In the 1830s, Britain had no official policy regarding emigration to its colonies, although there was interest due to Malthusian worries about overpopulation. It was not until 1839 that a state office dedicated to emigration was established.¹ In this selection from 1833, we see how Joseph Livesey’s (see Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 2) emphasis on respectability and improvement for the working classes easily encompassed emigration. This article, originally printed in the Leeds Mercury, stresses that workers whose markets were overstocked, such as agricultural labourers, and workers whose skills were in high demand in a new colony, such as builders, should very seriously consider emigration to find employment and good wages. However, the article insists that any worker who could find work in Britain should remain at home, clearly prioritizing the needs of the home country. The main point of the article is to warn emigrants and the British public in general of the many people who would try to take advantage of them with emigration schemes. Some companies and their agents might claim that work was available for all kinds of occupations, misinforming labourers in order to fill their ships and collect commissions. The article reprints advertisements to expose the language they use to trick potential emigrants. One ad declared that over one hundred jobs were available and emphasized the cheapness of food. The article also includes a letter from a correspondent in New South Wales who was interested in warning people of the dishonesty of the advertising claims. This letter challenged assertions about wages. The correspondent indicated that some emigrant tradesmen would most likely succeed because the cost of food and clothing were low. But other trades, like engineers, ‘would starve’.² While focusing on this warning, the article ends by reiterating the benefits of emigration for the groups ‘whose labour was redundant’³ at home but would be welcomed in Britain’s colonies. Multiple emigration schemes for the unemployed would be organized in the later part of the century. Already in the 1830s, however, social reformers like Livesey recognized the colonies’ worth as a potential solution to Britain’s surplus labour but also understood that desperate unemployed workers could be deceived by promises of better lives abroad.

John Crawford (1802–1874), from Paisley, Scotland, founded the New Zealand Land Emigration Society, which obtained large amounts of land in New Zealand and arranged several ships of emigrants to work it.¹ This document, a letter to the British prime minister and members of the government, lays out Crawford’s vision of emigration both as a solution to economic difficulties and a strategy to spread British civilization across the globe.² Crawford sees the problem of unemployed workers as national in scope, calling efforts such as Chartism (see Volume 1 Introduction), charity, and the Poor Law (see Volume 2 Introduction) failures in relieving ‘national distress’. He blames the lack of employment on the growth of the population, the expansion of machinery (see Volume 1 Introduction), and the consolidation of agricultural land. Wealth was concentrated in a few hands, while the masses were starving in a ‘condition worse than slaves’.³ Crawford mentions a General Greene, of the United States, who called on the suffering unemployed of Britain to emigrate to the United States, where they would always find land. Crawford argues that Britain should not support a ‘rival power’ with its labour.⁴ Rather, unemployed Britons should emigrate to the British colonies, bringing together the labour existing at home and the land waiting to be worked upon.⁵ He promotes an emigration scheme through which the home government would issue Colonial Land and Emigration Debentures (an unsecured form of credit) to the colonies, which would be repaid by the revenue raised from the land. Noting that the state had spent millions on the emancipation of enslaved peoples in the West Indies⁶ and the Afghan war (1839–1842),⁷ he asks why emigration was not as worthy a cause. He mentions that some money might be allotted to paying for ‘the free importation from Africa of negro labor’ for the West Indies, suggesting he believed that the islands were not a suitable destination for white emigrant British labour.⁸ Crawford also draws on religious rhetoric, comparing British leaders to Moses, saying it was their responsibility to guide ‘swarms of their unemployed’ out of their house of bondage to more productive and happy lives in the colonies.⁹ He advocates emigration tied to a racialized imperialism, where the emigration of Britain’s ‘Anglo-Saxon children’ was to spread Christianity and civilization.¹⁰ His version of imperialism sees unused lands in the colonies as ‘the inheritance of the working men of Britain’.¹¹ It is important to Crawford to point out that his plan was not partisan; he was a Conservative, but he knew of Chartists who supported his vision. According to Crawford, running the colonies cost about the same thing as running the Poor Law, and emigration would be a better system of welfare. Some worried that emigration ‘means compulsory banishment of the unemployed’,¹² a kind of population control along Malthusian lines. Crawford responds to this criticism by saying that well-planned emigration schemes followed emigrants to their new lands and made sure they were settled in work and in homes. Great Britain, ‘the greatest colonizing power on earth’, he argues, must organise emigration in order to stay ahead of other nations.¹³ The government needed to save the unemployed by investing millions in the structural problem of overstocked labour markets, as it had in other structural problems. Despite his racist and imperialist attitudes, Crawford does not blame the unemployed for their lack of work. He believes the government should take the responsibility for paying for the emigration scheme that will help unemployed workers. These were radical positions for the time.