ABSTRACT
While the general content of imperial migration studies is still broadly divided into ‘settler’ and ‘labour’ migration, reflecting older typologies of colonization and recruitment, there is a recognition that state intervention at the metropolitan and colonial level was an important factor at periods when the development of imperial states was impeded by shortages of manpower. 1 On the whole, the role of the self-governing colonial states, in competition with the United States, is more evident than positive direction from the imperial metropolis for most of the nineteenth century. Colonial land sales policies and regulation of bounty and nomination schemes contrast with the unwillingness of successive British governments to do more than enforce the passenger acts and finance the Colonial Land and Emigration Board, between 1840 and 1878. Between the experiments inspired by Henry Goulburn and Wilmot Horton for Upper Canada and the Cape early in the century, and the drive for imperial migrant preference leading to the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, the initiative lay with colonial governments and a variety of local recruiters. The commissioners of the Emigration Board provided free and assisted passages from colonial land funds for 386,591 emigrants to Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, Natal and the Falkland Islands. 2 But measured against the great waves of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century exodus from Europe totalling some 51 million people between 1846 and 1939, this diversion of British stock to British colonies and self-governing states can hardly be said to have altered the predominant flow to the United States by very much. Only during the last phase of mass European emigration does the flow of British migrants, as well as British capital, show an increased preference for imperial destinations compared to the United States. 3 The empire as a whole took less than a third of British emigrants before 1900, and then increased its annual intake to 68 per cent in 1910 and 78 per cent in 1913. Thereafter, the American Quota Acts of 1921 and the Restriction Acts of 1924 played into the hands of imperial promoters of overseas settlement, though with indifferent results. By the 1930s the presumed ‘complementarity of the emigration needs of European countries and the immigration needs of the New World had been broken’. 4 It was revived as part of the settlement of displaced persons after 1946, but under very different circumstances and patterns of international competition for manpower.
