hand, job of taking over most of the useable and colonisable land of planet earth’. This was ‘the prepotent characteristic of the Great Migration as the seizure and occupation of land and resources (timber, iron, gold and later petroleum)’. The great phase of European migration came to an end by 1914 when, ‘the last remnants of the so-called free land [had] been grabbed’, and there was an effective stop to European transoceanic migration.6 It had been a long, opportunistic historical moment when the attractions of colonisation were seized, and emigration was pulled by the rich rewards of cheap resources and rapidly expanding global commerce. And this was the reason ‘that the translation of large populations across the great distances and their overspreading of immense terrestrial spaces will never again be repeated’.7 Emphases among historians have shifted markedly. For example, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the dominant view of European emigration was that of Oscar Handlin. He depicted the great mass emigrations across the Atlantic as composed of people who were essentially ‘The Uprooted’, an image of trauma and exile, of the dispossessed and the pathetic, broken and booted-out of unhappy Europe. These were the people celebrated in 1886 by Emma Lazarus as the ‘huddled masses’ at the Doors of the Republic. They were sundered from their homelands by poverty, famine and oppression. They were the victims of the severe changes which afflicted Europe in the nineteenth century. In Baines’ single dismissal, it is a view ‘now discredited’.8 Yet elements of Handlin’s view remain prominent even in more subtle versions of the story. Thus Eric Hobsbawm employed similar phraseology when he described the advent of mid-nineteenth-century exoduses as ‘The uprooting of peoples, which is perhaps the most important single phenomenon of the nineteenth century, [and] was to break down this deep age-old and localised traditionalism’. Before the 1820s very few had migrated, but the exodus became universal, and it was essentially because ‘modern economic development of the world required substantial shifts of people’. Somehow agrarian and industrial

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change within Europe had become ‘a gigantic machine for uprooting countrymen’. The landless and the land-poor were the pioneers. But ultimately ‘the most rapidly industrialising countries … were also the great exporters of men’. They became a mobile international workforce, an ‘impermanent floating population’. Most of all, emigration was ‘the safety valve which kept social pressure below the point of rebellion or revolution’.9 Stability in pre-industrial Europe Virtually all historians accept the existence of a discontinuity in the long narrative of European emigration10 – displayed most clearly in the acceleration and extension of emigration by the mid-nineteenth century. But how much mobility was there in pre-industrial Europe? Internal migration had been widespread but, as in England, it was generally limited in its scope, with little effect on the balance of population in most localities: mobility was confined within a relatively narrow compass, with little long-distance migration except in unusual circumstances. Emigration was a different matter since it took population right out of the system.11 Tenurial traditions probably constrained the movement of populations in much of Europe. When the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft visited Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 1795 she observed remarkable stability, notably in Norway. She was impressed by the way in which land was held, to which she attributed the steady equilibrium of rural life: ‘The distribution of landed property into small farms produces a degree of equality which I have seldom seen elsewhere’, she remarked. The people were secure and land passed down to the next generation without fragmenting families: ‘The farmers not fearing to be turned out of their farms … are a manly race; … I never yet have heard of anything like domineering, or oppression’.12 This extreme predictability of Norwegian rural life in the 1790s gave no premonition of the later history of Norway – a country which shot up the league table of emigration by the late nineteenth century. The old way of life was probably contingent on a stability of numbers, on a population balance which soon proved to be impermanent.13 Rural life in Europe may have been generally stable but there were already some long-distance migrations which predated the better known movements of the nineteenth century. The river systems of western Europe witnessed flows of emigrants, especially indentured migrants from the German states, heading to North America in the 1760s and 1770s. And Dutch historians have shown the recurring movements of people into the estuarial quarters of Holland in what is called ‘the North Sea System’. The growth of the Dutch population in the great age, after the 1620s, was almost entirely due to immigration down the river systems, counteracting the high urban death rates of the time.14 Yet the mobilisation of emigration was slow, even sluggish, and emigration from Europe in the

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eighteenth century was relatively slight. Empire-building was generally limited by the dearth of potential emigrants. The recourse to indenturing and slavery appeared to testify to a supply-side deficiency, and a general resistance to the idea of colonisation and emigration. A case in point was Portugal, which was especially short of emigrants for its colonies. From 1748 to 1753 Portugal implemented a scheme for sending entire families to Brazil at the expense of the Crown. As C.R. Boxer reported, it was a time when groups of peasant families were sent from the Azores to Santa Catalina and Rio Grande do Sul. The projected total of 4,000 emigrant families was not attained, but sufficient numbers of both sexes arrived to give the Santa Catalina (modern Florianopolis) region a high proportion of white blood as compared with other parts in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil.15

This was a rare strategy of colonisation and was symptomatic of the problem of raising emigrants. So also was the reliance on convict and indentured candidates for emigration. As in the British case, internal migration in Europe continued to be more important than emigration even after the advent of the floods of people who went to America in the mid-nineteenth century. Most migration was intraEuropean;16 thus even at the peak time of emigration, most Italians migrated within Europe17 and some of the major people exporters (e.g. Germany and Britain) were simultaneously importing large numbers of immigrants. Moreover the return of emigrants was large: possibly half of those who went overseas in the late nineteenth century eventually returned home.18 Shipping data confirm high rates of permanent reverse migration to southern Europe, in substantial contrast to that of north and western Europe.19 Take-off from Europe There was a sequential extension of the centre of gravity in the sources of emigrants from Europe over the course of a century. Before 1840 mass emigration was mainly a British Isles phenomenon, but it was slowly being paralleled by a new geography of emigration, first manifested by the German states, which was noticed in Britain in 1846 when Germany was described as the only other country participating in emigration on a large scale. By 1840 German emigration had risen to 60,000 p.a., rising to 80,000 p.a. in 1846. A British commentator at the time claimed that ‘the pre-disposing causes are not occasional but permanent, in the subsisting state of the country’. He continued: ‘in Bavaria especially whole village communities sell their property for whatever they can get, with the clergymen at their head’. It was not a simple flight from poverty, nor was Bavarian emigration a result of oppression so much as a desire to escape restrictions:

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the emigrants sought ‘absolute, political and religious freedom’. They were moved by an ideal of Utopia in America. ‘It is not the very poor who emigrate; they cannot, in fact, but it is those who have some little to spare. Every emigrant is restricted to take with him equal to £24 in English money’. German emigration was directed almost entirely to the United States.20 The discontinuity in European migration is best depicted in a series of maps and graphs of the emerging exoduses.21 The statistics of emigration also show that in the first phase of continental migration, Germany dominated the new sources – indeed between 1841 and 1880, of the 13 million Europeans who emigrated to New Worlds at first (1845–50), about 80 per cent derived from the British Isles and Germany. This fell to 50 per cent in the following twenty-five years. Even in the 1860s migration from Europe was still largely confined to the upper Rhine valley and Britain.22 By the late nineteenth century the older model of settler migration had been overtaken by labour migration, by poorer people who depended entirely on their daily labour. Hoerder hypothesises several stages of European migration: at the start the movements were dominated by regional and seasonal migration, often from hilly or mountainous districts to more fertile zones notably for harvest employment. The Irish, even before the 1840s, had established this model which was later replicated by the migrants issuing out of southern and eastern Europe in the 1880s. Settler migration was another model for Europe: cheap farmland in America and Siberia created incentives for permanent migration. Nugent declares that ‘The great majority … sought, in essence, to depart from unpromising and circumscribed peasant life in Germany and to become independent farmers of 100 acres or more in the American West’.23 Settlers and workers belonged to quite different systems according to Hoerder.24 The mass emigration of workers of the later nineteenth century was ostensibly free and voluntary, but it derived from a context of poverty in many parts. After 1880 the gathering of mass labour migration reached into the south and east of Europe, whence emigrants headed for the eastern United States, though much of the movement was temporary and seasonal, with high return rates. The extension of mass emigration to eastern and southern Europe occurred mainly after 1870 – seen spectacularly in the outflows of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and ethnic Russians, which increased in great leaps by 1913, rising to 2 million per annum to the United States in the years 1900–10. German out-migration declined steeply after 1886, while that of Austria-Hungary rose rapidly and included many Bohemians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Croats: ‘The pioneer migrants were solicited by the recruitment agents of American employers and, after 1885, by the agents of steamship companies in Hamburg, Antwerp and Bremen’.25 The creation of better transport facilities was crucial. Subsequently the outflows became self-perpetuating: the first migrants became the mobilisers of the

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next cohorts. The new immigrants could earn seven to ten times as much in America than in their homelands, even as unskilled labour: ‘the economic calculation was obvious’. Moreover returning emigrants demonstrated their new wealth and their ability to invest at home – their return appearance made the local people ‘go wild with envy and desire’. At the turn of the century many people from eastern Europe were departing as seasonal or temporary migrant labourers rather than as permanent settlers. Return rates were surprisingly variable: they were notably high among the Italians and Greeks, but low for the Irish and the Jews. In 1907–8 Czechs were returning at the rate of 7.8 per cent; Germans 15.5 per cent, Hungarians 48.7 per cent, Slovaks 56.1 per cent, and Croats and Slovenes 59.8 per cent.26 The Jewish component, which was very large, was the most thoroughly permanent emigration and also maintained high proportions of females.27 The lure of America was irresistible but was crucially magnified by changes in rural Europe where economic transformation was inducing much higher rates of migration than ever before. Fertility rates were on the rise throughout Europe during this period, leading to an increase in the supply of young mobile adults. In the east the abolition of serfdom produced much deeper changes which generated cumulative long-term effects on the rural economy. These changes led eventually to the creation of a large mass of rural proletarians; meanwhile the rise of urban industrial sectors demolished the old rural handicraft sectors – which was especially damaging to many Jewish communities. Steamships supplanted sail by 1871 and opened up new means of exit for millions. In the later waves of European emigration, male departures dominated: ‘Sex ratios as imbalanced as these indicate a reluctance to form families in the host society, strong family ties at home, and a slower rate of social and political assimilation’. Evidently ‘the traditional practice of seasonal labour seeking to migrate could be extended to the U.S.A. chronically in need of workers’.28 Most of all, in the activation of emigration, was the operation of the twin propellers of population growth and agrarian dislocation. Thus the case of Iceland showed a sudden increase of emigration (equal to Swedish and British proportions) out of a rising population trend by 1870, which was related to marriage patterns and larger than normal cohorts of young people reaching marriageable age with diminished prospects at home.29 By 1900 almost a third of the European population had moved beyond their birthplaces. Some regions were able to absorb only a small proportion of the surplus population that had accumulated over the previous decades and movements outwards had become prodigious, with Iceland a surprisingly good exemplar. Wage rates were not only much higher in America but also now very well authenticated by better information channels stretching to the furthest corners of the continent. News of wage-rate differences was difficult to resist. In 1870 UK wages were only 60 per cent of those obtainable in the New World; the

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equivalent wages were 4 per cent for the Irish and 26 per cent for the Norwegians: ‘The gains from emigration were thus potentially enormous. And once the new steam technologies had lowered the cost of travel sufficiently, mass emigration became inevitable’.30 This was the new oceanic labour market in a uniquely liberal context. Thus population growth, economic restructuring, and declining transport costs boosted emigration rates first in the more advanced richer economies where workers could raise the passage costs. Somewhat later the poorer European economies began to experience rising living standards and the net widened eastwards across the continent.31 This emigration was initially self-reinforcing, as a result of ‘the friends and relatives effect’. In the twentieth century the balance was eventually re-stabilised – as wages converged to produce lower emigration rates.32 Hence, by 1875, the range of emigrants had already extended spectacularly and spread geographically into the heartlands of the European continent. From 1875 to 1914, 34 million emigrated, 25 million of them permanently. The annual numbers rose from 280,000 p.a. in the late 1870s, to 780,000 p.a. a decade later, then up to 2,000,000 in 1910. The source countries were spreading – thus Austria-Hungary was sending more than a million per annum at the turn of the century. Russian emigration increased very rapidly in the decades 1860 to 1914.33 Even more striking was the emergence of southern and eastern Europeans after 1885. Slavic, Jewish and Italian migration had emerged by the 1880s. Italy became a prime source and within Italy the south eventually overtook the north by 1914.34 Similarly Polish emigration was very high by the early twentieth century at eight per thousand, flowing to three distinct destinations, and very considerably above the European average, which itself had climbed greatly over the previous three decades. Most of these European emigrants were rural folk: in the vast flows of the years from 1899 to 1913, 68 per cent of the Hungarian emigrants to the United States were agrarians, though on arrival they gravitated mainly into industry and mining. Austrian and Russian migrants tended towards Vienna and lower Austria before they veered to the Atlantic. Russia was slow to develop internal migration, but surplus labour began to leave the great estates after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, first towards Moscow and St Petersburg. To call this kaleidoscope of mobility a single European movement, a unified Diaspora, stretches credibility. It lacked uniformity in every way, including timing, and the spectrum of circumstances and responses was wide and diverse. This, however, does not eliminate the possibility that it was a progressive, even sequential, evolution across the continent, with vital common roots. Baines has demonstrated the manifold unevenness in the record. In the late nineteenth century emigration per capita was very high for Norway but very low in France – thus the French emigrated at a rate thirty-three times less than the

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Norwegians.35 Less spectacular variations occurred across the continent, especially over time. Moreover there were very pronounced discrepancies within countries – as we have already seen in the case of Cornwall in England, and in parts of Ireland. In some countries there were outstanding emigration regions – thus Vaasa in Finland yielded a third of all Finnish emigration; from Austria-Hungary half of the emigrants came from Galicia and Bukovina; in Germany a quarter came from West Prussia and Pomerania; and of those who emigrated from England and Wales, 14 per cent came from the west of England. Thus European emigration was highly regionalised and uneven. Baines emphasises how national boundaries were not critical markers and that most emigration was provincial rather than national. Some minorities were clearly over-represented and distinguished by high propensities to emigrate: notably Jews, Poles and Lithuanians from Russia; Transylvanians from Romania; and the Sicilians and Calabrians from southern Italy, who had ‘ten times the rates for Emilio-Romagna and Sardinia’. These variations appear not to have been consistently correlated with levels of poverty. Thus the Sardinians were just as poor as the Abruzzis, but much less prone to emigrate. A particular explanation is undoubtedly required for the basic fact that Russian Jews accounted for a quarter of all American immigrants in 1910–14.36 Certain localities were thus disproportionately and mystifyingly emigrationsusceptible. Particular villages and districts protrude in the narrative. Localised emigration zones stand out and local conditions seem often to have been critical, with emigration rates varying unpredictably from village to village. It is likely that these variations related to local continuities and chain migrations which were inaugurated in some places and not in others, a flow once established generating further flows by the influence of information and revenues homewards. The role of families was central in such emigration, all within the network of kin. Family support systems minimised risk and also provided onward funding for emigrants – these were the social networks that were an essential element in the decisions of prospective migrants.37 Nevertheless, during the course of the nineteenth century there was a broad change from folk family-settler migration towards individual male-dominated labour migration. Hvidt found that 69 per cent of Danish emigrants (1868–1900) and 55 per cent of Swedish emigrants (1871–1900) were unskilled labourers. By 1930 Sweden had become an immigrant receiving country.38 Some locations seem to have leap-frogged directly into migrations dominated by single men, especially in southern- and easternEuropean zones which apparently missed almost entirely the folk stage. Demography and rural change The wider determinants of these great European outflows were eventually derived from underlying changes which affected the continent in repeated and sequential

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phases. Most of all, the pattern of migration coincided (and seemed to move lock-step) with population growth and agrarian change. The broad European demographic story was one of surging growth by the nineteenth century. In 1750 the total European population was about 150 million; by 1800 it had increased to about 185 million. Thereafter it rose much faster – to 266 million by 1850 and 401 million by 1900. The swiftest rate of aggregate population growth was after 1850, that is, a half century later than in the British Isles. Europe increased its share of the world’s population from 21 per cent in 1800 to 25 per cent in 1900 – despite, of course, the heavy leakage of net emigration to non-European destinations during the interim. It became the most densely populated region of the world.39 The population revolution was decidedly uneven. Thus some countries trebled their population between 1800 and 1910 (e.g. Finland, Denmark and England); some doubled their numbers (Benelux, Germany, Austria-Hungary); Italy was slower and France much slower still. By the late nineteenth century, England and Germany were sending out only 10 per cent of the natural increase of their populations, compared with 66 per cent from Norway and 100 per cent from Ireland. The chronology of European population growth was thus highly variable. Unprecedented population growth was first manifested in western Europe, where mass emigration was also first to emerge. It was most intensely witnessed in the crisis of the 1840s in southern Germany and Ireland which was associated in those regions with the concept of ‘crisis emigration’. But the correlation seems to have been more broadly based – the countries with fastest population growth were the most likely to produce emigrants. Ireland was located at one end of this spectrum. At the other extreme was France, which experienced low population growth and also very low rates of emigration: a large proportion of the French population remained on the land, in village life, in a system of agricultural tenure which gave a strong attachment to the land and coincided with low rates of emigration. Transatlantic Scandinavian emigration emerged by mid-century: Norwegians were first in the 1820s, then the Swedes in the 1850s, followed by the Danes and the Finns in the 1860s. It was migration from land-poor regions in Scandinavia to land-rich places in promised America: It altered the calculus of migration. These fabulous prospects made emigration far more alluring than moving to the city or remaining at home. By the middle of the century, this form of emigration from many regions of Scandinavia had dwarfed the internal migration that had gone before.40

The Norwegian case is especially instructive. The Norwegian population grew by 0.7 per cent p.a. in the years 1775–95. Thereafter, it ‘exploded’, reaching 1.4

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per cent p.a. between 1815 and 1835 and continuing at a very high rate into the next quarter century. This was one of the fastest growth rates in Europe and in 1850, despite early emigration, the population of Norway was 50 per cent bigger than it had been in 1800.41 There seems to have been a critical fall in the average age at marriage: ‘Population surged as a result, leaving more and more as landless farmers’. The framework of rural society was thus undermined: ‘The structures of local society had been irrefutably altered’; landlessness was increasingly common among the freeholding peasants and there was no big city to mop up the surplus. Emigration was the main Norwegian response, overwhelmingly from remote rural areas which were beginning to heed the news about America: ‘despite long-standing traditions of internal migration, only when knowledge of the possibility of emigration diffused into remote Norwegian peasant communities did out-migration rates explode’. According to one commentator, the collective psychology was propelled by the idea of landed futures in the United States ‘where lost social worlds might be regained’. This was rural-to-rural migration: ‘It is not surprising that opportunities to own American land beckoned’. It was ‘a Godsend to Scandinavian peasants’. In essence it was ‘a radical attempt to conserve’ a rural way of life which lasted to the end of the nineteenth century when urban migration emerged in larger proportions.42 Later in the nineteenth century, population growth was stronger in eastern European countries, especially after 1880, and emigration spread with it. The sequence of migration moved across Europe eastwards and southwards, yet in 1901–10 Norway, Scotland and Italy remained at the top of the league table in per capita terms.43 The impact of population growth was complicated in every way, and so it was for emigration. For instance, much of eastern Europe had been sparsely populated before the onset of demographic growth. Meantime, and earlier, ‘many rural areas, especially in western Europe became relatively over populated’. There were massive structural changes in the framework of existence and they clearly affected the supply of potential emigrants. As Thistlethwaite declared, ‘The great overseas migration is in a very broad sense to be treated as a major, but subordinate, aspect of European population growth and European industrialization’.44 Varying European timetables Population growth was evidently occurring in a transforming context of agrarian and industrial change, which carried the ultimate causes of mass migration. The rural world was being re-structured. Changes in tenurial arrangements were introduced virtually everywhere, though on radically different timetables. The most crucial was the abolition of serfdom in Russia from the 1860s but the consequences of this great change took several decades to run their main course.45

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‘Migration began later because in most areas the abolition of serfdom and industrialisation came late’. In Germany ‘extremely low wages paid to agricultural workers on large estates resulted in high out-migration’.46 Regional migration preceded external movements. Such fundamental rural changes had long been introduced in the westerly parts of Europe, most notably in the British Isles, two centuries earlier.47 The reaction to demographic and economic forces was variable, especially in the first stages. Often population growth moved in tandem with the cumulative and alarming subdivision of the lands to accommodate the rising numbers. This seems to have happened most clearly in Polish Galicia, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, northern Portugal, southern Germany and much of Italy. The subdivision of lands was the most telling early symptom of the mounting pressure of people on rural resources. Rising population and concomitant urbanisation created much greater demands for food for the market, a tendency which was generally regarded as incompatible with peasant production, especially where subdivision yielded little for the market. In many regions of Europe the same process can be seen at work: it entailed widespread commercialisation of the land and its uses, which most often pressed small holders to the edge of estates, or off the land altogether. Commercialising agriculture involved taking land from small self-sufficient producers and the concentration of their holdings into much larger units of production. This common process accelerated as it extended eastwards. For instance, it affected the Polish provinces and Hungary with radical re-organisation and the large-scale dispossession of peasants. One estimate suggests that in the late nineteenth century eastern Europe witnessed 5 million people already existing as a rural proletariat. Their tightened circumstances were exacerbated when local industries also caved under the competition deriving from the industrialisation of manufacturing. It has been suggested that ‘Part of the European population became peripheral in the late nineteenth century because the economic development of Europe implied an increase in specialisation’.48 The dangerous effects of population growth were encapsulated by the economic historians Milward and Saul, who pointed out that changes in the organisation of farming occurred throughout Europe; even where the demand for labour was not diminished, the rise in the supply of labour could not be absorbed. Virtually every European country was ‘faced with serious problems of poverty and unemployment arising from these changes’.49 The surplus of labour created in these ways was regarded by some as a great boon: E.D. Howard, writing in 1907, remarked that ‘The pressure of an increasing population on the resources of a country is one of the most compelling causes of industrial progress’. In France there had been little of this pressure to induce

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industrial employment and its effects were therefore negative. But in Germany: ‘Here we have one of the requirements of capitalistic production, a proletariat clamouring for employment’.50 Further east, especially in Russia, rising internal migration was related to increasing surpluses of rural labour, but with fewer industrial opportunities.51 Emigration was a partial solution, within and beyond Europe. Sometimes it amounted ‘almost to a fever, an irrational frenzy’,52 an echo of Dr Samuel Johnson in the West Highlands a century earlier. But behind the frenzies was the rising pressure of population on the land and the consequent subdivision of holdings. This, say Saul and Milward, was the most important cause of Europeans migrations, and they assert that ‘Those who argue that the pull from the United States was the main force governing migration seem to have little understanding of the basic forces in European history’.53 And thus the origins of mass migration derived primarily from internal European conditions. The intensity of the pressures for greater productivity on the land operated against the welfare of the small producers, especially among the peasantries across the continent who possessed scant legal hold on their lands. The competitive environment was made much more hazardous when the ironic consequences of previous emigration became manifest in the last decades of the century, when high volumes of cheap imports of foodstuffs and raw materials (e.g. copper ore) began to flood into European markets, depressing prices and intensifying already severe competition. Cheap imports from the new economies overseas added to the general derangement of the old rural societies. Italy was affected particularly badly in the 1880s and 1890s, coinciding with major exoduses from rural places. The impact of foreign competition was not uniform, because some countries imposed tariffs: these included Germany, Sweden and France. But other places were exporters, including much of Hungary and Russia, which now responded with accelerated land transformation. The Agricultural Depression of the 1880s was evidently connected to the emigration of the landless and the land-poor, coinciding with the very high rates of emigration. The widespread effect of these parallel developments was growing turmoil and pressure on the land – evictions, amalgamations, new methods and peasant resistance. Some of the turmoil and tension caused small producers to cling onto the land with increased tenacity and ferocity. Some of it was expressed in enhanced mobility and further streams of migration internally and externally. The movements were mesmeric and are not easily traced or disentangled – but the growth of populations and the subsequent decline in rural labour-use was undeniable. In England the agricultural population fell absolutely while total population increased continuously. In Ireland (the exceptional case) the nation’s population fell decade by decade after 1845 and much of the rural population became proletarianised. Such people faced falling living standards or, the other

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option, migration. Emigration was a means of escape – helped no doubt by the revelation of new destinations overseas, and falling transport costs. Emigration was selective and generally marginal to most places, but the aggregate effect was cumulative – of swelling numbers reaching the main emigrant ports. Sharp contrasts Emigration was uneven everywhere but even among the marked variations in Italy there were generalised symptoms of an underlying pressure on the land. It was not necessarily the very poor who emigrated; and the emigrants were a minor proportion of the total population anyway. In Italy the lead was taken by the small and medium farmers rather than the peasants of the large latifundia. In the great years of emigration, 1890–1913, Italian emigration became dominated by peasants issuing out of extremely poor places which had never seen emigration before. The outflow from southern Italy to America was sudden and very large, which, according to Dino Cinel, was an authentic discontinuity at the end of the century, a sudden mass phenomenon.54 Nevertheless the Italian migration of the 1890s also involved ‘jumping the invisible fence that separated Italy from France’.55 Almost all of the emigrants were rural folk, and there was a huge amount of seasonal migration.56 It was naturally accompanied by excited talk of the astonishing earnings available further afield, in America. Much of the Italian emigration of the late nineteenth century was characterised by a special psychology: this was emigration premised on the idea of return. Up to 90 per cent of the emigrants declared they intended to return to Italy and many of them did so. It was a particular strategy: to accumulate funds in America in order to acquire land back home on which to retire. It was a strategy that spoke in volumes of land hunger and conservatism – it also reflected the structural land situation in Italy.57 The commitment to return was not universal, as the case of the émigré Irish demonstrated. Other parts of Europe followed a different path: for instance, the earliest Ukrainian and Belarussian migrants to Canada in the late Tsarist era were religious refugees, political activists and military deserters but these pioneers were a minority and their numbers were quickly overtaken by emigrants from among the peasantry who were mostly temporary ‘economic sojourners and transient labourers’, intending to return to their homeland. They were being driven from the land by the effects of the demographic explosion and by poor soil conditions together with unfavourable inheritance policies.58 More fundamentally, in a general way, the Ukrainian and Belarussian peasants were not fully integrated into the Russian world; their rural homelands had been disrupted by modernisation, capitalism and the extension of the market economy – and especially by the abolition of serfdom. There had been a partial proletarianisation of the peasantry,

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which was also associated with the demographic upsurge in the countryside, the scarcity of arable resources, and the lack of urban opportunities. At the very centre of the eastern story was the spectacle of land pressure and the population factor. Some of the disengaged peasantry joined the burgeoning colonisation heading north and east within Russia – but mostly they were westward-oriented and looked to North America. And they were primarily ordinary male peasants in their twenties or thirties, mainly newly married. Much of the Canadian migration was essentially sojourner in character – and some of the emigrants received letters threatening divorce from women they had left behind. Canada continued to favour British immigrants but the great surge of settlers westwards between 1900 and 1914, especially into Saskatchewan, attracted large numbers of these central European peasantries. They were essentially a new agricultural population, mainly Ukrainians followed by Austro-Hungarians and Russians, despite considerable controversy within Canada.59 Consequently much of the mobility in eastern Europe was not permanent. In the decades before the First Word War, for instance, there was heavy seasonal migration from Ukraine to Germany, which can be traced to the 1880s.60 The level of mobility was extraordinary. As many as 20 per cent p.a. of the population were on the move; much of it was rural-oriented but it also flowed in large numbers into the towns and mines of Germany, with heavy return rates. This movement ran parallel with migration to the United States, much of it also temporary, typically over the span of three years. Both forms of Ukrainian mobility were associated with high levels of remittances. More generally Dirk Hoerder has pointed out that ‘Peasants from Norway to Italy sent members of their families to work abroad to accumulate the funds necessary to preserve a precarious rural existence and perhaps to increase meagre landholdings’.61 Indeed a common thread was the powerful impulse to raise money by seasonal external labour in order to retain or regain land at home, as best exemplified in Galicia. Women were involved but there was also a necessity to stay home to look after the land in the absence of the mainly male emigrants. The movement came to a sudden halt in 1914. There had been increased movement to urban areas in Europe by 1850 but in many places the local towns failed to absorb the influx of labourers, which led to more seasonal migration or to a second migration, and then a mobilisation of labour towards America. Hoerder argues that ‘Labour-exporting countries had (relatively) surplus populations, with chronic or permanent under employment’.62 Despite this evident mobility, the inertia of the displaced peasantry in many parts of Europe was a common source of frustration among commentators and landlords in the late nineteenth century. Most people, of course, did not emigrate and even in the most emigration-minded country, Ireland, there was always a

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modicum of resistance. Return rates from emigration in late nineteenth-century Europe suggest that the peasant tenacity for land was integral to the motivating forces of the time. Across much of Europe in the late nineteenth century there was a fundamental problem, notably in those zones where industrialisation had had little impact and where the agricultural sector confronted declining returns to labour. Yet populations continued to grow and pressure on the land mounted; consequently out-migration was necessary to maintain ‘even a constant level of economic well-being’. As Akenson explains, migration helped to promote ‘fundamental structural’ change, reduced the oversupply of labour and also benefitted land owners at the expense of the workers. Moreover ‘Those who migrated were in general better off, and those who did not were also better off in that, per capita, they were left with more land and other resources’.63 This was the rational case for emigration: rationality in the form of responsive adjustments. And these predominantly rural people supplied the New World’s labour needs – pouring into the great export-oriented commercial agricultures and, increasingly, into the mushroom-like cities springing up in the Americas and Australasia. The global implications were evident: Marx called the mobile international labour force the ‘light cavalry of capitalism’.64 In a similar vein, modern commentators proclaim the proposition that international migration and European imperialism were responsible for a process ‘whereby their [colonies’] economies were internally disarticulated and integrated externally with the world economy’. It was part of the acceleration of the changes from the preindustrial to the capitalist systems.65 The actual appearance of Europe’s emigrants on America’s doorstep – as captured in Emma Lazarus’ indelible image – was probably misleading. As David Gerber points out, emigrants, even from the peasant homelands, were typically the better off, the middling groups who could afford the passages. They looked bedraggled on arrival at Ellis Island, in part because the income gap between the continental immigrants and the receiving population in America had widened in the last decades of the century. In reality many of them were from the upper crust of European peasant society, which generally had much lower standards than those who did not emigrate.66 Absorbent cities of Europe European emigration, despite the huge numbers involved, was not the most important response to the pressures just described. Most migration was internal to Europe and ultimately fed into its rising urban concentrations. Most European countries possessed at least one big city which was the primary migrant destination from the countryside. The absorbent capacity of cities and towns was the critical factor in the long run. The scale of intra-European migration was extraordinary: Europe’s industrial cities attracted foreigners in vast numbers, for

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example Poles to the Ruhr in many thousands, while Germans streamed out of Hesse towards Paris, in a story repeated across industrialising Europe: it was, in Klaus Bade’s colourful image, Europe’s own ‘Wild West’.67 Prussia opened its borders to Poles in 1870. Meanwhile Italians flooded into Switzerland between 1860 and 1910; this imported labour became indispensable for rail and tunnel building, and thus the Swiss foreign-born population rose from 4.5 per cent to 15.2 per cent. Cities soaked up the rural surpluses and created the great new urban labour forces which eventually yielded new sources of wealth and rising living standards. Even in Scandinavia the internal movements were more important than emigration. Internal migration was therefore a massive process with countless variations, but most migrants went into the cities.68 Many European cities were very similar to those of America: thus in 1907, 47 per cent of the German population were internal migrants; in 1900 46.4 per cent of the population of Vienna had not been born there – they came from Bohemia, Silesia, Hungary, Bosnia, Galicia and Bukovina. Return migration was greater in Europe than in America because it was easier to get home.69 Urbanisation appeared as a substitute for emigration. It is significant that two of the greatest emigrant countries, Italy and Ireland, experienced little urbanisation. Meanwhile in Germany emigration declined after the 1880s at a time when industrialisation was on the march and Germany became a net immigrant country. Many operations in the Ruhr were heavily dependent on large numbers of foreign workers. Poles were migrating to the Ruhr by the 1890s at which time there was ‘an absolute scarcity of agricultural workers’: and German women were required to do much of the rural work.70 But the equation was not absolutely applicable: in Britain net emigration moved upwards even as urbanisation and industrialisation intensified in the late nineteenth century. Urban emigration was higher than rural from Norway, Finland and Denmark, as well as in Britain and parts of Germany and Italy. The story was often complicated by the inclusion of many people born in rural zones who then subsequently emigrated, in a secondary impulse, through the towns and ports. The English case was most affected by its very early industrialisation – more than half the population were already urban by 1850 and emigration was increasingly dominated by urban people. All of English emigration after 1861 was urban-dominated; in the late nineteenth century 22 per cent of all the emigrants came from London alone and of these, 75 per cent were London-born. Emigration evidently passed though stages and reflected the passage of industrialisation and urbanisation which had variable effects on departures from and entries to a country. There were concurrent influences which also induced migration. For instance the rapid demission of empire in Europe, most of all the Ottoman Empire, dislocated large numbers of ethnic populations in eastern Europe, even before

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the cataclysm of the First World War. There was a widespread ‘unmixing’ of peoples, especially among the Balkan Muslims, as a result of the formation of new nations in the region. Political change thus operated as a force for dislocation and out-migration in many directions.71 After 1914 a different form of emigration emerged: according to Akenson, the old ‘settler conquest version’ was overtaken by ‘labour-migration’ which became the primary mode – now mainly composed of urban and industrial workers and mostly from southern Europe. He sees this as a ‘filling in’ – the emigrants were now ‘engaged in the process of subfeudating [sic] the conquests made by the previous century’s marcher lords’. They became part of ‘Europe’s general flux of labour-migration’.72 In the intervening decades the vital wage differentials between Europe and the emigrants’ destinations had narrowed, thereby reducing the advantage of emigration; the demographic impulse had also changed – by 1914 birth rates and marital fertility in Europe were declining, presumably reducing the urgency of migration. European emigration was greatly reduced in the years 1925–39. Much of the decline was explained by: reduced overseas investment; by United States restrictions of 1924–27; by totalitarian restrictions; and by excess agricultural production in the Depression. A new equilibrium had been reached – population growth had shrunk, agricultural output had increased; the emigration imperatives had eased. Yet in some of the receiving countries, notably in Australia and Canada, the demand for immigrants was resumed with some urgency and policies were adopted to assist and attract renewed flows of emigrants, from Britain in particular. Residual questions Whether there existed a singular ‘European Diaspora’ is difficult to determine, partly owing to definitional problems. For instance, the Spanish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Italian and Greek diasporas are commonly regarded as independent phenomena, with their own literatures, myths, particularities, and disconnected from one another. But these diasporas possessed obvious parallelisms; they overlapped and conjoined in the ports of exit and places of destination. They ended up in melting pots, in which the European ingredients generally mixed together and, despite separatism in many places and times, they emerged as ‘blended’ Americans or Australians et al. These melting ‘diasporas’ exhibited substantial common origins and common destinies. It is significant that the great emigration ports – Rotterdam, La Rochelle, Liverpool and Hamburg – took only a few from their own localities. The emigrants were mainly en route from other regions or countries, funnelled to these highly developed outports. Explanations of the great European emigration attract scepticism, sometimes to the point of paralysis. For instance, Dudley Baines offers an astringent and

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sharply analytical commentary on the hazards surrounding causal propositions about emigration. His verdict allows for no patterns except the most banal, for instance that emigration was prompted by international development and the general desire for betterment. Most studies of the European diasporas are about opportunities overseas and the impact and responses at the destinations: they are little concerned with the original impulses. Baines indeed claims that there are no credible explanations of the very markedly differential exoduses across the European experience. Despite the astonishing outflows from Europe of about 60 million emigrants in the long nineteenth century, it is generally the case that less than two per thousand of any home population emigrated in each year. We are not able to explain why some emigrated and most did not. The raw differential between wage levels between home and overseas – the sine qua non of emigration – persisted throughout, and consequently many more Europeans could have benefitted from emigration than actually did. As we have seen, the rates of emigration across the continent were extraordinarily discrepant – for instance very high in Norway, very low in France; some regions produced many, some very few. Thistlethwaite long ago declared that the history of emigration was ‘an Andromeda, chained to the rock of national history and crying out to be freed to become an independent force’.73 Of the grand economic explanations, two dominate the account: the first sees a growing interdependence within the international economy, and labour moving sensibly with other factors of production between countries, leading to a rational and more efficient redistribution of European populations. From these efficiently interacting movements emerged the convergence of incomes and returns between the component parts of the integrating international system.74 A second and distinct version was the operation of ‘Core/Periphery’ forces: that is, the capitalist core exploiting the unskilled labour of the periphery – often composed of temporary labour migrants who were not authentic settlers and who were not necessarily benefitted by the process. As for motivation, Baines asserts that ‘We cannot know what actually passed through the minds of potential emigrants’. Did they ‘feel … that their occupations were threatened by technological change? Of course, we can never know what was in their minds’. Motivations are notoriously difficult to determine and ‘information about the social and economic characteristics of emigrants can tell us about their motivations only by inference’.75 Baines argues that the strength of conditions at the destination seem to predominate in the lines of causation – this is suggested as the peaks and troughs in emigration coincided across Europe,76 and the United States took two-thirds of overseas emigrants. Economic fluctuations coincided roughly across all European countries – despite great economic differences in the sending countries. It is therefore likely that conditions at the destinations were the decisive factor – and that knowledge of those

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conditions was critical.77 But the activation of these flows required a crucial readiness to respond. It is equally probable that people were more likely to move from places when they were caught in the midst of change, especially people who had access to more information than others. The greatest single change, as Wicksell had implied, was in the sheer number of people reproducing in Europe in the age of migration. It was the question upon which the influence of Malthus has never waned. Notes 1 Baines, Emigration from Europe, p. 15. 2 Donald Harman Akenson, Ireland, Sweden and the Great European Migration, 1815–1914 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), pp. 1, 261. 3 Ibid., p. 261. 4 Norman Macdonald, Canada: Immigration and Colonisation, 1841–1903 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1966), p. 30. 5 Ibid., p. 1. 6 Akenson, Ireland, Sweden, pp. 256ff. 7 Ibid., chap. 11, p. 257. See also George Alter and Gregory Clark, ‘The demographic transition and human capital’, in S. Broadberry and K.H. O’Rourke (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 59–60. 8 Baines, Emigration from Europe, p. 79; see also Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, chaps 1 and 2. 9 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution 1789–1848 ([1962] New York: Mentor Book edition, 1964), pp. 169–70; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Sphere Books, 1977), pp. 228–9, 231–8; The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Guild Publishing, 1987), pp. 37, 169. 10 Most recently James Boyd, ‘The Rhine Exodus of 1816/17 within the developing German Atlantic world’, Historical Journal 58 (Oct. 2015), 1–25. 11 See especially Leslie Page Moch, Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), and Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 12 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London, 1796), p. 41. 13 See Michael Drake, ‘Norway’, in W.R. Lee (ed.), European Demography and Economic Growth (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 284–318. 14 See Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten Prak, ‘Demographic change and migration flows in Holland, 1500–1800’, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 245, and Richard W. Unger, ‘Income differentials, institutions and religion: working in the Rhineland and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century’, ibid., pp. 271–94.

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15 C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 169. 16 For impressions of internal migration in nineteenth-century France see Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (New York: Norton, 2007), pp. 145–64. 17 Between 1876 and 1914, 44 per cent of Italian migrants went to European countries, 29 per cent to the United States, and 23 per cent to South America. Baines, Emigration from Europe, pp. 29–35. 18 Ibid., p. 29. 19 D. Fitzpatrick, review in Economic History Review 68 (2015), 755–6. 20 Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, anthologised in R.C. Bridges, Nations and Empires (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 157–8. 21 See Russell King et al. The Atlas of Human Migration (London: Earthscan, 2010), pp. 28–9. 22 Alan S. Milward and S.B. Saul, The Development of the Economies of Central Europe, 1850–1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), vol. 1, p. 148. 23 Walter Nugent, ‘Migration from the German and Austro-Hungarian empires to North America’, in Robin Cohen (ed.), The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 104. 24 D. Hoerder, Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 8. 25 Ewa Morawska, ‘East Europeans on the move’, in Cohen, Cambridge Survey, pp. 97–100. 26 Nugent, ‘Migration’, pp. 103–7. 27 Morawska, ‘East Europeans’, pp. 97–100. 28 Nugent, ‘Migration’, p. 107. 29 See Helgi Skui Kjartansson, ‘Icelandic emigration’, in P.C. Emmer and M. Morner (eds), European Expansion and Migration: Essays on the Intercontinental Migration from Africa, Asia and Europe (New York: Berg, 1992), chap. 5. 30 Broadberry and O’Rourke (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 2, pp. 15–19. The correlation was not necessarily perfect. J.D. Gould pointed out that ‘Italian emigration to the United States reached massive proportions in precisely those years when the income differential between the two countries had ceased to widen and was indeed tending to narrow slightly: ‘European inter-continental emigration 1815–1914’, Journal of European Economic History 9 (1980), 302, quoted by R. Faini and A Venturini, ‘Italian emigration in the pre-war period’, in Hatton and Williamson (eds), Migration and the International Labour Market, p. 78. 31 On passage costs, see Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 13–15, and John Killick, ‘Transatlantic steerage fares, British and Irish emigration, and return migration, 1815–60’, Economic History Review 67 (2014), 170–91. 32 Broadberry and O’Rourke (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 2, pp. 15–19. 33 On eastern and Russian migrations see A.S. Milward and S.B. Saul, The Development of the Economies of Continental Europe (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,

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1977), vol. 1, p. 146. On the genesis and direction of Russian migration at the end of the nineteenth century and the belief in Siberia as ‘a kind of Utopia’, see G.T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 250ff. 34 Italy became the largest supplier of emigrants to both North and South America – between 1880 and 1914, 4.1million Italians migrated to the United States, 1.8 million to Argentina, and 1.2 million to Brazil. 35 Between 1550 and 1820 the population of France increased by 79 per cent, while that of England increased by 280 per cent. In France a large proportion of the population remained on the land right up until the 1920s, coinciding with a low rate of migration; in France the system of agriculture gave a better adhesion to the land than in England. See Baines, Mature Economy, pp. 23–6. 36 See Fitzpatrick, Economic History Review 68 (2015), 755–6. 37 Ibid. 38 K. Hvidt, Flight to America: The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants (New York: Academic Press, 1975). 39 There is a good summary in André Armengaud, Population in Europe 1700–1914 (London: Fontana, 1970). Another synoptic account is that of Klaus J. Bade et al. (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 40 This section is based on Jon Gjerde, ‘The Scandinavian migrants’, in Cohen (ed.), Cambridge Survey, pp. 85–90, and Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 41 Russell King, ‘Migration in a world historical perspective’, p. 28; Drake, ‘Norway’, and ‘Introduction’, in Lee, European Demography, pp. 14, 21–2. 42 Frank Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe overseas: postscript’, in Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke (eds), A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), passim. 43 Baines, Emigration from Europe, p. 10. 44 Ibid. 45 Jan Lucassen argued that migration in eastern and central Europe had long been impeded by the prolongation of serfdom and slavery. Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe, p. 213. 46 Ibid., p. 22. 47 Note the special features of England: that 10 per cent of the land was worked by people who owned it – most of it, 90 per cent, was rented out to tenant farmers; 80 per cent of the labour force was landless labourers in 1851. Crossan, Guernsey 1814–1914: Migration and Modernisation, p. 29. 48 Ibid., p. 23. On the status and transformation of European peasant life across the eastern regions, see David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998), esp. pp. 235–42. 49 Milward and Saul, Economies of Continental Europe, vol. 1, p. 142. 50 E.D. Howard, The Cause and Extent of Recent Industrial Progress (London, 1907), anthologised in S. Pollard and C. Holmes, Industrial Power and National Rivalry 1870–1914 (London: Arnold, 1972), pp. 77–9.

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51 F.E.W. Palmer, Russian Life in Town and Country (1901), quoted in Pollard and Holmes, Industrial Power, p. 294–6. 52 Milward and Saul, Economies, p. 144. 53 Ibid., p. 145. 54 See Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 25, 35, 36. 55 F.L. Dingley in 1890, as quoted in Pollard and Holmes, Industrial Power, p. 304. 56 Milward and Saul, Economies, pp. 162–3. 57 Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, p. 65. 58 See V. Kukuskin, From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Emigration from the Russian Empire to Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), p. 9. 59 See Bill Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History (Calgary: Fifth House, 2006). 60 Krzysztof Lada and Czeslaw Partacz, ‘Working for Ukraine: Ukrainian seasonal labour in Germany, 1905–1914’, Itinerario 37 (2013), 87–99. 61 Hoerder, European Migrants, p. 6. 62 Ibid. 63 D.H. Akenson, ‘What did New Zealand do to Scotland and England?’, in Brad Patterson (ed.), The Irish in New Zealand (Wellington: University of Victoria Press, 2002), p. 187. 64 Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, p. 238. 65 P. Knox and J. Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy (London, Edward Arnold, 1989), p. 240, quoted in R.A. Butlin, Geographies of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 136. 66 David A. Gerber, American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 71, 79. 67 Referred to by Leo Lucassen, in review of Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung, in International Review of Social History 47 (2002), 115–16. 68 Vecoli gave the long perspective on these great movements: ‘Over the long period 1876 to 1976, 52 per cent of European emigrants went to European countries, 44 per cent to Americas (90 per cent of these to the US); 2 per cent to Africa and .5 per cent to Oceania’. Quoted in Butlin, Geographies of Empire, p. 160. 69 Hoerder, Labor Migration, p. 11. 70 Ibid., p. 304. 71 Roger Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of empire and the unmixing of peoples’, in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds), After Empire (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). 72 Akenson, Ireland, Sweden, pp. 258–9. 73 Baines, Mature Economy, chap. 2; Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration: postscript’. 74 See especially Hatton and Williamson, Global Migration, passim. 75 Baines, Emigration from Europe, pp. 15, 19. 76 Ibid., p. 21. See also Dudley Baines, ‘European emigration, 1815–1930: looking at the emigration decision again’, Economic History Review 47 (1994), 525–41. 77 Baines, Emigration from Europe, p. 36.

16

British emigration and the Malthus model

Spanning the transition The life of Robert Malthus (1766–1834) spanned the decades in Britain of the rapid transition towards mass international migration. This became manifest only towards the end of his life. He was keenly aware of the extraordinary reproductive feats of the American colonists and the potential of new lands in the colonies. He was also well-informed about the substantial migrations from particular regions of the British Isles at the end of the old century. But Malthus was not much engaged with the surging growth in the numbers of emigrants until the end of the 1820s. He had no anticipation of the flood of emigrants from Ireland and elsewhere in the 1840s. He was a man of a previous epoch, but his intellectual and moral influence was nevertheless powerful in the forthcoming age of emigration, specifically in deterring government from intervention in the process of emigration. The new demographic order The population factor, as we have witnessed in many cases, hovers above all questions about the mobilisation of the migrants. People most commonly migrate in contexts of demographic change, and the simplest suspicion is that times of rapid population growth created the pressure to push people outwards, increasing the scale and velocity of migration. Population growth and migration, and then emigration, mostly move in tandem. The British case, this chapter argues, was the precursor of the modern experience, now seen across the globe. But the population factor is not so clear-cut. The common historical understanding is that the pre-industrial population of the British Isles had been held back by Malthusian checks. Low living standards were related to high rates of mortality and also limited reproduction through the operation of various mechanisms of restraint. Then, at some time in the

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eighteenth century, the population of England (and most of the rest of the British Isles) began to increase annually in a sustained, unprecedented and cumulative way. This was ‘the demographic revolution’. There was sustained growth in every year from 1742 to 1871 – and it was much more rapid than elsewhere in Europe, though less than in the North American colonies in the eighteenth century. The most favoured explanation of the new demographic order – rising fertility and relatively stable mortality – relates to the escape from ‘the Malthusian trap’.1 For the first time in recorded history, it is contended, wages and living standards did not fall as population rose. Nutritional levels did not collapse nor even decline under the weight of population growth, though real wages rose only very slowly. There is therefore a remaining puzzle as to why nuptiality rose when living standards were uncertain and insecure. But, as Andrew Hinde says: ‘the Malthusian tether that bound population growth to real wages’ was ‘snapped’ and ‘this was undoubtedly the result of increased productivity in agriculture (and then by industry) arising from technological developments. These greatly increased the number of people the land could support’.2 On the negative side was the paradoxical effect of growth, which was so erratic and unpredictable that it produced an intermittent over-supply and redundancy of labour, and most of all in the rural sectors. This may have been the ultimate source of turmoil, of mobility, of restlessness. A new demographic regime had been inaugurated and England had been the fastest off the mark in the years 1750–1820 but, as we have seen, Holland, Germany and even Russia all eventually followed. The wider European demographic context suggests that, in 1000 AD, Europe had a population of 30–50 million. By 1800 it was 188 million; by 1914 it was 458 million and in 2000 it had reached 750 million. This great expansion had been paralleled with massive internal colonisation as well as the effect of colonising overseas and emigration. It could hardly be pure coincidence that large-scale emigration occurred in a period of rapid population growth; or that countries with the rapidly expanding populations were most likely to send out emigrants.3 Malthus equivocating Over these large spheres Malthus continues to cast his powerful influence. He proposed a series of apparently inescapable tendencies regarding the causes and consequences of population growth, which were generally ‘dismal’. The manner in which Malthus wrestled with the question of emigration typified the confusion which surrounded the subject in Regency and early Victorian times. It reflected the immense difficulty of fathoming the trajectory and dangers of population growth in the age of industrialisation and the commercialisation of agriculture. This common perplexity was at the centre of the very serious population puzzles that are encountered by modernising societies past and present.

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Emigration featured in Malthus’ thinking but in a relatively marginal role in the understanding of population dynamics. Moreover his interest in emigration was primarily restricted to its consequences for the sending country;4 he paid only minor attention to its ultimate causes. Malthus was a man of the pre-industrial age, confronting the population question even before the first censuses. He lived to see the revolutionary changes in the economy and, even more alarmingly, the results of the first three censuses (1801–21), which exposed the astonishing growth of the English population – which was far greater than he had ever anticipated. His earliest writings pre-dated the first censuses and he laboured under the severe delusion that the population of Britain in 1798 was only 7 million, whereas it was soon to be revealed that it was actually much closer to 11 million, an underestimate of 44 per cent. Had Malthus been properly aware of the true population size he might well have been even more alarmist about the immediate future.5 The newly revealed explosion in population numbers demanded a response in terms of population theory and, more pressingly, with regard to government policy for which emigration offered a possible option. This was the context in which Malthus emerged as a decidedly equivocal advocate of emigration. He was generally negative and unenthusiastic about any anticipated benefits for the home country. He was mostly lukewarm, if not actively opposed, to those who urged emigration as a solution to the problems of poverty, destitution and over-population across the British Isles in the early nineteenth century. Their idea was to populate the expanding British World overseas while simultaneously relieving the British Isles of its excess population. Malthus’ diagnosis of the underlying demographic question was critical in forming public perceptions and particularly regarding the public funding of emigration. In the outcome Malthus’ predictions about emigration were not well borne out and their applicability in the new industrial world is now generally discounted. The vacuum Malthus’ best-known propositions about emigration related to the utility or otherwise of emigration as a means of relieving the pressure of population on subsistence. His prescriptions were connected with his broad principle that population tended always to expand to the very limits of subsistence unless other influences actively intervened. The evolution of his thinking on emigration occurred during the volatile conditions in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, especially in the years after Waterloo when the demand for labour was suddenly reduced, causing serious mass unemployment in most sectors of the economy. In these circumstances, in 1817, Malthus was prepared to allow that ‘emigration is most useful as a temporary relief ’, and could be used to reduce the adjustment

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required until population would ‘conform itself to the state of the demand for labour’.6 Emigration was only marginally useful ‘as a partial and temporary expedient’. And emigration, incidentally, would help to spread the benefits of civilisation and ‘the more general cultivation of the earth’.7 Emigration was, at most, a ‘weak palliative’ to the problem of overpopulation.8 In 1826/7, in his famous explication before the Emigration Committee of Parliament, Malthus argued that the ineffectiveness of emigration as a permanent remedy was a consequence of the ‘vacuum effect’9 – by which he meant that the space released by the removal of emigrants was inevitably replenished by a subsequent re-growth of population, facilitated by the return to the subdivision of holdings and early marriages and followed by a further round of ‘prolificness’. As Malthus put it: ‘There is always a natural tendency towards the filling up of a vacuum’, which would render the effect of emigration ‘nugatory’.10 He was alluding especially to Ireland and the Scottish Highlands but he also feared the inundation of England by destitute Irish. He was prepared to allow that the refilling of the vacuum could be diminished if people were prevented from re-occupying the land whence the emigrants had departed. This could be accomplished by the prohibition of sub-division and the literal destruction of houses and cottages previously occupied by the departed emigrants.11 Malthus was straightforward in his advocacy of Clearances in Ireland and in the Scottish Highlands and he encouraged emigration only in conditions in which the re-generation of the population was fully prevented. Ultimately, after the end of Malthus’ life, the British experience of emigration in the nineteenth century told a different story: it became utterly clear that the record was highly varied, but that many parts of the country did indeed register a permanent reduction by migration in population levels: the ‘vacuum’ effect was eventually shown to be inoperative in practice. This was true of very large rural tracts of the country; it was also eventually true of the two sites to which Malthus had particularly pointed. The population of the Highlands began to fall absolutely after 1851; much more sensationally the population of Ireland fell like a stone after the Great Famine and did not begin to recover for another 150 years. Emigration was part of the cause; emigration indeed diminished population and the ‘vacuum’ simply did not work in the manner Malthus predicted.12 Even more broadly for Malthusian predictions, the population of the British Isles as a whole rose cumulatively for 200 years, and was clearly associated with rising living standards throughout most of its career. Britain escaped ‘the Malthusian trap’. The wrongness of Malthus seems to be complete. Indeed, when in mid-2005, Science magazine rank-ordered the ‘Big research questions’ of the day, it identified number twenty-five as: ‘Will Malthus continue to be wrong?’13 Nevertheless, the influence of Malthus caused his contemporaries and their immediate successors to dismiss emigration as a relieving mechanism for the

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demographic pressures of the day. According to Mark Blaug this was ‘a generation drunk on Malthusian wine’.14 Thus Herman Merivale, in his Lectures on Colonisation in 1839–41, cited the well-known case of the Isle of Skye, from which 8,000 of a total population of 11,000 emigrated in the late eighteenth century. Yet within a generation Skye had re-couped its original numbers, which then proceeded to grow much further. This seemed to be a perfect example of the Malthusian ‘vacuum’ effect. It encouraged generalised scepticism about the possible benefits of large-scale emigration, even from Ireland. In the outcome Merivale lived to witness the impact of the Great Famine and, in the post-famine edition of his Lectures in 1861, he conceded that emigration had now hugely reduced the Irish population; and emigration certainly helped to sustain its gradual betterment over the following century.15 In the case of the Isle of Skye, its population history followed a similar path, rising until 1851 and then beginning at last its long, continuous decline. There exists a debateable let-out clause for Malthus, located in his doctrine concerning the longer-run. There was less rigidity and less pessimism in Malthusian doctrine than is conventionally understood. Malthus was not saying that humanity was doomed forever to retreat to bedrock subsistence and misery.16 He was just as emphatic that the supplies of subsistence could be increased. J.J. Spengler, for instance, claims that Malthus was a Smithian and believed that urban and industrial development would ultimately increase ‘the expandability of employment’, which would lead to a better balance of population with subsistence. How much flexibility this permitted in the Malthusian framework is not entirely clear. The economist J.M. Keynes, a lineal intellectual descendant of Malthus, argued that the great expansion of trade, settlement and migration constituted the engine of development in the long Victorian era. It had also been the means by which Europe escaped the Malthusian disaster. But when, by 1914, the territorial expansion of the European people seemed to reach its geographical limits, Keynes became pessimistic. He sensed the end of the extended Malthusian limits. And in the short run, as in the unemployment crisis of 1922, Keynes was faithfully echoing Malthus’ thought when he described the idea of emigration as ‘only an expensive palliative’.17 Thus there is some doubt, which is not unusual, about the implications of Malthus’ prescriptions with regard to the emigration variable. But there is no doubt about the story of economic growth and ultimately the rising living standards during the Victorian Age – which is recognition of the success of the supply side which Malthus had indeed emphasised. Emigration was undoubtedly a vital component in the widening scale of British production around the world. When, in the 1930s, European emigration not only ceased but was reversed into net immigration there was a growing belief that Europe had come to the end of the great historical phase of population release to the rest of the world.

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Authoritative spokespersons announced ‘The End of the Age of Migration’. By the late twentieth century this indeed seemed to be the case – Europeans appeared to have ceased emigrating across the oceans.18 There was a paradox in this turnabout – for now movement about the globe was, in transport terms, easier than ever before. Moreover the aggregate population of Europe was greater than it had ever been and yet Europe had become a net importer of people from non-European places. Migrant psychology Emigrants in Malthus’ exposition were not necessarily either predictable or rational. And here he put his finger on the recurring problem of analysing migrant behaviour – that is, the great variability of migrant psychology. Malthus celebrated the courage of emigrants who laboured under great difficulties in new places, which they overcame by ‘those powerful passions, the thirst of gain, the spirit of adventure, and religious enthusiasm’ – and which, in their combinations, enabled them to overcome every obstacle. He noted also that emigrants often wreaked devastating effects upon indigenous peoples: it made ‘humanity shudder’, he said.19 At the same time Malthus noted cases where the ‘excessive tendency to emigrate’ had encouraged extreme procreation in the home parish. He referred to ‘whole tribes, who enjoyed the comforts of life in a reasonable degree’ and had left ‘from mere humour, and a fantastical idea of becoming their own masters and freeholders’.20 This ‘humour’ and these ‘fantastical ideas’, common among emigrants then and since, continue to challenge our understanding of the mechanisms and psychology of emigration. Pessimism and optimism It was not surprising that Malthus misunderstood the actual capacity of the home economy to expand its supply of foodstuffs and its demand for labour. As E.A. Wrigley points out, these were revolutionary economic times: at the very moment when Malthus was writing, the gross national product in England was rising unprecedentedly to an average growth rate of between 2 and 5 per cent per annum. This was a quantum leap over the typical pre-industrial rates of growth of between 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent per annum.21 It was, of course, a revolution beyond the limits of Malthus’ mind and was unaccounted for in his predictions. Malthus derived his thinking and premises from a world which was being overturned as he wrote. The Malthusian world was a pre-industrial world in which population growth seemed always most likely to outstrip and swamp any achievable economic growth. Now, for the first time in human existence,

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‘rising numbers no longer posed a threat to living standards’. The Industrial Revolution changed the underlying relationship between population and society.22 Malthus’ writings influenced the course of British emigration in two ways. First, it is likely that his repeated advocacy of the ‘vacuum effect’ helped to dissuade government from taking any positive steps to encourage emigration – in terms of domestic benefit it was (except in emergency conditions) pointless to subsidise emigration. His influence deterred the government from active intervention in emigration projects. It is, however, equally unlikely that his doctrines had much impact on the spontaneous and rising enthusiasms for emigration in the 1820s; his lukewarm endorsement of emigration in 1830 nevertheless imparted some intellectual encouragement to the new school of systematic colonisation. In the second place, Malthus’ positive though less well-known disquisitions on the prodigious possibilities of new lands and colonisation chimed with the increasing optimism of departing emigrants and he may have added a fillip to the time. Malthus’ domestic diagnostics were essentially applicable to those regions which remained closest to the pre-industrial world. In the Isle of Man, for instance, there was a modest and selective evacuation, an agricultural adjustment by way of emigration which helped to reduce the absolute numbers dependent on Manx agriculture without impeding rising productivity on the home farms.23 In the West Highlands emigration was sporadic and counteracted by the continued re-growth of the local population which rested on the old pre-industrial base and was accompanied by extreme congestion and deprivation. In Swaledale both processes operated in tandem, with considerable retention of the old system, cheek-by-jowl with the new. The rural outflows from Kent, Cornwall, West Cork, Wiltshire and west Wales were also fitful and unpredictable, yet generally unidirectional and permanent.24 E.A. Wrigley also pointed out that there was very little expansion of the agricultural labour force in England in the early nineteenth century, yet the massive growth of the home population ‘remained very largely home fed’. He estimates that rural output per man increased by 42 per cent in the period 1811 to 1852, which was part of the ‘very handsome long-term rise in output per man’ for the entire period 1600–1850. ‘Each man at work on the land in the 1850s was capable of meeting the food needs of significantly more people engaged in other work than his predecessor in the 1800s had been able to do’. This was the one great industry ‘in which output per head rose markedly but in which employment grew very little in absolute terms, and fell sharply as a fraction of the workforce’.25 Paradoxically, even though employment in agriculture grew very little, the total population of rural England continued to grow until the mid-nineteenth century. Only after 1850 did stagnation set in and then was often accompanied by persistent structural unemployment in the

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countryside.26 Consequently many people remained on the land who were not actually contributing directly to the great productivity increases. These included, for example, tailors, butchers, blacksmiths, carpenters and bricklayers, that is, trades which were not subject to much specialisation and served only local markets.27 Thus the contrast between advanced areas of English agriculture and, say, the remote Scottish Highlands was less than definitive – there were retentive tendencies in both spheres. Paradoxes of numbers In the fullness of time, of course, it became clear that population growth continued across the British Isles and the country continued to supply fluctuating flows of emigrants to other continents – Britain and Ireland remained net emigrant countries until the 1930s. Over the long run there was a central paradox in the story: emigration syphoned off a relatively small proportion of the British population and had only a small impact on its demographic trajectory. The Irish account is different and virtually unique in this respect: the Irish population fell continuously after the Famine of the 1840s. Yet any diminution of the impact of emigration is surely countered by Charlotte Erickson’s credible assertion that without emigration, England, and more especially Ireland, would have looked very different in the 1840s and 1850s.28 This should be related to the continuing and less cataclysmic process by which population was drained out of the rural parts of the British Isles over the longer run. What is clear is that nowhere could the rural world support the population which grew after 1750. This is a paradox because the rural zones were producing unprecedented food surpluses yet could not retain their people. Despite the relatively modest annual population percentage involved in British emigration, the flows of emigrants had colossal consequences in terms of the spread and their sheer reproductive behaviour across the migrant world. The British component of the world’s population rose spectacularly in the age of emigration. Malthus himself was staggered at the natural growth of the colonial American population. This record continued through the nineteenth century – in Australia, for instance, the local demographic increments outpaced immigrant inflows by the 1870s. By 1900, after many decades of high reproductivity, family sizes began to shrink: a population transition had begun and Australian mothers were accused of demographic sabotage.29 Emigration did not follow Malthusian rules in Britain. Population continued to rise and living standards increased; losses by emigration were replenished not by the effects of immigration but by the power of urban and industrial growth. But, as we have seen in Ireland and in the most resolutely rural parts of the main island, there was no resurgence of the populations depleted by migration.

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The vacuums in these places were not refilled – indeed, in defiance of Malthus’ predictions. Most of all, it became clear that emigration was not mechanically geared to demographic imperatives. Emigration responded to population changes but possessed a more complicated life of its own, affected by local and general influences which undermine the simple correlation with population growth and mobility. In this equation Malthus proved a fascinating and confusing guide. Population growth undoubtedly fuelled migration, but how this was translated into emigration is less clear – and evidently it changed in the late nineteenth century: it became an urban movement by that time – reflecting the structural change in the composition of the British population.30 Was the world therefore repeopled by such emigrants as though absentmindedly? There was a quickening and widening of the movement of humanity within and over old boundaries, often with fundamental political and economic consequences. Many of the autochthonous populations of North America, Australia and the Caribbean almost disappeared under the influence of the British emigrations. Human migration is often elusive, always difficult to categorise and to measure, often barely visible, commonly cloaked and unofficial. Its impact and connected problems consume a great deal of present-day diplomacy and give rise to special mechanisms in the attempt to control and limit the phenomenon. Its most public face is that of the refugee and the panic movements of large numbers of desperate people between countries, and now between continents. Yet this has been a relatively small part of the broader flows of modern migration. Notes 1 See Andrew Hinde, England’s Population: A History since the Domesday Survey (London: Hodder Arnold, 2003), pp. 177–8, 189; Joel Mokyr and Hans-Joachim, Voth, ‘Understanding growth in Europe, 1700–1870: theory and evidence’, in Broadberry and O’Rourke (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 1, pp. 18–21. For a vigorous re-statement of the ‘Malthusian trap’ doctrine, see Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 2 Hinde, England’s Population, p. 191. 3 See Massimo Livi-Baci, The Population of Europe (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2000). 4 He was, however, much engaged by the possibilities of population growth in the countries of destination, even in Australia. See, for example, Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 7. 5 This was the source of much late eighteenth-century demographic controversy, which took another three decades to disperse. See E.A. Wrigley, ‘Malthus reassessed’, Journal of Historical Geography 8: 2 (1982), 192, fn 2.

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6 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th edn (1826), eds. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, vol. 2 (London: William Pickering, 8 vols, 1986), p. 307. Malthus made the same assertion in 1798; T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: 1st edn (London, 1798), eds. E.A Wrigley and David Souden, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1986), p. 41. 7 See J.M. Pullen and Trevor Hughes Parry (eds), T.R. Malthus: The Unpublished Papers in the Collection of Kanto Gakuen University, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economics Society, 1997 and 2004), vol. 1, pp. 103–4. 8 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Patricia James ([1803] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol. 1, p. 340. 9 Ibid. 10 Third Report from the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom, 1827, in British Parliamentary Papers: Emigration vol. 2 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968), pp. 311–27; Q.3198, Q.3231, Q.3222, and Q.3395. 11 Ibid., Q.3231. 12 In both places, of course, emigration was commonly associated with widespread Clearances and evictions, but the main outflows proceeded at a much faster rate and from much wider causes. 13 Quoted in Richard H. Steckel, ‘Big social science history’, Social Science History, 31: 1 (2007), 4. 14 Mark Blaug, ‘The myth of the old Poor Law and the making of the new’, in M.W. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds), Essays in Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 125, 143. 15 See Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth, p. 5. 16 For the long term Malthus was optimistic, in effect advocating balanced growth and small families. With regard to his principle of population, he said future prospects were not necessarily ‘entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude the gradual and progressive improvement in human society’. Quoted by Donald Winch, Malthus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 103. For a general re-appraisal of Malthus’ doctrines and his wider horizons, see especially Bashford and Chaplin, New Worlds, chap. 7. 17 J.M. Keynes, ‘An economist’s view of population’, Manchester Guardian Commercial, 17 August 1922. 18 See Moch, Moving Europeans. 19 Malthus, Principle (1803), vol. 1, p. 340. 20 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 285. 21 Wrigley, ‘Malthus reassessed’, pp. 189–90. See also William Petersen’s review of D.A. Coleman and R. Schofield, The State of Population Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), in European Journal of Population 2 (1986), 407–10. 22 On the remarkable growth of productivity in British agriculture, see Cormac O’Gráda, ‘Farming high and low, 1850–1914’, Agricultural History Review 49: 2 (2001), 210–18, esp. 211. 23 Most parishes (sixteen out of twenty-one) reached their maximum populations in 1851 or before. The total population of the island, however, rose continuously to the

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end of the century, most of the increase relocated in the urban centres of Douglas and Ramsey. See A.W. Moore, History of the Isle of Man, 2 vols. (Douglas, 1992 reprint [1900]). 24 ‘Evacuation’ was the term applied by Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth, p. 118. 25 E.A. Wrigley, ‘Men on the land in the countryside: employment in agriculture in early nineteenth- century England’, in L. Bonfield et al. (eds), The World We Have Gained (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 295–337. 26 The decline of rural craftsmen’s employment is considered in Saville, ‘Internal migration’, 9–10, 13. Moreover female employment fell greatly and was precipitating much internal migration, compounded by the loss of employment in cottage industries. This tendency probably pre-dated the absolute decline of the rural population. 27 Wrigley, ‘Men on the land’, pp. 295–337. 28 Erickson, Leaving England, p. 13. 29 See Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 33–4. 30 On the emergent urban bias in emigration in the mid-nineteenth century, see Dewey, ‘Farm labour’, p. 849, citing Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, p. 279.

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A general view of the origins of modern emigration and the British case

Mentalities and motivations What moved millions of mainly quite ordinary British and Irish people to embark on long-distance migrations? This is a classic, indeed generic, historical question. It involves peering into the minds of vast numbers of people, which is impossible; it is extremely difficult even to count them, still more so to categorise them. Their minds may be unknowable. E.P. Thompson, the modern historian who did most to enter the collective psychology of the labouring people of England, warned that they often had slight engagement with their own futures: In general, the working population had little predictive notion of time – they do not plan ‘careers’, or plan families, or see their lives in a given shape before them, or salt away weeks of high earnings in savings, or plan to buy cottages, or ever in their lives ‘take a vacation’ … Hence opportunity is grabbed as occasion arrives, with little thought of the consequences.1

Whether this proposition applies to the life-changing decision to emigrate is not so clear, though emigration was often enough precipitate. A less fashionable historian, G.M. Trevelyan, believed that such people need to be explained beyond their own understandings: ‘to know more in some respects than the dweller in the past knew about the condition that enveloped and controlled their own life’.2 This sort of historical exercise requires an intimate access into their heads, and their contexts, to make any sense of their lives. Eric Hobsbawm had no doubts about the mentality of the plebeian society from which so many millions of emigrants issued. He claimed that ‘The majority of the British people in the first half of the nineteenth century was convinced that the coming of industrial capitalism had brought them appalling hardships, that they had entered a bleak and iron age’.3 Emigration from such circumstances is not hard to imagine or to understand.

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But were the people who emigrated in large numbers the products of deteriorating conditions in the British Isles, or were they the newly released and energetic seekers of distant opportunities? Or, more likely, many of both? Some clues are found in their identities – that is, by categorising the immigrants according to their essential characteristics. From these categories might be deduced the underlying conditions of their collective activation. This was the method employed by Charlotte Erickson – first asking the question whether the migrants to the United States in the early nineteenth century were traditional rural folk or the newly industrial people of Britain. Her conclusions were modest but suggest a transition in the types of migrants leaving England – increasingly urban people by the mid-century.4 By the 1880s, emigration to North America was rapidly exceeding the entire rural exodus in England and Wales and ‘the reserves of potential migration in the rural areas [were] now much reduced’.5 By then most British emigrants were urban people. A simple division is often made between ‘settler migration’ and ‘labour migration’, and another category is termed ‘self-exporting emigrants’.6 The simplest distinction is between forced and voluntary migration, between slave or convict migration and free migration. But this division is less definitive, which even the British case shows: indentured migration was an ambiguous category in terms of the actual exercise of free choice. Moreover the conditions surrounding emigration often severely circumscribed the options facing prospective migrants. The long historical narrative of emigration demonstrates many varieties and intensities of propulsion derived from the sheer force of circumstances. But some movements have straightforward causes, such as famine and expulsion. The efflux of people off the land is a universal and emotive question in many societies. Sometimes it involved the tragic displacement of entire peasantries, and was often depicted in folklore and song. It is even argued that coerced migration of this sort was a variety of genocide. When it entailed the erasure of entire communities, such claims contain a nugget of truth. But the forced movements of humanity are easier to explain than the greater mass of migration. Most emigration in the nineteenth century, and indeed in modern times, has been economic migration, of people volitionally seeking better lives for themselves and their children. But they migrated under widely varying circumstances, some clearly more desperate than others, some with a determination to improve or rescue the basic conditions of their lives and setting up for the next generation – emigration undertaken to avoid relative and absolute decline in status. But, even so, only a small proportion of such people actually emigrated. Within the British and European accounts of mass emigration there has been every variety of motivation. Political exile can be found in all decades; evictions caused people to depart; social and religious utopianism was recurrent; escaping military service and oppressive regimes was common enough; marital breakdown and new marital beginnings can be found in many cases; sheer eccentricity and

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inconsequentiality were rife. The list can be extended to cover virtually all human motivation. There is a disconcertingly wide and unruly variety of types, an extensive spectrum of cases. The British story contained a kaleidoscopic diversity of circumstances from which emigration emerged. Celebrating the sheer richness of the emigrant host tends to undermine any prospect of an overarching idea of causation. Nevertheless, enumerating the typologies of emigration brings some primitive order to the task, even if some of the proportions of the categories cannot be established. It is clear that most British, and indeed most international, migration has been essentially economic migration. The campsites The historical ‘campsites’ employed in this book are located across the British Isles, in radically different geographical and social circumstances. Each of them produced internal and external migrants in the decades before 1850, in varied proportions and timetables, but all of them lost population by way of emigration. Within every story there were conditions which prompted this outward impulse. They each exhibited certain common features as well as special local characteristics. Each place – West Cork, Shropshire, West Sussex, Kent, Swaledale, the Highlands, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and many other locations – all experienced sudden and unprecedented population increases; their agricultural populations rose and eventually fell absolutely as the national population continuously increased. Everywhere, internal migration to local places syphoned-off the majority of the departees. Over a longer period, perhaps two generations, many families were relocated into towns and cities, often widely dispersed. On the final edge of the process the dispersal of people reached the emigrant ports, taking away up to 2 per cent of the total population in some years. Thus it began as a rural movement and was then translated by steps into an increasingly urban mode. The mechanisms and facilities of emigration rose to accelerate the process connecting also with the changing imagination of the British people who had become attuned to the idea of emigration. The system operated thus. In the first place there was rising population in rural districts. At much the same time there was concerted and sustained increase of agricultural productivity. In the towns there was a widespread rising demand for labour but much less so in rural zones – a widening gap appeared between town and country: by mid-nineteenth century, wages in rural areas were generally only 50 per cent of those prevailing in comparable urban employment.7 There was clear evidence of progressive movement to towns by way of internal migration, under economic incentives and displacement. Emigration followed as a connected flow out of the system, stimulated by generalised mobility and the

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creation of special incentives and widening differentials between regions, favouring the literate, and the young.8 In brief, the British model that evolved in the late eighteenth century, possessed a handful of key characteristics. It entailed a quasi-autonomous and unprecedented increase of the population, mostly in the rural heartlands. Virtually coterminous was a radical improvement in agricultural productivity, and a relative decline in the demand for rural labour, paralleled by rising labour demands in the rapid growth of towns. This combination of conditions produced an accelerated level of internal mobility, usually of short distance in the first instance. The actual amount of internal mobility is debatable. Jason Long estimates that it was only 3–4 million in the years 1840–19009 – in which case emigration was a greater contribution to the readjustment of the population.10 Emigration by mid-century was probably greater than 3 million. Migration was also spurred by polarising conditions between the regions within Britain. It is likely that, from the 1760s, regional wage differentials widened during industrialisation: convergence came much later. In the interim, regions such as west Wales and the Scottish Highlands fell further behind, probably heightened by so-called ‘backwash effects’, which had negative consequences for some regions. Thus ‘industrialising regions had their counterparts in areas of stagnation and decline’. Regional divergence within Britain probably increased the susceptibility to migration. A region such as the Weald suffered ‘peripheralisation’ and de-industrialisation: if such a region failed to reach a critical mass it became ‘easy prey to the acute backwash effects of the next cyclical downswing’.11 Such conditions accentuated rural decline and increased the likelihood of outward migration, which was often the back-story of so many emigrants reaching North America and Australasia. When the productivity of agriculture increases abruptly and cumulatively while the rural population also reproduces at an unprecedented rate, then the urgency to relocate becomes relentless: the pressures were expressed in myriad ways, sometimes ‘perversely’ in a sheer reluctance to move off the land. Emigration was always stratified by class, wealth and scale, and also by region and sector, producing various patterns of emigration out of industrialising and modernising Britain. Rising literacy was related to the propensity to emigrate and it is likely that, after extreme difficulties such as famine, the eventual recovery of better living standards was converted into decisions to emigrate, often urged on by employers and landlords, as in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the 1850s. Better literacy rates now tended to reduce inertia.12 When ‘Prof Mayo Smith laid it down that persons rarely emigrate in order to better themselves, but because they are actually pinched at home’, it was often a false distinction.13 But many adjustments in the rural community had been achieved and by 1874 much of the work of out-migration had been done. For instance, in Lincolnshire it is said that ‘Emigration and migration had reduced the labour supply’ and the results

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were predictable: soon rural wages began to rise and employers began to build better cottages to encourage their labourers to remain, even to provide their workers with allotments.14 The release from the eternal bondage of the ‘the Malthusian Trap’ was by industrialisation, pioneered in Britain.15 Within the matrix of revolutionary population growth and economic transformation, migration performed an ancillary role. Emigration from Britain (and from succeeding countries, first in western Europe) was both cause and consequence of the release from ‘the Malthusian Trap’. The unprecedented growth of productivity across the economy allowed (or compelled) people to break out of the rural confines of traditional life – into industrial towns and overseas. Their subsequent spread across the world became a compounding means to sustain the ‘escape from Malthus’ (a formulation which, as we have seen, does some disservice to Malthus himself ). Into the New Worlds the emigrants exported their expansive productivity, which then reciprocated with the homelands, sustaining the much greater populations at both ends of the exchange of humanity. The costs and the turbulence of this global transition were colossal, driven by the emigrants themselves and always complicating the flows of people, first of all from the British Isles. Migration was part of the readjustment of the population to the pressures and opportunities that were created in the late eighteenth century. It connected with the questions posed by James Belich – namely, why the British were the most ‘eruptive’ of people in the nineteenth century and with what consequences?16 Similarly, Erickson notes the common sense notion that: ‘Migration was a means of dealing with structural dislocations in the early phases of industrialization in Europe and at the same time helped provide the donors with cheaper food and the raw materials for cheaper consumer goods’.17 Emigrants were simply an exaggerated and extreme version of the commonplace experience of movement: they were, in Erickson’s formulation, people who had been ‘confronted with structural change’. It was part of ‘their repertoire of dealing with change’,18 and in its different modes, was exhibited in each of the ‘campsites’ in the present account. Determinants The campsites, despite their diversity, align in the conditions favourable to migration and emigration, and therefore encourage broader explanations of the British discontinuity. Yet most accounts of emigration are essentially descriptive – describing the flows and destinations of migrants, together with the mechanisms which facilitate movement. But what have been the activating forces to be detected in the generation of migration and its discontinuities? It is common to believe that migration is a spontaneous and ‘natural’ movement of people for the obvious advantage over staying at home: the Lucassens, for instance, declare

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that human migration is ‘a normal and structural element of human societies throughout history’.19 Another approach to the generic question is indeed structural, namely the study of the underlying causes of international migration, the forces which shaped and governed the flows of humanity, the final explanations of such movement. In general, migration analysts have been in the thrall of the simplest of models – of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ forces – which, taken together, explain the movement of humanity across the frontiers, local and even global. Some forces push people outwards: hunger, depression, overpopulation, disease, oppression, mania. Some attract and pull magnetically: better living standards, land, weather, affluence, prospects for children, employment. And, still further, the calculus of history can invoke the notion of ‘convergence’ – it is as though history abhors differentials – that it is a quasi-hydraulic system, people like water, finding their own level while they equalise the primal forces of push and pull.20 The convergence hypothesis of migration sees emigration as a process, like international trade itself, which benefits both sides of the transaction, and the world in general, to equalise returns to labour and capital between home and away. Emigration is part of the adjustment of the differentials of income across the migrational systems, now global. The differential was the driving motor and this can be identified in each theatre. Such a formulation remains controversial and always risks the taunt of determinism. As Noel Annan caustically remarked: ‘Social scientists have depersonalised acres of human experience so that history resembles a ranch on which herds move, driven they know not why by impersonal forces, munching their way across the prairie’. Annan extols Isaiah Berlin’s work because it ‘pullulates with people’ and because ‘He does not see human beings as flies struggling vainly in the cobweb of historical causation, incapable of acting as free agents’. Berlin indeed condemned the idea that ‘history is the study of classes and social movements, impersonal forces such as demography and climatic changes, of technological development and terms of trade’ and hence little of history is either ‘inevitable or determined’: Berlin’s work was designed to confound determinism.21 This puzzle is at the heart of the migration question and is the enemy of any attempt to affix a generic source to the rise of mass expatriation. Emigrants are stranded as random, motley and unstructured crowds of folk. The promptings of millions of migration decisions had local, indeed familial and personal, stimuli – not to mention the influence of the apparatus of communications and persuasion. Obviously local and even regional differences in the extent and propensity to emigrate were affected by, for instance, recruitment campaigns and the sudden ‘epidemics’ of enthusiasm – many of which are well documented – and then perhaps the process of migration became more ingrained and habituated and less in need of special explanation.

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None of this need diminish the role of underlying conditions which moulded the structures affecting individual propensities towards emigration. Powerful forces did indeed exist, and they are urgently expounded by their advocates, often in the form of simple truisms such as the universal proposition that most emigration was for betterment. The consequences of migration are much better known than the originating causes of these great movements.22 In terms of the structural underpinnings of population mobility and its eventual expression in actual emigration, there are long lines of causation as well as matters of contingency in the story. Engines of mobility But what exactly was prompting and propelling the rise of mass migration? What determined the oscillating pressures of push and pull within the human populations? What were the underlying engines of this incessant but fluctuating propeller of mobility? This is principally a historical question. In the long perspective there was a great discontinuity in the course of international migration around the 1820s, but the causes remain mysterious. There has been a comparable search for the long roots of the Industrial Revolution, and a similar quest can be ordered for those of emigration: the two processes no doubt intersect beneath the grand level of history. Bernard Bailyn suggested that historians ought to be especially alert to the ‘latent forces’ at work under the surface of the normal visible causal changes.23 A similar approach was that of Fernand Braudel who sought somehow to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes – and that other, submerged history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time.24

The engines of mobility were certainly revolving deeply within the structures of the systems of change. International migration grew out of conditions common to some of the other great evolutions of the modern world, including industrialisation, global trade and the democratising nation state, often in the wake of imperialism. And these conditions were mixed in differing strengths and combinations. But most relevant to the genesis of modern mass emigration have been the parallel changes of urbanisation and demographic upsurge, both located at the centre of the universal changes at work across the developing modern world, overlapping in all directions. Bailyn himself maintained that the internal mobility systems of Britain in the late eighteenth century spilled over into the massive outflows of emigration westwards across the Atlantic – over ‘the pond’ as it became known.25 Somehow

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‘The Atlantic became a Highway’ but derived ‘from internal movements’, and was ‘mysterious and chaotic’, indeed ‘A blur lacking structure, scale and detail’.26 In the British case there is a crucial question about the extent of internal mobility in the home context, studied most influentially by Clark and Souden. At first glance it seems unlikely that a traditionally stable and immobile population would, at one fell swoop or in a series of shifts, lift itself and launch overseas, as though from a standing start. One might expect a society or district to embark on the emigration project only after some psychological and practical preparation – an acclimatising to the process of mobility – a seasoning in the act. Emigrants would already be experienced in mobility, familiar with the idea, habituated to a degree. There is indeed a substantial body of evidence, in several locales, of internal migration accelerating and expanding ahead of, and parallel with, the emergence of large-scale overseas emigration. Moreover the habituating of mobility within the population spurred the process at large – so that after arrival in the receiving communities abroad, the immigrant population struck out further – renewing the momentum of migration in the new world – with further steps of internal mobility. There was an extended continuum of migration, with phases of preemigration, emigration and post-emigration. And the process became more complicated by means of chain migration – each successive wave of migrants paving the way for the next, facilitating and financing the inter-generational movements of emigrants – which may have begun by a model of internal migration. This is clearly part of the search for a line of causation in the panorama of emigration. A central question flowing from the enhanced general mobility of the modernising population was their accommodation and their ultimate destination. What provision, if any, was made for extruded labour from agrarian transformation? In parts of mid-eighteenth-century Scotland elaborate efforts were made to establish new ‘improvement’ villages for their reception, with considerable, though mixed, success.27 But in England there was little replication of this system for relocating displaced rural people. In Ireland there were many examples of ‘model villages’ established to accommodate the swelling rural population, but in the long run (as we have seen) famine and mass eviction pushed people off the land in the most extreme expulsive fashion. There were many other responses – including the sudden uprooting of entire communities, as from the West Highlands to North America in the late eighteenth century. Efforts to accommodate and retain the population generally gave way to the wholesale exoduses of rural labour entirely out of the sector. In most of the British Isles the out-moving population gravitated to towns of increasing scale as each decade passed. Emigration was generally secondary to this movement, but related. In lowland Scotland the rural adjustment is celebrated for its sheer alacrity: T.M. Devine argued that Scottish hiring practices created

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a tight equilibrium between the supply and demand for labour. Labour, if not needed, had no alternative but to migrate – unlike in England where the Poor Law gave people certain rights of settlement. Scottish agriculture was remarkably successful because its workforce was so adaptive and mobile as required: ‘The countryside was rendered free of the consequences of structural unemployment by a ruthlessly efficient system of channelling labour which was surplus to requirements of the land’.28 This makes high virtue of expulsive migration. Population and rurality Population growth from the mid-eighteenth century across the British Isles created an unparalleled but underutilised reservoir of labour and people on the land. The increasing increments of population growth propelled many responses. One was the continuing but hesitant and uneven evacuation – sometimes painfully slowly. Some of this was translated at several removes towards emigration. There was also a great deal of dislocation and despair in rural Britain – manifested in widespread poverty and repeated crises of production, prompting riots, inwardness, religious fervour, stoicism and utopianism. But the main effect over the long run was migration – the inexorable exodus of rural people and their convergence in towns and dispersion overseas. Population growth was therefore the prime engine of mobility; it expanded the numbers available for emigration and perhaps also increased their propensity to migrate. The causes of the population revolution of the eighteenth century have consumed the energies of two generations of demographic historians: they have concentrated on the critical question of the unprecedented growth of the population of western Europe in the eighteenth century. This entailed one of the greatest discontinuities in the history of humanity – the cumulative expansion of the population from sometime around 1750. The most sophisticated research has dealt with the English case; though not unique, it was the forerunner in the demographic revolution. The recurrent problem facing all the demographic analysts is that of mobility – that is, people whose movements beyond their own parishes undermine the carefully re-constructed data on births, deaths and marriages. One way to deal with this slipperiness of the population is to assume a uniform movement, or some estimate of the realistic leakage out of, or into, the region. This is obviously unsatisfactory, since it relegates migration to the status of a residual factor and this is frequently extended to the larger historical narratives: the emigration of the British people is normally reduced to a footnote, not only in the account of British demography, but also in the general life of the nation and in the history of British imperialism. At the end of Empire the last expatriates became ‘the detritus of imperialism’, sent to ‘a historical Siberia’ for the ‘historically drab’.29 This was an echo of James Stephen’s remarks in 1839 when he sighed that

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emigration: ‘is a dull subject, at least to me’. He declared that emigration was ‘not any part of an organised scheme, much of it more like human ballast’.30 Despite their huge numbers and the extraordinary spread across three continents, the emigrants from the British Isles are treated as dependent variables, as the foot soldiers of empire, simply oozing out of the motherland in response to the dictates of the global economy and the Colonial Office, rarely as prime movers in their own right. The fact remains that most people simply did not emigrate. Emigration was always a minority activity, involving a small proportion of the people at any one time (except from Ireland, 1850–1900). As we have seen, the number of people emigrating in any given year oscillated greatly, but very rarely accounted for as many as 2 per cent per annum, the rest literally in any given year unmoved. Yet this small percentage possessed astounding leverage: it was, of course, a cumulative force, each year building on the previous, often greater than the natural increase of the donating local population, in a sort of compound interest. Meanwhile James Belich – from New Zealand on the extreme edge of the Anglo-World – has identified these common migrants as the principal dynamic force in the western expansion of the frontier worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.31 Thus there exists a strange imbalance in the treatment of this factor in modern history, even in the country that led the process. The flood The most developed model of the great age of international migration is that of the economists T.J. Hatton and J.G. Williamson, who describe the nineteenth century as ‘The Age of Mass Migration’ and ‘the first global century’. They are in no doubt that there was a discontinuity: before 1820 most emigration had been confined to slaves, convicts and servants. In the decades from the 1820s to the 1850s, ‘global migrations changed dramatically’: it was indeed ‘a regime change in world migrations’ – in scale, composition and freedom, increasingly involving single people in a ‘spectacular transition’. It was an ‘amazing’ transition and ‘a decisive shift in the history of intercontinental migration’.32 By 1820 free emigrations from Europe were already reaching 50,000 per annum to the United States alone. Until 1850 the flow was dominated by Britain and Germany. Migration in this model is no mystery: migrants ‘do it today to improve the quality of their lives, and they did it for the same reason two centuries ago’. Hatton and Williamson’s line of causation is emphatically deterministic: ‘the variety in European emigration experience can be explained by a common economic framework, rather than by idiosyncratic non-economic factors embedded in country-specific history and culture’.They concede the influence of ‘cultural affinities, location preferences, and the friends-and-relatives effect’, but

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insist that these operated beneath the ‘strong economic forces in immigrant selection’.33 Changes in the basic facilities of emigration were crucial in this exposition: at first emigration was dominated by the better off-families, by farmers and artisans, and the early British emigrants exhibited their essential ‘high quality’. Before 1820 the costs of emigration and low wages had impeded emigration, and ‘the poverty trap’ operated. The great change was the prospective emigrants’ ‘improved ability to take advantage of the rewards’ of their emigration:34 at the heart of their calculations was the income differential – facilitated by the reduction in transport costs through the nineteenth century. It was a continuous process, which eventually brought emigration within the reach of the very poor, enabling the catchment of emigration to reach across Europe by the end of the century – to bring into the net Italians, Poles, Slavs, Russian Jews, Mexicans, poor Greeks and Turks. The lowering of these costs meant that the ‘poverty trap’ of emigration had been broken. As transport costs fell, so income levels rose simultaneously with industrialisation; the constraint on emigration was further released and it was more easily financed by the widespread recourse to remittances, especially in Spain and Portugal. Later, the very same process affected the rest of the world – through to the present day. Hatton and Williamson explicitly seek ‘the forces which served to shift labour demand and supply in the origin and destination counties’. On one side they invoke population forces: namely the demographic transition which affects all when modern development unfolds, ‘producing a swarm of young adults’, who were precisely those most responsive to emigrant incentives. In Europe most left to escape poverty: and ‘it was the underlying economic and demographic labour market fundamentals’ that induced each surge in emigration. Yet emigration also rose when living standards were rising at home. This was especially true of the British Isles and Denmark and thus ‘Real wage gaps do not suffice by themselves to explain emigration’.35 The second side of the explanation relates to land abundance and labour scarcities in the destination countries, which determined most of the differentials that fuelled the emigrations. Poorly paid labour in Europe gravitated to the high-wage opportunities in America and beyond. The demographic transition generated the human numbers, and three key changes drove the outflows: transport costs had been stable from 1688 to 1820, but then fell drastically; government subsidies gave some help; and the great European famine of the 1840s was decisive as market forces under the regime of laissez-faire became crucial. In the early phases British and German emigrants were driven by wage incentives; the rest of Europe was held back by poverty constraints. But the Irish were an exception to the general rule – ‘negatively not positively selected’ by the impact of famine. Chain migration from Ireland enabled the poorest to enter

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the story – and ‘path dependency’ became vital (‘a powerful magnetic field’ was created by earlier emigration).36 Attitudes also changed – industrialisation generally reduced attachments to the land and widened the regime of wage labour. At the centre of this great process were ‘World Factor Migrations and the Demographic Transition’. Migrants moved between low-income countries to higher-income destinations, drawn by the positive differential, the consequence eventually being to narrow the difference, to produce a ‘convergence’, most of all by the diminution of poverty in Europe. Eventually the wage gap between destination countries and much of Europe was reduced; with equal effect was the decline of the demographic pressure, which eventually caused a long-term reduction in the emigration imperative. Indeed Hatton and Williamson see emigration as the global facilitator of ‘convergence’ and the general universal growth of living standards: ‘mass migrations were doing most of the convergence work’, they declare, and similarly the ‘labor market forces … [were] doing most of the work’.37 This is the overarching story and the background to individual decisions and local variations and myriad smaller factors. No doubt, in the broadest sense, emigration correlated with these crucial variables – most notably with the quantum of information, with transport costs, and with the gap between income at home and abroad. The availability of assistance, the prior emigration of kinsfolk, and the widening availability of destinations and opportunities overseas, were also connected. None of these explains the different responses in different regions, nor the blunt fact that most people did not react. The correlations do not explain the failure of most people to respond to the variables. A key question is how emigration was roused – was it simply a matter of facilities being created in response to demand conditions? How were the basic underlying factors transmitted into the overseas flows? Or did the actual mechanisms themselves generate the movement? Even more fundamentally, none of the carefully plotted economic variables account for the origin of the fundamental motivating force, the powering engine of the differential. If the differential between the home and destination places was the moving force, then we have to explain the genesis of the differential itself. The vital differential The most general and recurring explanation for emigration gives the starring role to the differential: the differential was the sine qua non of emigration – it varied with conditions between home and away, and was wide enough to create a set of urgent propulsions from one side to the other. For instance, the appropriation of virgin land overseas, enhanced by the increased security and cheapness of transport and settlement, created a context of rising productivity and incomes in the new land, eventually sufficient to beckon immigrants.

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Alternatively, deteriorating living standards at home might induce an expellant effect. A combination of these conditions, of course, compounded the impact upon the differential. Such explanations must relate specifically to the central discontinuity, the precipitate rise in the rate and scale of British emigration after Waterloo. Once the differential rewards of emigration became visible and publicised to a suggestible population, some special trigger might set the process in motion. The critical issue then becomes the determinants of these changes within the variables affecting the differential. Was there indeed a sudden and decisive widening of the revealed differentials?38 The question is complicated by the likelihood that emigration itself affected the differentials, a situation in which cause and effect circle each very closely. As already signalled, the engines of change underlying the differentials were related to population growth, agricultural transformation and industrialisation – all heavy variables which dislocated the lives of millions of people, some of whom took to the ocean-going ships. Irish historians, in particular, resist such mechanical explanations. In this recoil there is an elevation of local circumstances to accentuate the diversity and complexity of the migration question. Similarly, as Charlotte Erickson points out, emigration is highly selective and not governed mechanically by economic determinants: evidently not all people in similar economic circumstances choose to emigrate.39 There were no systematic rules at work: individual, family and local conditions exerted a large impact – though this does not rule out a general upward shift in propensities to emigrate. The approach adopted in this book has been to examine in depth these local circumstances in a wide arena of cases – in a search for concordances within the range found. There may be a ladder, or hierarchy, of conditions – individual decisions, collective mobilities, system-wide changes – which allowed for ‘subterranean’ forces to shape the tendency to migrate. Ultimately the predisposition, or the potentiation of the home populations towards emigration, is the central problem in the explanation of mass emigration. It is closely connected to the continuing quest for commonalities in the manner in which European peoples were galvanised to cross the oceans. The revolutionary rise in productivity under modern economic growth was associated with cumulative migration of people from the land and their offspring. These original movements off the land were integral and essential to the activation of modern economic growth. Britain under strain At the core of the story were the upward shifts in British emigration, but the decisive acceleration was not achieved in a single leap: the first surge occurred

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in the 1770s, but then stuttered through phases of wartime, until emerging in full spate from the late 1820s. At the time of this disjunction Britain confronted the strain of sustaining revolutionary rates of population growth. Unprecedented improvements in rural productivity generated great turmoil and displacements among people on the land. The parallel growth of towns generated internal incentives and indeed imperatives; the availability of emigration possibilities was an extension of the flight to the towns – an option which was opening simultaneously and growingly, especially after 1815. The parallelism is striking and may have possessed the same root system – interconnecting with the expansive outreaching of colonisation and the phenomenal growth of the United States. This explanation connects the four great processes of the age – demographic changes, agricultural revolution, imperialism and industrialisation.40 The curious corollary of the demographic revolution was that the feeding and clothing of the swollen population was achieved by a smaller proportion of the rural population. This left dislocation and decline, evacuation and disturbance in their midst. It finally expressed itself in migration to the cities and abroad. Out of this dual transformation in rural productivity and population growth were created the conditions of emigration. Both also had fundamental effects on the differential between home and destination countries, the widening incentive to leave the British Isles. In this structural narrative of migration there were also ‘accelerants’ and ‘retardants’, operating upon what may be regarded as the ‘natural’ movement of people towards an equilibrium of opportunities and welfare. Among the accelerants were the persuasive accounts sent home by previous migrants and the associated publicity and propaganda, together with improved transport facilities, landlord pressure and the influence of local leaders. The retardants encompassed sheer poverty, news of the failure of some of the previous migrants, inertia and bloody-minded resistance to change, as well as considerable ideological and religious opposition to emigration. These latter forces operated in the short-run, as opposed to the deeper structural forces that affected the main motor of the income-differential which drove the larger process. Psychology of emigration There was a concomitant psychological change within this long story: aspiring migrants pushed change along in their energised state, eager to co-operate in the advance of industry and the expansion of settlement overseas. But many of them harboured backward-looking yearnings for the old rural world they had rejected – an atavistic tension in their collective mentalities, witnessed in both North America and Australasia in much of the nineteenth century.

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Beyond these generic elements at the centre of the British case, there were of course exceptional conditions which gave remarkable favour to the emigrating people of the British Isles (and indeed much of Europe) during the great Age of Emigration. This was not only the time of exuberant Imperialism (led by the British) but also of laissez-faire. The British emigrant faced an extraordinary and unprecedented range of options – that they chose the United States more than anywhere else simply demonstrated the unique openness of this migratory world. There were few constraints on the British people as to where to emigrate in the Anglo World, apart from the cost of passage. These conditions were never replicated. Moreover many of the desirable destinations not only maintained open doors but also attracted, welcomed and even subsidised these immigrants. People were able to reach destinations with demonstrably higher living standards, where land was available and large families welcomed; and where civil law, freedom of religion and education were guaranteed in mainly peaceful settings. It was an ideal context to sustain mass emigration. Moreover after 1825 there were no impediments standing in the way of emigration, though the British government had little inclination to involve itself in the actual process. These were all highly favourable conditions in which to launch mass emigration, regardless of the underlying propellants identified in this account. It was a time of very low barriers to emigration and falling costs of transport. Industrialisation, emigration and imperialism were, therefore, linked responses to the common denominator of population growth thrust onto an old restricted agrarian base which was itself narrowing, producing an inexorable outflow. It is noteworthy that those parts of Britain which were unable to redeploy the increased population at the end of the end of the eighteenth century were faced with accumulating difficulties – of greatly expanded populations bottled-up in worsening conditions such as those prevailing in the north-west Highlands. For the rest, emigration was one of the exceptional options employed by the much larger population mainly disengaged from the rural homeland. They were later superseded as emigrants by their urban descendants. The spill of population needed outlets, and intensive emigration was one possible resort, but mostly the road to the emigrant ports was not taken. Instead, most were accommodated in the rapid growth of non-agricultural employment and the expansion of urban places which possessed the capacity to absorb the outflows. The availability of opportunities overseas was an ancillary solution. These options operated in tandem – sustaining population growth, food supply and markets. The perplexity is that the actual net loss per annum was ostensibly slight, yet enough somehow to repopulate three continents. The emigrants ceased to have much influence on the home society, except indirectly through feed-back effects. But the rate rose substantially at the end of the eighteenth century and remained surprisingly high. For the receiving countries the critical question

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concerned the way in which their populations were generated in those far distant places, and the dramas and the mechanisms which produced these inflowing peoples. At home, in many emigrant-supplier places, there was a ubiquitous tightening of conditions on the land. It was most clear-cut in the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, where people were obviously ejected by rural transformation. The swelling local populations were rendered redundant by radically new methods of agricultural productivity, and the land was re-deployed even as the population grew faster than ever before. The Irish and Scottish cases were severe and vivid versions of the broader pictures of rural transformation across the British Isles. But land hunger and depopulation were at its core – a recurring pattern across the country. Each structural equation altered and released the candidates for re-distribution, even across the oceans. It fed the towns and the overseas destinations in a multitude of different modes, and shifted over the passage of decades. It was, moreover, the model of modern change, a generic process to be repeated across the growing world through to the present day. The prototype These then were the relentless structural changes behind the movement of people which eventually emerged into mass migration and emigration. Some of these impulses are witnessed at ground level in the myriad individual cases and special localities which tend to obscure the larger forces. British life had been gripped by seismic changes in the fundamentals of economic and demographic existence. But they were ultimately manifested and activated at the level of the family and the locality, and most of the release mechanisms and the expulsive pressures worked their results in undramatic ways. The combination of circumstances produced an exodus from rural areas – a phenomenon widely repeated across the world. The coincidence of these demographic and economic conditions in Britain with the sudden availability of seemingly unlimited new lands for occupation in North America and Australasia greatly increased the potency of the imperative differential that propelled emigration. The rewards to labour and capital were altered radically by the access to resources – mainly at first to land overseas itself. It paralleled complementary changes in Britain where labour was less valuable than overseas. Factor relationships had switched about, and this was a driving force for emigration. It was the basis for the shift in the differential which was the sine qua non of international migration. This became the standard recurring pattern for economies embarking on rapid modern economic development. The crucial historical question is how the large structural forces were transmitted into the actual movements to emigrant ports of the British Isles. How were tens of thousands (and eventually millions) of

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ordinary working people from the depths of the British Isles mobilised to undertake the definitive journey across the oceans? This was a massive enterprise achieved with little governmental or commercial intervention: in some ways it was a most remarkable achievement of laissez-faire,41 of volitional behaviour on a globalised scale before the concept had been coined. The mechanisms in Britain were articulated through market forces which transmitted structural adjustments to even the most remote rural enclaves in the emerging industrial economy. Pressure from the rising population and from urbanisation created intense new demands, which were registered in the allocation of resources most urgently in the farming sector. Agricultural improvement – the intensification of land use and economies in labour – was a response to rising demand, inducing changes which eventually revolutionised the supply of rural products. Rising prices and the upward pressure on rents impelled the rural community towards greater efficiency – by rationalising land use and employing labour more rigorously (as well as a multitude of other changes in transport, financing, marketing and distribution). Often the readjustment was more than robust, pushing people off the land, amalgamating farms, appropriating common lands, ousting small and indolent producers. It was literally dislocating, setting off new rounds of mobility. In the end the rural sector expanded positively and unprecedentedly, to the demands generated by the essential needs of the expanded and industrialising population of the country. The same forces induced particular distensions and great ructions in even the most distant parts. For instance, the demands for certain chemicals suddenly expanded – such as soda in the glass and soap industry – causing the redistribution of much of the population of the Scottish Highlands into the production of soda ash via kelp production, a vast upheaval which rose as quickly as it collapsed in the years 1780 to 1820. Equally, the demand for wool grew explosively and the stimulus was transmitted to grazing territories within the British Isles and beyond – the impact was profoundly dislocative and virtually irresistible once begun. The circumstances which favoured and impelled British emigration in the early nineteenth century were subsequently replicated across the future modern world. They set the pattern essentially because these were the necessary conditions and components of the modernising economy. Migration was, and remains, the irresistible consequence of the type of changes which were first demonstrated in the British Isles. In modern China and India rapid population growth and agrarian revolution are presently accompanied by a massive turnover of the population towards the cities, and the same phenomenon is witnessed elsewhere in the transforming Third World. The outward imperative recurs across the story – usually exhibited in vast internal re-distributions of rural people, but also where feasible, into the international arena. It is the migration imperative that grips entire societies at certain points in their evolutions. In the twenty-first century the impulse, overwhelmingly economic migration, is no less potent but the

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external opportunities for dislocated peasants are now much less welcoming or available. Hence the modern story sees a continuing replication of the old combination of conditions which had set the people of the British Isles out into the wider world, internally and externally. The coincidence of sudden population growth and agricultural transformation propels most migration, which may become external where there exists a receptive destination. This is an iron rule of modern adjustment, though most of it takes the form of internal migration (the most forceful versions of which have been in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China). In essence the model follows the convergence of sudden unprecedented population growth with the commercialisation of rural production (yielding much higher returns). The absorption of the excess/surplus rural population requires outlet (or Malthusian disaster) and finds its most likely haven in industrialisation and urban growth. Migration becomes unstoppable and, at its edges, issues out across borders and seas. The scale and velocity of both international mobility and the urgency of the movements to mega-cities have raced forward at an alarming and exciting rate. This account therefore suggests a recurring discontinuity in modern history, the original roots of which were located in the eighteenth-century British Isles. Today the same generic forces operate with no less pressure and the consequences are visible in the faces of the desperate and/or striving people who seek economic betterment, but without the opportunities accorded to their more favoured nineteenth-century predecessors. Notes 1 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), p. 13. 2 Quoted by Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. ix. 3 Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 105. Current opinion suggests a fall of living standards in the years through to the 1830s which may well have affected the differentials becoming known to prospective emigrants. These findings suggest a widening of the differentials at the moment of ‘discontinuity’ and thus the incentive to emigrate rendered greater. 4 See Erickson, Invisible Immigrants and Leaving England. 5 See Saville, ‘Internal migration’, pp. 2, 9–10, 13. 6 Marks and Richardson (eds), Introduction to International Labour Migration, p. 2. 7 See Saville, ‘Internal migration’. 8 The scale and speed of rural out-migration in Victorian times was often regarded as too slow to produce the best benefits to the workers and the country at large – notably in the writing of Richard Jefferies. See E.L. Jones, ‘The land which Richard Jefferies

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inherited’, Rural History (2005), 83–93; and Jones, ‘Richard Jefferies’, Richard Jefferies Society Journal (April 2005). 9 Jason Long, ‘Rural-urban migration and socioeconomic mobility in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Economic History 65 (2005), 1–35. He calculates that a quarter of Britons moved from one county to another between 1851 and 1881. They were responding to market signals in an increasingly efficient labour market. 10 The relative roles of migration and population growth in the urban expansion is considered by Robert Woods, ‘Population growth and economic change’, in Mathias and Davis (eds), First Industrial Revolution, esp. pp. 151–2. 11 Pat Hudson, Regions and Industries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 16, 35. See also Eric Richards, ‘Margins of the Industrial Revolution’, in P. O’Brien and R. Quinault (eds), The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 203–28. 12 See E.G. West, ‘Literacy and the Industrial Revolution’, in Joel Mokyr (ed.), The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), chap. 11. 13 Palgrave’s Dictionary of Economics (1925), p. 697. 14 T.W. Beastall, The Agricultural Revolution in Lincolnshire (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee for the Society of Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 1978), p. 235. But the adjustment was not perfect. See E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), pp. 54, 61. 15 This is a view underscored by E.A. Wrigley – that population growth was faster than ever before but supported by the transformation in agricultural productivity in the long eighteenth century. For this reason (based on the escape from the reliance on the old organic economy) England and Wales did not pay the ‘bitter price for rapid population growth’. It avoided the Malthusian crisis which is, of course, the monumental hypothetical alternative in the story. E.A. Wrigley, ‘British population during the “long” eighteenth century’, in Floud and Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1, p. 94. 16 Belich, Replenishing, passim. 17 Erickson, Leaving England, p. 3. 18 Ibid., pp. 23, 28, 32–3. 19 Lucassen and Lucassen, Migration, Migration History, p. 9. 20 ‘Push and pull’ was apparently first used by Harry Jerome in Migration and Business Cycles (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1926), p. 203, fn 17; David Pope, ‘Empire emigration to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, 1910–1939’, Australian Economic Papers 7 (1968), 171fn. Ideas regarding ‘convergence’ are most associated with the work of Jeffrey Williamson. 21 Noel Annan, Introduction to Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), pp. xiii–xiv, xviii, xxvi–xxvii. 22 Of the former there is much fine work – most notably the volume of S. Constantine and M. Harper, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 23 B. Bailyn, ‘The challenge of modern historiography’, American Historical Review 87: 1 (1982), 1–24. 24 Braudel quoted by John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (Harlow: Pearson, 5th edn, 2010), p. 163.

278

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25 Bailyn, in the Introduction to Nicholas Canny, Europeans on the Move (1994), says the Atlantic expansion was related to the domestic expansion: ‘Often it was simply a spin off, an offshoot, of domestic enterprise, economically, entrepreneurially, and demographically’, p. 1. 26 Bailyn, Peopling, p. 19. Note that John MacKenzie talks of the ‘compulsive expansiveness of empire’: Introduction to Nigel Dalziel’s Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 9. 27 The Scottish planned village system was part of an intensification of settlement, often employing waste land and much of it designed to accommodate the expanding and extruded cottar population. 28 T.M. Devine (ed.), Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland 1770–1914 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1984), p. 6. 29 John Darwin, ‘Orphans of empire’, in R.A. Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 329. See also John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 29–31. 30 Quoted in Barbara J. Messamore (ed.), Canadian Migration Patterns, p. 1. 31 Belich, Replenishing, passim. 32 Hatton and Williamson, Global Migration, pp. 31–2, 12. 33 Ibid., pp. 52, 92. 34 Ibid., p. 11. 35 Ibid., pp. 21, 56, 57. 36 Ibid., p. 92; p. 65, citing Roy Geary. 37 Ibid., pp. xi, 3, 79. 38 The central paradox in the story is that rapid growth and industrialisation was paralleled by the unprecedented out-migration. Moreover the exodus from Britain in the late nineteenth century actually occurred when its living standards were rising – presumably the differentials had widened by even greater changes in the destination places. 39 Erickson, Leaving England, p. 24. 40 David S. Landes argues simply that the improvement in transport to the open spaces of America was ‘just in time to tap an unprecedented upswing in European population’. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 171. Lydia Potts is a rare analyst who explicitly seeks ‘to discover the actual causes of migration … and the link between migration and capitalism or imperialism’. Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books, 1990), p. 3. 41 This does not, of course, imply that laissez-faire was morally neutral or without political and ethical consequences. See Philip Harling, ‘Assisted emigration and the moral dilemmas of the mid-Victorian imperial state’, The Historical Journal 59 (2016), 1027–49.

Index

advertising 24, 25, 37n.42, 83, 95, 170, 197 Agar, Nigel E. 115–16 ‘agrarian myth’ 115 agricultural crises 25, 57, 125, and passim agricultural labour 68, 100, 137, and passim Akenson, Donald Harman 226–7, 240, 242 Aldingbourne (Sussex) 59 Allen, Robert C. 127–9 America 25, 26, 32, 59–61, 87–104 see also United States American Dream 87 Annan, Noel 264 Argyll, 5th Duke of (John Campbell, 1723–1806) 197 Armstrong, Alan 96, 187–8 Arnold, Rollo 161 Asian migration 79, 81 assets of emigrants 26, 145, 197 Australia 57, 61, 150–64 New South Wales 16, 57, 63, 67, 152–3, 157–8, 160, 162, 203, 216 Queensland 4, 112, 154, 157, 160 South Australia 16, 31, 61–2, 116–17, 150, 160, 183–5 Tasmania 57, 151 Victoria 16, 116, 156, 183 Western Australia 57, 61

Barbados 93 Barclay, Charles 64 Barra (Hebrides) 194, 199 Barry, Rev. James 138 Beckett, J.C. 74 Bedfordshire 115–16 Belich, James 82–3, 184, 263, 268 Benenden (Kent) 75–6, 187 Benn-Walsh, (Sir) John 140 Berlin, Isaiah 264 Berthoff, Rowland 115 Bielenberg, Andy 212 Birch, J.W. 34n.3 Birmingham 130 birthplaces 39, 109, 132, 133n.11, 160, 187, 189, 231, 241 Blaug, Mark 252 Bodnar, John 99 Boston (Massachusetts) 138 Boxer, C.R. 229 Braudel, Fernand 19n.27, 40, 265 Brazil 5, 181, 229 Brereton, William 41 Bridgewater Canal 47 Bridgnorth (Shropshire) 108, 109, 111 Brown, Ford Madox 159 Buchanan, A.C. 96 Buchanan, Rev. J.L. 198

Bade, Klaus 241 Bailyn, Bernard 8, 17, 43–4, 75, 94, 226, 265–6, 278n.25 Baines, Dudley E. 32, 126, 184, 188–9, 225, 227, 232–3, 242–3

Caird, James 92 Calder, Jenni 201 Canada 58, 63, 65, 96, 109–11, 139, 141–2, 145–7, 201, 239, 242 Canny, Nicholas 35n.11, 53n.18

280 Index capitalism 18n.23, 88, 99, 182, 238, 240, 259, 278n.40 Cardiganshire 168–71 Caribbean 4, 10, 75, 93, 256 Carr, E.H. 1, 17n.1 censuses 106, 125, 132, 169, 171, 182 chain migration 100, 142, 147, 266, 269 China 18n.10, 159, 275 Chisholm, Caroline 158 Christensen, P.P. 92 Cinel, Dino 238 Clanricarde, 1st Marquis of (Ulick John de Burgh) 218–19 Clark, Peter A. 80, 266 Clarkson, L.A. 209–10 Clavering (Essex) 67 clearances 145, 193–206 passim, 251 Cleveland (Ohio) 30 Clonlisk (Tipperary) 143 Clydesdale 45 Coalbrookdale (Shropshire) 46, 105 Cobbett, William 56, 66, 81, 99, 130, 187 Cogenhoe (Northamptonshire) 40 Cohn, Raymond 76 Coleman, D.A. 213 Collins, Rev. Michael 139 Colonial Land and Emigration Commission 156, 184 Colonial Office 142, 268 Connecticut Land Company 25 Connolly, S.J. 217 convicts 63, 151–4 Corkery, Daniel 138 corn 47, 62, 110, 140 Cornwall 180–5, 189 cost of migration 26, 50, 65, 69, 76, 95, 111, 137–8, 146, 152, 154, 156, 159, 173, 199, 204, 232, 269–70, 273 Cressy, David 89 crime and punishment 63, 75, 152–4 Dalley, William 162 Daly, Mary E. 210 Darien venture 42, 195 D’Cruze, Shani 45 Denmark 228, 233–4, 241, 269 Devine, T.M. 266–7 Devon Commission (1845) 219

diasporas 7, 18n.19, 78, 84, 120–1, 163, 226, 232, 242–3 disease 22–3, 40, 68 Dobson, Mary 186 Dodd, J.P. 107 Donnelly, James Jnr. 140–1, 208, 213 Dorking (Surrey) 64–5 Dorset 191n.39 Douglas (Isle of Man) 26, 28 Dundas, Henry 196–7 Dyos, H.J. 7 Ebensburg (Pennsylvania) 167–8 economic migration 23–4, 26, 260, 269, and passim egalitarianism 26, 32, 60, 174, 183 Egremont, 3rd Earl of (George O’Brien Wyndham) 63 Ellastone (Staffordshire) 112–13 Elliot, Thomas Frederick 136 Elliott, Bruce 32, 141–2, 145–7 Ellis Island 240 Eltis, David 81 emigrants cited Alderston, Jonathon 174 Baker, Jacob 116–17 Buxton family 112–13 Cameron, Donald 160 Corlett family 22–4 Farmer, William 109–11 Gallop family 61 Goldsworthy family 185 Grevatt, George 58 Griffiths, John and Margaret 111 Hack, John Barton 62 Harvey, John 60 Henty family 57, 69 Isted, William 59 Kelly, Thomas 20–1 Kelly, William 25–6 Kemp, George 67 Le Prevost, N. 31 Lloyd, Rev. Rhees 167 McDonalds of Glengarry 48 Oates, William 182 Piggott family 68 Potts, William 112 Richards, Henry 111 Roberts, Evan 168 Shaw, Benjamin 45

Index Somerville, Alexander 45 Talbot, Richard 142 Tear, William 26–7 emigration assisted 62, 65, 76, 112–13, 136, 142, 150, 155–7, 161, 174, 183, 203–4, 216, 219 coerced 3–5, 45, 90, 152–4, 267 free 4–5, 75, 81, 96, 155 emigration agents 65, 75, 94, 156, 161, 197 Emmer, Piet C. 80 enclosure 13, 42, 49, 126–8, 167–9, 172 Erickson, Charlotte 9, 23, 32, 63–4, 76, 95–6, 100, 115–16, 255, 260, 263, 271 estate agents (stewards) 74, 140, 166, 174, 218–19 eviction 43, 65, 74, 138–9, 144–6, 168, 202, 212–13, 218–19 Falvey, Heather 42 family migration 1–3, 9,13, 23, 26, 30, 57, 97–8, 114, 146, 158, 195, 233 famine 76, 106, 136–46 passim, 207–24 passim Finland 233, 234, 241 Fischer, David 88 fishing 21–2, 31, 33, 193–5 Fitzpatrick, David 217, 220 food prices 47, 106–7, 143, 202, 212 Ford and Darby 46 Foster, Vere 216 Fothergill, Charles 176 France 246n.35 Frayn, Michael 19n.33 Galway 146, 210, 213, 218–19 Gatineau (Canada) 110 Geary, Laurence M. 210 Georgia 94 Gerber, David 101, 240 Germany 8, 74, 76, 85n.12, 90–1, 94, 99, 114, 229–30, 234–9, 241, 249, 268 Gesner, Abraham Pineo 201 Gladstone, William Ewart 214 glass 276 Gloucestershire 1, 72n.38 glove making 66–7 gold rushes 31, 113, 156, 158–9, 161, 183

281 Gordon, Colonel John (of Cluny) 200, 203 Gore-Booth, Sir Robert 216 government policies on emigration 48–50, 74–6, 94 Gravesend 189 Gray, Malcolm 193 Greece 226 Guernsey 31–2 Hallas, Christine S. 174, 176 Hammond, John Lawrence and Barbara 127 Handa 33–4 Handlin, Oscar 11, 227 Harris, J. Henry 182 Harris, Ruth Ann 138 harvest failure 22, 55, 211, 213 Hastings, R.P. 173 Hatton, Timothy 76, 268–70 Heaton, Herbert 129 Hicks, J.R. 132 Highley (Shropshire) 108–9 Hinde, Andrew 249 historiography 9–12 Hobsbawm, Eric 8, 227–8, 259 Hoerder, Dirk 99, 230, 239 Holland 228 Horton, Sir Robert John Wilmot 131, 139 Houston, R.A. 51–2 Howard, E.D. 236 Howell, David W. 166 Hudson, Patricia 185 Hull 173, 179n.62 Huskisson, William 67 Hvidt, Kristian 233 Iberian emigration 74 Iceland 231 Illinois 111, 174 imperialism 82, 87, 147, 151, 240, 267 improvement (agricultural) 49, 126–7, 140, 266 indenturing 4, 75, 91–7 India 58, 182, 275 indigenous peoples 61, 113, 256 industrialisation 46, 99, 105–7, 112, 114–15, 130, 263 inheritance 31, 41, 110, 124, 147, 213, 238 internal migration 108–9, 116

282 Index Iowa 174 Ireland 48, 106, 131, 136–49, 207–24 iron industry 105, 107, 112 Italy 207, 232–9, 241, 245n.30, 246n.34 Jenkins, Geraint H. 165 Jersey 36n.42 Jewish emigration 230–3, 269 Johnson, Samuel 78, 192, 197, 237 Jones, David J.V. 166 Kay, James 115 Kenny, Kevin 217 Kent 185–9 Kermode, Frank 30 Kerry County (Ireland) 140 Keynes, John Maynard 252 Kiernan, Victor G. 44–5 Kinvig, R.H. 21 Kippen (Stirlingshire) 51 Knowles, Anne Kelly 168 Kussmaul, Ann 52 labour 69, 106, 108, 154, and passim labour supply 94, 97, 130–2, 228, 242, 262 lace-makers 160 laissez-faire policies 76, 97, 269, 273, 275 Lancashire 45, 47, 126, 176 land 20, 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 29, and passim acquisition 41, 59, 155, 174 availability 48–9, 57, 143–4, 201, 227, 274 desire for 47, 89, 97–8, 129, 184, 196, 274 use 42–3, 228 land speculation 29, 94 landlords 34, 47–50, 98, 107, 121, 123, 127–8, 141, 160, 165, 167–9, 172, 193–204, 210–20 Lang, Rev. John Dunmore 158 language 24, 34n.2, 78, 139, 170, 183 Laws of Settlement 39 Lazarus, Emma 227, 240 Lee, Laurie 1 letters 20, 23, 25, 27, 58–61, 116–17 Lewis (Hebrides) 48, 196, 202 literacy 9, 20, 68, 115, 152, 155, 162, 220, 262 Liverpool 20, 22, 25, 126, 170, 174, 179n.62, 216–17, 242

Livi-Bacci, Massimo 17n.4 living standards 60, 111, 117, 129, 204, 237 Locke, John 42 Lockwood, W.B. 21, 34n.2 London 132, 188–9, 191n.39, 241 Long, Jason 262 Lucassen, Jan 80, 122, 263–4 Lucassen, Leo 80, 122, 263–4 MacDonald, John 196 Macdonald, Norman 227 MacKenzie, John M. 278n.26 McKeown, Adam 79 McLeod, Rev. Norman 199 McNeill, Colonel (of Barra) 200 MacNiven, Archibald 197 Madeley (Shropshire) 106, 112 Malkin, Benjamin Heath 170 Malthus, Thomas Robert 28, 46, 62, 123–5, 192, 194, 248–58, 263 Manchester 23, 66, 130 Manning, Patrick 79 Man, Isle of 20–31, 254 Marks, Shula 118n.15 marriage 5, 38, 40, 45, 51, 89, 100, 113, 117, 124–5, 143, 186, 208, 251 Marshall, Alfred 73 Marx, Karl 44–5, 78, 127–8, 131, 193, 240 Masterman, C.F.G. 12–13 Matheson, Sir James 202 Mathias, Peter 127 Merivale, Herman 252 Michigan 58–9 Middlesex 126, 188–9 Mill, John Stuart 37n.42, 218 Miller, Kerby A. 147 Mills, Dennis 125 Milward, Alan S. 236–7 mining 21, 30, 108, 173, 176, 180–5 Mizen Peninsula 137 mobility 38–46, 77, 82, 105, 153, 266 Moch, Leslie Page 80 model villages 266 Mona’s Relief Society 29 Montgomeryshire 166–7 Montreal 34, 174 Moore, A.W. 34n.3 mortality 41, 43, 126, 137, 186, 213

Index motives and aspirations of emigrants 23, 44, 49, 62, 83, 88, 97, 100, 117, 243, 260–1 Myddle (Shropshire) 52n.7 Nair, Gwyneth 108–9 Natal 29 Neeson, Jeanette M. 42, 127 networks of emigrants 20, 23, 100, 176 New England 89 New York 114 New Zealand 1, 78, 111, 155–63, 184, 268 Newbury, Colin 97 North, Douglass C. 88–9 North Carolina 95 Norway 228, 232, 234–5, 239, 241, 243 Nova Scotia 95, 199 Nugent, Walter 230 O’Gráda, Cormac 212–13, 215, 220 Ohio 16, 20–32, 97, 166, 168, 171, 199 Ottawa 147 Pacific islanders 4, 154 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount (Henry John Temple) 216 parishes and emigration 28, 59, 64–5, 76, 112, 126, 173–4 Parkes, Henry 162 Passenger Acts 50, 74, 199 paupers 65, 98, 108, 128, 160, 215 Payton, Philip 182 peasantry 99, 101, 127, 144, 193–4, 236–40, 276 Penn, William 42 Pennsylvania 167 Persse, Henry Stratford 221n.12 Petworth Project 63–5, 68 philanthropists 58, 63 Pictou 34 Pine-Coffin, Sir Edward 202 Plunkett, Sir Horace Curzon 218 Pollard, Sidney 130–1 Pooley, Colin G. 45, 53n.21 Poor Law 43, 65, 69, 116, 139, 176, 187–8, 219 population (increase) 30, 52, 69, 74, 106, 123–7, 132, 175, 184, 186, 188, 208–9, 234, 267

283 Port Phillip 58 ports (emigrant departure) 157, 169–70, 173, 196, 225, 242 Portugal 229, 236, 269 potato crops 22, 33, 137–8, 140, 144, 183, 193–4, 202, 210–18 poverty 55–6, 62–7, 112, 116–17, 128, 138–40, 145–6, 186–8, 192–206 passim, 207–21 passim, 223n.42 Preston 133n.11 proletarianisation 43, 51, 98, 101, 124, 231, 236–8 protest 23, 55, 63, 153, 167, 172 psychology of emigration 80, 82–3, 101, 175, 253, 272 Raban, Jonathan 98 Ravenstein, Ernst Georg 76 Rebecca Riots 169 Redruth (Cornwall) 190n.8 refugees 5–6, 36n.42, 81, 160, 238 regional emigration 165, 171, 220, 226, 232–4 Reigate (Surrey) 64 religion 26, 28, 42, 59, 88, 165, 166–8, 205n.23, 273 Calvinist 167 Catholic 59, 138–9, 143–4, 146–7, 157–8, 196 Church of England 68 see also parishes and emigration Congregationalist 167 Methodist 22, 24, 26, 59, 113, 182–3 Mormon 29, 111 Protestant 138–9, 141–3, 145–7, 209 remittances 182, 185, 239 rents 47, 51, 145, 169, and passim return migration 42, 89, 182, 231, 238–9, 241 Reynell, Carew 93 Richards, Eric 2 Richardson, Peter 118n.15 riots see violence Robinson, Peter 139 Rothenberg, Winifred Barr 8 rural emigrants 28, 30, 73, 100–1, 166, 189 rural transformation 48, 112, 120–32 passim, 170, 184, 272, 274 Russell, Lord John 220

284 Index Russia 79, 230, 232–3, 235, 237–9, 249, 269, 276 saddlers 112–13 Salt Lake City 29 Saul, S.B. 236–7 Schofield, R.S. 91, 123–4 Schull 137–40 Schwartz, Sharron P. 185 Scotland 48–9, 78, 131 Highlands 48, 192–206 seasonal labour migration 51, 77, 166, 231, 239 Select Committee on Agriculture (1833) 174 Select Committee on Emigration (1841) 157 Select Committee on the Poor Law (1833–36) 139 Selkirk, 5th Earl (Thomas Douglas, 1771–1820) 199 Settler Revolution (settlerism) 82–4 sheep 33–4, 140, 169, 193–4, 200 Sheffield 130 Shepperson, Wilbur 115 Shetland 133n.9 Shropshire 46, 105–13 skill 180–5 Skye (Scotland) 252 Slack, Paul 80 slavery 3–4, 10, 21, 76, 90–1, 93–4, 154, 182, 229, 268 Sligo 216 Smith, Adam 74, 89, 91, 127, 131 Smith, Mayo 262 Smout, T.C. 46 Snell, K.D.M. 30, 117 Sockett, Rev. Thomas (Rector of Petworth) 63 Souden, David C. 39, 92–4, 266 South America 182 Southey, Robert 126 Spain 75, 173, 269 Spengler, J.J. 252 St Kilda 33–4 Staffordshire 112–13 statistics of emigration 75–7, 79, 82, 85n.12, 89–91, 114, 189, 225, 229–30, 232, 243 Stephen, James 267–8

Stevenson, Robert Louis 183 Storrington (Sussex) 60 Stromness (Orkney Islands) 196 sugar 90, 93, 154 Sussex 55–69 Sutherland 34, 196, 202, 204 Sutton Maddock (Shropshire) 109–10 Swaledale 172–6 Swan River colony 57–8, 61, 178n.44 Sweden 233–4 Swing, Captain 55, 63–4, 108 Switzerland 241 tariffs 56, 237 Taylor, Clare 166–7 Tennessee 166 theories of migration 3–14 Thirsk, Joan 42 Thistlethwaite, Frank 11, 81, 87, 180, 235, 243 Thomas, Brinley 11 Thomas, David 70n.5 Thomas, R.P. 88–9 Thompson, E.P. 127, 259 timber trade 138–9, 171, 201 Tipperary 141–8 Tisdall, Sarah 19n.32 tobacco 90, 93 tourism 21, 30 trades and occupations 23–4, 27, 31, 112 Tranter, N.L. 135n.38 Trevelyan, Sir Charles 214 Trevelyan, George Macaulay 259 Ulster 74, 97 unemployment 52, 66, 160, 129, 131, 145 United States 11, 20, 22, 28, 58–9, 76, 87–104, 174, 230, 235, 237, 242–3, 268, 273 urban emigrants 100, 189, 260 urbanisation 2, 6–7, 13–14, 41–3, 46, 88, 124, 132, 188–9, 215, 236, 241, 265, 275 Van Diemen’s Land see Australia: Tasmania Van Vugt, William E. 24, 97, 171 violence 22, 23, 55, 64, 106, 108, 111, 145, 169, 183, 209–10, 219–20, 267 Virginia 89

Index wages 61, 92, 96, 101, 103n.40, 231–2, 263, 261, 269–71 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 115, 155 Wales 165–72 Wallace, Alfred Russel 172 Walsall (Staffordshire) 113 war 47, 49, 55, 82, 91, 111, 166, 169, 194 Watson, Henry 62 Weald 262 Welsh Land Commission 170 Wensleydale 175–6 West Cork 137–41, 215 West Indies 91 Whyte, Ian D. 76–7, 98 Wicksell, Knut 227, 244 Williamson, Jeffrey G. 11, 46, 76, 268–70 Wiltshire 116 Winstanley, Michael 212

285 Wollstonecraft, Mary 228 women 27, 52, 61, 66–7, 69, 72n.38, 106, 109, 128, 155–8, 166, 174, 182, 184–5, 188–9, 195, 239, 241, 258n.26 wool 66, 72n.38, 193, 202, 275 Worcestershire 66–7 Wrigley, E.A. 253–4, 277n.15 Wyndham, George (1863–1913) 216 Wyoming 183 yeomen 31, 41, 88, 97, 121, 128, 130, 147, 173, 184 Yorkshire 172–9 Young, Arthur 56, 127, 130, 138, 169 youth, migration 32, 40, 46, 58, 109, 156, 184, 231, 262 Zelinsky, Wilbur 76, 122