Genesis of International Mass Migration

The mass movement of people between continents is a modern phenomenon with immense political and economic repercussions. Like imperialism and industrialisation, mass emigration affects almost all modern societies; it is one of the great forces in the contemporary world.

The first mass transit of ordinary people began in the British Isles in the late-eighteenth century. There was a great surge in the outflow of emigrants from the 1820s when the British and Irish began to spread in very large numbers into North America and then to Australasia, amongst other places. A transforming Europe followed suit later in the nineteenth century.

Eric Richards argues that this world-wide phenomenon derives from common conditions in modernising societies which were first manifested in the British Isles, critically connecting with the expansion of Empire and of the Anglosphere. Finding the roots of this vast exodus is a great challenge and here a series of localities are investigated to expose the mechanisms of migration. These range from Tipperary to West Sussex, from Montgomeryshire to the Isle of Man, from Shropshire to the West Riding of Yorkshire and up to the Scottish Highlands. The book explains how this exodus affected the re-peopling of North America and Australasia, how Europe came to follow a similar path and how the British case became the model of so much subsequent global movement of human populations.

Richards contends that subterranean changes in British demography and agrarian life were the ultimate sources of the activation of this mass emigration, which eventually involved about 19 million people from the British Isles in the long nineteenth century.