The legacy of nineteenth-century settler emigration persists well into twentieth- and twenty-first century literary thought and practice. We occupy a world in which migration has lost none of its vigour, its aesthetic or rhetorical appeal. Current debates on migration are as much about national identity, the free movement of labour and capital, and differing contexts of home-making, as they are about national borders, refuge and asylum. Not only has the visual urgency and topicality of migration increased in the media, its cultural politics continues to provide authors and artists with a rich and fascinating source of enquiry. What are the resonances of a study on white settler-colonial emigration which emerges at a time of rampant national debates on global migrations? Perhaps most importantly, writing this book against this contemporary moment has bought home the pressing need to draw out the distinctions between different structures of mobility, the literatures they produce, and the critical framework with which to analyse them. The movements of nineteenth-century settler emigrants, post-1950 diasporic migrants, and contemporary refugees and asylum seekers, for example, are all determined by very different structural dynamics. In turn, these broader categories are marked by internal differences and specificities. Susannah Moodie, for example, who writes against a male tradition of emigration literature in Roughing It in the Bush but opens her book with pejorative and condescending comments about the Irish emigrants around her, exposes the nuanced, uneven web of colonial settler migration. Necessarily, attending to the structural specificities of nineteenth-century settler emigration and drawing out the distinctions between different forms of mobility requires a different set of critical vocabulary from that which we use to talk about twentieth- and twenty-first-century emigration.

As this book as demonstrated, nineteenth-century settler emigration had a pervasive and deep-rooted hold on the Victorian cultural imagination, and the lived practicalities of private lives both in Britain and the colonies. It had far-reaching consequences into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring the intersections between colonial emigration and its literary outputs provides us with new ways in which to understand and interrogate the complex and varied workings of mid-century empire. It has necessarily entailed interrogating the silences and occlusions of these texts: part of the ethical and political difficulties of researching and writing this book has been the question of how to examine the cultural work of emigration literature without privileging the voice of the settler emigration over that of indigenous peoples.