Eric Richards, renowned for his work on the Highland Clearances and Australian immigration, has taken on the formidable challenge of providing a chronological overview of British and Irish migration since 1600. In his overview Richards examines the regional origins of approximately 25 million migrants, the reasons for their departure, and change over four centuries. In seeking to chart the patterns, shape, scale, and direction of this mass movement, the synthesis is primarily concerned with conditions and circumstances in the homelands rather than the experiences of settlement abroad, though some examples of the latter are briefly cited. The book's most substantial contribution is arguably its comparative dimension, and one not solely confined to Britain and Ireland. We learn, for instance, that while Britain and Ireland contained only 10 percent of Europe's population, between 1815 and 1930 they supplied 36 percent of all European migration. Furthermore, the increase in English migration after 1620 was twice as great as that of Spain and forty times that of the French. By 1870, however, emigrants from Europe to the United States surpassed those leaving Britain.

Differences between the various British and Irish migrations are also highlighted. While English migrants dominated the earlier outflow, there was an upsurge in migration from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century. Ireland was noted for its rough gender parity and minimal return migration. Meanwhile, Scots were distinctive for the emotional communal partings largely confined to the Highlands and for a rate of emigration two-thirds more than England in the 1920s. Though rarely appearing throughout the book, the Welsh, Richards contends, were more inclined to leave for religious rather than economic reasons.

Change over time is at the heart of this synthesis. Briefly mapping the pre-1600 period enables Richards to demonstrate the considerable outflow of people in the early seventeenth century, which from the 1630s onward saw a notable shift to slavery. Indeed, between 1700 and 1760, only 23 percent of migrants were free. From 1750 to 1930, Britain's population more than doubled, the fall in infant mortality being singled out as the most critical aspect in this demographic revolution. In 1807, Britain's abolition of the slave trade heralded the beginnings of mass migration, and an estimated 19 million people emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from surveying the broad demographic flows, Richards also charts the changing character of regional origins and destinations. In the eighteenth century, Ulster, Yorkshire, and Scotland became increasingly important elements of the outflow, while the United States was usually the most favored destination until its decline in the twentieth century. The dominions were increasingly preferred, with Richards indicating that in 1913, four-fifths of migrants went there while in the 1920s two-thirds of emigrants sought Canadian and Australasian shores. The changing perceptions and public rhetoric of migration is also noted. Whereas earlier flows were viewed as detrimental, after 1800 migration was considered beneficial. The terms “emigration” and “immigration” also came to be included in the same debate, with immigrants attracted to Britain by rising wages and employment opportunities.

Indeed, the enduring importance of migration within and to Britain is a major theme in Richards's survey. Other types of mobility are also covered, including return, tourist, and retirement migration. Major events, including the Mayflower migration, slavery, the ill-fated Darien scheme, and the Great Irish Famine, are likewise incorporated. Explaining the reasons for the outflow, Richards incorporates a number of factors, including the role of agents, emigration societies, shipping interests, colonial propaganda, and subsidized emigration. So, too, are individual motives for moving supplied. According to Charlotte Godley, writing from Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1851, “If anyone gets into a scrape, or makes a bad marriage `Oh, go out to New Zealand (or some other very distant colony) where no one will know anything about it.' One is sometimes disposed to feel a little indignant about it, but in fact, it is a very good and right thing that there should be a place where people can, as it were, begin over again” (165).

Indeed, Richards's major contention, having blazed through four centuries of migration from Britain and Ireland, is that emigration was undertaken to improve individual living standards and prospects. Population pressure alone was insufficient to explain departures. Emigration was not, then, a movement of the uprooted or exiled but was instead a “spirit of enterprise,” seemingly involving the young, better-off, skilled, and literate elements of the home populations. The concept of population transfusion, rather than hemorrhage or safety valve, suffuses the book. As for British invisibility, Richards attributes this to four main factors: most migrants went to the United States, migration was such a common event that there was little contemporary comment, departures occurred over time and place, and migration had little influence on the size of Britain's population.

Given its achievements, it seems churlish to criticize, but the linkages between certain origins and points of destination could have been explored (thinking particularly of the work of David Fitzpatrick for Irish migrants), together with perplexing conundrums such as the high rate of migration from urban industrial Scotland (what T. M. Devine has termed “the paradox of Scottish emigration” [Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh, 1992)]). Nevertheless, the book provides a comprehensive approach to the ambitious field of comparative migration. Still required, however, are compendium volumes analyzing the various experiences of British and Irish migrants throughout the diverse places in which they settled, and the consequences of those movements on the respective homelands.