Eric Richards died suddenly in September 2018, shortly after attending a conference, “Colonial and Wartime Migration (1815–1918),” at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens that he had co-organized with Marie Ruiz. Ruiz subsequently edited Bridging Boundaries in British Migration History: In Memoriam Eric Richards. It is prefaced by the remarkable “Eulogy for Eric” written by his wife, the distinguished legal scholar Ngaire Naffine, and a moving and insightful valedictory tribute from his long-standing friend and collaborator David Fitzpatrick. Too unwell to attend the conference, Fitzpatrick also died the following year, making this commemoration a doubly sad event. The book's cover reproduces the central scene in The Last of the Clan (1865), by the Scottish painter Thomas Faed, but its melancholy look should perhaps be tempered by recalling Richards's characteristically robust emphasis on the stubborn resistance among those under pressure to emigrate in his brief unsentimental appraisal of this canvas in Britannia's Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (2004)—a general point that he reiterated in his plenary remarks at Amiens (30).
As Ruiz notes in her introductory essay—which offers an excellent overview of Richards's research and methodology—the conference provided the initial impetus for the reworked essays collected in the volume. For obvious reasons, Richards's unrevised keynote address, “Emigration at Extremes,” is necessarily a partial exception, but it reads wonderfully well and makes an essential agenda-setting contribution to the success of the volume as a whole. He opens with a succinct statement of the difficulties in linking those local conditions that made emigration an imaginable option to larger emergent patterns of mass mobility—“a very advanced kind of historical rope-making” (28). He then sketches out an ambitious project that builds on “a synchronicity” between his own Pacific-centered work and Bernard Bailyn's depiction of the “large-scale galvanic changes in the Atlantic basin” operating as a connected and interlocking transoceanic system (40). Although his vision was never realized, the value of Richards's essay is twofold. Firstly, it shows him returning to his starting point, the Outer Hebrides, in Britannia's Children and gradually deriving a new analytic model from this critical retrospective. Secondly, it allows the reader to see how his bold hypotheses were shaped by a scrupulous examination of the metaphors and rhetorical figures animating some of the most influential explanations of major intercontinental migrations. For while Richards recognized the seductive power of Bailyn's writing, he never succumbed to the “geological images of semi-mystical processes and forces at work” there (37). Rather, he sought to move beyond them.
The main body of the book is organized into two sections (“Macro-history of Migration” and “Micro-history of Migration”), each consisting of four essays. Given Richards's insistence on the need to combine these approaches, this bifurcation may seem a self-defeating strategy. But because the essays are the fruits of a sustained engagement with his many-faceted oeuvre by colleagues and interlocutors, they have a coherence and pertinence that they might otherwise have lacked. Contributors within the field that Richards did so much to energize—among them Hilary M. Carey, Kent Fedorowich, A. James Hammerton, Marjory Harper, Jim McAloon, John M. MacKenzie, and Andrekos Varnava—testify in their different ways to the cross-generational and transnational impact that his research has had over what was an immensely productive career extending into a belated and vigorous post-retirement. The timeframe covered by the essays is slightly broader than that covered by the conference, reaching into the late 1930s in some instances. All of the essays are assured and thoughtful interventions, occasionally entering the fray from unexpected angles. Bernard Porter, for example, argues that what he calls the “romanticized Victorian view” of British migration, a vision of budding young Raleighs setting out to conquer the world, has led to a kind of cultural myopia regarding those Britons who took “the short route” to a new life simply by crossing the English Channel and settling there (123–24). Although the population data relating to the scale of this phenomenon are quite limited, Porter is able to cite a wealth—or perhaps a patchwork—of what he frankly calls “anecdotal” evidence ranging from travel writing to developments in the wine trade (127). Yet if, as he suggests, these English colonies did in part reflect Britain's growing cosmopolitanism during the nineteenth century, there seem to be as many dissonances as there were convergences here (132). At the other analytic extreme, Hammerton's essay, “‘Empire Made Me?’ English Lower-Middle-Class Migrants and Expatriates, 1860–1930,” shows how much can be gleaned from an artfully deployed pair of comparative life histories contrasting the careers of two upwardly mobile lower-middle-class expatriates working at the blurred edges of the empire in Persia and Mesopotamia. The easily missed addition of a question mark in the title is a skeptical take on Robert Bickers's Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003), a biography of a disappointed clerk-turned-policeman in the British zone of Shanghai. Hammerton's two organization men, with their expertise in languages and communications and their deft negotiating skills, were worlds apart from the desperate hypermasculinity and bloody climax described in Bickers's book—indeed, one of them actually served as the chairman of the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s. This richly detailed essay suggests that a closer alignment between business history and migration studies might pay substantial dividends in tracking what Richards described as the “diversity and heterogeneity” of British migrant and expatriate experience (172).
Toward the end of his life, Richards turned his attention to contemporary migration crises, noting the steadily increasing rigidity of state borders while also arguing that the factors underlying mass movement had remained much the same as they had always been. Nevertheless, this volume remains primarily concerned with strongly institutionalized systems of emigration, and it is striking that only Porter mentions the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century refugees. In this sense, too, Richards's legacy leaves historical boundaries that still need to be bridged.
