Emigrant Homecomings The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000

Emigrant Homecomingsaddresses the significant but neglected issue of return migration to Britain and Europe since 1600. While emigration studies have become prominent in both scholarly and popular circles in recent years, return migration has remained comparatively under-researched, despite evidence that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between a quarter and a third of all emigrants from many parts of Britain and Europe ultimately returned to their countries of origin. Emigrant Homecomingsanalyzes the motives, experiences, and impact of these returning migrants in a wide range of locations over four hundred years, as well as examining the mechanisms and technologies which enabled their return. The book examines the multiple identities that migrants adopted and the huge range and complexity of homecomers' motives and experiences. It also dissects migrants' perception of "home" and the social, economic, cultural, and political change that their return engendered.

Marjory Harper is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen.

1. Introduction --Marjory Harper * Section 1: Overviews of return * Emigrants returning: the evolution of a tradition --Mark Wyman*  ‘Come back Paddy Reilly’: aspects of Irish return migration, 1600–1845 --Patrick Fitzgerald * Section 2: Motives of return migrants * Children of the diaspora: the ‘homecoming’ of the second generation Scot in the seventeenth century --Steve Murdoch
 * Running home from Australia: intercontinental mobility and migrant expectations in the nineteenth century --Eric Richards *  ‘My wayward heart’: homesickness, longing and the return of British post-war immigrants from Australia --Alistair Thomson * Roots tourism as return movement: semantics and the Scottish diaspora --Paul Basu * Section 3: Mechanisms of return *  ‘Settling down’: masculinity, class and the rite of return in a transnational community --Bruce S. Elliott  8  Canada in Britain: returned migrants and the Canada Club --Kathleen Burke * ‘Two homes now’: the return migration of the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf --Marilyn J. Barber * Section 4: The impact of return * Returning to Belhelvie, 1593–1875: the impact of return migration on an Aberdeenshire parish --Alexia Grosjean * The Highlands and the returning nabob: Sir Hector Munro of Novar, 1760–1807 --Andrew Mackillop * Index