Considering the sheer volume and variety of migration within the British Empire, it isn’t surprising, perhaps, that only recently has serious attention been paid to the phenomenon of colonial return. Perhaps, as Alistair Thomson suggests in his contribution to Emigrant Homecomings, discussing homesickness among British migrants to Australia, there is a “historical amnesia” in migrant nations, intent instead on “the struggles and successes of the migrants who stayed on,” rather than those who returned to Britain (106). Or perhaps, as Alexia Grosjean suggests, returnees have not figured prominently in metropolitan history because they were seen as failures, even though in the case of the Scots that she is discussing, the sheer scale of migration meant that returnees would necessarily exist in significant numbers.

In a mostly successful attempt to structure this volume of diverse chapters originally delivered as conference papers, the editor, Marjory Harper, has separated it into thematically organized sections. After first offering an overview of return, the second section is concerned with the motives of return migrants, followed by the mechanisms and then finally the effect of return. This thematic approach does provide the reader with some guidance in drawing connections across wide chronological and geographical territory.

For many readers, Mark Wyman and Patrick Fitzgerald's chapters, offering overviews of the phenomenon, may be the most useful, given the aforementioned paucity of material yet available about return migration to Great Britain. They work well together, as Wyman offers a survey of the phenomenon across Europe, and Fitzgerald then provides the more particular details of Irish return migration. The section on motivations of return contains some particularly helpful analyses of the messy and unpredictable decision-making processes of particular migrants, particularly Eric Richards's and Alistair Thomson's two chapters on return migration, realized or not, from Australia, during two very different time periods, the nineteenth century and post–WW II era, respectively. “The matter of returning was not simply a measurable and predictable outcome of an economic calculus,” Richards concludes (100). Similarly, the contributions addressing the effect of the return on metropolitan communities show that it is not easily predicted or categorized.

The real strength of the volume, however, lies in the chapters that address what Harper has named the mechanisms of return, but which are really preoccupied with migrants’ growing recognition of, and reconciliation with, a transnational identity. Bruce Elliot interprets masculine performativity in the choices of Irish migrants to Canada and the United States within the mid-nineteenth-century context of both Ireland and the migrant communities. Marilyn J. Barber's discussion of the missionary members of the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf during the interwar years similarly charts an internal journey, embarked upon by British missionaries to western Canada who, thinking of themselves initially as the one-way emissaries of British Christianity in the Dominion, find themselves becoming the “living links of Empire,” bringing Canada to Britain as well.

Although the volume is both sprawling, attempting to cover four centuries, and narrow, with multiple contributions on the return from Canada and Australia and the return to Scotland and Ireland, Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 merits attention, not least because it is a much needed early foray into what promises to be a growing field of inquiry. It provides an overview of the field as it stands, as well as a variety of case studies that focus on the individual rather than the process of return migration.