Land and Labour

The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844-51
This book is a history of the Potters’ Emigration Society from its founding in 1844 to its dissolution in early 1851. The Society, which became a national organisation after 1848, sought to solve the problems of surplus labour by turning workers into frontier farmers. It was the most significant industrial emigration scheme of its period.
Land and labour provides the first full-length history of the Potters’ Emigration Society, the controversial trade union scheme designed to solve the problems of surplus labour by changing workers into farmers on land acquired in frontier Wisconsin. The book is based on intensive research into British and American newspapers, passenger lists, census, manuscript, and genealogical sources. After tracing the scheme’s industrial origins and founding in the Potteries, it examines the migration and settlement process, expansion to other trades and areas, and finally the circumstances that led to its demise in 1851. Despite the Society’s failure, the history offers unique insight into working-class dreams of landed independence in the American West and into the complex and contingent character of nineteenth-century emigration.