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Sending out Ireland's Poor: Assisted Emigration to North America in the Nineteenth Century

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXI; Issue: 490 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cej093

1477-4534

David Fitzpatrick,

Irish and British Studies

Sending out Ireland's Poor: Assisted Emigration to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by Gerard Moran (Dublin: Four Courts P., 2004; pp. 252. £55). Most theorists draw a sharp distinction between individual migration and projects organised by bodies such as state agencies, churches, landlords, and philanthropists. Self-financed individual migrants are usually pictured as economic man or woman, responding rationally to superior opportunities elsewhere and so promoting the economist's goal of convergence by supplying excess labour to regions of greater demand. In contrast, interventions by élites or the state interfere with freedom of movement by using migration as a tool for social engineering. Such interventions include restrictions on inward or outward movement, expulsion of unwanted subgroups, colonisation schemes, and subsidies for the migration of groups defined by sex, age, occupation, religion, or family status. Gerard Moran's painstaking study of ninetenth-century Ireland concentrates on the ambitious but ultimately impracticable project of solving Irish poverty and backwardness through the systematic displacement of rural Ireland's ‘surplus’ population to the New World. If whole households rather than surplus children could be transplanted from congested districts or estates, then emigration might serve as a cure rather than a panacea. Both private and official proponents of systematic emigration maintained that this project would simultaneously benefit senders, goers, and stayers. Irish parasites would be transformed into nation-builders in North America or Australasia, while the residual population would flourish in the absence of crippling poverty, crime, and under-investment. Assisted movement and resultant ‘chain migration’ would accelerate economic convergence by facilitating ‘rational’ migration by those with the desire and the need but not the wherewithal. Admittedly, the primary economic rationale was that of the sponsor rather than the migrants themselves, creating a potential conflict of interest between landlord and dispossessed sub-tenant, or between state and pauper. For most nationalist and Catholic commentators, assisted emigration was a cloak for expropriation and the lofty utterances of its proponents masked self-interest. Those who accepted subsidies were exiles faced with Hobson's choice, often left to flounder unaided after the voyage while propagandists flourished misleading letters and reports purporting to prove their happiness and success abroad. Moran tentatively suggests at the outset that those receiving such assistance were indeed a distinctive sub-group of reluctant, dysfunctional migrants amidst the millions trying to make the most of their perceived opportunities (p. 15). Yet he concludes rather lamely that they constituted ‘a group whose journey and settlement in North America was every bit as daunting and traumatic as those of the ordinary Irish emigrant’ (p. 223). Much of his evidence, drawn mainly from familiar sources such as parliamentary papers and estate records, confirms the local popularity of assistance schemes, the methodical and occasionally lavish organisation of some major projects, the retrospective satisfaction expressed by many recipients, and the economic benefits for the home estate and community. In practice, as Moran confirms, the human pawns in projects affecting nineteenth-century Ireland often confounded their original objectives. In the absence of compulsion, schemes sponsored by official or private bodies could only recruit those already disposed to migrate, this disposition being fuelled by the same rational motives that impelled unassisted migrants. Candidates became adept at exploiting the rules, faking qualifications, and taking control of the selection process from officials, landlords, and agents. Ambitious projects such as the voluntary removal of 2,000 residents from the Shirley estate in Monaghan, before and during the Great Famine, were ‘tenant-driven’ (p. 59). Moran's thorough synthesis indicates that previous studies have somewhat understated the scale of private assistance. Yet only about 100,000 emigrants of the Famine era received even minor subsidies from landlords, less than three per cent of the total outflow from 1835 to 1855 (p. 36). His upper-bound estimate for all forms of ‘full or partial assistance to North America’ during the century is 300,000 (p. 14), similar to the number helped out to the Australian colonies through a combination of public and private assistance. Since emigration amounted to about eight million, it is obvious that the project of systematic assistance failed to take off. The continuing achievement of millions of poor Irishmen and women in escaping Ireland without organised help, and often making better elsewhere, was a triumph of will and mother wit over intimidating obstacles of poverty, ignorance, disorganisation, and discomfort. It also undermined the political and economic appeal of planned migration by offering a far cheaper and less controversial alternative on a scale undreamt of by planners. The general impression that most emigrants eventually made something of their life elsewhere reinforced the dominant belief that migration should be left to market forces, with only occasional injections of state or private money to clear bottlenecks. The story of assisted emigration, though fascinating in its pretensions and probably responsible for certain regional disparities in development, is marginal to the history of Irish emigration. It also confirms the limited power of British governments and Irish élites, illustrating the extraordinary capacity of ‘ordinary’ people to make and remould their own history. Moran's monograph avoids such broader speculations, leaving unexplored comparative aspects of Irish planned migration such as the Australasian alternative to North America as a destination, the extent and success of similar schemes in Britain, and the evolution of such projects over time. Even so, by documenting the experiments of Irish social engineers from Peter Robinson in the 1820s to Vere Foster and James Hack Tuke in the 1880s, Moran gives new life to a theme once dominant in Irish and British migration studies but long out of fashion.