The movement of large numbers of people from Europe to the Americas and other parts of the world was one of the most important features of the international economy in the years after the Napoleonic wars. More than 50 million people were directly involved. Emigration could not fail to have profound effects on both the sending and the receiving countries.

There are some ambiguities in both the emigration and immigration statistics of individual countries but they are not important enough to obscure the main features of the movement. The temporal pattern was that the volume and the rate of emigration rose to die First World War, continued at a lower rate in the 1920s, and collapsed in the international depression of the early 1930s. There were large fluctuations around the upward trend, however. Emigration rates peaked in 1854, 1873, 1883, 1907 and 1913. The geographical pattern was that, in general, European emigration spread from west to east. In the early nineteenth century, most emigrants came from Britain and Ireland. By the 1850s, emigration had become important from some of the German States and Scandinavia. By the early twentieth century, emigration from Norway, Sweden, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland had passed its peak. But very large numbers of emigrants were leaving from Italy and from many parts of southern and eastern Europe (Ferenczi and Willcox, 1929–31, 1, 236–88).

About 52 million people were recorded as having left European countries for overseas destinations between 1815 and 1930.