ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century has rightly been called Britain's Imperial Century. One of the recent motives for imperial acquisition argues that the engine of British expansion was the chaotic pluralism of private and sub-imperial interests: religious, commercial, strategic, humanitarian, speculative and migrational. In any case, governments were chary of prescribing emigration as an eligible policy, although the implacable evidence of unprecedentedly rapid population growth, especially in the 1810s and 1820s, made a persuasive case on its own. In prison, Edward Gibbon Wakefield developed his ideas about the value of encouraging emigration both to support under-populated colonies and to reduce over-population in Britain. His favoured method was to sell colonial land and to raise a land tax to fund the transportation of labourers at no charge to themselves. He formed the National Colonisation Society on his release from prison in 1830.
