Emigration from Europe to Colonial Destinations: Some Nineteenth-Century Australian and South African perspectives

Abstract

In a seminal paper published nearly forty years ago, Frank Thistlethwaite argued that the migration process ought to be liberated from the stereotypical historiographical tradition. This tradition offered a homogeneous image of undifferentiated waves of uprooted peasants and artisans suffering from epidemics of emigration fever during times of crisis. Instead, he argued, a close study of the individual or group experience of emigrants from particular regions, to specific destinations, would reveal a great deal about the motives, characteristics and pathways of people participating in highly distinctive movements. Thus, emigration might be seen not as a phenomenon in its own right, but as an aspect of a process that stimulated the seasonal circulatory movements of specific occupational groups not only within Europe, but extending outwards around the Mediterranean basin and often culminating in a circular navigation of the ‘Atlantic lake’. For millions of European workers, a natural extension of this ‘proletariat globetrotting’ was an individually-organized one-way voyage to the New World.