‘Better Britons’ are men and are made: Matthew Fulford, Becoming ‘Better Britons’: Canadian Emigration Schemes and Imperial Masculinity, 1880-1914, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2021 | settler colonial studies blog

‘Better Britons’ are men and are made: Matthew Fulford, Becoming ‘Better Britons’: Canadian Emigration Schemes and Imperial Masculinity, 1880-1914, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2021

19Jan22

Abstract: Between 1880 and 1914, charitable emigration societies run by middle-class reformers worked to recruit and relocate London’s working-class men to work in western Canada. These societies were motivated by fears about unemployment and the moral degradation of men in the city and sought to reunite working men with the land. For the men involved, emigration provided an opportunity to improve their status and assert their masculinity by becoming rugged imperial men. For Canadians, meanwhile, recruiting a steady stream of honorable hard-working men to settle rural lands in the west was essential to their early nation-building efforts. Both the emigration societies and Canadian officials were preoccupied with the kinds of men that moved to the region, and both parties were influenced by ideas of urban degeneracy, race, and social categorization in how they described the men. English reformers believed they were working to save the empire from a moral crisis related to overcrowding and sinfulness; Canadians argued that receiving good quality Anglo-Saxon men was necessary to build a strong nation within the wider British world. For the men themselves, success in their new lives would elevate them from a status as failed breadwinners to manly, imperial men.

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