Industrial Emigration in Early Victorian Britain

Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, emigration has been a habit with the British people. But it was the nineteenth century, when almost seventeen million persons emigrated, that witnessed the United Kingdom's most extensive exodus: approximately eighty per cent of the emigrants went to North America. A broad, historical explanation of the forces that motivated British subjects to abandon their homeland can be found in numerous works. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to view in greater detail one small facet of a not uncommon, yet entangling, subject. A series of specialized studies producing greater exactness of information would perhaps lead to a fuller and more complete understanding of a topic that has been open to much conjecture.