7 - Assisted emigration

Summary

Emigration was actively promoted by governments, railways and land companies. But only a minority of the emigrants were affected, the great majority paying their own fare. If emigrants were ‘assisted’, they were more likely to be helped by friends and relatives than by outside agencies. A reasonable guess is that about a quarter of the emigrants were helped by friends or relatives and only some 10 per cent were officially assisted.

Emigrants had frequently been discouraged by European governments in the early nineteenth century. Policy was guided by mercantilist principles, which held that labour was a national resource and that the national ‘wealth’ would fall if labour was lost. Even the British banned the emigration of skilled artisans at one time. Prohibitions on emigration were not easy to enforce, however. After some years governments began to see that emigration would be a way of relieving poverty and removing undesirables. They began to promote emigration schemes. By mid century, however, the desire to emigrate in most western European countries was strong and the schemes were abandoned as unnecessary. Government policy then shifted towards protecting the emigrants from exploitation by shipping companies and emigration agents (Norman and Rundblom, 1988, 42–4). British government schemes continued, nevertheless, because they had the additional aim of populating the colonies. Emigrants were to be induced to go to the Empire rather than elsewhere. Between 1846 and 1869, 339,000 emigrants from Britain and Ireland were aided by government schemes, but this was only 7 per cent of all emigrants at that time (Glass and Taylor, 1976, 59–98).