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The controversy that had always been a concomitant of emigration clearly did not cease with the passage of the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, which sharpened the debate from party political, ideological and practical perspectives. In a Scottish context, the youthful exodus from urban-industrial areas – which accounted for much of the country’s inter-war emigration – also became one of the sharpest rocks on which formal schemes of empire settlement foundered, while simultaneously exposing the paradoxical attitudes
12 A CENTURY OF EMIGRATION Emigration has been a central feature of Highland history over the last three centuries and, for much of that period, the scale of outward movement was significantly greater than that from other areas of Scotland. Its origins were rooted in the dramatic and controversial changes in the region. Clearances, commercialisation, demographic pressures, famine, economic collapse and landlordism all had an impact on the emigration process though there is much debate among scholars about the precise and relative significance of these various
4883 Social Change PT bjl.qxd 1111 2 3 4 15 6 7 8 9 10 1 112 1113 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 13/6/07 11:07 Page 57 4 Emigration and migration They went across the fields at six o’clock this morning, they are in America long ago. (Tipperary boy, 1890s, asked about his sisters1) How many and where? The alarming figures have been so often repeated that we are in danger of taking them for granted: in 1890 there were 3 million Irish people living outside of Ireland and 40 per cent of all Irish-bybirth people in the world were
Establishing the tradition In the course of the nineteenth century emigration was woven indelibly into the fabric of Scottish life and lore. Between 1825 and the outbreak of the First World War at least 1,841,534 emigrants left Scotland for non-European destinations, constituting an exodus which had profound psychological, as well as demographic, implications. 1 In particular, there developed a historiography of enforced diaspora, fuelled by polemicists, poets and novelists, which portrayed the movement
amply provided for; but that the whole proceeding was illegal. (PP, 1851, XL, 417, my italics) THESE CONCLUSIONS, drawn in 1851 by Richard Hall, the Poor Law Inspector conducting the inquiry into the emigration of children to Bermuda by the Board of Guardians of Marylebone in St Paneras parish, marked the end of one of the first
Emigration from Scotland has always been very high. However, emigration from Scotland between the wars surpassed all records; more people emigrated than were born, leading to an overall population decline. This book examines emigration in the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century. Although personal persuasion remained the key factor in stimulating emigration, professional and semi-professional agents also played a vital part in generating and directing the exodus between the wars. Throughout and beyond the nineteenth century Scottish emigration was, in the public mind and public print, largely synonymous with an unwilling exodus from the highlands and islands. The book investigates the extent to which attitudes towards state-aided colonization from the highlands in the 1920s were shaped by the earlier experiences of highlanders and governments alike. It lays particular emphasis on changing and continuing perceptions of overseas settlement, the influence of agents and disparities between expectations and experiences. The book presents a survey of the exodus from lowland Scotland's fishing, farming and urbanindustrial communities that evaluates the validity of negative claims about the emigrants' motives vis-a-vis the well-publicized inducements offered through both official and informal channels. It scrutinizes the emigrants' expectations and experiences of continuity and change against the backdrop of over a century of large-scale emigration and, more specifically, of new initiatives spawned by the Empire Settlement Act. Barnardo's Homes was the first organization to resume migration work after the war, and the Canadian government supervision was extended from poor-law children to all unaccompanied juvenile migrants.
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
The dynamics of emigration The British World, in its most basic origins, started with people moving along country lanes from cottages in the towns and villages of rural Britain. This movement extended across several centuries and ultimately stretched across the globe. It reached its flood tide in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when it became increasingly an
indicating her own sense of having developed into a more knowing or sophisticated person through experience and emigration. 49 Another interviewee (who did not wish to be named or quoted directly in the book) also remembered the genderless or unisex toilets in Jules, and noted that this inspired the ire of Ian Paisley and his Church; as in Hector's narrative, the figure of Paisley recurs here as an emblem of restrictive constructions of gender and sexuality in the North. We also discussed buying clothes
17 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