Imagine you could go anywhere in the world – no passport needed. All around you there are posters and pamphlets extolling the virtues of emigration and offering incentives to ease your passage to settle in distant sun-kissed lands. Would you be tempted? 

From the early 19th century to the beginning of the First World War, it’s estimated that over 10 million British people chose to migrate. Most went to settle in the United States and around Britain’s growing empire. Over half of these emigrants left from the port of Liverpool.

Mukti Jain Campion talks to Ian Murphy, Director of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, to discover how the port of Liverpool became the gateway to millions of new lives abroad, and examines the importance of printed propaganda in fuelling 19th century British emigration with Dr Fariha Shaikh, Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham and author of Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art.

A Culture Wise Production for the Migration Museum

Producer: Mukti Jain Campion

Readings: Adrian Preater and Joanna Purslow

Music: Shakira Malkani

Shanty Singers: Mary Keith, Peter Brown and David Wells-Cole

Image credit: Osbert Parker from his video Timeline, as featured in the Migration Museum's Departures exhibition.

Exhibition: This podcast accompanies the exhibition Departures: 400 Years of Emigration from Britain at the Migration Museum in London. For more information, visit: www.migrationmuseum.org/exhibition/departures.