English Emigration, Kinship and the Recruitment Process: Migration from Melbourn in Cambridgeshire to Melbourne in Victoria in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

There are still comparatively few investigations which look, in detail, at who the rural English emigrants of the nineteenth century were, the villages and communities they came from, and the rural kinship and recruitment networks which supported their decision. Deficiencies in the published statistical returns, and the fact that good historical data about the English is mainly concerned with the first half of the nineteenth century, have not helped further emigration research. This has led to the situation whereby English emigration has been largely disregarded by some historians or, because British governments were initially preoccupied with emigration as a means of relieving distress, interpretations have tended to rest, precariously, on generalisations that English emigration was the product of economic dislocation. The dearth of historical studies is most striking if we note that, between 1853 and 1930, the English contributed over nine million emigrants to the European diaspora, that numerically they dominated Britain's non-Irish (English, Scottish and Welsh) emigration to most of the destinations available to them, and that the English have proved to be some of the most mobile and persistent of all international migrants.

Canwick (Lincolnshire) and Melbourn (Cambridgeshire) in Comparative Perspective within the Open-Closed Village Model

“…There was a total of 181 known emigrants to various countries during the late 1830s to 1866. 8 There must have also been much net loss by migration to other parts of the country after 1851, as population peaked in that year.…”