Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T12:30:57.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - English and Welsh emigrants in the 1880s and 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2009

Get access

Summary

The relatively high rate of emigration from Britain in the 1880s has, not unnaturally, attracted considerable scholarly attention. It used to be a common view, for example, that it was the consequence of an agricultural depression and that the fall in the rate of emigration in the 1890s was because agriculture revived. This issue was examined by Charlotte Erickson in a well-known paper. She was able to show that the majority of British emigrants to the U.S.A. in the 1880s had previously lived in urban areas. She also showed that large numbers of the emigrants were unskilled workers. Professor Erickson's findings suggest that an agricultural depression was not the main cause of the emigration, but they do not prove it. Among other things, we need to know where the emigrants had been born. If the condition of agriculture was related to the rate of emigration we would expect that the number of rural-born emigrants increased in the 1880s and decreased in the 1890s.

The course of emigration in the 1880s is part of a wider issue. We can assume that more people emigrated in the 1880s because the net benefits of emigration were greater in that decade than in other decades. But were these emigrants more likely to have come from those counties from which emigration had been high or from those counties where it had been low?

The answer to this question will provide some important clues about the significance of the flow of information.

Type
Chapter
Information
Migration in a Mature Economy
Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales 1861–1900
, pp. 178 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×