Yann Béliard – Migration to and from Hull, and its impact on the labour movement, 1840s-1914
Hull in the 19th century could not have grown to become the third British port without the massive influx of “foreign” workers. Most came from the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire hinterland, others from the Celtic periphery – notably Ireland. Those domestic migrations were completed by a smaller but permanent input from continental Europe, as 2 million people passed through Hull on their road to the “new worlds” between 1836 and 1914. The local working class also came to include seamen from Britain’s Asian and African colonies.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how the local labour movement reacted to the challenge of immigration. Though the employment of foreign workers could be used by employers to weaken the labourers’ bargaining position, many became involved in the trade union and socialist movement, thus contributing to an overcoming of cultural and linguistic barriers.
The making of a common class consciousness was however not without blindspots. And emigration was yet another challenge that labour activists had to face.
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Yann Béliard is a Senior Lecturer in British studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France. His PhD, completed in 2007 under the supervision of the late François Poirier, dealt with class relations in Hull from 1894 to 1910. Since then he has edited a special issue of the Labour History Review (April 2014) revisiting ‘The Great Labour Unrest, 1911–1914’. His research focuses on British labour in the age of empire, with particular emphasis on workplace struggles, transnational activism, and race. Recently he has explored more particularly Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought years and produced a series of notices for the Dictionary of Labour Biography. He is currently working on the edition of a collective volume on British labour and decolonisation. |
Fabrice Bensimon – British Labour and Migration to Europe during Industrialisation (1815-1860). The Case of the Lace Makers
Over the past few years, in Britain as well as in several European countries, the issue of labour migration has become central. Many have claimed “British workers for British jobs”, while the success of Brexit at the 23 June 2016 referendum has often been understood as a refusal of immigration. The history of labour shows that the issue is not new, although in ways that were different.
In the period 1815-1870, several thousand British workers and engineers went to the continent for work purposes, playing a decisive part in European industrialisation. They came from across Britain, especially industrialising areas like South Wales, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire and Dundee. They worked in linen, cotton, lacemaking, in woolcombing, the iron industry, mechanics, steamship manufacture and in railway building. In these sectors, Britain had a technical advantage. Workers emigrated because they could market their skills at good value; or because their British employers sought to make the most of their technical lead by setting businesses up abroad; or because by producing on the continent, they could avoid protective tariffs. Most went to France, Belgium, and the German states, but some went to Holland, Scandinavia, Austria and the Habsburg dominions, Switzerland and as far as Russia, the Mediterranean and the Empire. Some stayed just a few years—for example, during the building of a railroad—and then went elsewhere, while others settled on the continent permanently. In consequence, although European countries followed differing paths to industrialisation, British workers and engineers contributed to each of these distinctive pathways. How decisive was this?
To date, only selected aspects of this vital flow of British emigrants have been studied. Most research has focused on economic history: British engineers, businessmen and workers had played a key part in the industrialisation of Europe. Some research has focused on specific technologies or trades. Economic historians have also highlighted the ways specific techniques of manufacture were circulated. There is also now a significant bibliography on the diffusion of technology to the European empires and on the part played by industrial technologies in imperialism, especially in the British case. We know less, however, about the social and cultural history of the workers themselves.
In this paper, I will focus on one sector, that of the lace makers who emigrated from the East Midlands to Northern France. This connection began 200 years ago, in 1816. During the Napoleonic wars, artisans and inventors in the East Midlands had managed to devise ground-breaking machinery for the making of “bobbin-net” lace, which could successfully compare with hand-made lace. When the wars ended, they had a competitive lead over continental production, especially that of France, the largest market for lace. To avoid the high tariffs that protected the French market, smuggling across the Channel was widely used. But smuggling came at a cost. And from 1817 onwards, Nottinghamshire lace-makers started emigrating to Calais. This meant that they could easily sell on French markets. And they could also keep close connections with the east Midlands, Nottingham in particular, where they often went to buy machinery and cotton thread, hire workforce and get first-hand information on patterns and techniques. Correspondence, newspapers, and the circulation of many agents, lace makers and mechanics played a decisive part in creating a unified production area that included both the East Midlands and the Calais region. By 1848, there were in Calais more than 1,800 British lace-makers and their children and women, who did not operate the machines but did all the preparing and the finishing of the lace. All of them were the anonymous artisans of the lace revolution of the nineteenth century.
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Fabrice Bensimon specialises in nineteenth-century British history, which he teaches at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where he has been Professor of British History and Civilisation since 2008. He was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellow for 2016-18 at UCL, and his current research project focuses on British migrant workers to the European continent in the period of industrialisation (1815-1870). |
Hilary Carey – Clergy for Convicts: Religion, Emigration and the Convict Probation System in NSW
From 1788 to 1874 the British government transported over 180,000 prisoners from Great Britain and Ireland to penal colonies in Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar. While their main function was to be part of the unfree labour force that ‘opened up’ the colonies to British settlers, the moral welfare of the prisoners was not entirely neglected. To implement an ambitious programme of reform, the prisoners were supplied with chaplains and religious instructors, tracts, Bibles and chapels to moralise them into submission. This paper will examine just one group of religious emigrants, namely the Protestant and Catholic clergy who were recruited to support Lord Stanley’s ‘probation system’. The Probation scheme was in operation from 1842 until the abandonment of Transportation in VDL in 1853 but continued in other forms in Port Philip (Victoria) and Western Australia. This paper examines the religious aspects of Lord Stanley’s probation system and its impact on the anti-Transportation campaign. It begins by examining regulations devised for Pentonville, which put the probation system in place and made it the ‘portal to the penal colonies’, in the words of Sir James Graham. It considers how the religious provisions of the probation system were staffed and implemented by the new class of religious prison officers, many of whom were pious laymen attracted to the reformative aspects of the system (and the relatively generous salaries). It asks how the religious professionals recruited to the convict service viewed their role and to what extent they were able to make careers and permanent homes for themselves and their families after the Probation system terminated.
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Hilary Carey was born in Perth, Western Australia. She studied history at the University of Sydney and Balliol College Oxford where she completed a DPhil in medieval history in 1984. She taught at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney before getting her first permanent job in 1991 at the University of Newcastle, NSW. From 2004 to 2005 she was Keith Cameron Professor of Australian History at University College Dublin and she has also been a visiting professor or fellow at Balliol College Oxford, the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, University of Sydney, the University of York and the University of Edinburgh and Life Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She is currently Professor of Imperial and Religious History and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Bristol. She is the author of God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801-1908 (Cambridge UP, 2010), Empires of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Believing in Australia: A cultural history of religions (Allen & Unwin, 1996), In the Best of Hands. A history of the Mater Misericordiae Public Hospital and Private Hospital North Sydney 1906-1991 (Hale & Iremonger, 1991), Truly Feminine Truly Catholic – A History Of The Catholic Women’s League In The Archdiocese Of Sydney 1913-87 (New South Wales University Press, 1987); co-editor with Colin Barr of Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750-1950 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); and co-editor with Glenn O’Brien of Methodism in Australia: A History (Routledge, 2015). |
Adam Cutforth – “There and back again”: an ANZAC’s round-trip to the Western Front
When war broke out in 1914, many in far-flung corners of the Commonwealth saw an opportunity for adventure and patriotic service to the King. After all, from the mid-1800s successive waves of immigrants had left the UK for the colonies in the Antipodes.
No surprise then that New Zealand, like Australia, sent more than their share of soldiers to join the WWI fray, often with grim results.
Pint-sized Archie Greves, a shepherd from the remote east coast of NZ’s North Island, eagerly signed up. Thus began a long journey that led to the Western Front in 1916, where he survived almost 3 years of action in Northern France and Belgium, before being wounded just before the Armistice.
Archie’s story is typical of so many ordinary “kiwis” and for this reason was worth capturing for posterity, based on his own diaries. Though powered by a deep sense of patriotism that had survived the separation from “Mother England”, there was never any question about where home really was, and Archie spent the rest of his life happily contributing to NZ society.
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Adam Cutforth is the author of A Sovereign In My Pocket, The Story of Archibald Kirk Greves, MBE first published in 2006 by L’Association France Nouvelle-Zélande. Born in New-Zealand, he has been living in France since 2002. Holder of an MA in English Literature (University of Auckland) and a lawyer by profession, Adam has also worked in journalism and communications. He is currently involved in leading transformation at Air Liquide, an international French company. |
Santanu Das – South Asian Troops in Europe, 1914-1918 – Image, Song, Literature
During 1914-18, over a million men from undivided India voyaged to the heart of whiteness and beyond – Mesopotamia, East Africa, Gallipoli, Egypt and Sinai – to serve in the First World War as part of the British colonial forces. Of them, around 140,000 men, including both combatants and non-combatants, served in France and Flanders. Drawing on archival material from across Europe and India – trench artefacts, diaries, photographs, paintings, and original sound-recordings from the POW camps in Germany – this paper will try to recover a sensuous and emotional history of the Indian sepoys on the Western Front. How did the men feel as they encountered Europe and the war – and sometimes love – for the first time? How were they understood and represented, and what traces did they leave in the literary, visual and aural culture of Europe at the time? In a context when most of these men were non-literate and did not leave behind an abundance of memoirs or written testimonies, a dialogue between words, objects and images becomes vital. Methodologically, the paper wishes to raise two issues: the importance of unconventional archives in the recovery of histories of colonial migration; second, the role of the literary, both as source-material and as a way of reading, in both interrogating and filling in the gaps in historical sources.
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Santanu Das currently teaches in the English department at King’s College London and is a Fellow-Elect at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge UP, 2005) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge UP, 2011) and the Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2013). He has published a photographic history 1914-1918: Indians Troops in Europe/ L’Inde dans la Grande Guerre, les Cipayes sur le front de l’ouest (Gallimard, 2014) and his monograph entitled India, Empire and First World War Culture will appear this September. He has been involved in several centennial commemorative projects on the war, from radio and television programmes with the BBC to advising on concerts, exhibitions, and dance-theatre. |
Kent Fedorowich – The ‘Sawdust Fusiliers’: The Canadian Forestry Corps, 1916-1919
In 1916, the growing German submarine threat forced London to stop importing Canadian timber as food, munitions and forage were prioritized for transhipment across the North Atlantic. A viable alternative, however, was the recruitment of experienced Canadian labour which could harvest Britain’s ancient forests. Within six weeks 1,600 men from across Canada were recruited to the 224th Canadian (Forestry) Battalion, based out of Ottawa. At the end of the war, 41 companies were working in Britain and 60 in France, a total of 23,979 men. In addition, so-called ‘attached personnel’ from the Canadian Army Service Corps, Canadian Army Medical Corps, Finnish seamen, Portuguese and Irish labourers, conscientious objectors, enemy aliens, Belgian refugees and crucially, German prisoners-of-war bolstered final numbers to 31,447.
This paper explores this unknown unit, which by the end of the war provided 70% of all the timber used by the Allies on the Western Front. Using the Canadian Forestry Corps as a lens to examine the mobilisation of specialist labour for the war effort, this paper explores the various ethnic communities, including large numbers of Franco-phone and First Nations, which comprised this force between 1916 and 1919.
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Kent Fedorowich is a Reader in British Imperial and Commonwealth History at the University of the West of England. A Canadian living in the UK, his work focuses on empire migration, Anglo-dominion relations and Anglo-Canadian wartime relations, as well as the resettlement of British ex-servicemen in the dominions during the inter-war period, the British diaspora in the 20th century and the peopling of the British World. With Charles Booth, he is involved in the BBC’s “WW1 At Home Project”, which focuses on war stories and their impact on Britain and Ireland – a project also supported by the Imperial War Museums and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is the co-author with Bob Moore of The British Empire and its Italian Prisoners of War, 1940-1947 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 ), co-editor with Andrew Thompson of Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester University Press, 2013), co-editor with Carl Bridge of The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (Taylor & Francis, 2003), co-editor with Martin Thomas of International Diplomacy and Colonial Retreat (Taylor & Francis, 2000), and co-editor with Bob Moore of Prisoners-of-War and Their Captors in World War II (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996). |
David Fitzpatrick – Irish Migration and the Great War
Between the Great Famine of the 1840s and the Great War, long-distance emigration from Ireland regularly outranked that from any other European country. Though most emigrants chose America, Irish incomers were markedly over-represented by comparison with English and even Scots settlers in most parts of the British Empire. Irish migration, primarily conducted by individuals with support from relatives, also embraced large numbers of military, naval, and civil service personnel whose migration was centrally directed and typically reversible. By 1900, unofficial outward migration was also counterbalanced by substantial reverse movement, often temporary. The immediate effect of the Great War was to sharply curtail conventional out-migration, while vastly increasing military migration to novel destinations in Europe and the Near East. Military out-migration was dominated by men, whereas at least half of those forced to stay at home were women. The ‘call to arms’ summoned hundreds of thousands of servicemen of Irish birth or descent from the dominions and the USA, and many of these spent periods of leave or convalescence in Ireland. The armistice was followed by the demobilisation of about 100,000 servicemen bound for Ireland, but ‘normal’ emigration to the USA and the Empire was not fully restored until summer 1920. Though the Irish were not among the ethnicities convulsed by conscription or forced displacement during and immediately after the Great War, their novel migratory trajectories had important economic, social, cultural, and political consequences for the home country. Indeed, these trajectories helped to shape the post-war Irish revolution, leading to partition and civil conflict across lines unimagined before 1914.
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David Fitzpatrick was born in Melbourne, Australia and was educated at the University of Melbourne and Trinity College, Cambridge. A research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Melbourne, he has been professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin, since 1979. He has also been visiting fellow or professor at several universities in Australia, at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and at Edinburgh. He is former Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and author of six books and over 100 other works. His research focuses on Irish history since 1795 (especially nationalism, republicanism, loyalism, demography, and emigration); the Irish in Australia, Britain, and elsewhere; the history of Loyal Orange Institution, 1795-1995; the impact of the Great War on Ireland in international context; as well as American and cosmopolitan influences in post-Famine Ireland. His is the author of Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cornell UP, Ithaca; Cork UP; Melbourne UP, 1995); Politics and Irish Life, 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork UP; 1st edn 1977); The Two Irelands, 1912–1939 (Oxford UP, 1998); and Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge UP, 2014). |
James Hammerton – “’Empire made me?’: English lower middle-class migrants and expatriates, 1860-1930.”
In 1898 Sidney Webb characterized the Australian population as ‘all of them gambling profit-makers, keen on realizing the Individualist ideals of the lower Middle Class of 1840-1870’. His cryptic commentary on social values avoided the question of an actual lower middle-class presence in the immigrant population, a lacunae which has been replicated in modern migration history, where lower middle-class migrants as a distinct grouping rarely receive explicit mention. In fact the marginal lower middle-class, especially the much-maligned white-collar component, occupied a significant place among British emigrants from the early 19th century, and, arguably, their values of social respectability and self-improvement played a significant part in the character formation of settler colonies. Moreover, their quest to succeed as migrants was one element of a larger process by which heightened global mobility, in formal and informal empire and beyond, offered opportunities to the marginal middle-class well beyond reach at home. Here, as others have noted recently, the distinction between migrant, expatriate and sojourner was a fluid one.
In this paper, drawing on a family archive in the British Library, I wish to pursue Robert Bickers’ idea of empire as a unique field of advancement for the lower middle-class (Empire made me: an Englishman adrift in Shanghai) through examination of two Englishmen’s expatriate careers. The first, that of William Cooper, takes us to the early establishment of the telegraph with its beginnings in India, Russia and Persia and the activities of the Indo-European Telegraph Company; secondly, Cooper’s son-in-law, Edgar Wilson, pursued parallel opportunities, initially as a shipping clerk, for Lynch Brothers shipping company in Persia and Mesopotamia, just as oil exploration was beginning. Both men experienced sharp career advancement, both enjoyed successful marriages and family lives despite periodic separations, but their attitudes to long-term expatriate postings, and to overseas travel, differed markedly. Their history, and the larger Cooper Wilson project, brings some new insights to our understanding of empire as a field of enhanced social mobility for the British, as well as the histories of masculinity, marriage and sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Jim Hammerton is Emeritus Scholar at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His publications have ranged across nineteenth century female emigration (Emigrant gentlewomen: Genteel poverty and female emigration, 1830-1914 (1979, republished at Routledge in 2016), the history of marriage and marital conflict in nineteenth century England (Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth Century Married Life (Routledge, 1992), the lower middle class in Victorian and Edwardian England, and postwar emigration from Britain (Ten Pound Poms: A life history of British postwar emigration to Australia (Manchester University Press, 2005) with Alistair Thomson). His most recent publication is Migrants of the British Diaspora since the 1960s: Stories from Modern Nomads (Manchester University Press, 2017). His current research focuses on the history of an English expatriate extended family in Iran and Iraq in the early twentieth century. |
Marjory Harper – “The hands of the clock have begun to move backwards”: postwar emigration from Scotland
In the 1920s more people emigrated from Scotland than in any decennial period since records had begun. Was their departure triggered by disillusionment and despair, or by the expectation of better opportunities and the unprecedented availability of State funding? How did their attitudes and experiences compare with those of their compatriots who had emigrated a century earlier, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars? Using a variety of tools – including personal testimony from participants, press coverage, and recruitment propaganda, as well as official policy documents – the initial part of this paper will scrutinise the objectives of some of the men, women and children who emigrated, particularly to the Dominions and the USA, from a variety of geographical and socio-economic constituencies in Scotland. It will then consider the impact of their emigration on the donor and host communities, as well as on the participants themselves. Perspectives from the 1920s will be compared with those of a century earlier, and – by contextualising the Scottish experience within the wider British narrative – the paper will also address briefly the concept of exceptionalism in Scottish emigration.
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Marjory Harper is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research focuses on British emigration since 1800, particularly from Scotland. Two of her monographs (Adventurers and Exiles (2003) and Scotland No More? (2012) have each won an international prize. She co-authored (with Stephen Constantine) Migration and Empire (2010), a Companion Volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire and she has published around 100 articles. Her edited collection, Migration and Mental Health: Past and Present was published in 2016 and she has authored a number of articles on migration and mental health in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her most recent monograph, Testimonies of Transition (an oral history of twentieth-century Scottish emigration) was published in May 2018, and she is about to begin a commissioned monograph on Scottish-Antipodean networks. She is Director of a new online Master’s Programme in Scottish Heritage, which was launched in September 2017. |
Edward Higgs – Spirit photography as war photography, and migration across the Great Divide
Migration in the Western demographic tradition is understood as a movement across state and administrative boundaries. This is linked to the nineteenth-century European concept of statistics as ‘STATE-istics’, based on the post-Westphalian understanding of the State, especially in its Napoleonic form. Although much human movement cannot be seen in these terms, it has been cemented into the modern passport with its photograph, which in turn is a product of the First World War. But the Great War, and Western military conflicts of the nineteenth century (the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War), also encouraged the belief in another form of movement across a boundary, that of spirits between this world and the next, which was also evidenced by the photograph. The paper will explore the development of the supposed photography of spirits as a reaction to war, and the concept of boundaries between our world and that of the spirit world. This raises the whole question of the way in which the photograph has become the principle form of identification in a world (or worlds) on the move.
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Edward Higgs studied modern history at the University of Oxford where he completed his doctoral research in 1978. This was on the history of nineteenth-century domestic service. He was an archivist at the Public Record Office, the national archives in London, from 1978 to 1993. He was latterly responsible for policy relating to the archiving of electronic records. He was a senior research fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine of the University of Oxford, 1993-1996, and a lecturer at the University of Exeter from 1996 to 2000. His early published work was on Victorian domestic service, although he has written widely on the history of censuses and surveys, civil registration, women’s work, the impact of the digital revolution on archives, the information state, and the history of identification. He is mainly interested in British History but with international comparisons, and tries to cover broad themes in early modern, modern and contemporary history. Particular interests include statistical representations of society; social construction of knowledge; state surveillance of the citizen; the impact of communications on state and society; the history of information; and the history of identification. One of his current research interests is the history of identification in Britain over the last 500 years. This is a contribution to the work of an international network of historians active in this field which he has established in conjunction with Professor Jane Caplan of the University of Oxford. Known as IdentiNet, this network is being funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He is also the Co-researcher for the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) Project, which will create an integrated dataset of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1911. For this work Professors Kevin Schürer and Edward Higgs have received one of the largest personal grants ever awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The I-CeM Project will create one of the most important historical datasets in the world, and put British social scientific research, and the University of Essex, at the forefront of international efforts in the field. |
Jim McAloon – Irish immigrants and the middle class in colonial New Zealand 1890-1910
In the last quarter of a century scholars of migration in New Zealand have paid attention to the component nationalities and regions of the (then) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland rather than combining them all under the label ‘British’ or ‘Pakeha’ (an indigenous Maori term for non-Maori or for whites). In 2013 a multi-authored work, Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, was published. Among the themes explored in that work was the fortunes of Scottish migrants in the colonial economy, a topic that was explored by drawing on a large biographical database and in comparison with the English. This paper will extend that work, and hope to move beyond some stereotypes, by discussing the fortunes of the Irish, considering occupational distribution, career paths, and wealth for the Irish in New Zealand.
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Jim McAloon is Associate Professor and Head History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is also President of the New Zealand Historical Association and a member of the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand. He has a wide range of interests in the economic and social history of New Zealand and other places, including settler societies, colonial development, class and history, labour history, migration, twentieth century political history, and Māori land issues. His publications include, with Peter Franks, Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916-2016 (Victoria University Press, 2016); Judgements of all kinds: economic policy-making in New Zealand, 1945-1984 (Victoria University Press, 2013); with Brad Patterson and Tom Brooking, Unpacking the kists: the Scots in New Zealand (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013); No Idle Rich: the Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago 1840-1914 (University of Otago Press, 2002 (winner of the History section in the Montana NZ Book Awards in 2003, and the Archives and Records Association of NZ Ian Wards Prize in 2002); Nelson: a regional history (Cape Catley/Nelson City Council, 1997) (joint winner of the 1999 J M Sherrard Award in Regional History). His current research is on the middle class in colonial New Zealand. |
John M. MacKenzie – Early nineteenth century war and the distinctive Scottish Diaspora
The connection between the Scottish diaspora and the Napoleonic Wars is perfectly represented by the Scots experience at the Cape in southern Africa. Scots were already present in the Dutch colony, mainly as mercenaries, and were highly active in the capture of the Cape in 1895 and again in 1806. From 1815 onwards, Scots at the Cape reveal the extent to which we can indeed identify a separate Scottish diaspora. They played out specific roles, constituting in many cultural and qualitative ways a substantially different experience from that of other migrants from elsewhere in the British Isles. Throughout the Empire, and notably in South Africa, the Scots demonstrated the export of a distinctive Scots civil society, particularly their activities in the press and commerce, as well as in their educational system, legal ideas, the military, Presbyterianism and missions, as well as in environmental professions, many related to intellectual traditions associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. At many social levels, Scots invariably presented different skills sets, which led them to be major players in specific economic sectors. They also created an ethnic associational culture, promoting Scots literary, musical and dance traditions. The cultural consequences of this distinctive stream are still apparent today.
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John M. MacKenzie is Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University where he held the chair of imperial history. He has taught at the University of British Columbia, Wilfrid Laurier University (Ontario), and the universities of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Liverpool. He holds honorary professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Stirling, is an honorary professorial fellow at Edinburgh University and visiting professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was historical consultant for the ‘David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Royal Academy, Edinburgh, in 1997; and for the ‘Victorian Vision’ exhibition at the V&A Museum, London, in 2001. He edited and contributed to the catalogues for both exhibitions. John has made a number of television and radio programmes associated with his specialist interest in the history of the British Empire. His many publications include Propaganda and Empire. The manipulation of British public opinion 1880- 1960 (Manchester University Press, 1984, reprinted 1985, 1988, 1990, 1994, 1997) and The Scots in South Africa (2007). Among his co-edited books are Scotland and the British Empire (2011, with T.M. Devine) and Global Migrations (2016, with Angela McCarthy). |
Bernard Porter – British colonial migration in the 19th century. The Short Route
‘When the British went out colonising in the 19th century it wasn’t only, or even mainly, to the “colonies’”. More settled in the independent USA than in all the remaining British colonies combined, and a significant number made their new homes on the continent of Europe. This has been a relatively unexplored aspect of British colonising history hitherto. The present paper will seek to begin to fill this lacuna, by describing these more neighbourly migrants and the informal little colonies they formed in Europe, and placing them in the context of British migration and imperialism generally. It will also draw out some tentative implications for how modern Britons and others should regard their historic “place in the world”, especially with regard to the present controversy over “Brexit”.’
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Bernard Porter is Emeritus Professor of History from University of Newcastle. He has also taught at the Universities of Hull, Yale, Sydney, Stockholm and Copenhagen. He graduated (MA and PhD) from Cambridge University. His major ‘imperial’ books are Critics of Empire (1968), The Lion’s Share (1975; 6th edn. 2019), The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), and British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (2016). He has also published on the British Secret Services and Victorian Architecture; and contributes to the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and to his own blog: bernardjporter.com. He lives in Hull and in Stockholm. |
Eric Richards – Migration at Extremes
Emigration is usually a matter of connecting far ends together, literally and metaphorically. I start with some tiny islands off the north-west coast of the Scottish Highlands in the mid 19th century, and their sudden evacuations to Australia and Canada. At the opposite extreme is the migration of tens of millions of people between continents throughout that century: the great oceanic migrations of. Europeans who overwhelmed the Americas and Australasia.. The extreme question is how we connect minute evacuations with the huge phenomena of mass international migration: what kinds of explanation can there be?
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Eric Richards is Emeritus Professor of History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and was Carnegie Trust Centenary Professor in Scotland in 2014. His publications include: Britannia’s Children. Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600, (Bloomsbury 2012); Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1900 (Manchester University Press 2008); The Highland Clearances; People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2016). His last book is entitled The Genesis of International Migration: the British Case 1750-1900 (Manchester University Press, 2018). |
Géraldine Vaughan – “Promote Protestant emigration!”: John Dunmore Lang, Religious Immigration and Imperial Identities in the Mid-Victorian era.
The Scots-born Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878) travelled on six separate occasions back to Britain in the mid-nineteenth century to promote his scheme of assisted (Protestant) emigration to New South Wales. As one of the cofounders of the short-lived Australian League (1850) and of several politico-religious periodicals, Dunmore Lang longed for an independent colony and contributed to the imagining of a British-Australian identity. Based on his writings in connection with emigration schemes, this paper will analyze Lang’s anti-Catholic rhetoric, and his influence on the issue in mid-Victorian New South Wales.
| Géraldine Vaughan is Associate Professor in modern British history at the University of Rouen, Normandy, France. She’s a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). Her research focuses on Britishness and anti-Catholicism. In 2013, she published a book on the experience of Irish migrants to Scotland: The “Local” Irish in the West of Scotland, 1851–1921 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
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Colonial and Wartime Migration, 1815-1918 