Petworth Emigration Scheme - Background

Background

In the early nineteenth century malthusian predictions of overpopulation seemed to be true in Europe. The disappearance of bubonic plague after the seventeenth century and the introduction of smallpox vaccine in the later eighteenth century had allowed birth rates to exceed death rates in the young, giving population growth. There was no possibility of importing food from outside of Europe at that time, so food prices had risen, and with the decline in military employment after the Napoleonic wars unemployment and hunger were widespread in the countryside. Shelter and food for the destitute was provided locally by committees of landowners and clerics and varied from one area to another. Funding for this cames from the Rates, a local property tax, which became higher with increasing poverty. In 1830 an outbreak of civil unrest by desperate agricultural workers, the Swing Riots, occurred in southern England, prompting the wealthy to look for a way of losing some of the surplus population, especially the more troublesome members, through emigration. Upper Canada was seen as somewhere with unfarmed land to settle and not too costly to reach, but far enough that people would not easily come back.