ABSTRACT
From the point of view of sheer numbers, Irish emigration was the most significant outflow from any European country before 1850. While the famine reinforced and enhanced the exodus from Ireland, it did not start it. Connell (1950a, p. 27) estimated that during 1780–1780 1.75 million Irishmen left their country. Connell’s estimate is at best an informed guess, since usable data for the years before 1815 are unavailable. Adams’s classic work on emigration before the famine (Adams, 1932) allows us, however, to estimate with some accuracy the dimensions of the phenomenon in the three decades between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the famine. Total emigration to North America and the British colonies was estimated by Adams at about 1 million. Fairly reliable data for the years 1825 – 45 show the total number of emigrants to North America in these years to have been about 825,000. 1 In the late 1820s and early 1830s Canada accounted for two-thirds of the emigrants to North America, but after 1835 the USA became the preferred destination, and absorbing almost three-fifths of Irish overseas emigrants. The estimation of the magnitude of the Irish exodus is complicated by a large emigration to Britain. Irish emigrants to Britain were not registered in any port, and it is therefore difficult to form a precise idea on their numbers. The only figure available is the estimate of the British Census of 1841 of the number of persons bom in Ireland residing in Great Britain. The British Census (Great Britain, 1843, Vol. XXIV, p. lxxxix) reported this number as 419,256. Since Irish emigrants lived predominantly in urban and thus high-mortality areas, the number of emigrants to Great Britain almost certainly exceeded 500,000. A lower-bound estimate of total emigration from Ireland between Waterloo and the famine would thus be around 1.5 million, or about 0.7 percent annually. 2
