Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities gives voice to the Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh women and men who negotiated the complex and often dangerous world of emigration between 1815 and 1845. Using "information wanted" notices that appeared in colonial newspapers as well as emigrants' own accounts, Errington illustrates that emigration was a family affair. Individuals made their decisions within a matrix of kin and community - their experiences shaped by their identities as husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and cousins. The Atlantic crossing divided families, but it was also the means of reuniting kin and rebuilding old communities. Emigration created its own unique world - a world whose inhabitants remained well aware of the transatlantic community that provided them with a continuing sense of identity, home, and family.

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities gives voice to the Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh women and men who negotiated the complex and often dangerous world of emigration between 1815 and 1845. Using "information wanted" notices that appeared in colonial newspapers as well as emigrants' own accounts, Errington illustrates that emigration was a family affair. Individuals made their decisions within a matrix of kin and community - their experiences shaped by their identities as husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and cousins. The Atlantic crossing divided families, but it was also the means of reuniting kin and rebuilding old communities. Emigration created its own unique world - a world whose inhabitants remained well aware of the transatlantic community that provided them with a continuing sense of identity, home, and family.

Annotation In the fall of 1831, Mrs McIndoe and her children left Scotland to join her husband, William, a labourer on the Rideau Canal. When they arrived they discovered that William had already moved on, forcing Mrs McIndoe to appeal to the public to help reunite her family. As Elizabeth Jane Errington illustrates, the nineteenth-century world of emigration was hazardous.Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communitiesgives voice to the Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh women and men who negotiated the complex and often dangerous world of emigration between 1815 and 1845. Using "information wanted" notices that appeared in colonial newspapers as well as emigrants' own accounts, Errington illustrates that emigration was a family affair. Individuals made their decisions within a matrix of kin and community - their experiences shaped by their identities as husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and cousins. The Atlantic crossing divided families, but it was also the means of reuniting kin and rebuilding old communities. Emigration created its own unique world - a world whose inhabitants remained well aware of the transatlantic community that provided them with a continuing sense of identity, home, and family.

Methodists in nineteenth-century Ontario and Quebec, like all British subjects, existed as satellites of an influential empire. Transatlantic Methodists uncovers how the Methodist ministry and laity in these colonies, whether they were British, American, or native-born, came to define themselves as transplanted Britons and Wesleyans, in response to their changing, often contentious relationship with the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Britain. Revising the nationalist framework that has dominated much of the scholarship on Methodism in central Canada, Todd Webb argues that a transatlantic perspective is necessary to understand the process of cultural formation among nineteenth-century Methodists. He shows that the Wesleyan Methodists in Britain played a key role in determining the identities of their colonial counterparts through disputes over the meaning of political loyalty, how Methodism should be governed, who should control church finances, and the nature and value of religious revivalism. At the same time, Methodists in Ontario and Quebec threatened to disrupt the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Britain and helped to trigger the largest division in its history. Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic shaped - and were shaped by - the larger British world in which they lived. Drawing on insights from new research in British, Atlantic, and imperial history, Transatlantic Methodists is a comprehensive study of how the nineteenth-century British world operated and of Methodism's place within it.

Canada and the British Empire traces the evolution of Canada, placing it within the wider context of British imperial history. Beginning with a broad chronological narrative, the volume surveys the country's history from the foundation of the first British bases in Canada in the early seventeenth century, until the patriation of the Canadian constitution in 1982. Historians approach the subject thematically, analysing subjects such as British migration to Canada, the role played by gender in the construction of imperial identities, and the economic relationship between Canada and Britain. Other important chapters examine the history of Newfoundland, the history and legacy of imperial law, and the attitudes of French Canadians and Canada's aboriginal peoples to the imperial relationship. The overall focus of the book is on emphasising the part that Canada played in the British Empire, and on understanding the Canadian response towards imperialism. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, it is essential reading for anyone interested either in the history of Canada or in the history of the British Empire.

The Ottawa Valley is a region of Canada straddling the Ottawa River in Ontario and Québec that is well known for its rich singing, storytelling, fiddling and step dancing traditions. Settled largely by the Irish, Scots and the French over the past two hundred years, it had largest concentration of people of Irish origin in Canada by the late 19th century. Travelling through the Valley one gets the sense of coming face to face with the past. While its dramatic history is filled with incidents of extreme hardship and tragedy, the overriding impression is of a triumphant survivalism associated with its strong men of the past; the voyageurs, the coureurs du bois and the lumbermen. The legacy of this unique heritage—from fiddling and step dancing to tales of priests, lumberman, and Orange and Green rivalries—is explored in this book through the voices of Valley people themselves. The author reveals the importance of place and history in the transmission of this vibrant regional culture down to the present day.

In the context of surging interests in reconciliation and decolonization, settler colonialism increasingly occupies political, public, and academic conversations. Nothing to Write Home About is a detailed study of the settler colonial significance of British family correspondence sent between the United Kingdom and British Columbia between 1858 and 1914. Drawing on thousands of letters written by dozens of correspondents, it offers insights into epistolary topics including trans-imperial family intimacy and conflict, settlers’ everyday concerns such as boredom and food, and the importance of what correspondents chose not to write about. Analyzing both the letters’ content and their conspicuous, loaded silences, Laura Ishiguro traces how Britons used the post to navigate the family separations integral to their migration and to understand British Columbia as an uncontested settler home. This book argues that these letters and their writers played a critical role in laying the foundations of a powerful, personal settler colonial order that continues to structure the province today.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.