ABSTRACT
The ‘discovery of unemployment’ in the 1880s and 1890s pushed policy makers to look more often to the state for answers to the problem of unemployment, but existing means of addressing the social questions surrounding unemployed workers did not disappear. The sources demonstrate that both labour colonies and emigration were envisioned as ways to restore men to independence by returning them to work on the land, and some reformers believed they had discovered that these projects could turn the once ‘unemployable’ into honest men who adhered to the work imperative that was so central to norms of British masculinity. Growing concerns trade depressions, casual labour, and the numbers of chronically unemployed workers made assisted emigration seem increasingly like a viable and even necessary way to address overpopulation and destitution. The effort to send unemployed workers abroad to colonies in the British empire can in some ways be viewed as an extension of the purpose of domestic labour colonies.
