“The sun never sets on the British Empire”, or at least it didn’t until the 1950s and 1960s. Back when Colonialism was in full swing, the British Empire covered about a quarter of the earth’s surface. A simple question: outside of penal colonies, where did the British find so many people to venture off to the colonies, to either settle or rule? How were they recruited? Did colonists come from the middle class, or were they working-class people seeking a better life?
All sorts. Many came from Scotland and Ireland due to poverty. The colonial government required educated administrators. The Foreign Office was and remains a plum job. Military officers were needed to command the troops, and they all took their families. Some stayed. There were plenty of younger sons and daughters who weren’t going to inherit. Remember that large families were the norm back then. Then there were schoolteachers, tradesmen, merchants, farmers, and so on.
And the sun still never sets on the British Empire. We’ve still got enough small islands around the world for this to hold - just.
I believe that almost 40% of the East India Company officers were Scots.
A lot of the emigrants to Australia/New Zealand were Scots Highlanders (rather than Lowlanders) where you can trace the reasons for emmigration back to the Highland Clearances or the Potato Famine.
At one time the Australian government offered subsidised passages to British immigrants.
Many Californians went to Australia for the gold rush in the 19th c.
In addition to what Quartz and others said, it’s worth noting that Britain ruled many of its more heavily-populated colonial regions (e.g., the Indian subcontinent) using a relatively small number of people. Sure, there were quite a lot of Brits who went off to the colonies, and who reproduced while living there, but in many colonies the British themselves were vastly outnumbered by the locals.
As mhendo said, Britain’s largest colonial possession–India–was governed largely through Indians, with a very thin layer of white colonists in charge.
This.
Basically, there were two kinds of British colonies:
(1) Those where British and Irish, and later some other European immigrants, displaced the indigenous peoples. The main examples are the North American colonies (Canada and the US), and Australia and New Zealand. South Africa almost, but not quite, fits this pattern.
(2) Those where British administrators and entrepreneurs made their fortunes out of the indigenous peoples, but never displaced them. The colonies in Africa and South Asia fit this pattern – as did China for a while.
The British colonies in the Caribbean don’t fit either pattern: the indigenous peoples got displaced, but ultimately those islands were taken over by the descendants of West African slaves.
In some of the islands–such as Trinidad–the number of descendants of Asian Indian agricultural and railway workers rivals or outnumbers the number of descendants of West Africans.
free land!
at least in western Canada, which had a homestead policy where settlers could get a free quarter section of land, plus another quarter section dirt cheap. that’s what attracted one of my sets of great-grandparents from Scotland.
I recently sawthis map which shows the Anglophone British colonies and the UK (then including all of Ireland) in around 1915. What struck me about it, and it was something I hadn’t really thought about before but the combined (white) population of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa was at the time much less than the population of the UK.
Were children of British citizens born abroad themselves British citizens by birth? What about children of a Brit and a native?
Read about the Highland Clearances someday. The local lords discovered that sheep were more profitable and elss hassle than tenants in the growing textile trade of Britain. By a quirk of feudalism, scots farmers were considered tenants on their lords’ land. Many lords used this detail to basically evict their tenants and let then fend for themselves anywhere but their lands. The “generous” ones arranged for transportation to the far corners of the earth.
That’s why there are millions of Scots names all over the ex-empire and the USA; you’ll find “Glengary” Streets, Roads, Avenus, etc. but Glen Gary itself is practically deserted.
I think the term, particularly during the main period of the British Empire, was not “British citizen,” but “British subject.”
Basically, if you were born within the British dominions, you were a British subject, at least if you were the child of British subjects. I think the situation was different for children of native peoples. As for couples where one partner was British and the other was a native, i believe that the status of the couple was controlled by the father. So, a native or foreign woman married to a British man became a British subject, but a British woman married to a native or foreign man would take the status of her husband. I’m not sure, though, if this meant losing her British subject status.
All legal questions aside, however, there was also a strong social and cultural benefit to being born in England. While someone born in the colonies might be a British subject, there was a certain stigma attached to their status. It was not unknown for wealthy British colonial families to actually send a woman back to England so that she could give birth at “home,” thus giving the child the social status that went with being born in England.
Oh, that sounds like fun. Morning sickness compounded with sea sickness?
Until the British Nationality Act 1948 there was no distinction. Canada had, the previous year, decided to introduce separate Canadian nationality.
Of course, you only need two antipodal points for that statement to hold.
So if you wanted to, you could give up everything except, say, Ascension Island and the Pitcairn Islands, and you could still make the claim with confidence.
I always get a laugh out of the story of the Barr colonists who ended up founding the city of Lloydminster, Saskatchewan/Alberta. Note to self: if you’re going to travel to the wilderness and build an “all-British colony”, don’t follow a blowhard who knows nothing about the area.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=ArchivedFeatures&Params=a2135
The population of UK and Ireland (c. 66m) still outnumbers the total populations of Canada (34m), Australia (22m), New Zealand (4m), plus the white South Africans (5m).