Book Description

Excerpt from British Emigration to North America Projects and Opinions in the Early Victorian Period When En g, land with the sixteenth-century loss of Calais, gave up her ambition for provinces in France, she receded from the main land, and settled back as an agricultural country off the coast of Europe. But as the door was closed towards the continent, it was opened towards the sea. Although other European states already held sway over large colonial possessions, novel accident, natural advantage, or native acumen allowed the island kingdom to become the nucleus for the world's foremost empire. And although Britain developed remarkably stable, yet unusually elastic, institutions, thousands of her citizens found religious, political, or social reasons for leaving their homeland. The economic motive was perhaps an even greater stimulator of emigration; While the rapidly growing commercial spirit especially encouraged the colonization impulse. Once established, commerce and colonies became dual forces which more and more were to dominate the actions and mould the lives of the British people. As the aura of respectability was thrown around commercial activities, so, to a lesser degree, emigration and colonization came to be acknowledged as legi timate undertakings. Anglo-saxons flowed to every continent and established settlements gover - looking every ocean, and, long before Victorian times, made Britain into Europe's leading commercial and imperial, as well as colonial, power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.