From Britain to Brazil : Migrant Histories in the 1890s

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 capitalism: the tariff-related collapse of the textile industry in northern England became connected to the labour shortage on Brazilian coffee plantations – the two linked by a migration industry that trafficked in people for profit. Yet the central story remains one of failure: nearly a fifth of emigrants died, while many others were left destitute, drifting through Brazil in hopes of finding a way back home.

Moving beyond the conventional focus on stories of successful settlement, From Britain to Brazil explores a failed late Victorian migration to reveal the human costs of global labour schemes and the forces that sustained them.