Trade Unions and Emigration in Late Victorian England: A National Lobby for State Aid

Abstract

That the state might owe its poor and unemployed a helping hand to emigrate to wherever there were jobs found common enough expression in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1820s and 1830s there were the conflicting schemes of Wilmot-Horton and E. G. Wakefield. Carlyle advocated in 1843 a state emigration service to provide a bridge to the colonies, and Irish troubles periodically provided a source of speculation about the usefulness of state emigration as a solution to agricultural distress. For Tories it could be a conservative measure to diminish at a stroke economic distress and the social disruption it bred, while some Liberals viewed it as a necessary rationalization of the labor market and supported it in the same spirit, and with the same arguments, as the Cheap Trains Act. Organized labor itself had had recourse on occasion to the emigration of members both as a restrictive guild practice and a militant trade dispute tactic. The extent to which trade unions continued to favor emigration benefits after mid-century has been a subject of some dispute. There is also the question of trade union attitudes toward schemes of state emigration — distrusted by many in the early Victorian period as transportation of the poor. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate a strong continued interest in an emigration solution by many trade unions well into the 1880s, and that after mid-century much of organized labor turned from emphasis on emigration benefits provided by the union to acceptance of and agitation for a state program of emigration assistance funded by the national exchequer.

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