The Age of Mass European Emigration

Economic historians Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, in The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (1998), gave this era its standard name, estimating that roughly 50 to 60 million Europeans emigrated overseas between approximately 1815 and 1930 - one of the largest sustained episodes of voluntary human migration in recorded history, driven by rapid population growth, recurrent agricultural crises, and the widening gap in wages and opportunity between Europe and the labor-scarce economies of the Americas and Oceania.