According to Harriet Martineau, it was in the mid-1820s that emigra-tion, ‘in the modern import of the word, first began seriously to engage the attention of society’. Looking back at the social and financial adjust-ments required by Britain's turn from a war- to a peace-time economy in The History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace: 1816–1846 (1849), Martineau characterises the years 1824–6 as critical ones for Britain's domestic situation, outlining a disturbing ‘spectacle of intoxica-tion and collapse’ fuelled by a major financial crash, poor harvests and rising food prices. Martineau estimates that in 1820 nearly 18,000 British people emigrated to the North American colonies, while 1,063 went to the Cape Colony and 19,000 to the Australian settlements, with the number of emigrants increasing nearly threefold between 1821 and 1826. If, as a neo-Malthusian, she ties emigration more closely to domestic ‘seasons of adversity’ than emigration statistics now support, Martineau is right in suggesting that mass voluntary emigration began to gather force in the 1820s – one million emigrants had left Britain by 1840 and over six million by 1870 – and that the emergence of large-scale Anglo-Saxon settler diasporas in North America, Australasia and southern Africa coincided with a period of almost unprecedented demographic growth and popular unrest within Britain itself.

Other than unsuccessful middle-class attempts to channel radical unrest into campaigns for assisted emigration, there was little direct correlation between emigration and events such as the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. However, state-sponsored emigration schemes in the early 1820s did respond to the domestic upheaval and sense of social crisis Martineau outlines, particularly to rising pauperism, the politicisation of discourses surrounding the taxation of food and the radicalising effects of post-1800 industrialisation. Spearheading the emigration scheme to the inauspicious eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in 1820, as well as organising two waves of voluntary state-sponsored emigration from Ireland to Canada in 1823 and 1825, Robert Wilmot-Horton, under-secretary at the Colonial Office, argued that the British and Irish pauper problem could best be relieved by continuous, planned emigration on a national scale, imagining the transformation of unemployed Britons into productive working-class communities of ‘new world peasant proprietors’ in terms very similar to Robert Owen's Report to the County of New Lanark (1820).