From Britain to Brazil: Migrant Histories in the 1890s (McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History)

In the early 1890s, nearly three thousand emigrants from towns and cities across Britain and Ireland were lured to Brazil by promises of free passage, work, and land.Instead, after arriving in South America they endured extreme hardship, wandering thousands of miles in search of employment and aid as disease, poverty, and displacement claimed hundreds of lives.Most of those who survived eventually returned home.From Britain to Brazil traces these emigrants’ journeys, examining the forces that drove them to leave home and the migration agents and commercial networks that profited from their hopes. John Zucchi highlights the reality of displacement in intimate, descriptive, and dramatic detail.He shows how racialized ideas of tropical climates shaped both British perceptions and the emigrants’ own sense of biological and cultural vulnerability, further undermining their adaptation to South America.He argues that most local movements of population in the period were connected to global ca