Eric Richards

Emigration from Scotland between the Wars: Opportunity of Exile?

A tradition of emigration agents and activists Highland problems and solutions the Lowland clearances creating Christian colonists evaluating emigration.

The great emigration of 1841: recruitment for New South Wales in British emigration fields.

In 1841 the colony of New South Wales offered an unprecedented number of heavily subsidised passages to British emigrants. It sought specific categories particularly single young women domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The colony preferred English and Scottish rural immigrants....While the influence of the selection criteria as well as local factors was pronounced this paper argues that the recruitment also expressed the changing propensities to emigrate within the regions of the British Isles. In particular it demonstrated the willingness of young Irish women to emigrate where facilities were provided to overcome their poverty. The immigration of 1841 was a turning point for Australia: it was the largest recruitment before the gold rushes of the 1850s and already signaled some of the main characteristics of Australian immigration history. (EXCERPT)

After the Clearances: Evander McIver and the ‘Highland Question’, 1835–73

This article explores how estates in the Scottish Highlands were managed after the clearances. The land system had been radically redrawn, creating consequences that those who inherited the post-clearance world endeavoured to manage. At the centre of the post-clearance Highlands were the estate managers, or factors, who were effectively responsible for the economic and social conditions on their employers’ estates. They controlled the levers of Highland life and faced the realities of the post-clearance order. Prominent among this group was Evander McIver. This article examines McIvers career up to 1873, framed by a discussion of the ‘Highland Question’ of how estates reacted to the continuing poverty and occasional destitution of their small tenants, or crofters. McIver held adamant views on this question, and the origins and expression of these views through his career are delineated in this article.

An Australian map of British and Irish literacy in 1841

This contribution to the study of the literacy transition in Britain, Ireland, and Australia also touches on the relationship between literacy and international migration. Some 20,000 emigrants arrived in Australia in 1841 and their literacy is here established at the individual level, and then related to regional origins, occupations, religion, sex, and family status in the British Isles. The new Australian data offer unusual evidence to juxtapose with the prevailing account of British and Irish literacy. The paper makes systematic comparisons of the immigrant evidence with existing literacy findings for the populations of England and Wales, of Ireland, and the colonial population of Australia in the year 1841. The results also show extraordinary similarity of rank orderings between the Australian data and the conventional sources. The results show that the immigrants were consistently more literate than the home and the receiving populations and indicate a substantial link between migration and literacy.

Conflict and stability in Scottish society, 1700-1850 : proceedings of the Scottish Historical Studies Seminar, University of Strathclyde, 1988-89

Between the early 18th and the mid-19th century Scottish society was tranformed by industrialisation, urbanisation and changes in agriculture and rural society. This work challenges the view that this upheaval did not stimulate much unrest and that a modern society developed smoothly.

Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands after 1914: The Later Highland Land Wars

globalized public consciousness’ (6). This culture is ‘diverse’ and ‘contradictory’ (7), but ultimately a consensus builds. There is not much room for contestation, conflict, anticolonialism – reflections of the fissures and margins of German society – and we are left wondering about the relationship between a unifying culture of colonialism among youth and the acrimony and aggression of a divided society. Bowersox acknowledges the anti-colonialism of Social Democracy but chooses not to foreground it. Certainly he underlines the importance of divergent opinion; colonialism develops through ‘negotiations and conflicts’ (211) and that tension extends to the world of Social Democracy. But he would persuade us that – ambivalence, hostility and imaginative transgression notwithstanding – what emerges is a broadly shared colonialist perspective. In the end, even colonialists failed to appreciate the extent to which their worldview penetrated German youth, even as a ‘vaguely defined colonial world became a common, familiar and popular reference point for young Germans across lines of class, gender, region and confession’ (213). The ranks of tens of thousands of young Pathfinders, mostly boys but also some girls, are only the least ambiguous manifestation of this. Scouting – Baden-Powell transposed to a German-colonial imaginative space – was a principal vector of shared youth colonialism, although even here tensions emerged as conservative nationalist critics protested dangerous cosmopolitanism or vulgar exoticism. The troops of young scouts, imagined en masse, provoke the question of generational formation, as does, of course, the category of ‘youth’ in general. Germany circa 1900 was a very young country, dynamic, with a lot of young people. Presumably only an expanded periodization would permit Bowersox to really ask whether and how colonialism was transformative of a generation, to measure its effects in shaping or even defining a generation that would rise to adulthood during and after the First World War. Does it short change a study of youth to look ahead to the men and women they became, to reduce the experience of youth to prelude? Or, conversely, is such a study undercut precisely by excluding a retrospective point of view, explaining a generation by the shared experience of their childhoods? I do not know, but certainly this compelling study invites us to consider the possibilities of continuity and change across thresholds of adulthood and catastrophe in the early twentieth century.

WOrkers for Australia: a profile of british and Irish migrants assisted to New South Wales in 1841

Convict transportation to New South Wales was terminated in 1841. It was swiftly replaced by a new population stock in the form of the greatest Australian immigration before the gold rushes. This profile of 20,000 British and Irish assisted migrants, based on individual-level data, establishes their age, sex, religious, educational and occupational characteristics. Their composition differed markedly from the existing colonial population and other migrant flows at the time. They reflected the recruiting methods of the time as well as the changing migration propensities in the British Isles. The migrants were better human capital than was acknowledged at the time. They constituted a new start in Australian demographic development. This reconstruction of the socio-economic characteristics of the 1841 migrants provides a new mid-century benchmark for systematic comparisons with other migrant populations, within and beyond Australia, and in other periods. It is a contribution to the quantitative study of colonial society.

A very likely merchant of early Sydney

Not a lot is known about James Chisholm, possibly just enough to fill a small entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, though he has not entered those portals. He became a self-made wealthy merchant and landowner in early Sydney. Born in Mid Calder in lowland Scotland in 1772 in modest circumstances, with some local patronage he joined the 29th Regiment of Foot aged sixteen, and in 1790 transferred to the New South Wales Corps, sailing with the Third Fleet to Sydney Cove in 1791. He then led a quiet career in the regiment for two decades, but garnered his income until he was able to start private trading, in liquor and property. He left the regiment and stayed on in the colony, accumulating assets steadily, got married and expanded his commercial interests. There was not much drama in his life, but he built up a nice position in commercial circles, buying land and property. He was connected with the formation of the Savings Bank of New South Wales, and involved in education and linked with J.D. Lang and W.C. Wentworth. He sustained a certain nostalgia for his Scottish roots; he died wealthy, providing a platform upon which his family was able to expand the fortune spectacularly in the following generations. Chisholm’s biographers, a retired animal scientist (and descendant of Chisholm) and a local historian, are determined to rescue their subject from his colonial obscurity. They have produced a celebratory exercise in family history, a model for anyone chasing their quarry through the thickets of genealogical and antiquarian history, each tiny discovery met with a sense of rapture well known among enthusiasts. Chis Maxwell and Alex Pugh demonstrate astonishing energy and ingenuity in their pursuit of James Chisholm, even listing every significant person who crossed his path, however fleetingly, in the colony between 1810 and 1837 (all charted in an appendix running to 22 pages). It is a feat of almost obsessive historical retrieval, an end in itself. The practical problem is that Chisholm left very few useful traces of his life. Even worse, he was barely literate when he left Scotland and, though he picked up better writing skills, he was not much of a correspondent and left no memoir (77). He did write three letters back to his old patrons in Scotland in 1820–25, however, and his biographers pounce on this source to reveal his reverence for the old patriarchal world from which he sprang, as well as the self-satisfaction he felt for his own success in New South Wales.

Quantifying New Zealand’s Scots

Retrieving large immigrant populations from their ‘invisibility’ has been a central task of social historians. Finding the precise composition of the incoming people is the first step towards questions of origin, motivation, ‘human capital’, career paths, and even ‘identity’. One way is to interview them, or to invade their personal correspondence. The trouble is that their numbers are too large, and such documentation too limited, to yield systematic data across wide populations. Pioneer statistical work was begun by the late Charlotte Erickson who used fragmentary shipping lists relating to immigrants arriving in the United States in the nineteenth century. She wanted to categorise, using nominal data, the types of people arriving: whether they were rural or urban, industrial or agrarian, skilled or not, young or old, families or individuals. It was ambitious work because it aimed to say why these people were drawn across the Atlantic, and to demonstrate their fitness for the new country. Erickson became embroiled in controversy about the provenance, typicality, and interpretation of her material. In Canada, Bruce Elliott employed family sources to trace in unrivalled detail the characteristics of migrants from North Tipperary. Australian historians face many disadvantages in this field, with few useable shipping lists and no census data. But the assisted immigrants are better preserved and the records of the convicts offer marvellous material for statistical work. New Zealand has been described as a ‘clean laboratory’ in which to test hypotheses about immigrants. There is indeed a tradition of quantitative research in New Zealand: notably, Rollo Arnold’s analysis of the immigrants of the 1870s, Rosalind McClean’s wellknown Edinburgh thesis, and Erik Olssen’s work on class and occupation, as well as the statistical findings of Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn on immigrants over the longer run. Now Dr Rebecca Lenihan has subjected the Scots of New Zealand (hardly a neglected group) to an extremely detailed analysis designed to provide a ‘profile’ of the incoming immigrants and, even better, to trace their subsequent careers within New Zealand over the decades 1840–1920. The most engaging aspect of Dr Lenihan’s work (much of which is already reported in a companion volume) is the data and methods she employs.

The Poor Relation: a history of Social Sciences in Australia. By Stuart Macintyre

a pre-Maori native race, a mass migration fleet of seven canoes and a secret cult of the so-called supreme god Io. The last of these beliefs represented the apotheosis of Best’s lifelong search for hidden Maori knowledge, combined with his distaste for missionary teachings, and it has proved particularly persistent. Holman especially enjoys challenging current arguments for the cult promulgated by a liberal generation of Pakeha Christian ministers, the sort of people Best would have sneered at. This is a bold book, unafraid to allow the author’s views and voice to be heard amid the welter of his historical sources, yet it resists oversimplifying complex and often poorly recorded events and issues. Holman frequently draws enlightening connections between the historic and the recent, describing, for instance, the syncretic religion of the guerrilla leader Te Kooti as a form of liberation theology. And Holman shares with Jamie Belich a flair for coining vivid historiographic neologisms, referring to the government’s policy of penetrating the Urewera with roads for both civil and military purposes as a ‘Pax Pakeha’. His book is sparsely yet usefully illustrated with archival images and the author’s own competent photographs. These, however, are inserted on text pages rather than in a separate photographic section, a decision that trades topicality for clear reproduction. The core of the book lies in the author’s combing of previously unexplored archival sources, extending to Best’s handwritten notes in copies of influential works in his personal library. In spite of this considerable depth of research, this reviewer could wish that some questions had been investigated even more fully. Tutakangahau was undoubtedly the most important of Best’s Tuhoe informants, but other tribal elders also supplied valuable ethnological material, and we learn almost nothing of them. Best’s years overseas are sketched with frustrating brevity, and his dispute with the law at Te Whaiti, in which Tutakangahau’s formidable wife was prominent, deserves greater attention. These criticisms, however, are muted by my admiration for the author’s ultimate achievement. In May 2010, negotiations for settling the Tuhoe tribe’s Treaty of Waitangi claims were forestalled when New Zealand’s prime minister rejected any restoration of the limited internal autonomy spelled out by Tutakangahau in his 1872 declaration. This disturbingly unilateral action makes Holman’s book more timely than even its author can have foreseen. An adequate understanding of Tuhoe’s claims for the Urewera requires close attention to the historical utterances of its people, the language in which they were expressed and the context in which they appeared. Best of Both Worlds is a cogent and compelling exposition of these principles and a superb example of their practice.