As Alexander Murdoch remarks at the outset of his study of British emigration, “Migration was part of the human condition throughout history” (1). The history of international migration is long and wide. Anthropologists, historians, and geographers have recently discovered “diasporas” proliferating in many theaters of human mobility. These larger perspectives can expose the common features among national and regional experiences of migration. The likely origins of modern mass migration were found in the movements out of Iberia in the early sixteenth century, then overtaken by the coerced flows of slaves out of Africa and, just as large, the extraordinary outflows of people from the British Isles, outflows that were dominant until the 1870s.

British emigration was never stable or predictable, nor was it lacking historical mystery. Murdoch is an historian of Scotland and especially of the evolution of “British identity,” and these interests color his perspective on the sprawling phenomenon of British emigration over three centuries. Eschewing the slippery statistics of migration, Murdoch focuses on its political ramifications rather than the mechanics of what Bernard Bailyn once described as the “great westward transfer of people [which] is a blur, lacking structure, scale and detail” (The Peopling of North America: An Introduction [New York, 1986], 8).

The central argument is that emigration was vital for Britain, not for conventional economic or demographic considerations, but because it “created a crucible of British identity and purpose” (1). Emigration provided a context in which the component peoples of the British Isles could coexist and interact without serious conflict. This, argues Murdoch, was vital for the maintenance of political cohesion in Britain itself. The intensifying engagement of Scots and Irish in the process transformed it into a decidedly “British” enterprise. The Stuarts, from the very start, had inaugurated this grand design by way of the Anglo-Scottish plantations in Ireland. Over the following two centuries, says Murdoch, the evolving permutations of emigration expressed shifting manifestations of “Britishness.” The interflowing migrations between Scotland, Ireland, and America seem to accommodate to the idea of being “British.” This is a subtle and ramifying thesis, which, from its sheer scale, is necessarily more suggestive than definitive.

Murdoch has more interest in the ideologies of emigration than the actual emigrants who loom small in this account even though the possibilities of emigration “fundamentally altered the parameters of working people's lives” (10). He considers ideas about colonization in More's Utopia and also in John Locke, noting their justifications regarding the appropriation of land from indigenous people and the pacification of the “barbarian peripheries.” He gives special attention to “the colonial-born” (whom he terms “creoles”), arguing persuasively that the rise of self-reproducing colonies was a crucial transition in the Atlantic world (32). It was an arena of shifting permutations with perplexing consequences for the British State. After 1800, opinion in Britain shifted decisively toward the positive encouragement of emigration: this was a “hinge of change” (10).

Murdoch's account takes on much more tangible meaning where he employs direct evidence. He demonstrates the close association of transatlantic trade patterns with certain types of migration, especially in the Scottish context. Thus, in the early eighteenth century, ships carried tar and turpentine eastward and, as in a barter system, brought westward consignments of indentured labor: “Emigrants were but one form of cargo” (63). Clearly, emigration was only possible “where it was profitable for merchants to promote it” (62), but this depended on supply and demand across the system. Many of the migrant flows are not easily explained, notably the surges of humanity out of northern Ireland: deteriorating soil conditions may have been crucial, but there was also an established tradition of mobility originating in Scotland in the previous century. Murdoch gives special prominence to the impact of military recruitment, which created parallel channels for migration most notably from the Scottish Highlands.

The unprecedented structural changes in the late eighteenth-century economy invaded even the most remote corners of the British Isles. How these upheavals affected emigration is a grand question hovering over the entire story. Official policy was confused by the contemporary inability to fathom the population and economic tendencies of the time. Murdoch takes the view that rural change caused people to flee the country out of anxiety over their living standards. A simpler proposition is that competition for land was rising across the British Isles, and this pressure rendered cheap land in America irresistibly attractive. Murdoch indeed quotes some wonderful immigrant letters whose common theme was economic betterment.

The puzzle is that some regions (such as Ulster, parts of Yorkshire, and the Highlands) exhibited “the emigrating impulse” more urgently than others, and the story was complicated by differing proportions of convicts and indentured and free migrants. Emigration might entail a quasi-cultural rejection of social change at home, though this was rarely divorced from a simple economic consideration. Thus a substantial leaseholder in Skye in 1771 was distressed by his landlord's rent demands and exclaimed angrily, “I grew out of this ground and have as strong an attachment to my native soil as any man, but the low price of cattle and kelp has put it out of my power … to pay our rents” (66). The available alternative was emigration to America, and the people of Skye might well feel a certain schadenfreude when they rejected their oppressive landlord.

At the end Murdoch widens his horizons to include the antipodean theater of British emigration, reminding us that Botany Bay received the convicts previously denounced by Benjamin Franklin as “Human Serpents sent to us by the Mother Country” (74). Selective emigration may have influenced the shape of Australian culture, but, more certainly, Australia was able to generate effective schemes of assisted emigration for working emigrants. The earl of Selkirk, author of “a manifesto of Empire” (1805), is here credited as the pioneer of assisted emigration, yet he produced no practical mechanism for ordinary migrants, and the land grant system benefited only the bourgeois emigrant.

Murdoch argues that emigration was mainly for the losers in the broad project of modernization (99) and that the British state regarded this as a reasonable proposition (though it adamantly refused to finance the process [101]). This verdict depends on how we identify the actual emigrants, and here too much credence is invested in the U.S. shipping lists (those of Australia are better). Murdoch suggests that many of the emigrants were people who were, in effect, rejecting social change and hoping to recover abroad the worlds they were losing at home. He offers similarly probing ideas about the transfer of class attitudes and the Americanization of the English emigrants, as well as the role of return migration. And, though some of the best parts of his book draw on immigrant letters, the author remains skeptical about their general utility. Beyond the claim that emigration molded shifting identities, Murdoch conveys no overarching interpretation of his long story. Instead, his compact essays sparkle with thoughtful ideas relevant to the entire evolution of the Anglo world.