Emigration from Europe to Colonial Destinations: Some Nineteenth-Century Australian and South African perspectives

Itinerario

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 133-152

  Haines, Robin ^a   Shlomowitz, Ralph ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 68849129999     PISSN: 01651153     EISSN: 20412827     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0165115300021574     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. Frank Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ in: Stanley N. Katz and Stanley I. Kutler eds, New Perspectives of the American Past 11 (Boston 1969).
2. Rudolph Vecoli has also argued that Italian emigration was seldom the tragic epic as described in Oscar Handlin's pioneering model (The Uprooted, New York 1951).
3. See Vecoli, ‘Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted” ’ in: Leonard Dinnerstein and Frederic C.Jaher eds, The Aliens (New York 1970).
4. Jon Gjerde confirms that American social historians found litde evidence to support Handlin's ‘history of alienation thesis’. Instead, theyfound diverse and rich immigrant experience. See Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Baleslrand, Norway to the Upper Middle West (Cambridge 1985).
5. This term was first used by R.F. Foerster in 1919. See Thisdethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe Overseas’, 63.
6. Between 1821 and 1900, an estimated total of at least 1,482,093 emigrants arrived in Australia from the United Kingdom, of whom, between 1831 and 1900, 740,073 were government-assisted. For an extended analysis of our data and methodology see Haines and Shlomowitz, ‘Nineteenth century immigration from the United Kingdom to Australia: an estimate of the percentage who were government-assisted’, Flinders University Working Papers in Economic History 45 (1990).
7. Compressed versions of these data can be found in the same authors' ‘Immigration from the United Kingdom to Colonial Australia: A Statistical Analysis’, Journal of Australian Studies 34 (1992) 43–52
8. ‘Nineteenth Century Government-Assisted and Total Immigration from the United Kingdom to Australia: Quinquennial Estimates by Colony’, Journal of the Australian Population Association 8 (1991) 50–61
9. ‘A Statistical Approach to the Peopling of South Australia: Immigration from the United Kingdom 1836–1900’, foumal of the Historical Society of South Australia 19 (1991) 108–118. Between 1845 and 1889, 35,251 government-assisted emigrants were brought to the Cape Colony (and a few thousand to the colony of Natal). The government-assisted flow to the Cape Colony was sporadic, dependent, in part, on the demand for labour, available finance, and political events: 3,839 (1845–1850); 9,324 (1857–1862); 21,277 (1873–1882); and 811 (1889). Unfortunately, data do not appear to be available to estimate the number of unassisted immigrants. Our Cape Colony data on assisted emigration are based on tables contained in the appendices of the annual reports of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, published annually in British Parliamentary Papers, and on the sporadic annual reports of the Immigration Agent at the Cape, published in the Cape Parliamentary Papers.
10. Esmé Bull, Aided Immigration from Britain to South Africa 1857 to 1867 (Pretoria 1991) 911.
11. See also H.M. Robertson, ‘The Cape of Good Hope and “Systematic Colonization”’, The South African Journal of Economics 5 (1937) 367411 but esp. 402.
12. In the 1890s, a ‘Report on the Natal Government Emigration Agency in London for the Year 1890’, tabled as Appendix 5 in the Select Committee on Colonization, British Parliamentary Papers XI, 1890–1891 (152) 74–77, emphasised that Queensland was offering better inducements than Natal and that all of the Australian colonies, New Zealand, the Cape and Natal were ‘bidding briskly for emigrants from Europe, and free passages were provided for very large numbers’.
13. Although beyond the brief of this paper, New Zealand was another British colony whose experience parallels that of Australia and South Africa. See, for example, Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington 1981)
14. Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington 1990).
15. Via their agents at the major British ports, the CLEC was responsible for policing the Passenger Acts. Oliver MacDonagh has analysed the way in which the emigration service was a paradigm case for the growth of Victorian government. See A Pattern of Government Growth 1800–60 (London 1961)
16. Fred H. Hitchins, The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (Philadelphia 1931).
17. For a detailed analysis of the CLEC and its precursors, and for a discussion of changes to selection criteria, regulations and the various schemes in operation in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century, see Haines, ‘Indigent misfits or shrewd operators? Government-assisted emigrants from the United Kingdom to Australia, 1831–1860’, Population Studies 48 (1994) 223–248.
18. At the Flinders University of South Australia Eric Richards is currently undertaking a longterm project using ships' lists to analyse the geographical origin, age, gender, occupation and family status of all 19th-century arrivals in Australian ports, assisted and unassisted. For the US see, for example, Charlotte Erickson, ‘Explanatory Models in Immigration and Migration Research’ in: Ingrid Semmingsen and Per Seyersted eds, Scando-Americana Papers on Scandinavian Emigration to the United States (Oslo 1980)
19. Scando-Americana Papers on Scandinavian Emigration to the United States.
20. ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841’, I and II, Population Studies 43 (1989) 367; 44 (1990) 31
21. Population Studies.
22. ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1831’, Population Studies 35 (1981) 186–187.
23. See also Population Studies, leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca 1994).
24. See also Raymond L. Conn, ‘The Family Composition of European Immigration to the US during the Early Mass Migration’, Social Science History (forthcoming)
25. William van Vugt, ‘ “Running from Ruin?” The Emigration of British Farmers to the USA. In the Wake of the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, Economic Hillary Review 2nd series 41 (1988) 411–428.
26. For South Africa see Bull, Aided Immigration from Britain to South Africa.
27. Fares could rise dramatically during times of crisis including, for example, the Crimean War. See McDonald and Shlomowitz, ‘Passenger Fares on Sailing Vessels to Australia in the Nineteenth Century’, Explorations in Economic History 28 (1991) 192–207.
28. Although US-bound emigrants received parish subsidies before 1834, after the inauguration of the PLC, parish unions were refused permission to aid all but colony-bound candidates. Guardians were severely chastised by the PLC on occasions when they relaxed this rule. Parish-aided candidates to Canada could, of course, work their way to the US. See Haines, ‘ “Shovelling out Paupers?” Parish-assisted Emigration from England to Australia 1834–1847’ in: Eric Richards ed., Poor Australian Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century (Canberra 1991).
29. From these data, a profile of government arrivals has been assembled. For New South Wales see RJ. Shultz, ‘Assisted Immigration into New South Wales and Port Phillip District 1837–1850’ (Doctoral dissertation; Australian National University 1971).
30. see Haines, ‘Indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators?’
31. for an extended analysis see ‘Indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators?’.
32. ‘Government-Assisted Emigration from the United Kingdom to Australia 1831–1860: Promotion, Recruitment and the Labouring Poor’ (Doctoral dissertation; Flinders University of South Australia 1992).
33. See also F.K., Crowley, ‘British Migration to Australia: 1860–1914’ (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford University 1951).
34. Haines, ‘Indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators?’, 223.
35. Conceptual issues have been analysed and criticised by, among others, a prominent geographer who has argued that ‘an excessive preoccupation with [migration] theory by most economists has done a certain violence to reality’. See Wilbur Zelinsky, ‘The Impasse of Migration Theory: A Sketch Map for Potential Escapees’ in: Peter A. Morrison ed., Population Movements: Tlieir Forms and Functions in Urbanization and Development (Leige 1981) 34.
36. The most recent economists' text is edited by Jeffrey Williamson and Timothy Hatton, Migration and the International Labour Market, 1850–1939 (London 1994).
37. In addition to works mentioned above and below, pioneering but still influential theoretical analyses in this field include Harry Jerome, Migration and Business Cycles (New York 1926)
38. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration 1607–1860 (1940; rev. ed. 1961)
39. Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy (Cambridge 1954)
40. Jeffrey Williamson, ‘Migration to the New World: Long term Influences and Impact’, Explorations in Economic History 11 (1974) 357–389
41. Maldwyn Jones, ‘The Background to Emigration from Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century’ in: Dislocation and Emigration: The Social Background of American Immigration 7 (1973) 3–94
42. J.D. Gould, ‘European Inter-Continental Emigration 1815–1914: Patterns and Causes’, Journal of Economic History 8 (1979) 593–679.
43. Of Broeze's many articles see in particular, ‘Private Enterprise and the Peopling of Australia, 1831–1850’, Economic History Review 25 (1982) 235–252.
44. See also Haines, indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators?’.
45. McDonald and Shlomowitz, ‘Passenger Fares on Sailing Vessels to Australia in the Nineteenth Century’. Passenger fares for the voyage to the Cape Colony and Natal were reported in the annual reports of the CLEC. In 1850, for example, the average passenger costs was £7.5 for the Cape Colony and £11.4 for Australian colonies, but costs rose dramatically during the Crimean War.
46. See, for example, Erickson, ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841’. The focus on US streams has led to an assumption that agricultural workers were less inclined to emigrate than their town and city counterparts. Yet comparative data suggest that rather than Australia receiving the US ‘spillover’, as many historians have argued, that insofar as rural workers are concerned, in years when government-assisted passages were available, agricultural labourers tended to choose Australia.
47. See Haines, indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators?’, 242–246, esp. Tables 7 and 8.
48. This proposition was put forward nearly forty years ago by Shepperson who used a wide range of parliamentary, newspaper and other published reportage to conclude, in British Emigration to North America: Projects and Opinions in the Early Victorian Period (Minneapolis 1957) 243, that ‘as a practical movement emigration was almost entirely initiated, conducted, and sustained by the people themselves. It was a self-impelled, personally arranged, and individually financed adventure’ which was aided by a wide-range of philanthropic organisations.
49. N.B. Butlin in: Forming a Colonial Economy: Australia 1810–1850 (Canberra 1994) argues that assisted emigration to Australia may have been a form of ‘proto-transportation’ whereby the criminal classes were shovelled out, via the workhouses, to Australia. See esp. 9, 18, 27.
50. Although less strident, Geoffrey Blainey in: A Shorter History of Australia (Melbourne 1994), puts forward a similar view. See esp. 52–53.
51. Lacking footnotes, both texts paraphrase the classic views of R.B. Madgwick, Immigration into Eastern Australia (rev. ed. 1969) 215, 249, passim
52. R.M. Crawford, Australie (rev. ed. 1979). Madgwick's classic and pioneering study on which most secondary studies rely heavily, did not assess the immigrants' characteristics by either using passenger lists or immigration agents' reports, but drew on impressionistic evidence which, due to tensions between the colonial and imperial administrators, always conveyed negative impressions of immigrants even in the face of contrary contemporary evidence. For views which oppose Madgwick and Crawford (and therefore Butlin and Blainey)
53. see Shultz, ‘Assisted Immigration into New South Wales and Port Phillip District 1837–1850’
54. Crowley, ‘British Migration to Australia: 1860–1914’
55. Haines,’ “Shovelling out Paupers?” ‘
56. “Shovelling out Paupers?”, indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators’.
57. For a discussion on this question raised by Mokyr and Tranter see Richards, ‘British Poverty and Australian Immigration in the Nineteenth Century’ in: Richards ed., Poor Australian Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century 4, 28.
58. For some criticisms of the ad hoc nature of push/pull analysis see Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge 1985) 20, passim
59. David Pope, ‘The Push-Pull Model of Australian Migration’, Australian Economic History Review 16 (1976) 152
60. Erickson, ‘Explanatory Models in Immigration and Migration Research’, 13
61. ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1831’, 175
62. ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841, part II’, 21
63. Zelinsky, ‘An Impasse in Migration Theory”, 27
64. Jones, ‘The Background to Emigration from Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, 28 passim
65. Williamson, ‘Migration to the New World’, 357–389
66. and see the introduction to Shula Marks and Peter Richardson eds, International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives (London 1984) for a critique of the theoretical debate, esp. 3–9.
67. David Fitzpatrick argues that the repulsion/attraction dichotomy is, in a sense, ‘false since both “push” and “pull” are prerequisite to every decision leading to migration’ in Irish Emigration 1801–1921. (Dublin 1985) 26.
68. More recent analyses include Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930, Macmillan (London 1991) passim
69. and, more particularly, Macmillan.
70. ‘European Emigration 1815–1930: looking at the Emigration Decision again’. Economic History Review 47 (1994) 525–544
71. Hatton and Williamson eds, Migration and International Labor Markets.
72. Thistlethwaite, in ‘Migration from Europe’, 77, argued that ‘only in the impossible world of economic abstractions could Hansen's desire to move be conceived of as mere economic opportunity’. See also 75, 80.
73. Erickson, ‘Explanatory Models in Immigration and Migration Research’, 13
74. Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Challenge of Modern Historiography’, The American Historical Review 87 (1982) 1–3.
75. Erickson was referring to the difficulty in interpreting the extent to which ‘expulsive forces’ stimulated by cyclical depressions or structural transition were responsible for fluctuations and/or trends in British emigration to the US. See ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841’ I and II, Population Studies 43 (1989) 367
76. Population Studies, 44 (1990) 31.
77. ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1831’
78. See also Leaving England: Eosays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca 1994).
79. Erickson, ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841’ I, 367.
80. Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, 141.
81. See also, 6. For a similar analytical approach to Irish ‘cohort depletion’ see David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration 1801–1921 (Dublin 1985)
82. Irish Emigration 1801–1921.
83. ‘Emigration, 1801–1807’ in: W.E. Vaughan ed., A New History of Irebind 5 (Oxford 1989).
84. Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy, 178. See also, 4–7, 87, 127, 141–143, 166, 172, 176178.
85. Shlomowitz, ‘Nominated and selected Government-Assisted Immigration from the United Kingdom to Australia, 1848–1900’,Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia 20 (1992) 151–155.
86. See W. Pearce's report to the Select Committee on Colonization, Appendix 5, British Parliamentary Papers XI, 1890–1891 (152) 74.
87. See, for example, Erickson's pathbreaking study of emigrant letters, Invisible Immigrants (London 1982).
88. Bailyn, The Peopling of British Peripheries in the Eighteenth Century (Canberra 1988)
89. The Peopling of British Peripheries in the Eighteenth Century.
90. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York 1986)
91. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction.
92. Voyages to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York 1988).
93. Bailyn's integrative study of English and Scots emigrants to America between 1773 and 1776, is based on the quantitative analysis of shipping registers in those years which allowed a ‘career-line analysis’ of each named emigrant. By judicious collation of diverse quantitative and descriptive sources located in the UK and the US including newspaper and parliamentary reportage, official correspondence, parish and other local records, genealogical data and private manuscript sources, he produced a narrative synthesis which is shared by the studies of Brij Lal for India and Fiji, Cirmiliyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Canberra 1983) and Jon Gjerde for Norway and the US, From Peasants to Farmers (Cambridge 1985).
94. This is particularly true of Norway. See Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers.
95. See Richards' discussion of this point in David Fitzpatrick ed., Visible Immigrants (Canberra 1990) 13.
96. This comment does not, of course, apply to Irish emigration which is covered by an extensive secondary literature including Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation (Ithaca 1995).
97. Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers, 295.
98. Peter H. Hempstead, “Halfway across the World: Emigration from Bedfordshire’, The Bedfordshire Magazine 18 (1982) 1
99. Based on Charles Buller's speech to the House on 6 April 1843 which was published as a pamphlet On Systematic Colonization and later included in: E.G. Wakefield's A View of the Art of Colonization (London 1849), these arguments were reiterated for a number of years in mid-century by public speeches (published in the press), articles and pamphlets and in correspondence with the Colonial Office by Francis Scott, MP and his colleague W.H.G. Kingston, the author, who combined to form a formidable and influential duo in this field.
100. See, for example, Speech of the Hon. Francis Scott, MP (London 1848) 10.
101. Household Words was deliberately priced to attract the literate lower classes and its weekly readership was equivalent to the daily readership of The Times. See Harry Stone ed., The Uncollected Writings of Charles Dickens: Household Words 1850–9 (London 1969) 13. Dickens was well aware of the attraction of emigration matters to his working-class reading public and continued to include articles on Australia in Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round
102. For example, in November 1849, Samuel Sidney's Sidney's Emigrant's Journal (London 1848), originally priced at twopence for each weekly edition, was collected into one foolscap folio volume of 346 pages priced at 10s6d. entided Encyclopaedia for Emigrants.
103. In the same year he also published a sixpenny Sidney's Emigrant's Journal and Traveller's Gazetteand his The Three Colonies of Australia was reprinted the year following its publication in London in 1852. Meanwhile, his Sidney's Australian Handbook (London 1848) was reprinted nine times by November 1849.
104. Many of the emigrant guides and handbooks were dedicated to Australasia but included long segments on the Cape Colony and Natal. Far fewer South African guides were published but include J.C. Byrne, Emigrants' Guide to the Cape of Good Hope … with a map of the Colony (London 1848)
105. James Arbuthnot, Emigrants' Guide Book to Port Natal… with Newly Constructed Map of the Colony (Aberdeen 1862)
106. William Kermode, Natal: Its Early History, Rise, progress and Fulure prospects as a Field for Emigration (London 1882).
107. See Mark Baker, ‘Aspects of the Life of the Wiltshire Agricultural Labourer, c. 1850’, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine 74/75 (1981) 161–169
108. Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine.
109. ‘Some early Wiltshire Emigrants to Australia’, The Hatcher Review 2/17 (Spring 1984) 328–334
110. The Hatcher Review.
111. ‘A Migration of Wiltshire Agricultural Labourers to Australia’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia 14 (1986) 67–81.
112. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation
113. Oceans of Consolation, ed., Visible Immigrants
114. Richards ed., Poor Australian Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century: Visible Immigrants Two (Canberra 1991)
115. Patrick O'Farrell, Utters from Irish Australia 1825–1929 (Sydney 1984)
116. Haines, ‘Therapeutic Emigration: Some South Australian and Victorian Experiences’, Journal of Australian Studies 33 (1992) 76–90.
117. See Haines, ‘Shovelling out Paupers’.
118. Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe Overseas’, 68.
119. Haines, ‘Health, Hygiene and History: Emigrant Voyages and Health Regimes in the 19th Century’ (Flinders University of South Australia; forthcoming).
120. On births and deaths on these ocean voyages, see Shlomowitz and McDonald, ‘Babies at Risk on Immigrant Voyages to Australia in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review 44 (1991) 86101
121. McDonald and Shlomowitz, ‘Mortality on Immigrant Voyages to Australia in the 19th-century’, Explorations in Economic History 27 (1990) 84–113.