In August 1847, the Virginius reached the quarantine station on Grosse Île, not far from Quebec City. Well over half its 476 passengers – all of them Irish – died either en route or on Grosse Île, mostly from typhus.Footnote ¹ Seven months later, in March 1848, the Arabian arrived in Georgetown, British Guiana. Its 268 passengers were Africans who had been ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy from slave ships, deposited in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and just a few weeks later sent aboard the Arabian for passage across the Atlantic to work as indentured labourers on the Guyanese sugar plantations. Well over a third of them already showed symptoms of dysentery before the ship left Freetown. Within a fortnight of arrival, a fifth of them were either already dead or hovering at death’s door.Footnote ² Nine months later, in December 1848, the Earl Grey ended its trip from Plymouth to Sydney. Its 217 passengers were teenaged Irish orphan girls. In stark contrast with the unlucky passengers of the Virginius and the Arabian, only two of the girls had perished during a much longer voyage. But the Earl Grey’s surgeon-superintendent, Dr Henry Douglas, had tainted the reputations of fifty-six of them, alleging they were violent and disorderly, petty thieves, liars, and prostitutes. Douglas rid himself of them as soon as he could, dropping them off far to the north in Moreton Bay (later Brisbane), where, like the girls who sailed on to Sydney, they were apprenticed as domestic servants.Footnote ³

These three voyages are superficially connected in the misfortune that plagued their passengers – though misfortune turned into disaster in only the first two cases. Those passengers also had in common a prior victimhood. Some of the Irish girls on the Earl Grey had been orphaned by the Famine that the Virginius passengers were trying to escape, while the health of the Arabian’s passengers had been badly compromised by their prior ordeals in the holds of slave ships. Another thing all these passengers had in common was that they were part of an unprecedented wave of emigrants roaming the globe at mid century. This vast movement of mostly poor emigrants, an outsized number of them Britons or British imperial subjects, was a new phenomenon. A final thing these humble emigrants had in common was that they were shipped across vast expanses of ocean through the agency of the British imperial state. This was a state that aimed to turn them into workers who could make a more ‘productive’ contribution to the globalising economy it sought to shape in ways that redounded to British advantage.

Managing Mobility tells the story of the British imperial state’s involvement in the huge mid nineteenth-century migrations around and beyond the burgeoning British Empire. We know that the Empire grew enormously between 1840 and 1860. An era that saw the advent of relative social peace and ‘equipoise’ at home – as the Hungry Forties gave way to the Prosperous FiftiesFootnote ⁴ – was one of remarkable imperial violence and expansion that witnessed rampant annexationism and the ruthless suppression of rebellion in India, two wars against China, and murderous settler expansionism in southern Africa and the Antipodes.Footnote ⁵ By the latter year, Britain was well on its way to ruling over a quarter of the earth’s surface, and more than a quarter of its people. We also know that these decades witnessed an unprecedented movement of people around the Empire and around the world. Over the eighteenth century, half a million people emigrated from the British Isles; between 1815 and 1914, more than 20 million did. The volume of emigrants grew dramatically from the mid century forward. It was the Potato Famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s, killing around a million people and forcing two million more to flee Ireland, that accelerated British emigration from mid century, and made it disproportionately Irish. Of the 50 million or so European emigrants who crossed oceans between 1850 and 1914, a quarter of them were Irish, English, Scottish, or Welsh. Most of those emigrants settled in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and especially the United States, a magnet of opportunity that drew some 60 per cent of the total number.Footnote ⁶ Their volume grew as the century progressed – 216,000 in the 1820s, three times that many in the 1830s, over twice as many again in the 1840s (to almost 1.5 million), almost doubling yet again in the 1850s (to over 2.6 million), and peaking in the 1880s (at over 3.2 million). Well over two million emigrants continued to leave Britain in every decade until the 1930s, when the Great Depression drastically curtailed emigration the world over. More emigrants left Britain than any other European country in every decade from Waterloo to the Wall Street crash – with the sole exception of 1901–10, when more Italians (3,615,000) than Britons (3,150,000) left their home country.Footnote ⁷

We tend to think of the United Kingdom as a nation (like others in the global north) in which the volume of immigrants coming in routinely exceeds the volume of emigrants leaving. Between 1945 and 2000, however, the balance was roughly even, with net immigration exceeding net migration by only 6 per cent (roughly 8.5 million versus 8 million). Moreover, while the United Kingdom is now, on balance, an immigration state, throughout the nineteenth century Britain routinely lost far more residents than it gained. More people likely left Britain in the 1850s alone than the number of foreigners who settled in Britain during the thirteen-plus decades between 1800 and 1945.Footnote ⁸ As the United Kingdom remained the most densely populated and urban country in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, this routine people-shedding provided an unobtrusive but important safety valve that helped to quell Malthusian fears and deserves greater attention as a source of Victorian Britain’s relative stability.Footnote ⁹

While the United States absorbed much of Britain’s Great Emigration, that Emigration also made for the explosive growth of the Empire’s white settler colonies – what James Belich has memorably called the ‘British West’. The settler population of Australia alone, for instance, grew from under 12,000 in 1811 to almost 4 million by 1901 – rising from one-tenth of 1 per cent of the US population in the former year to over 5 per cent of the US population in the later one.Footnote ¹⁰ The United States witnessed remarkable rates of demographic growth well into the twentieth century, in which immigration loomed especially large. But so too did Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa; their combined population reached nearly 40 per cent of that of the United States by 1920 – 24 million versus 62 million.Footnote ¹¹ This settler population explosion of the nineteenth century facilitated, over the span of about three generations, a great land rush that led to the expropriation and exploitation of much of the world’s best arable and pastoral land.Footnote ¹² It was accompanied by chronic warfare with indigenous peoples that often slowed white encroachment – in New Zealand and southern Africa, for instance – while elsewhere it brought catastrophic indigenous population decline through exterminationist violence and the transmission of disease – in Van Diemen’s Land and Queensland, for example.Footnote ¹³

Mass emigration and indigenous death and dispossession were two of the most conspicuous traits of what Martin Daunton calls the ‘first major episode of globalisation’ that began at mid century and only came to an end with the guns of August 1914. They were closely connected to two more – greatly enhanced global trade flows and capital mobility, underwritten by the ‘sound money’ of the gold standard that made the City of London the centre of the financial universe.Footnote ¹⁴ While the British Free Trade regime of the second half of the century created big advantages for colonial primary products like wool and grain, the rapidly growing white settler populations of the ‘British West’ also enjoyed prime access to the City of London capital markets as their economies diversified along with the growth of their populations. By the end of the century, white Australians enjoyed an average standard of living considerably higher than Britons, and not much below that of the richest country in the world – the United States.Footnote ¹⁵

The mass migrations that brought predominantly British white settlers to the United States and to the ‘British West’ were by no means the only ones that started at mid century and gathered pace as the age of sail turned into the age of steam. The whole world was seemingly on the move. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, some 55 million people left Europe, mostly to the Americas. But over the same span of time, at least 50 million migrants from India and South China left their homes – most of them bound for Southeast Asia, though some for Australia and islands throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans, from Mauritius to Fiji – while another 48 million traveled from North China, Russia, Korea, and Japan to Central Asia, Siberia, and Manchuria. All three of these vast migrations gathered pace over the second half of the nineteenth century, and peaked in the 1910s and 1920s. Early on, in the 1850s, there was significant convergence of these vast migrant streams – notably in the movement of over half a million Chinese to the Americas and Australia, most of whom paid their own way to seek economic advantage, and in the third of all Indian overseas migrants in the 1840s and 1850s who moved to destinations far from the Asian mainland, chiefly under contracts of indenture.Footnote ¹⁶ By the early twentieth century, however, racial politics had split in two the European and Asian migration streams. Chinese migration was essentially barred by the white settler colonies and by the United States, as well, while demand for tropical labour shifted away from the sugar estates of the Caribbean to the tea gardens of Assam and Ceylon and the rubber plantations of the Malay Peninsula. Migration from China and India peaked in the decade before the onset of the Great Depression. But by then almost all of it was to the lands of Southeast Asia, which 4.9 million Indians and 3.8 million Chinese entered while another 4 million Indians and 2.9 million Chinese left between 1921 and 1930.Footnote ¹⁷

European and Asian migration were only fully separated – for political as well as economic reasons – at the end of the nineteenth century. But it was already apparent by 1850 that the British Empire was being bifurcated by the emergence of a settler ‘Angloworld’ and a post-Emancipation plantation complex that at first focused on sugar and gradually spread to the production of many other tropical commodities. A temperate zone of white settlement and a tropical zone of Asian plantation labour became two separate and unequal foci of what Freddy Foks has memorably termed the ‘emigration state’ of Victorian Britain and its empire.Footnote ¹⁸ This emigration state was by far the most interventionist in its efforts to save the British Caribbean sugar complex, which was threatened first by emancipation in 1833 and then again, only fifteen years later, by that very state’s imposition of a free-trade regime that obliged West Indian ‘free’ sugar to compete on the open market with sugar produced by enslaved people in Cuba and Brazil. Thus, just as hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing for their lives from Famine Ireland in the late 1840s and early 1850s, ships subsidised by the British imperial state carried 36,000 ‘liberated’ enslaved people from the West Coast of Africa to the British Caribbean. There, it was hoped, they would make up for the labour shortage created when many freed Blacks abandoned sugar work, and at meagre wages that would make ‘free’ sugar more competitive in the world market. But 36,000 Africans were not nearly enough to meet the British Caribbean demand for new sugar workers. So, over the next twenty years, 18,000 Chinese and over 100,000 Indians were shipped halfway round the world to work on the plantations, the latter via an intricate state-supported network.

By the time the indentured-labour regime in Britain’s tropical possessions came to an end after World War I, almost 1.5 million people had been recruited and shipped overseas to destinations within the British Empire. Indentured workers from India accounted for 85 per cent of the total. Over a third of them, some 450,000, traveled to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, which, like its Caribbean counterparts British Guiana and Trinidad, was a valuable sugar colony ceded to the victorious British during the great wars with France (and its sometime allies Spain and the Netherlands) at the turn of the eighteenth century. But 490,000 more went to the British Caribbean, the prime destination for Indian indentured workers by the mid 1860s. Seventy-one per cent of them travelled to British Guiana and Trinidad. Under 7 per cent went to Jamaica, the pre-Emancipation leader in British colonial sugar production that (for political and financial as well as agricultural reasons) was unable to bring in enough indentured labourers to work its depleted soil and compete with the newer West Indian sugar-cane territories. As the British imperial sugar belt gradually extended to span the globe, moreover, indentured workers followed – to the newer sugar estates of Natal and Fiji (and also many foreign sugar territories such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Dutch Guiana), as well as the rubber plantations and tin mines of Malaya, and the railroads and gold mines of the Transvaal.Footnote ¹⁹

It is important to note that state-sponsored Indian indentured migration came to only a small fraction of the massive internal Asian migration that was happening simultaneously. More people moved from (mostly south) India to work the tea plantations in Ceylon in the century after 1848 than traveled to the British Caribbean over the entire history of indentured migration, and far more still traveled to Burma to gather the rice harvest over roughly the same period. These tea and rice workers, moreover, did not generally travel on indentured contracts, but under the kangany debt-peonage system that was far more common than indenture in the inner-Asian labour migration networks.Footnote ²⁰ Admittedly, state-sponsored indentured labour migration counted for only a modest percentage of overall Indian labour migration. Nevertheless, recruiting and moving 1.5 million workers from India to the other side of the world, and closely supervising the terms of their labour, was a remarkable feat of ‘imperial resource allocation’Footnote ²¹ for a Victorian British state – and its auxiliaries in India and the West Indian colonies – whose reach and powers were modest by post-1914 standards. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, this labour-allocation system evolved into what Radhika Mongia has vividly termed ‘a massive, micromanaged, state-controlled enterprise’ which, through a ‘continual process of accretion’, produced a ‘gargantuan machinery of techniques and technologies to manage every aspect of Indian indentured emigration’.Footnote ²²

Just as indentured migration was becoming a conspicuous fact of Caribbean life, the British imperial state and its antipodean counterparts played a similarly outsized role in the growth of the free white settler population in the Australian colonies. There were almost two and half times as many settler Australians in 1850 (405,000) as there had been in 1840, and nearly three times as many in 1860 (1,145,000) as there had been in 1850. The majority of Australian immigrants in these decades relied on government support to pay for the lengthy and expensive trip. So too, of course, had the British convicts who had preceded them to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land over the previous sixty years. Without convict transportation – and the statist bureaucratic and penal infrastructure that made convict transportation possible – the Anglo settlement of Australia, some 12,000 miles away from the British Isles, would have been inconceivable. Still, in a mere twenty years, between 1831 and 1851, ten thousand more free immigrants arrived in the Australian colonies than the total number of convicts who landed there over the entire seventy-year span of the transportation system (170,000 versus 160,000). The fares of over two-thirds of those free immigrants were subsidised from public funds.Footnote ²³ It is true that, for brief stretches thereafter, the percentage of British immigrants who fully paid their own way to Australia exceeded the percentage of those whose ways were publicly subsidised – spectacularly so during the gold rush of the early 1850s. The number of British immigrants who were lured into Victoria’s gold fields in 1852–53 alone, for instance, exceeded the grand total of all convicts who had preceded them to the southeastern corner of Australia. Nevertheless, government subsidies remained crucial in sustaining the flow of ultra long-distance emigrants to Australia. Over the entire span of the nineteenth century, subsidised passengers accounted for close to half of the 1.6 million people – ten times the total number of transported convicts – who made their way freely to Australia.Footnote ²⁴

The indentured migration of hundreds of thousands of Indians to the British Caribbean and the state-subsidised migration of hundreds of thousands of free Britons to Australia were, for their time, remarkably ambitious projects in social engineering. They would have been unthinkable without the sort of deep, broad, and sustained intervention that we do not typically associate with the early to mid Victorian state. Indeed, the two decades between 1840 and 1860 saw the heyday of a minimal British state that sought to legitimate itself through a staunch commitment to laissez-faire – drastically lowering taxes and spending, promoting free trade, and in other ways making itself deliberately less palpable to Britons at home. In keeping with these premises, it is generally taken for granted that the British state had precious little directly to do with the movement of British subjects round the world in these decades. Thus, for instance, the eminent migration historian Eric Richards asserts that the most important point about nineteenth-century emigration was ‘its sheer spontaneity. It happened outside government control and beyond contemporary understanding. It was atomistic. Millions of people departed with astonishingly little framework or ideology’.Footnote ²⁵

There is much truth in this assessment, and it closely jibes with what is by now a well-established historical narrative of Victorian mass migration in which the role of government was modest and limited. In simplest terms, the story goes like this. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British government, like its continental counterparts, took a mercantilist view of immigration: a nation’s people was a valuable resource that needed to be held on to no less than other forms of national wealth such as gold, so (admittedly not always effective) legal obstacles to their free exit were the norm in Britain as elsewhere. But decennial headcounts showed the British population growing at the unprecedented and alarming rate of 2 per cent per year between 1801 and 1821. Thanks to this explosive growth it was first in Britain that mercantilism gave way to Malthusianism, and that the authorities first made what would gradually become a more widespread European shift ‘from wanting to hoard bodies to wanting to shovel them out’, as Nancy L. Green has vividly put it.Footnote ²⁶ ‘Exit’ via emigration seemed to offer one promising way of escaping the Malthusian trap of grinding poverty driven by overpopulation. Thus, in 1824 the British government led Europe in eliminating all legal impediments to emigration.Footnote ²⁷ It also bankrolled a half-dozen migration experiments, chiefly orchestrated by Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office for most of the 1820s, who viewed emigration as a potentially valuable weapon in the fight against overpopulation at home.

Wilmot-Horton’s projects were modest in scale. All told, they cost £175,000 of public money, sent 10,500 humble Irish, Scottish, and English migrants overseas – mostly to Upper Canada, but also to the Cape – and furnished small land grants to some of them. This was a significant departure from the discouraging approach that the British imperial state had hitherto taken to immigration. But, at a time when postwar retrenchment and cheap government were the orders of the day,Footnote ²⁸ there was little enthusiasm for the state to commit taxpayer money to a burgeoning migration, overwhelmingly to the United States, that most emigrants were willing to pay for themselves.Footnote ²⁹ Between 1826 and 1830, an average of over 30,000 Britons annually found the means to emigrate, while the British Treasury spent not a penny on emigration.Footnote ³⁰ It devoted precious little of British taxpayers’ money to emigration thereafter. Indeed, Wilmot-Horton’s modest emigration schemes were the most expensive state-subsidised schemes of the nineteenth century. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act permitted Boards of Guardians to use rate money to promote emigration. But the nearly 26,000 poor people who left the British Isles through this mechanism before 1860 were but a tiny fraction of the total emigrant cohort, and Poor Law emigration slowed down considerably thereafter as colonial and metropolitan opinion alike increasingly condemned it as a mere ‘shoveling-out’ of paupers. Many charitable organisations dabbled in subsidised emigration in the second half of the century. But the overwhelming majority of emigrants continued to rely exclusively on their own resources to exit Britain, and chiefly on remittances sent back home by family members who had preceded them overseas – mainly to the United States, which as late as the 1890s was still drawing over two-thirds of all British emigrants. The only assistance any of them received from the British government came in the form of guides and handbooks produced by a two-man Emigrants’ Information Office that was budgeted within the Colonial Office and only set up in 1886.

British emigration reached its peak in the first two decades of the twentieth century, cresting at almost 400,000 in 1913 alone, and the settler colonies of Canada, Australasia, and South Africa finally started absorbing more British emigrants than the United States. But it was only during the slump after the Great War that the British government finally started devoting anything more than a pittance to subsidised emigration. Within five years of the enactment of the landmark Empire Settlement Act of 1922, some quarter of a million Britons had received public financial support for their outbound journeys to the settler colonies – the majority of British emigrants who left the United Kingdom in these years. The onset of depression greatly reduced migration from Britain as from all countries after 1929. But the British imperial government still managed to spend over £6 million on emigration between the wars – roughly ten times more than it had spent on emigration over the whole span of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³¹

Measured chiefly in terms of public spending, then, Britain’s ‘emigration state’ was a twentieth-century phenomenon. Still, the minuscule sum of British taxpayer money that the mid Victorian state devoted to emigration is by no means the only way to understand its people-moving priorities. This book’s main argument is that there was indeed an ideological framework to that state’s relationship with the massive global migrations that gathered momentum between 1840 and 1860. These migrations involved the ostensibly minimal mid Victorian imperial state in significant projects of social engineering that had deeply ambivalent moral consequences. The ‘spontaneous’ Irish Famine emigration exemplified in the nightmare voyage of the Virginius implicated that state in mass death while showing its commitment to convert the Irish countryside from a subsistence economy of peasants and potatoes to an export economy of cattle and sheep. The end of convict emigration in the late 1840s highlighted the imperial state’s failure to preserve a penal regime that had been the making of white Australia, but that Australian settlers now damned as an unacceptably corrosive influence on respectable antipodean society. The emigration scheme that sent the Earl Grey’s orphaned passengers to Sydney in 1848 highlighted a dramatic reversal in emigration policy – the imperial government’s new commitment to transforming Australia from a set of convict colonies to conspicuously moral colonies of free white settlers in which the ratio of women to men would be brought into more virtuous equilibrium. But it also led to charges that the imperial state was dumping immoral paupers on its most promising colonies. The emigration of ‘freed’ enslaved people from West Africa to Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana in the late 1840s, including those aboard the Arabian, showed the British imperial state’s commitment to saving plantation society in the British Caribbean from the twin threats posed by slave emancipation and free trade in sugar. The rise of Indian indentured immigration in the early 1850s showed that state’s willingness to embark on a massive labour scheme to revive the sugar complex in the British Caribbean that tarnished its anti-slavery credentials by subordinating the interests of Brown workers to those of white planters.

Historians of the Victorian empire have tended to focus on the transmission of goods, wealth, and ideas, while historians of Victorian migration have tended to focus on the ‘spontaneous’ movement of people through physical space, largely outside of ideological frameworks. But the transmission of people was an important concern of imperial and colonial statesmen alike in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Hence the imperial state was deeply involved in projects that moved people across vast distances in order to meet ideological objectives. One such objective was to make the Caribbean safe for the sugar monoculture by bringing in a non-slave but distinctly unfree Black and Brown workforce. Another was to make Australia a virtuous zone of white settlement marked by political autonomy and a diversifying economy. Yet another was to thwart peasant alternatives to staple production in places as varied as Ireland, Trinidad, and Sierra Leone. These ideological objectives reflected growing British pessimism about the improvability of the Empire’s non-white subjects. British racism for the time being remained more cultural and historicist than explicitly biological. But imperial statesmen came to assume that the timescale for the ‘improvement’ of non-white peoples was much longer than their abolitionist predecessors had tended to believe.Footnote ³² Accordingly, this new generation of statesmen strongly felt that the gradual ‘civilisation’ of the Empire’s subject peoples could best be achieved by putting them to use as producers of tropical goods which had value in a global commodities market that disproportionately favoured Britain. In this sense, they felt that the imperial state’s involvement in immigration schemes could help to legitimate the Empire even to its non-white subjects.

Prejudice, of course, produces axiomatic assumptions. A favoured axiom of British and colonial authorities alike was that the wretched of the earth were far better off as manual workers contributing to a globalising economy in some tangible way than they were as peasants whose independence (they also assumed) merely meant the freedom to remain forever poor and too often starving. So the Empire was actually doing them a big favour, these authorities condescendingly reasoned, by moving them from the Gangetic plain to British Guiana, or from Sierra Leone to Trinidad, or from Connacht to Quebec. British imperial statesmen likewise sought to legitimate the Empire to discontented colonists from Trinidad to Tasmania by subsidising immigration schemes designed to supply those colonists with the kind of workers they demanded – though the immigrants thus provided often fell short of inflated colonial expectations. Finally, mid century immigration schemes sought to legitimate the Empire to Britons of all ranks at home by providing them with cheaper sugar and other commodities from its tropical zones and more wool and gold from the temperate regions of the Antipodes. Those temperate regions, of course, also conveniently doubled as ‘civilised’ places of white settlement to which Britons in search of a better life might consider emigrating themselves.

Managing Mobility takes advantage of much excellent recent work on the lived experience of mid nineteenth-century migrants and on the complicated relationship between the British metropole and British colonies better to understand the character of imperialism and the imperial state. Migration policy provides but one of many instances in which the ostensibly moral foundations of the mid Victorian state ‘at home’ led to dubious moral consequences within what John Darwin has dubbed the ‘British world system’.Footnote ³³ Those foundations were laissez-faire or a reluctance (albeit a reluctance often overcome) to interfere with property rights and market relations,Footnote ³⁴ ‘cheap government’,Footnote ³⁵ free trade,Footnote ³⁶ and ‘good government’,Footnote ³⁷ or rational standards of administrative efficiency and disinterestedness.Footnote ³⁸ Each of these shibboleths, institutionalised within the Victorian state, carried a potent moral charge that was supposed to free the autonomous British subject from the oppressions of the unenlightened past. Laissez-faire was supposed to save the subject from misbegotten paternalism, ‘cheap government’ from the hugely expensive and maldistributive late-Georgian fiscal-military state, free trade from a protectionist system that favoured narrow, privileged interests at the expence of everyone else, and ‘good government’ from aristocratic jobbery and political favouritism.

These metropolitan shibboleths, however, generated troubling moral outcomes as they radiated round the globe. As the fiscal-military state gave way to ‘cheap government’ at home, for instance, it was greatly built up in India. The perceived depredations of the Indian fiscal-military state were a prime cause of the 1857 Rebellion. That Rebellion was put down by massive violence, and the habitual use of Indian soldiers for imperial expansion and policing thereafter shifted much of the cost of empire from affluent British to very poor Indian taxpayers.Footnote ³⁹ Free trade undermined the sugar economy of the British Caribbean,Footnote ⁴⁰ exacerbated devastating famines in Ireland in the 1840s and India in the 1870s and 1890s,Footnote ⁴¹ and became the chief rationale for two particularly sordid wars with China that were (paradoxically) fought in support of the Indian government’s lucrative monopoly of the opium trade.Footnote ⁴² ‘Good government’ as translated into innumerable colonial settings meant rule by a small handful of white Britons over enormous numbers of Brown and Black people who were deemed unfit to govern themselves.Footnote ⁴³ Thus did political values that had legitimated the British state ‘at home’ by 1850 become denatured and even corrupted in colonial contexts.

The troubling but mutually constitutive relationship between liberalism and empire is now far better understood than it was a scholarly generation ago.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nevertheless, much still remains to be explored about how these foundational Victorian values got twisted out of shape as they circulated round the empire, and Managing Mobility seeks to promote that understanding. In the migration cases examined here, laissez-faire led to morally questionable consequences in very different corners of the globe at almost precisely the same time, whether laissez-faire was honoured in the breach or in the observance. And it was often honoured in the breach. Indeed, the rhetorical triumph of laissez-faire tended to mask the extent to which government intervention simply shifted from tariffs to migration subsidies in the 1850s. In reality, the effort to advance a global system of commodity exchange from which metropolitan Britain would chiefly benefit prompted the imperial state to steer poor white, Brown, and Black people from one end of the earth to the other. In the effort to advance that system – to create an ostensibly ‘natural’ global economic order – the minimal state committed itself to remarkably ambitious social-engineering projects that sought to mobilise and direct labour to where it was (supposedly) most needed.

The scale of those ambitions was the more remarkable because the job of carrying out and coordinating them centrally fell to a tiny handful of men. The imperial state’s interventions in migration were restricted to a few administrative offices – the Foreign Office to some extent, but chiefly the War and Colonies Office, a compact administrative unit that was not even divided into two separate War and Colonial offices until 1854. Most of the day-to-day central management of migration issues was handled by the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, his undersecretaries, and a three-man unit established in 1840 – the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (CLEC). Much of the human traffic floating round the world’s greatest empire was launched on an endless stream of papers that flowed from their cramped offices on Park Street in Westminster. Over its thirty-year existence, the CLEC was responsible for the recruitment of over 340,000 British and Irish emigrants, mostly to Australia, and for arranging the details of their passage – all of this through its handling of nearly £5 million from colonial land sales. It was also responsible for the central oversight of the recruitment and migration of tens of thousands of African, Chinese, and Portuguese Madeiran and (in coordination with the Government of India) hundreds of thousands of Indian workers to Britain’s sugar colonies. It was even tangentially involved – in partnership with the Home Office – in the passage of British and Irish convicts to the Australian colonies in the waning years of the transportation regime.

Thus, it was a few statesmen and administrators who sought to ship hundreds of thousands of migrants the wide world over to meet the ends they deemed most profitable for Britain. Chief among them in this era was Henry George, third Earl Grey, son of the ‘father’ of the Great Reform Act and Colonial Secretary during the full span of Lord John Russell’s Whig-Liberal government of 1846–52. A keen student of political economy who had studied under J. R. McCulloch, Grey was as staunch a proponent of hard work as he was of laissez-faire and of the British Empire as a force for what he deemed the advancement of civilisation throughout the world. As an undersecretary at the Colonial Office in the early 1830s he worked closely with the legendarily hard-working permanent undersecretary James Stephen, and shared Stephen’s devotion to duty if not his evangelicalism. The long-serving senior clerk Sir Henry Taylor deemed Grey ‘the most laborious, able, public-spirited, & honest-minded of the eleven secretaries of state for whom I have served’Footnote ⁴⁵ – indeed, so hard-working and micromanaging that it helped provide Taylor with ample time to cultivate his chief reputation as a poet and essayist while at the same time serving as the Colonial Office’s resident expert on the British West Indies.

Grey surrounded himself with men who themselves had served apprenticeships under Stephen in 13 and 14 Downing Street. These were the damp, cramped, and crumbling buildings from which a staff that numbered only twenty-five as late as 1838 sought to administer over thirty colonies by such a routinely immense volume of reading and writing that Stephen could describe a typical day as one ‘diligently enough spent in keeping back the flood of papers from deluging us’.Footnote ⁴⁶ One of those able lieutenants was Herman Merivale, a barrister of such formidable intellect that he was elected to the Professorship of Political Economy at Oxford shortly after turning thirty, parlayed his influential Lectures on the Colonies (first published in 1841) into an appointment as assistant undersecretary of state for the colonies, and succeeded to permanent secretary when Stephen finally retired in 1848.Footnote ⁴⁷ Another was Frederic Rogers, eldest son of a Sussex baronet who, like Merivale, parlayed a brilliant Oxford career into colonial administration – in Rogers’s case as one of the CLEC’s three commissioners, whence, after fifteen years of service, he succeeded Merivale in 1860 as permanent undersecretary in the Colonial Office. A serious Anglican churchman like his Oxford friend William Ewart Gladstone, in 1871 Rogers became the first full-time professional civil servant to be raised to the peerage and to the Privy Council as Baron Blachford.Footnote ⁴⁸

Most notably, there was Thomas Frederick Elliot, who exerted more official influence over emigration than any other public servant at mid century. The youngest son of Hugh Elliot, sometime Governor of the Leeward Islands and of Madras, T. F. Elliot was a member of a titled Scottish family with a long tradition of Whig politics and public service. Family connections secured him a clerkship in the Colonial Office at the tender age of seventeen, but his ability won him rapid promotion thereafter. By his mid-twenties he was already in charge of the Colonial Office’s earliest effort to promote assisted emigration to Australia, and in his early thirties he was appointed, in 1840, as one of the CLEC’s three original commissioners, and promoted to assistant secretary at the Colonial Office in 1847, where he served until his retirement in 1868. The second cousin of Lord John Russell’s second wife, Elliot moved comfortably in the highest ranks of Whig-Liberal society, his home in Belgravia was familiar to London’s more progressive intellectuals, and he counted Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill among his friends.Footnote ⁴⁹

This compact group of bureaucrats were among the ablest to be found at Westminster in the waning days of administrative nepotism prior to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the latter 1850s. While their numbers were very few, through their ideological and even psychological assumptions they committed the imperial state they served to big utopian dreams. Thus, they confidently assumed that British criminals could be turned into productive colonial citizens via the transportation system. They firmly believed that enslaved Africans ‘liberated’ on the high seas could be turned into civilised producers through their relocation from ‘savage’ West Africa to the emancipated West Indies. They staunchly insisted that the horrors of the Famine could transform Ireland from a subsistence potato patch into a high-profit pasture. Finally, they steadfastly affirmed that a proper mix of immigrants, properly controlled, could save the Caribbean sugar islands from degenerating into barbarism.

In this tight cohort of public servants we see a full share of the confidence and righteousness with which nineteenth-century imperialists – European ones generally but British ones most notably – appointed themselves the ‘lords of human kind’.Footnote ⁵⁰ They did manage to meet some of their broader ideological objectives. At the same time, the outsized hopes and dreams of this tiny metropolitan governing elite were often circumscribed and sometimes thwarted by the ambitions and the agency of people ‘out there’ in the Empire. They were partly checked by ‘liberated’ Africans who wanted to cultivate subsistence crops independently in Sierra Leone and not cash crops in quasi-servitude in Trinidad. They were more fully thwarted by the free settlers of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land who no longer wanted a convict workforce. They were sometimes frustrated by indentured Indians who often fled from the sugar plantations, and more fully stymied by a Caribbean planter elite that sought to restrain sugar workers via a highly coercive labour regime that looked uncomfortably unfree to the Colonial Office, but in which the Colonial Office acquiesced. In the stories behind these various migration schemes – the ways in which central ideological imperatives were partly achieved but also limited and even blocked – we see some of the important ways in which the mid century Empire and metropole were messily but tangibly linked.Footnote ⁵¹

The social-engineering projects examined in Managing Mobility – often improvised, usually attenuated, and sometimes subverted though they were – provide another way to understand the most important story about the British Empire in the mid nineteenth century. This is the story of how the mid-Victorians lost their parents’ faith in the improvability of the subject peoples of the Empire, and how (partly in consequence) that empire was split in two between white zones of growing freedom and autonomy and Black and Brown zones of ongoing coercion and subordination.Footnote ⁵² By 1860, the Australian colonies were self-governing, mostly free of convicts under sentence, and increasingly white. Settlers had already killed indigenous peoples to the point of extinction in Tasmania and in broad swathes of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, and kept up the killing as they laid claim to ever more territory in the north and the west of the continent. Restrictive legislation was already imposing limits on Asian immigration in these nascent days of ‘White Australia’. The gender ratio within the white population was slowly inching towards parity. Australia’s contribution to the global commodities market was broadening and deepening beyond wool and gold. Britons, who for many decades had thought of Australia as a place of shame and degradation, as an open prison, now felt it had joined the vanguard of civilisation.

Britons had long thought of Ireland – peasant, Catholic Ireland, at least – as only marginally less backward and degraded than convict Australia. But many of them felt that the providential visitation of the Famine had ‘civilised’ Ireland by ridding it of unproductive cottiers (i.e., the large class of peasants typically farming half an acre or less, at a correspondingly modest rent), thinning out the land for the cattle and sheep that had much greater market value. It was true that most of the Irish emigrants who were lucky enough to escape death forsook the Empire for America. But once Irish immigrants became railroad navvies or canal diggers in the United States, British observers felt they were now contributing to the advancement of global commerce in a way they never could have done as subsistence potato farmers in Munster or Connacht.

As for the West Indies, the British assumption remained that its only path to eventual civilisation was to continue to be what it had already long been – a sugar monoculture ruled by white planters and worked by Black and (increasingly) Brown labourers. In Britain itself, emancipation was a badge of national honour, but also a source of potent disappointment. By 1860, many observers had come to think that the ‘Mighty Experiment’ of abolition had failed because freed slaves had forsaken the plantation for subsistence agriculture. Jamaica, they concluded, had never recovered from the Black flight from the sugar estates, and the assertion of Black autonomy there was murderously beaten down in the suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. But Trinidad and British Guiana marked a more hopeful tale in British eyes. There, the influx of indentured Indian workers saved the sugar complex. While the overwhelming preponderance of men among Indian immigrants remained a source of official anxiety, those men were brought to heel by an indenture regime that became more not less coercive over the third quarter of the nineteenth century. British observers even came to see the global spread of that regime as offering a modest but convenient pressure valve for famine and rebellion in British India itself. Thus, the immigration tales featured in Managing Mobility provide another means of understanding the bifurcation of the empire at mid-century.