208 Chapter Six
men were carried on the rolls of the two armed services,^45 i.e., nearly
4 percent of the entire active work force of Great Britain. Recruit
ment into the army came disproportionately from the impoverished
Scottish Highlands, and to the navy from seaport towns where press
gangs picked up any ablebodied man they encountered who did not
have a fixed abode and settled employment. This meant that two
localities whose eighteenth-century record showed them particularly
responsive to political discontent were drained of unemployed and
underemployed young men, just as happened in Paris and the rest of
France after 1794–95.
In Ireland, the other long-standing ulcer of British society and poli
tics, response to rural impoverishment and population growth fol
lowed two divergent paths. In Ulster among Scots-Irish Protestants,
emigration to America had become a tradition since the famine years
of 1717–18; and after interruption during the War of American Inde
pendence, 1775–83, a trickle of emigration from the north of Ireland
resumed until interrupted again in 1812–14 by a new American war.^46
This outflow, averaging something like 2,000–3,000 per annum, was
large enough to make a difference to the province of Ulster and seems
to have provided an effective safety valve for social discontent in that
part of the British Isles. In the south of Ireland, a different stream of
migration temporarily relieved the rural overcrowding from which
Catholic Irish had long suffered, when landlords in Leinster and
Munster discovered that instead of using their estates for grazing, as
had been usual before 1793, the rising price of grain made it worth
while to break the sod and sow wheat or oats. This required man
power for plowing and harvest; and by offering the poor Irish an acre
on which to grow potatoes for the support of their families, the neces
sary manpower could be found. As a result, Connaught, where the
Cromwellian settlement of 1650 had confined the Catholic poor, par-
- This figure is from Glenn Hueckel, “War and the British Economy, 1793–1815:
A General Equilibrium Analysis,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1972): 371.
Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire
(London, 1814), p. 47, gives figures that add up to 511, 679.
- Official statistics were not kept on either side of the Atlantic, but historians are of
the opinion that a total of about 225,000 Ulstermen arrived in America between 1718
and 1775, and that when emigration resumed after 1783 the flow was somewhat smaller
than it had been before the War of Independence. Cf. H. J. M. Johnston, British
Emigration Policy, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 6–7. The beginnings of emigration to
Canada and the Carolinas from the Scottish Highlands dates from after the Seven Years
War, when discharged veterans were offered land in the New World. Cf. Helen I.
Cowan, British Emigration to British North America: The First Hundred Years, rev. ed.
(Toronto, 1961), pp. 3—64. But the numerical scale of this movement was too slight to
have much demographic effect back home.
