The Scope Of The Diaspora
In the middle of the great age of international migration in the nineteenth century the British were aware that they had contributed disproportionately to the great flows of people out of Europe. The large numbers of British people living abroad caused the census takers increasing difficulty as they attempted to keep track of the population at home and abroad. The census of 1861 commented on the extraordinary dispersion of the British people over the previous few decades:
The people of these islands are more movable than other nations, and large numbers of them are always abroad ...sometimes on the Alps, sometimes in the deserts of Africa, or in the strangest places; but generally in ships at sea, in the great commercial entreprts, in the capitals of Europe, in our colonies, or in the States of America. (Anon, 1863, p. 4)
The reach of the British people, even as early as 1861, was already difficult to quantify. The census offered a series of estimates (Anon,...
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Richards, E. (2005). British Diaspora. In: Ember, M., Ember, C.R., Skoggard, I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_5
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