Emigration And The Labouring Poor

Robin Haines has analysed the origins, occupations, literacy, and mobilization of emigrants recruited in the UK on behalf of colonial legislatures. Her exploration of strict selection procedures shows that the symbiosis between the clergy, empire-minded philanthropic societies, and parishes, which combined to fund the emigrants' considerable pre-departure expenses, increased the opportunities for underemployed rural and domestic workers during an era of farm rationalization and industrial restructuring. Although poor, hybrid state and private funding enabled them to relocate to Australia where their skills were in demand.

Robin Haines has analysed the origins, occupations, literacy, and mobilization of emigrants recruited in the UK on behalf of colonial legislatures. Her exploration of strict selection procedures shows that the symbiosis between the clergy, empire-minded philanthropic societies, and parishes, which combined to fund the emigrants' considerable pre-departure expenses, increased the opportunities for underemployed rural and domestic workers during an era of farm rationalization and industrial restructuring. Although poor, hybrid state and private funding enabled them to relocate to Australia where their skills were in demand.

This dissertation, employing analytical models and methodologies ispired by the 'New Imperial History', the 'British World' model, post-colonial theory, and transnationalism seeks to understand why and under what circumstances Canada restricted charitable emigration from East London by 1910. It examines how British charities, politicans, commentators, and, above all, emigrants developed and experienced an imperial discourse and practice of assisted emigration over the course of six decades under ever-changing economic circumstances at home. Overall, it argues that British emigration charities, under the mounting pressures of poverty at home and spurred on by liberal and imperial reformist attitudes, rarely heeded Canadian warnings about the sending out of poor urban immigrants from East London even though they were English. Instead, these emigrationists developed a system of assisted emigration that largely suited their own objectives of poverty management. East End emigrants experienced this system with varying degrees of success, failure, beneft, and harm. The dissertation explores their experiences in two case studies in addition to three chapters on the evolution of assisted emigration discourses and practices in the East End. In placing assisted emigration of the urban poor from East London at the centre of a discussion of late nineteenth and early twentieth century intra-imperial responses to poverty, this dissertation reveals a complex interplay between social welfare, liberalism, and migration in two disparate but connected parts of the 'British World, ' home and abroad. In doing so it fosters a deeper understanding of the evolution of colonial immigration policy and complicates the limits of race and class for studies of English emigration.