Emigration to the New Worlds: Migration Systems in the Early Nineteenth Century

Eric Richards

The spirit of immigration is very great. People have got impatient and though you cannot stop the road it is yet in your power to mark the way. (George Washington, 1784)

I

In the great age of international migration most migrants were people of modest means for whom the passage to the new world required substantial sacrifices of income or assets or else a new degree of debt. Before 1800 the most widely used method of emigration was the unambiguous economic system of slavery which was financed by the buyer of slave labour and the mercantile intermediaries. The second method was indenturing where emigrants mortgaged themselves to colonial employers in order to pay for the transatlantic passage. Both of these methods diminished radically in the early nineteenth century, at least in the anglophone world. They were replaced by other means of migration. The immigrant-seeking countries - notably the United States, Canada and Australia - adopted different methods for their respective needs. The general story is dominated by self-financing atomistic migration, comprising families and individuals, 1 mostly going to the United States. This article considers several broad differences between the main theatres of British emigration in the nineteenth century and the way in which their resources, especially land, were mobilised to deliver migrants. It relates to broader debates about the historical evolution of national traditions of immigration.

In 1839 Herman Merivale, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, wrote a synoptic history of European colonisation since 1492.2 He presented a panorama of colonisation over three centuries - an attempt to bring a pattern to the perplexing and kaleidoscopic history of the outreach of Europe into empire since the time of Columbus. During the 1820s and 1830s the public mind in Bridn had been bombarded with controversy about the past, present and future of colonisation, especially as i t related to emigration. Most notable were the increasingly strident and dogmatic voices associated with the “systematic colonisers” - the people invariably connected with the name of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ideologues who sought to m‘ake a science of colonisation.

Empire-making and colonisation seemed to be occurring without direction, pattern or coherent philosophy. The government itself appeared to lack even a supervisory role over the great spontaneous process of emigration which grew at an extraordinary rate in the late 1820s. J. C. Byme, toured the British colonies around the world in the 1830s and 1840s, and was astonished that a vast imperial edifice had been created without conscious design. Britain had become “the great colonising nation of modem times” but this had emerged unplanned and beyond the control of Ihe British government. Britain owed her

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imperial status “not to the wisdom of her statesmen or any great national exertion” but to “individual enterprise, and the energy and perseverance of her soiis”. Britain’s colonial expansion was the consequence of spontaneous and unprotected emigration. Byme saw the emigrants as the neglected vanguard of empire. They were, he said, “abandoned to their own resources, tens of thousands of the lower classes [who] annually seek a home beyond the ocean waters”.’

The intellectual craving for some fonn of patteni by which to understand these extraordinary exoduses from Britain, was the common denorninator of the ideas issuing from the Wakefieldians, aid from Merivale and Byme. This also links them with modem commentators: historians of international migration are still perplexed by the apparent spontaneity, scale, character and timing of the great nineteenth century migrations. The development of British emigration to North America and Australia in the early decades of the nineteenth century was related to the beginnings of an acceleration of migration out of Europe. It was part of what Imr6 Ferenczi called “ProletzTian Mass Migratio~i”,~ the great re-shuffling of the world’s population. The search for historical pattenis in these migratory phenomena, and explanations of differences between them, take many forms. This article considers the mans by which emigrants were channelled to the main destinations of international migration. Generally we have little finn understanding of the dynamics, even the mechanisms, of these demographic movements. A comp,arison of the North American and Australi,an immigration systems offers a novel angle on some of these old problems.

I1

Merivale, in his quest for a patteni in the history of colonisation, decided that it was essentially a story of trial aid error, of experimentation. He pointed out that “During the long period [since Columbus] scarcely a season elapsed which did not cCmy some portion of the enterprising spirits of Westeni Europe to try their fortunes in new colonisation”. It had produced a bewildering series of colonial improvisations. Practically every conceivable form of government and commerce had been put to the test: “Some states granted soil to exclusive companies; some to feudal proprietors, some farmed it out to capitalists, some cultivated it with slaves, and extenninated native races”. This history of experiment had been continuous and repetitive - “Scarcely an experiment in colonisation c,an be suggested by the ingenious speculator of the present day, for which the precedent cannot be found in the colonial history of the sixteenth and seventeenth cent~ries”.~

According to Merivale, nowhere in the historical record of colonial experiment was there a solution to the recurrent problem of all colonies, namely the supply of un-coerced labour: “various modes have been at different times resorted to for keeping up the supply of hired free labourers, which have, in general, proved wholly ineffective.” This, according to Merivale and other colonisation theorists of the time, was the central problem of new colonisation. The most vital consideration in colony-making was the generation of an appropriate supply of migrants flowing from the metropolitan centre to the new colonial territory. This was the crux of much of the public debate throughout the 1820s and 1 8 3 0 ~ ~ It was the intellectual context in which Canada and Australia were taking shape, both adding their share of experimentation to the search for a solution to the problems of coinmunity formation, economic development and, most fUIidamelik~ly, the supply of labour. Merivale, in effect, provided a long historical perspective which emphasised the imperfections of previous colonial experience. Merivale described the contemporary diagnosis of the colonial problem and the much publicised and celebrated solution offered in the early 1830s. This, of course, was associated with the sudden materialisation of Edward Gibbon Wakefield aid his school.

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Wakefield offered a systematic solution to the perennial problem of colony-making, originally in his Letter from Sydney in 1829, and then in further versions over the following three decades. His prescription was drawn primdly from his reading of conditions in Canada (where he drew on Robert Gourlay in p~ t i cu la r )~ and Australia (notably in debt to Wentworth in this case)* and it was intended to govern future policy in both places. Wakefields ideas provided a powerful rationale for government intervention in the outflows of migrants from the British Isles after 1831.

Wakefield‘s theory of colonisation has always been a matter of controversy, in part because he shifted his ground so often, and also because so many of his basic tenets were never tested against the evidence of the world about him. Nor did his sc,andalous personal background and his tzste for synthesising ideas borrowed or stolen from more original thinkers, help his own cause. At the centre of his “system” was the notion that all previous attempts at colonisation (most recently at Swan River in western Australia) had been fatally flawed by their disregard for the essential principle of concentrated settlement which, Wakefield maintained, was the sine 4ua non of any form of civilised community or an effective division of labour. The energies of the colonisers [and the economic effect of their capital were dissipated because the base of the society [and economy was invariably spread too widely by the wasteful and prodigal distribution of land to incoming colonists. His main target was the practice of land granting. Looking back over the history of North American and Australian colonisation, the Wakefieldizuis argued that the key asset of the virgin colonies - their lands - h<ad been granted away in fits of institutional over-generosity. Land granting was corrupt and had subverted the economy of colonial life; it undermined a colony’s ability to develop its basic needs. Scarce labour in newly- settled territories was spread too thinly across too much cheap land.9

The obvious remedy for this universal problem of colonisation was to restrict the distribution of land, to hold settlement in check, to concentrate settlement “scientifically”. This meant the ending of free land grants and the imposition of a “sufficient” selling price for land which would ensure a concentration of settlement and a proper division of labour. A sufficient price required the designation of a minimum price which, in practice and in theory, became an endless bone of contention. The effects would, however, be broad and beneficial. The most fundamental related to the division of labour. Ordinary labour would not gain premature access to land; instead common immigrants would remain for some period as a usable labour force, a colonial proletariat, ‘and would combine adequately with capital and land in the new and much improved colonial equation.

The problem of labour supply was at the centre of the Wakefield science of colonisation. His system was designed to cope with the recurrent problem of colonisation, past and present, that of providing an adequate supply of labour by concentrating the energies of labour in proper combination with the other factors of production. This was the core of his system, ‘and despite the great controversies that gathered around Wakefield‘s schemes, none of his critics questioned the basic assumption that labour shortage was critical in all colonisation. As Merivale re-affrmed, from 1605 to the Swan River enterprise in western Australia in the late 1820s, all colonisation had succeeded or failed, in proportion to its ability to solve the labour problem.

Wakefield’s solution was to restrict land to capitalist investors in order to preserve the incoming labour force as a proletariat. This was the most eye-catching feature of Wakefieldianism and one which gave it considerable theoretical attraction to Marx. Wakefield was probably correct in saying that the labour-supply question was he most important single matter in colonisation. This proposition stands. But the rest of his chain of reasoning was almost certainly wrong. The inadequacy of colonial labour supplies was not primarily a consequence of the lack of concentration of land settlement. The ease of

394 Migrution Systems in the Eurly Nineteenth Century

access to land by the labouring classes was, in reality, never a prime cause of labour shortage. In New South Wales - the subject of Wakefield’s first theorising - labour was short not because of the disposition of land but because the demand for and supply of labour were out of kilter. Demand for labour had grown faster than the local supply, while immigration had been slow to respond. It was not a consequence of the dispersal of labour or because labourers acquired land too quickly, As Buckley pointed out, very few of the labouring classes bought land before 1831. Labour shortages, in any identifiable or practical sense, were not governed by the price of land or by its concentration. hi any case, access to land by ordinary folk was effectively restricted in New South Wales long before Wakefield’s views had any impact on policy. The large capitalists almost always acquired most of the agricultural land; few ordin,ary immigrants became landholders or pastoralists. Changes in land policy associated with the Ripon Regulations in 1831 (which imposed minimum price legislation on colonial land sales) made little difference to this question.10

Hence Wakefield‘s entire system was founded on a misconception, a mis-diagnosis of the central colonial problem. In reality. labour was a problem of the supply and demand for immigrants. Empirically W‘akefield‘s theory made little sense. Added to this was the endless controversy about his prescription of a “sufficient price” of land and the imposition of uniform and minimum prices for land of obviously different qualities. Together these criticisms have led many historians to regard Wakefieldianism as so much hot air. His assumptions arid his interpretation of the colonial experience, were simply wrong.

While Wakefield laboured to produce seriously misguided propositions on land disposal in the empire, tens of thousands of emigrants continued to leave the British Isles for the new worlds. The receiving countries, the LJnited Slates, Canada and Australia, evolved different immigration systems which responded to their specific needs and to the differential impact of Wakefields ideas on the practical business of solving the labour problems, in each place.

I11

Colonisation before 1815 (mainly in the Americas) had demonstrated a wide diversity of solutions to the labour problem. These raiged from the recruitment of native labour to that of slavery by way of enonnous importations of captive people from another continent. Neither of these had been employed in Australia or Cana&i. Corporate emigration, organised by joint stock companies, had also been employed in the earliest days of tr,ansatlantic colot1isation and had encouraged both family and labour migration. But the greatest solution adopted in the first century or so in the North American theatre had been that of the indenturing of white labourers (mainly from the British Isles and the German sates). This, together with slavery, eventually took over the main role of labour supply for about 150 years. Transported convicts were also employed, about 60,000 before the War of Independence, but this was less significant than the other solutions. Neither self-financing free-emigration nor subsidised immigration loomed as large as they became in the nineteenth century. Indeed the recourse to indenture and slavery were both expressions of the relative difficulties of attracting free immigrants to North America before the nineteenth century. In much of tlie eighteenth century the North American colonies also diminished their reliance on net iinmigration by achieving unprecedentedly high levels of demographic reproduction.

The supply market for emigrants was subject to radical change at the tune when Canada and Australia were entering the market for intercontinental supplies of labour.

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The British slave trade had little future after the 1790s; by 1815 indenturing was rapidly ceasing to be the means of migration by which poor venturers from Europe crossed the Atlantic; * employers in Australia attempted to use indenturing and to revive the idea, but its success was poor and sporadic and (with the exception of sugar plantation work in Queensland later in the century) Australia never relied on this mode of labour supply.’* There was little recourse to indenturing in Canada either. Convict emigration was vital - indeed the original ruison d’etre - in the Fist fifty years of Australian colonisation. But by 1830 it was no longer, on its own, adequate to the needs of New South Wales and was far less important in the next twenty-five years; South Australia, established from 1836, set its face against convictism altogether.

It was during the 1820s that the questions of who should emigrate, and to which destinations, began to exercise British public attention as never before. Once it was accepted that emigration was in the interest of all parties, a further question presented itself, that is, who should initiate <and pay for emigration? Was emigration the financial responsibility of local, national or colonial authorities? Should Britain or the colonies pay, or should it be left to individual migrants themselves? Perhaps their landlords or employers at home should pay, or else their prospective employers in the colonies. The fact that emigration was proceeding “spontaneously” did not absolve the parties from their obligations. Similarly, the fact that emigration was expanding and developing at an unprecedented rate meant that the phenomenon had become not only a matter for governmental concern (and regulation) but illso for big business, regardless of the sources of funding for migr‘ants.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century both Canada and Australia changed the basic character of the supply and sources of their immigrants. After 1812 Canada could no longer rely on an ovefflow from the United States for its main supply of new settlers” (indeed the reverse would generally apply), From the 1830s the Australian colonies c‘ame to depend decreasingly (at least in proportional tenns) on convict immigrants. Canada and Australia found themselves in a position in which they were required to generate their own independent flows of free immigrants from Europe, which meant overwhelmingly from the British Isles. Indeed, for much of the coming several decades they became competitors in the sane market supplying potential migrants. The history of Canadi,an and Australidan immigration intersected over this time. There was a key shift in the immigration history of the two countries around the 1820s <and this also coincided with a crisis in emigration policy in Britain itself. The 1820s was a decade greatly concerned with emigration - and it was a decade which may be represented as a hinge of immigration policy for both Canada and Australia. In the outcome the United States, Canada and Australia adopted somewhat different solutions to their immigration requirements.

The re-shuffling of the European populations clearly accelerated in these decades and the United States, Canada and Australia were the prunary destinations, eventually helping to re-balance the world’s population. But the outcomes were uneven -between 1815 and 1850 the United States received from the British Isles about 1.55 million immigrants, Canada 0.96 million, and Australia only 0.203 million. The latter colonies sought migrants in a context in which the United States exerted a far greater competitive strength in attracting new supplies of immigrants.

The most obvious differences between Australian and Canadian immigration were to do with scale and timing. Voluntary migration to Canada began earlier and was already in flood before Australia entered the market for free immigrants in 183 1. C<anada was able to attract far greater numbers of immigrants, except during the years of the Insurrection in the late 1830s - at which time, it is true, there were serious Canadi‘an fears of Australi‘an

396 Migration Systems in the Early Nineteenth Century

competition. But Canadian immigration remained subskvitially greater until the time of the Australian gold rushes in the early 18SOs, which provided the principal watershed in Australian immigration history. The most obvious factor in the difference between the two countries as destinations was also the most important - namely that Canada was nearer and much cheaper to get to, while Australia was the furthest and dearest destination for European emigrants. Indeed the differences between “the systems” adopted by the two places was largely a matter of Australia trying to compensate for the disadvantages of distance.

I t is well known that after 1831 the Austrdkan colonies devised systems of highly coordinated state-subsidised emigration and this was undoubtedly instrumental in establishing effective flows of migr,ants from the other side of the globe before 1850. It was a remarkable piece of state-engineering, a great achievement in government planning and enterprise. In the course of the nineteenth century the Australian colonies received about 1.6 million immigrants, almost half of whom were, in varying degrees, assisted from the British Isles. This entailed massive intervention by colonial governments in the international labour market and the creation of elaborate bureaucracies aid complicated interactions with the shipping trades. Government assistance also helped to stimulate self- financing migration which, in aggregate terms, was the source of slightly more than half of all Australican immigration (and virtually all migration to North America).

Emigration from the British Isles to Canada, apart from its convict migrants, had been taking place spontaneously from the 1760s as part of the general North American intake at the end of the eighteenth century. There were particul,~ flows from the Scottish Highl‘ands and lowlands to particular parts of the east coast, and from northern Ireland and the English west country, which often generated almn in London and iunong landlords. Some of these migrations were communal in character and all seem to have been self-financed. For the period of the French and American wars, through to 1815, the migrant flows were severely reduced. After 1815 a new era of migration dawned and a new context for migration. Now there was a broad acceptance of the benefits to Britain of the on-going migrant exodus on a substantially greater scale, aid the population and defence needs of Canada were increasingly publicised. l4

The flow began to expand vigorously and by 1820 there were about 15,000 per annurn reaching Canadian ports ‘and growing numbers were proceeding to Upper Canada. At the turn of the 1820s Canada was attracting 30,000 emigraits each year, mostly paying for themselves. But many of these immigrants were pushing on to the lJnited States, much to the chagrin of the colonies themselves. Onward migration from the Canadas to the United States was clearly their greatest problem in terms of labour supply and immigration policy. This was the contemporary perception and there were many estimates of its scale though it is impossible to be precise. It was reported, for insmce, that one-third of all Canadian immigrants between 1825 and 1831, went on to the United States. After 1831 it was reported to have increased. In 1849 it was said that 10,000 out of 38,000 went in the same way. Norman Macdondd wrote of the “consLmt stream of emigrants across the Canadas to the United States”. The Durham Report said that sixty per cent of totid immigration into British North America went south. Merivale said that seventy-five per cent of all British North American immigrants went to the United States, and there were other reports of fifty per cent re-migration.lS The alternative attraction of the United States required special responses of the Canadian authorities which were not necessiuy in Australia. Though there was some re-migration from Australia to New Zealand, Chile and California and some return migration to BritTin, it was never a matter of public concern. l6

A secondary element had been added in the 1820s - among the emigrants to Canada were two sorts who were assisted from British sources <and paid for by British funds.

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Some were financed by landlords to reduce poverty on their estates; (and others were subsidised by local Poor Law boards for much the same reason. Indeed throughout the post-war period there were several experiments and schemes, some associated with local and some with central government initiatives. On six occasions between 1815 and 1825 the British government was involved in emigration schemes. Under the influence of the Colonial Office, and especially of Wilmot Horton - said to be “obsessed” with emigration - there was a campaign devoted to the proposition that emigration was the solution to the political, economic and social problems which were undoubtedly disturbing the British Isles in this period. Many influential people agreed that there was an imperative need for a metropolitan pkw to coordinate massive emigration - some great state engine to generate very large outflows of the poor from Britain ‘and thereby relieve the country of its overwhelming problems. This was the tenor of Wilmot-Horton’s thinking. The scale of his plans was extraordinary. In fact the state schemes to Canada and the Cape never really came to much - they were too expensive and impractical. l7

Part of the problem of the state-emigrationists was that they had little understanding of the migration that was already flooding out of the country on its own account and was far larger than any state scheme ever achieved. In the mid-1820s it was thought that state- aided emigration would become the main fonn of expatriation. In reality this remained the minority migration throughout. While the debate about the role of govenunent raged in Whitehall and Westminster, and with little public appreciation of the matter, private migration was expanding greatly, without pressure or assiskmce from the government. At some time in the late 1820s, the average propensity to emigrate in the British Isles leapt above previous levels. It was the first decade of “mass migration” and it suggests a radical shift in the preparedness of people to emigrate. This great unexplained fact is ‘an essential element in the story of migration to both Australia and Canada as well as the United States. The spontaneous flow to Canada was affected mainly by internal circumstances - as during the Insurrection of 1837 when immigration fell to a mere 3,000 per annurn for several years. Earl Grey took the view that state intervention would undermine or “derange” the existing system of spontmeous emigration to Canada. l 8

The flow of humanity to Australia was different. A few professional immigrants were brought to the colony, even from the beginning, aid some f<mners were introduced to promote greater self-sufficiency in the penal colony. The express purpose of New South Wales was to receive banished convicts at minimum cost to the British Exchequer. Hence voluntary immigration to the antipodes, despite expressions of interest in free immigration by people in Britain, was virtually negligible until the mid- 1820s. Australia’s civikan population, till then, was derived almost entirely from military personnel “staying on”, from the ranks of the coiivicts at the end of their sentences, and from the natural growth of the population in the second and third generations.

In the 1820s the long-distance penitentiary continued to operate and expand but was rapidly augmented by the greater potential for much broader economic growth. In brief, Australia began to generate its own internal ruison d’etre: most notably the emergence of the key staple, wool, began to transcend the gaol function of New South Wales. As opportunities for investment emerged so the new economy developed its own labour requirements - concomimt with the growth of urban life in New South Wales. Although imports of convicts continued, the labour needs of the colonies began to outstrip the convict supply. Free immigration rapidly overhauled the convict supply and eventually accounted for ten times as many as the convicts in the demographic intike during the course of the nineteenth century.

There was self-financing immigration even from the start of the convict colony and was increased in the 1820s by the economic optimism associated with the growth in

398 Migralion Systems in the Early Nineteenth Century

pastoralism and trade. A few hundred free immigrants arrived in New South Wales in the early 1820s - and were rewarded for their initiative by grants of land in propartion to their capital. In fact they were welcomed very selectively, and not given the green light until the end of the 1820s. The first phase of free migration to Australia was generally plutocratic migration - men with capital to set up in fanning - with very little authentic labour migration which was regarded as impractical and unnecessary un ti1 the convict system proved inadequate. But Australia, in contrast to Canada, could not rely on “spontaneous” immigration. It was too far away and the passage too dear. In the late 1820s the demand for labour was building up beyond the capacity of the convict system to satisfy the colony. By 1828-29 the colonists, the employers, were seeking new means of recruiting labour, and therefore of attracting migrants. Eyes turned to India and China for “coolies”. But the idea of obtaining self-financing working-class immigrants from the British Isles was beyond all practical likelihood.

The first serious effort to solve the Australian labour problem grew out of a convergence with British policy - along the same road which brought the idea of Poor Law migration and colonial subsidies. This thinking had already been tried in Canada and the Cape. For New South Wales the f is t concerted intakes of subsidised free immigrants were in 1832, mainly females in the first instance. Following the earlier sequence of events in Canada, it soon became apparent that the British resolution to fund emigration to Australia was not serious on any large scale. The Poor Law authorities were more likely to pay the lesser cost of sending the poor to C‘mada than to Australia. Increasingly the Australian colonies simply took over the scheme, paid for it themselves, and in 1841 were funding more than 25,000 immigrants to the new continent. This was supplemented by a smaller but increasing number of self-financing migrants, creating a subsidiary flow for the expansion of settlement at six places along the antipodean coasts. The subsidy system became the engine of the Australian system until the advent of gold in 1851-52.

This, therefore, was the critical difference between the two systems. Austr a i a 1’ was greatly dependent on subsidised immigration, an induced flow; Canada relied much more on spontaneous self-financing immigration though it was much agitated by the great seepage of migrants out of Canada into the United States. When the Australian colonies required free immigrants in the late 1820s they co-operated with Britain to create a special system to cater to Australian needs. In effect, while the IJnited States remained the main destination for most emigrants, Australia and Canada employed different agencies and mechanisms by which to channel the human transfusions which were required for their respective colonial developments.

IV

What were these agencies and mechanisms? Both Australia and Canada faced much the same problems of labour supply aid population development as all previous and subsequent colonies in those areas often called “regions of recent settlement”. Faced with the overwhelming popularity and competition of the United States - ‘and eventually competition from each other - how did Canada and Australia channel emigrants in their direction? What means did they employ and how effectively? Australia, even apart from the problem of distance, faced a11 uphill task since, in the minds of possible migrants, it was stained with convictism. Canada was often regarded as little more than a conduit to the more attractive reaches of new territories in the IJnited States. Australia did not figure as a serious destination until the late 1820s. after Wakefield’s Letter From Sydney (1829). In the years following its publication there was a general shift towards an activation of a system which would solve the problem of Australia’s cost disadvantage. Some of these

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ideas, however, had been partially anticipated in the evolution of immigration policies in Canada which were designed to compensate for Canadian disadvantages in the rivalry for immigrants with the United States. These ideas hinged on the factor of colonial land.

Between 1815 and 1830 most public debate and colonial experimentation had looked to metropolitan funding of pauper or assisted migration to Canada. lJnder the influence of Wakefield the debate eventually swung around 180 degrees to that of deploying colonial revenues to pay for the flow of emigrants from Britain to the receiving colonies, a notion which converged with Wlakefield‘s doctrines concerning the appropriate distribution of land in colonisation. These ideas evolved quickly so that, by late 1831, there emerged the Australian solution which entailed the utilisation of land sales revenues to pay for emigrant passages, Yet, despite the pervasive impact of Wakefieldian theorising, Canada did not directly adopt the mechanism of laid revenues to stimulate its own streams of migration.

Policies governing land-disposal were controversial in all “regions of recent settlement” and remained contentious throughout the period 1815 to 1850.19 Land in Canada had been disposed by gr‘mt and at colonial discretion right through the 1820s. The failure to raise revenues by land sales was a severe constraint on colonial polices and it was the alleged prodigality and folly of this policy which became the particular target of Wakefield, the systematic colonisers and later, of the Durham Report. In the United States regulations of a basically fiscal sort had been introduced at the time of Independence - and land thereafter was only available by sale and by auction with a minimum price attached.20 Thomton Leigh Hunt contrasted the American system of land disposal with that of “official anarchy” in the Caiadas - “the disposal of waste lands in the United States has been regulated, since 1796, by a system of sale; in Canada by no system at all”. It was regarded by the systematic colonisers as the cause of backwardness in the British colonies in contrast to American prosperity.21 Until the late 1820s the Australian colonies were not much different from Canada. Laid was available by grant to expirees, to officers, and to immigrants who could prove their capikd worth: land was available only in proportion to the capital being brought into the colony. This was based on the notion that the capitalist immigrant would be able to provide employment to convicts and thereby reduce the strain on the state-operated f‘mns in the penal colony. By the late 1820s the system simply exacerbated the developing labour shortages which were beginning to threaten the growth of colonial production and wealth. As it stood the land grant system in Australia discouraged ordinary immigrants even if they were able, by some miracle, to afford the passage money to Australia.

Criticisms of the land gr‘mt system were straightforward: it led to favouritism and corruption; it gave h i d to people least likely to use it; i t dispersed settlement; it raised little or no revenue for government needs of any sort. It was wasteful, inefficient, inequitable, and immoral - and this was the crux of the argument employed by Wakefield himself, who formed it into the so-called theory of systematic colonisation. It is well known that the cavalier land grant policy was already under attack in both Canada and Australia some considerable time before Wakefield began his own campaign. As early as 1825 the policy was shifting - this is seen in Colonial Office documentation and in New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and British North America.22 Imperial authorities in London were Lakidg the view that land should bear a price and that it should be distributed not by discretioil but by competition. Lord John Russell declared that British colonial policy after 1831\,was grounded on the notion that land revenues “must be appropriated to public uses and for the public benefit” - that indeed, the Crown Lands in the colonies are held in trust, not merely for existing colonists, but for the people of the British Empire collectively. These purposes included public works and “the ordincay

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exigencies of the public service.”23 Ostensibly the imposition of a price on land was not necessarily advantageous in terms

of attracting immigrants. Clearly one of the attractions to a certain type of emigrant was the easy access to land for settlement and commercial development. In principle, therefore, when the Colonial Office required Australia and Canada to impose a price on all land - by 1831- they instantly reduced their competitive edge vis h vis the United States and any other attractive destinations for the intending migrant. Wakefield and his followers went further and demanded a minimum and generally spe‘aking a high price for all land. On the face of things this seemed anathema to the task of attracting ordinary migrants.

A central distinction must be made between land as an attraction to migrants and land as an instrument for funding the delivery of migrants. Land was the prune asset of colonies. The Durh<m Report stated this as the special feature of new colonies: “In old countries no such matter occupies public attention; in new countries, plaited on the fertile and extensive temtory, this is the object of the deepest moment to all, mid the first business of the Government”.24 Land was the key element in the emergence of a colonial economy and in the process of attracting labour and capital. A colony could employ land in various ways, or indeed leave it dormant for future generations. Land could be used as a lure to prospective immigmits, as a direct stimulus to recruitment. Alternatively it could be employed to raise funds to pay for the importation of migrants. L‘and, therefore, was at the centre of the theory and practice of colonising and of emigration systems as they evolved historically. In the course of the nineteenth century Australia and Canada chose to activate the vital factor of land in quite different ways in their efforts to promote colonisation and settlement.

Given that labour shortage was recognised as the universal problem in most colonisation it is surprising that no direct theoretical linkage had been made between the disposal of land and the recruitment of labour until the late 1820s. The idea of using the revenue from land sales directly to pay for immigrants’ passages was first employed in the early 1830s aid was derived from Wakefield and, in practice, was almost entirely associated with the Australian colonies. It was an extraordinarily simple but critical equation, for it connected the main deficiency of the colonies - labour - with their abundant asset - land. The germ of this seemingly obvious idea can be found in the eccentric writings of Robert Gourlay in 1819 but is difficult to locate, in an unambiguous form, in any of the literature before Wakefield‘s Letterfroin Sydney. The brilliaitly simple device of employing land revenues to pay for immigrant pissages was first articulated in Wakefield‘s prose composed in Newgate Prison in 1829.25.

But perhaps this accentuates too much the imporLance of the events of the 1820s and the significance of Wakefield. In reality there had been historical precedents of various sorts. In a simple way land had been granted away in the most liberal (or, in W‘akefieldi<an terms, prodigal and wasteful) fashion since the beginning of colonisation. There was nothing new about using land as a reward for services, as <an enticement to settlers, as a source of revenue, as a payment for promoting emigration. North American colonimion from 1600 onwards witnessed a range of experiments in the uses of the asset most generally available in a new colony. There were several solutions which manipulated land availability to generate labour supplies including the colonial heudrigtzt system.26 The easy access to land was evidently the most important factor attracting self-financing migrants to British North America from the sttvt of colonisation - the land-loving small

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capitalists/farmers, the yeomen, the coilunurial settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But this was never the whole of even the main part of North American immigration.

At Independence the United States abandoned free hand grants and thereafter sold all land by auction - i t was able to attract its immigrants by the lure of prosperity and high wages rather than by free land. Less competitive, but no less needful of labour, Australia and Canada used their land assets differently. After 1831 the Australian colonies channelled a very high proportion of land revenues (in South Australia it was virtually 100 per cent for several years) to meet the cost of paying for the transit of immigrants.27 This constituted a vast commitment of colonial income to a specific purpose, an identified colonial priority. It began in South Australia in 1836 and affected policies in all the colonies of Australasia, in varying degrees, for the next half century. It was a great colonial strategy which diverted a very substantial part of colonial income - of disposable income - to a highly specific purpose. There were precise aspects to the system worth emphasising; first, it was collective, and was operated by colonial governments (eventually in conjunction with the Colonial Laid ‘and Emigration Commission); second, it raised the cost of land instantly; third, the migrants were completely free on disembarkation, not at all under contract;28 fourth, the benefits generally did not accrue to individual landowners or colonists (except, sometimes, in the case of the Bounty system).29 It created a flow of migration which could not have been otherwise achieved. It was a collective decision made to meet [an identified colonial need. It was a tax on land, on new land owners, for the facilitation of immigration - but the benefits would flow to the colony at large. Hence it was highly selective taxation, the political consequences of which seem to have been less divisive than one might have expected. Colonial employers were generally prepared to allow the state to manage the labour supply, partly because there was no legal or practical means in the colonies of ensuring that imported labour would remain with any employer who chose to act unilaterally and introduce his or her own immigrant labour supply. Any employer who bore his or her own costs of importing a labourer had no gu[mntee that the labourer would stay in his or her employ. The question of labour supply was thereby defined ‘and acknowledged as a collective problem which could best be tackled by collective means - that is through taxation and a centralised immigration system.

The W‘dcefield principle was originally intended to cover all new colonial development across the Empire. In the outcome only Australasia consistently applied land sales revenue to the purpose of subsidising immigration for any length of Lord John Russell h‘ad to acknowledge that the condition of the finances of the Cape Colony prevented the use of any part of the land fund to pay for e~nigration.~’ Buller tried unsuccessfully to convert C‘anada to the Wakefield immigration system. In Lower Canad? the disposition of land was either already decided or was under local control. But more decisive still were the effects of distance and cost - Australia had little option but to use colonial revenue to subsidise passages, but Canada was less bound in this way.32

Canada adopted the kand sales poIicy determined in Whitehall by 1831, but did not commit the revenues to subsidise iin~nigration,~~ or at least not directly. In some ways Canada actually adopted an intermediate solution between those of the United States (free market) and Australia (state enterprise). As Peter Burroughs puts it, the Wakefieldian prescription “could be usefully modified in the British North America”. He paraphrases Buller to say that “the cost of the passage across the Atlantic was relatively inexpensive compared with the voyage to a distant country like Australia, and so the land fund might be more profitably spent on public works and opening up the Canadian interior with roads and bridges”.34 This was the infrastructure system - using land revenue not to pay the

402 Migration Sys tem in the Early Nineteenth Century

immigrant’s passage but to make the colony more attractive on arrival and dissuade onward re-migration to the United States. Such a programme would offer inducements to both incoming labour and to colonising f‘mners. Though the Canadian method did not go as far as the Australian subsidisation approach it nevertheless entailed partial state intervention to counteract Canada’s competitive we(akness in relation to the United States.

The Canadian formulation, as it emerged in the late 1820s and 1830s, was not entirely novel. There were precursors and contemporary variants on the same idea. It was itself a version of the traditional corporate style of migration with roots in the seventeenth century when joint stock companies bought land <and rendered it more attractive to subsequent settlers by “improvements”. In the previous phase of Canadian colonisation - the land grant era - some of the laid grants had been predicated on the notion that the grantees would improve the land and also import immigrants. They would invest in the land holdings and import settlers at a profit to themselves and for the general benefit of the colony. The Selkirk enterprises in the first two decades of the century corresponded to this model as did most subsequent land company colonisation. Part of the motivation was the commercial development of the colonies by way of corporate private enterprise. The creation of land companies - of which the Canada Company was the most prominent - was posited on such assu~nptions.~~ These mechanisms usually worked in a commercial manner - involving the employment of agents and shipping companies selling land and passages to prospective emigrants on behalf of Ixid companies who prepared the land for sale or lease.36 Much of the infra-structural function was undertaken by private enterprise under arrangements between land companies and colonial governments (and this might include advertising for settlers, facilitating laid access and industrial development). 37 Land revenues were channelled into government coffers and directed to various public policies, some developmental, others not. Moreover credit <arrangements were offered to many ordinary land buyers which thus provided an advantage over the equivalent settler in the United States. In Canada, therefore, there was a trade-off between the price of land and the presumption that much of the purchase money would be spent in ways which would favour settlement.

Free land grants were effectively prohibited in both Canada and Ausualia by 1831 and the findings of the Durham Report reinforced the Wakefieldian foundations of the policy. Australia adhered strictly to the policy. But competition by the IJnited States for immigrants caused a substantial retreat in IJpper Canada. The Land Act of 1841 allowed the Governor to make grants of fifty acres to British male subjects in blatant contradiction of Wakefieldian and Imperial policy. It became “one of the cardinal principles of Canadian land and immigration policy”. It was, essentially, an effective means of giving the immigrant indirect financial assiskwce since the laid could be sold on ‘arrival to pay off the costs of passage. This left the Canadian immigrants in a condition comparable with that of the emigrant assisted to Australia.3* But Imperial h i d principles were clearly compromised in the process.

The Australian system broke new ground in the history of international migration. Here the state intervened to solve the problem of supplying immigrants to the most distant continent. It is true that state enterprise was powerfully seconded by the private enterprise of the shipping interests39 and, during the gold rushes particularly, the private sector sometimes claimed the lion’s share of the emigrant trade. Nevertheless the Australian immigration system w<as mainly the creation of colonial governments working in k-idem with the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners in London. During its inaugumtion in the early 1830s colonial opinion and colonial employers at large prevailed upon the state to undertake the main task. Private interests in the colonies failed to emerge swiftly enough to meet these needs and in consequence state enterprise was widely

Eric Richards 403

welcomed even though it required mdical policies of land taxation to finance the flow. In essence, the Australian version of Wakefieldianism entailed the differential taxation of land buyers whose money was applied for the general good in the fonn of subsidised immigration. The fact that the immigrants were entirely free to move wherever they wished in the colonies (or even to depart altogether if they chose) meant that the benefits of the system could not be appropriated to the specific use of particular taxpayers. It is surprising that the system did not generate more contemporary political controversy than it did.4

VII

In summary, therefore, the United States opted for a free commercial iinmigration system - with land available at a market-determined rate; Canada offered small land grants to immigrants and land at special rates to companies as an incentive to settlement and this was sometimes reinforced by provisions that required a part of land sales revenue be employed directly on infnstructure investment; and Australia (for several decades) went the whole-hog and earmarked a very high proportion of all laid revenue to pay the passages of large numbers of subsidised and carefully selected immigr,ants. To a degree these models simply reflected the comparative difficulties of the respective destinations for British immigrants; it was proportional to the attraction and proximity of each destination. Thus the United States could rely on a self-financing flow of immigrants without artificial stimulation; Canada also received such a flow but it was neither large enough nor was it retained with sufficient confidence to allow it to be taken for granted - hence the Canadian system required a measure of state intervention; and distant Australia was obliged to provide a comprehensive system of govenunental assistmce until it became attractive enough to generate its own flow of spontaneous immigration. Even during the gold rushes assistance to immigrants was maintained and was renewed at many times in the remainder of the century.

There were, therefore, three modes of immigration in the three countries. But they were neither as neat nor as exclusive as these schema might convey. For instance, there were times when some parts of the United States employed extraordinary incentives to deliver immigrants, and there were times when Australia left immigration to free market operations. But the schema may stand as a simple model for the three countries. It was a model which worked in a context in which, by 1830, there was a spectacular rise in the rate of emigration, especially from Great Britain.

The utilisation of land was the common denominator in the generation of these emigrant flows. But land was clearly mobilised in different ways to suit the requirements of each place. Land was directly instrumental in conveying emigrants to Australia; in Canada it was used to facilitate settlement and enhance the competitive power of the provinces; and the United States normally adopted a policy which allowed land to find its own price: it also permitted the luxury of diverting all land revenues into Federal coffers for the general good. Through the rest of the century endless variations were played on these three themes, but the broad framework remained intact.41

Where this leaves Wakefield is arguable. It is difficult nowadays to find anyone who has a single good word to say for Moreover Wakefield originally placed no weight on the idea of employing land revenue for the purpose of paying for emigrants: so far as the essence of his theory was concerned the money could just as well be poured into the sea. Wakefield, of course, eventually set his seal of approval on subsidised immigration. This was decisive because the specific channelling of the land fund into assisted immigration provided the essential first mechanism for Australian immigration, and, in a

404 Migration Systems in the Early Nineteenth Century

different way, also increased the competitive capability of Canada. W‘akefield was part of the argument which persuaded colonial interests to pool land resources towards the creation of a bridge of emigration from Bridn to Australia - without which most labouring emigrants, especially in the early years when the real costs of emigration were so much higher, could not reach Australia. The large-scale provision of direct assistance, and the considerable bureaucratic framework that this entailed, was one of the great achievements of state enterprise in the nineteenth century. It imposed a degree of state regulation which helped to make emigration to Australia safe and efficient, especially compared to the more m‘uket-oriented systems operating across the Atlantic in the mid- century. Assisted emigration accounted for seventy per cent of emigration to Australia before the gold rushes. It broadened the flow, it replaced convictism and i t held off the use of indenturing for most of Australian immigration needs. In the process the Australian colonies gained the inestimable advantage of being able to select a large proportion of their migrants, to “design” the peopling of the new continent.

Notes

1 2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9

10

11

12

See Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) p. 240. Herman Merivale, An Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1839). J. C. Byrne, Twelve Years Wandering in the British Colonies from 1835 to 1847 (London: R. Bentley, 1848) II, p. 329. h e Ferenczi, International Migrations Volunie I: Statistics (New Yo1.k: Gordon & Breach, 1929, 1970 reprint edition) p. 81 Merivale, An Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Colonization and Colonies. See for example, H. J . M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, I815-18.?0 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). See, for example, Lois Darroch Milani, Robert Gourluy, Gadfly (Willowdale, Ontario, nd). W. C. Wentworth, A Statistical Account of the British Settlements in Australasia (2 vols. London: Whittaker, 1824). See Stephen Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement,1788-1920 (Melbourne: Macinillan in association with Melbourne University Press, 1924) p. 48; Norman Macdonald, Canada, 1763-1841 Immigration and Settlement (London: Longmans, Green, 1939) p. vii. K. Buckley, “E. G. Wakefield and the Alienation of Crown Lands io N.S.W. to 1847”, Economic Record 33 (April 1957): 80-96. See Charlotte Erickson, “Why Did Contract Labour not Work in Nineteenth Century United States?’, in Shula Marks and Peter Richardson, eds, Internationul k1boUr Migration: Historical Perspectives (London: Maurice Temple Smith for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984), p. 49. The failure of indenture arrangements among most white migrants in Australia is generally attributed to their alleged non-enforceability. See, for instance, Thoinas Bannister, A Letter on Colonial Labour and the Sale of Lands (Hobart: N. Olding, Printer, 1833), p. 16. The problems facing private employers in their efforts to introduce labour into Australia were stated cogently by James Macarthur in New South Wales, Its Present State and Future Prospects (London:

Eric Richards 405

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

20

21

22

23

24 25

26

Walther, 1837) p. 151. See Phillip Buckner, “The Peopling of Canada”, History Today (November 1993): 50. Early emigration policy to Canada was much influenced by considerations of defence. See Lillian Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 85. Norman Macdonald, Canada, 1763-1841 Immigration and Settlement (London: Longmans, Green, 1939), pp 522-3; R. S. Longley, “Emigratioa and the Crisis of 1837 in Upper Canada”, Canadian Historical Review 17 (1936): 29-40, A. R. M. Lower, “Iimnigration and Settlement in Canada, 1812-20”, Canadian Historical Review 3 (1922): 46. See Eric Richards, “Return Migration and British Emigrant Strategies in Colonial Australia”, in David Fitzpatrick, ed., Home or Away? Immigrants in Colonial Austrdia: Visible Immigrants Three (Canberra: ANU, 1992). pp. 64-105. See Eric Richards, “British Poverty and Australian Immigratioii in the Nineteenth Century”, in Eric Richards, ed., Poor Australian Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century (Canberra: ANU,

See Peter Burroughs, British Attitudes to Canadu (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 32-3. The respective land systems are summarised in Ericksoo, “Why Did Contract Labour Not Work in Nineteenth Century United States?’, pp. 177-81. Though driven by budgetary priorities the abolition of land grants and the adoption of a commercial market system were symptomatic of the political and demographic confidence of the newly independent United States. See generally Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (New York: Peter Smith, 1924). Thornton Leigh Hunt, Canada and South Australia (London: A. Cole, 1839), p. 16. Earlier North American land disposal policies are surveyed in G. F. McGuigan, “Administration of Land Policy and the Growth of Corporate Economic Organization ia Lower Canada, 1791- 1809”, in W. T. Easterbrook and M. H. Watkins, eds, Approcrches to Cunadian Economic History, (Toronto: McClelland 8c Stewart, 1967); later land policy is summarised in Gerald M.Craig, Upper Canada (London: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), chapter 7. See for example, Helen Cowan, British Emigration to North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961) p. 233 Quoted in F. Hitchins, The Colonial Lcrnd a d Emigration Commission, 1840-78 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1931) p. SO. The doctrine that colonial land was “the rightful patrimony of the English people” was reaffirmed in the Durham Report and also by Lord Grey in 1852, who asserted that “The waste lands of the vast colonial possessions of the British Empire are held by the Crown, as Trustee for the inhabitants of the Empire at large. and not for the inhabitants of the particular province, divided by arbitrary geographical limits, in which any such waste lands happen to be situate”. Quoted by Hugh Edward Egerton, Short History of British Colonial Policy (London: Methuen, 8th edition, 1929) pp. 284-5. Quoted in Burroughs, British Attitudes to Cutudu, p. 57. See Robert Gourlay, General Introduction to Statistical Account of Upper Canada (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1822) p. ccccxvi. Robert Torrens, amongst others, came close to a plan which allocated land revenues to assist immigration in his speech to Parliament in January, 1827 - Substance of a Speech delivered by Colonel Torreas (London: T. Brettell, 1827, reprinted Adelaide, 1962) p. 54 - but even so he failed to make the final step in the plan. John Galt in his autobiography (published four years after Wakefields Letter from Sydney) advocated that a price should be put upon the Crown Lands in the Colonies, and that from these sales a fund available for purposes of emigration should be formed. Galt seemed to be claiming that, in this idea, he had anticipated the systematic colonisers, but he gave no documentation to sustain this claim. John Galt, The Autobiography 2 vols (London: Cochrane, 1833), p. 349. This operated in several of the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in essence it was a way of recompensing in kind, by land grant, any settler who introduced immigrants to the colony. It used land as a quid pro quo for the private funding of immigration, which was the method used and subsequently much criticised at Swan River. In this method the public benefit was recognised in the private act. It was indeed a variation on the idea of giving an immigrant land on arrival. Instead, in this case, the person who paid the passage was

1991), pp. 1-32.

406 Migration Systems in the Early Nineteenth Century

rewarded with land. A further variation, common in the Caribbean. was the promise of a small quuitity of land to every immigrant after a period of time in the colony - usually at the termination of an indenture contract. It was a kind of retention allowance offering an incentive to the immigrants to complete the indenture and also a persuasion to stay on in the colony when

21

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

it terminated - and again it was a mode which employed land as the currency of the system. One of the reasons that slavery was introduced was the fact that this system of land rewards broke down when the supply of available land in the West Indian islands became effectively exhausted in the 1680s and after. On the headright system see Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black: fhe Sevenleenfh Century Virginian (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971) and the review by Edmund S. Morgaii in Virginian Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1972): 261-71. Revenues from land sales were subject to variation over the years and so also was the price of land. In 1842 the Imperial Land Sales Act fixed auction as the method of selling land, subject to a minimum price of 20 shillings per acre and earmarked half the revenue for funding immigration. See C. J. King, An Outline of Closer Settlement in New South Wales (NSW, n.d.)

The Australian immigration scheme simply unloaded immigrants at the docks and relied on the operation of the free labour market to absorb them as it wished. Labour therefore went to the best employer, the highest wages, or the most convenient location. This was a variant of the assisted programme in which, between 1837 and 1844, colonial employers made their own arrangements to introduce immigrants and were reimbursed for their outlays when the emigrants anived in the colony. It was, in essence, a hyhrid private/public mode of immigration. From the beginning Wakefield regarded subsidised emigration as applicable only to new colonies. In his pamphlet Sketch of a Proposal for Colonising Australasia (London: J. F. Dove, 1829) he said explicitly that ‘The tneasure could not be applied to Canada. Because the vicinity of the United States would induce emigrant labourers to emigrate once more in search of waste land, or extravagant wages, and the purchasers of waste land in Canada would thereby be cheated of their consideration.” Wakefield told a parliamentary enquiry in 1840 that “the giving of free passages to emigrants to Canada, would be precisely equivalent of making a present of so many citizens to the United States”. Free passages were appropriate for Australian migration because there was virtually no leakage of migrants: Sydney Herald, 19 December 1840. H. M. Robertson in “The Cape of Good Hope and ‘Systematic Colonisation”’, South African Journal of Economics 5 (1937): 373-4, argued that Wakefieldian principles were subsequently influential in the development of assisted immigration schemes in the colonies of southern Africa. The notion was not accepted in Australia without question and there was consideration of alternatives - which included indenturing and “coolie” immigration. Many colonists continued to believe that Britain should always pay for the expatriation of its own citizens, especially its paupers. But this view was undermined by the extreme scarcities of labour experienced in Australia at various tunes after 1830. This point is made most clearly by Hitchins, The Colonial Land and Emigrafion Commission, 1840-78, p. 8, fn. 29. See also Cowan, British Emigration to North America, p. 125. Peter Burroughs, The Colonial Reformers and Canada, 1830-1849 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), p. 71. See Clarence Karr. The Canada Land Company: The Early Years (Ottawa: McClelland & Stewart, 1974); [R. B. Strickland], The Backwoods of Canada being LEtter.s from the Wife of an Emigrant OSJicer (1836) - about the Land Companies spending land revenue money on infrastructure rather than immigration directly; and The Emigrants Guide (Westport: J. Hoban, 1832), p. 39. Enterprises in Australia, eg. the Australian Agricultural Company, the Van Diemen‘s Land Company, and the South Australian Company, imported migrants but were not tied with such clear requirements as the Canada Company. William Cattermole toured the south of England it] 1831-32 on commission for the number of emigrants he recruited to Canada. He apparently sold 100,000 acres of land in Upper Canada. Cowan, British Emigration to North America, pp. 180-1.

pp. 40-4.

Eric Richards 407

31

38

39

40

41

42

See, for example, Helen I. Cowan, British Immigration Before Confederation (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1968) pp. 12-13. Hugh Mackenzie Morrison, “The Principle of Free Grants in the Land Act of 1841”, C a d i a n Historical Review 14 (1933): 392-407. The grant was increased to 100 acres in 1853, Macdonald, Canada, 1763-1841 Immigration und Sctrlcmcnt, p. 13. See also R. G. Riddell, “A Study of the Land Policy of the Colonial Office, 1763-1855”. Canadian Historical Review 18 (1937): 403. See Frank Broeze, “Private Enterprise and the Peopling of Australasia”, Economic History Review, 35 (1982): 235-53. For an interesting modern restatement of the theoretical relationship between land and labour in immigrant territories of the nineteenth century see, James Foreman-Peck, “Insiders and Outsiders: The Political Economy of International Migration during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, in Camille Guerin and Carl Strickwerda, eds, The Politics of Immigrant Workers (New York Holmes & Meier, 1993, especially p. 304. In Australia, of course, the land price system was effectively undermined by the semi-official sanctioning of cheap access to pastoral land by way of squatting - which had little effect on immigration (except in the demand for shepherds and its weak linkage effects) though it was certainly important for general economic development. In Australia, where the ideas were taken furthest, settlement was not much restricted, if at all, because conditions required extensive production methods and the power of the squatters was mainly unrestrained. In the United States a great deal of land was bought up by large land companies which used promotion, publicity and development work to induce immigration directly onto their lands and those of railway companies. See Paul Gates, The Famers‘Age 1815-1860 (New York: Holf Rinehart & Winston, 1962), p. 82. Frank Broeze in Mr Brooks and the Australian Trade (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), p. 136, says bluntly that emigration to Australasia in the 1830s and 1840s “was the result of the activity of private enterprise rather than the impact of Wakefield”.