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Introduction Between 1869 and 1939, over 100,000 children, seen to be at risk from crime and destitution, were removed from orphanages, workhouses, families and streets of Great Britain. Many were sent to Canada and are now known as British Home Children. Others went to Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia. Approximately fifty organisations were involved in juvenile migration
This book introduces the reader to emerging research in the broad field of 'imperial migration' and shows how this 'new' migration scholarship had developed our understanding of the British World. This is done through an analysis of some of former colonies of British Empire such as Australia, Canada, India and Zambia. The book focuses on the ideas of Reverend Thomas Malthus of how population movements presaged forces within sectors of a pre-industrial economy. The formation of national and imperial identities along racial lines in the mid-nineteenth century is covered by an analysis of the mid-nineteenth century British censuses. The clergy played a pivotal role in the importation and diffusion of a sense of British identity (and morality) to Australian churchgoers. The resistance and accommodation of Welsh Presbyterianism in Eastern Bengal is investigated through the varieties of engagement with Indian Christians and non-Christians. The book argues that Asian migration and the perceived threat it posed to the settler colonies was an issue which could unite these seemingly incongruent elements of the British World. Child migration has become a very sensitive and politically charged issue, and the book examines one of the lesser studied child migration agencies, the Middlemore Children's Emigration Homes. The book also deals with the cultural cross-currents in the construction of an Anglo-Canadian or 'Britannic' national identity. The white settlers' decisions to stay on after independence was granted to Zambia are instructive as it fills an important gap in our understanding of Africa's colonial legacy.
problems of demobilisation, veterans’ discontent, industrial regeneration and chronic unemployment. Moreover, the failure of the British government to launch a successful domestic colonisation scheme also had a direct bearing on the implementation of this empire migration project. The outbreak of war effectively ended imperial migration for the next five years. ‘Of course everything here is all war and
Both writers and critics of the British World have primarily focused on the white inhabitants within it; the role of non-whites and their impact remains problematic. It is only by studying the reactions to Asian migration, however, that historians can understand why, over time, the concept of empire became less compelling to the settler colonies and why alternative imagined
Migration to Natal From the 1850s there were fresh attempts to encourage migrants to move to South Africa, particularly to Natal. The colony of Natal had been annexed by the British in 1843 in order to frustrate the Boer Voortrekkers in their desire to establish a republic there, a settlement which had led to conflict with the Zulu which would become a major element of the
Settlers at the End of Empire is a ground-breaking study that integrates the neglected history of emigration from the United Kingdom with the history of immigration to the United Kingdom in the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing attention to the volume and longevity of British emigration, Settlers at the End of Empire analyses the development of racialised migration regimes in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), from the Second World War to the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994. Both white emigration from the United Kingdom and the arrival of increasing numbers of Commonwealth migrants of colour were cast as signs of national decline and many emigrants cited the arrival of migrants of colour as a factor in their decision to leave. South Africa and Rhodesia meanwhile, moved from selective immigration policies in the 1940s and 1950s to an intensive recruitment of white migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an attempt by these increasingly embattled settler regimes to increase their white populations and thereby defend minority rule. Though such efforts bore limited results in war-torn Rhodesia, South Africa saw a dramatic increase of European and especially British migrants from the 1960s to the early 1980s, just as the United Kingdom implemented immigration restrictions aimed at Commonwealth migrants of colour. In all three nations, therefore, though they took different forms, migration policies were intended to defend nations imagined as white in the wake of imperial collapse.
Professor Drummond's two pioneering studies, British Economic Policy and the Empire 1919-1939, 1972, and Imperial Economic Policy 1917-1939, 1974, helped to revive interest in Empire migration and other aspects of inter-war imperial economic history. This book concentrates upon the attempts to promote state-assisted migration in the post-First World War period particularly associated with the Empire Settlement Act of 1922. It examines the background to these new emigration experiments, the development of plans for both individual and family migration, as well as the specific schemes for the settlement of ex-servicemen and of women. Varying degrees of encouragement, acquiescence and resistance with which they were received in the dominions, are discussed. After the First World War there was a striking reorientation of state policy on emigration from the United Kingdom. A state-assisted emigration scheme for ex-servicemen and ex-servicewomen, operating from 1919 to 1922, was followed by an Empire Settlement Act, passed in 1922. This made significant British state funding available for assisted emigration and overseas land settlement in British Empire countries. Foremost amongst the achievements of the high-minded imperial projects was the free-passage scheme for ex-servicemen and women which operated between 1919 and 1922 under the auspices of the Oversea Settlement Committee. Cheap passages were considered as one of the prime factors in stimulating the flow of migration, particularly in the case of single women. The research represented here makes a significant contribution to the social histories of these states as well as of the United Kingdom.
encountering anti-British sentiment from Afrikaner nationalists, the overwhelming experience, as described in Chapter 1 , was one of welcome, hospitality and abundance. While white British migrants were likely to experience social mobility in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia as members of a privileged racial minority, Black migrants to the United Kingdom were more likely to experience the reverse due to racial discrimination in housing and employment. 6 In official terms too, these migrations were considered very differently. The
‘semi-slave labour system’, the poster’s message was: ‘Don’t support them. Don’t emigrate.’ 1 While there had long been critiques of white migration to South Africa and Rhodesia in this vein, as campaigns against white minority rule in both nations intensified from the 1960s opposition to white migration became more prominent and widespread. Despite these campaigns and increasing international condemnation, British migration, especially to South Africa, continued at high rates throughout much of the 1970s and into the
A political cartoon in the Evening Standard in January 1969 shows two families on a beach carrying suitcases, with a small boat in the distance. One family, clearly intended to represent migrants from South Asia, is arriving, while the other, a white British family, is leaving. The caption reads, ‘Agreed then, you have 14 Upper Pinner Road, we take the boat, and the best of British luck to you!’ 1 This image depicts a well-known aspect of post-war British history: the increase in the migration of people of