ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘the British World’ has been much employed and debated in recent years – though some of that debate has been over how the concept can be defined, and indeed whether it is even useful. For too long imperial historians have lived in a self-imposed ghetto into which many influences from outside have barely penetrated. On the other hand, for their part British historians have remained too England-centric and have not properly taken up J.G.A. Pocock’s 1974 challenge to integrate the rest of the peoples of the home islands and of the British overseas into their accounts. In 1999 Pocock could still beseech us to remember that, ‘There was a British world, both European and oceanic, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it had a history’, which remained to be written. Canada remained the favoured destination for British migrants until about 1870.
