The Great British Migration

The British are the greatest migrants of the modern age. They began the modern trend of migrating for economic reasons. In his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, historian Niall Ferguson writes: “Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.”