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  • Return Migration and the Mechanical Age:Samuel Butler in New Zealand 1860–1864
  • James Smithies (bio)

Travel is the source of the 'new' in history. The displacements of the journey create exotica ('matter out of place') and rarities … 1

Modernist experimenters and self-conscious opponents of 'the Vic-torians' claimed writer, painter, musician, social critic, explorer and photographer, Samuel Butler (1835–1902) as an important intellectual forebear, but for many years after that he was simply ignored, ornoted as a mere curiosity – an interesting case of a significant Victorian intellectual who coincidentally spent some time in New Zealand. John Stenhouse2 and Roger Robinson3 have gone some way towards altering this perception, but his significance is deserving of more detailed examination. Butler represents an excellent example of return migration – a demographic trend that is often underestimated in narratives of colonization, but was instrumental in the colonization of both New Zealand and the wider empire. More broadly conceived as 'transitory colonization', this feature of our imperial past enables us to acknowledge the impact that transnational flows of people, finances and ideas had on the colonization process – even at the very edge of empire, where the dominant themes were of geographic, cultural and intellectual backwardness.4 After staking out new colonial territory, digging up moa bones, scandalizing his friends with free-thought, and engaging Darwin with his erudite articulation of the theory of evolution, Samuel Butler returned to England with a new antipodean perspective on the modern world that explicates the basically synchronous relationship between England and its antipodes that existed during the mid-nineteenth century.

Return Migration

Figures for rates of return migration are notoriously difficult to ascertain with any degree of accuracy, but there is little doubt that [End Page 203] nineteenth century populations were remarkably mobile. In 1859 (the year before Samuel Butler arrived), the New Zealand Official Statistics recorded 21,188 arrivals and 10,950 departures, with a net population increase of 12,180 in a total estimated population of 71,508.5 Although it is impossible to trace return migrants within these numbers, the reality is instructive: for every two people that entered the country, another left (either temporarily or permanently). This would suggesta highly fluid population and a high rate of what could be termed 'transitory colonization' across the population as a whole, which would fit well with Miles Fairburn's6 broader thesis of atomization, bondlessness and transience.7 Viewed in this manner, the colonial project looks like a chaotic, random and fundamentally transnational affair, with a variety of different historical actors contributing to the process. Rather than being the province of an identifiable strain of settlers with definite and increasingly autochthonous genealogies, it looks like a collaborative project pressed home as much by myriad sojourners and entrepreneurs as permanent colonists. The picture would, of course, come as no surprise to most historians, and is the basis of the trend towards transnational history. Indeed, it is a perspective on the past that meshes well with what we know about the cultural history of nineteenth century metropolitan England.8 John Darwin has commented upon the'reciprocal impulses which travelled between the centre and its diverse peripheries',9 and Simon Potter suggests that '[s]ignificant levels of return migration' were a key factor in imperial communications networks.10 Yumna Siddiqi points out that 'returning colonials'11 were such a commonplace in England that by the turn of the century they had become stock characters in the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, representing rather menacing departures from civilized society. According to Siddiqi, Doyle's mongoose-owning and one-legged returnees represented deep-set concern about 'the emergence of an itinerant, transnational underclass of poor Europeans – the flotsam and jetsam of Empire' (Siddiqi, 233) who could only but contribute to the degeneration of British culture.12

Recursive patterns like this are relatively well-known to students of the gold-rushes, where European and Chinese men followed their fortunes around the world from California to New South Wales and Victoria and finally to New Zealand, contributing to the colonization of each area in turn. Indeed, there are almost as many studies...

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