Agrarian turmoil and the activation of mass mobility

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. The emigration question was interconnected with the way in which the labour supply for the industrialisation of the British economy was achieved. The state of mobility and the transfer of labour out of rural England was becoming much clearer by mid-Victorian times. 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 did mass emigration become an overwhelmingly urban and industrial phenomenon.

The discontinuity

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 years 1768 to 1776 may have marked an earlier fundamental discontinuity in emigration but the evidence is ambiguous. There is 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. Strong support for the discontinuity thesis comes from the quantitative historians T.J. Hatton and J.G. Williamson. The American scholar Raymond Cohn has 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.

Islands of exit

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. The emigration records of the Isle of Man and Guernsey display great contrasts in their trajectories, though the final shape was rather similar. The Isle of Man was only marginally affected by the emigrations, though population pressure slowly diminished during the rest of the nineteenth century. 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 migration mystery

Historians have resorted to a language of mystery and metaphor when they come to grapple with the great structural changes which underpin the array of contributory causes of migration. The British Isles was the prototype case of agrarian transformation associated with industrial growth and mass migration. 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 the migratory turmoil. There were links along the chain of causation towards the migration of millions of the British people in their confusing permutations. 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. International emigration has depended on the basic facilities of migration. The British case was the prototype of modern rural-urban migration and has been replicated, with important variations, across the world.

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

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 much reduced’. By then most British emigrants were urban people. 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. The campsites, despite their diversity, align in the conditions favourable to migration and emigration, and therefore encourage broader explanations of the British discontinuity. 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. 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.

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

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. Rural west Wales was especially prominent in the emigration account; it also vividly manifested some of the classic conditions making for mobility. Increased mobility in rural Wales was marked also by particular episodes of emigration which entered the folk memory. 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. The Swaledale economy remained dominated by agriculture, and productivity increases were impressive, especially in dairying. 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.

The Australasian case

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. The Australian case was famously different from, and began more than a century later than, the great transatlantic migrations from 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. The eventual despatch of 160,000 convicts to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1867 barely merited the name of an emigration system. 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 1860.

The Irish case

This chapter deals with Ireland’s place in the more generic context of the origins of migration from the British Isles. The first crescendo of mass international migration came in the mid-1840s and was disproportionately Irish. Population growth, famine and emigration in the Irish case are commonly regarded as tied together inextricably. 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’. The potato failure in 1846 produced catastrophic levels of mortality and then massive migration. The evacuation of rural Ireland eventually issued forth into a flood of emigrants across the Irish Sea and across the Atlantic. Whatever the ideological assumptions, the readjustment of agriculture in Ireland, especially in the decades of the Great Famine, was radical and ruthless.

Remote departures: the Scottish Highlands

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 Highlands present a clear-cut case of emigration as extrusion, of a poor population propelled outwards by force majeure. 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. 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 1806-1807. 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, and the availability of philanthropic, landlord and colonial assisted passages.

Cornwall, Kent and London

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. 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. 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. Cornwall and Kent were two variants of the general responsiveness of rural England to the opportunities of emigration and the imperatives of population shifts. Kent was a more purely rural county, with little mining activity, but adjacent to London.