Maltese emigration : political overtures

Abstract

Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century and for mo re than 50 years later emigration was one of the issues that bedevilled political organizations in the Maltese Islands. It originated with sporadic adventures to the neighbouring North African city ports where individual workers and small groups of peasants made “redundant" by the new English policy of laissez-faire, found easy work as traders or hawkers and developed gradually into a mass exodus of villages seeking " better prospects" in the distant "vast territories of the Empire". No pattern was at first followed and people were allowed to leave and return at leisure. But after the turn of the century when the "surplus population" began to weigh heavily upon the British Treasury, emigration schemes became regular items on the lists of local British administrators.