Emigration and Social Change: Pamphlet, Memory and Statistics
A candidate is investigating Maltese emigration for the question: 'How far did emigration change Maltese society between 1945 and 1970?' She has two sources. Source A is a pamphlet issued by the Emigration Department in the early 1960s describing assisted passages to Australia and promising 'a bright future for the Maltese family in a new land'. Source B is a transcript of a 1998 interview with a woman who left Gozo in 1958 at the age of nineteen and worked in a factory in Melbourne; she recalls that 'we wrote home every month and sent money when we could'. The candidate has also found official statistics showing heavy net emigration in the 1950s and a sharp fall by the late 1960s. Her draft reads: 'Source A is biased, so I will not use it. Source B is a personal memory, so it is trustworthy.'
1. Assess the candidate's two judgements about the sources.
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Both judgements are wrong in the same way: they treat a single label - 'biased', 'personal memory' - as a verdict instead of an analysis.
A government emigration pamphlet is certainly promotional, and its promise of a bright future is not a description of outcomes. But bias is not a reason to discard it. It is excellent evidence of official policy: what the state wanted emigrants to believe, which destinations it favoured, what anxieties about population and unemployment it was addressing, and how it sold emigration to families who might otherwise have refused. What it cannot do is tell the historian what migrants actually found.
Equally, a personal memory is not automatically trustworthy. The interview took place forty years after the voyage; memory selects and reshapes, and the account will be shaped by how the interviewer framed the questions. It is strong on experience, feeling and family economy - the monthly letters and the remittances are exactly the kind of detail statistics cannot supply - but weak on dates, numbers and typicality. One woman from Gozo cannot represent all migrants.
The correct move is to match each source to a question it can answer, and to corroborate both against the statistics and against other testimonies.
2. How should the candidate use the sharp fall in emigration by the late 1960s as evidence within her argument?
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Cautiously, and with attention to what the fall does and does not show.
It shows a change in conditions rather than simply a change in mood. Heavy emigration in the 1950s points to a population pressing on scarce employment and to an official policy of assisted departure; the decline by the late 1960s is consistent with a growing local economy, new employment, rising expectations, and the political change that followed independence in 1964. That makes the decline evidence about Malta's development, and indirectly about the limits of emigration's long-term impact.
But the inference has risks. Net migration figures combine departures and returns, so a fall in the net figure may reflect more people coming back rather than fewer leaving. And the question asks how far emigration changed society, not how much of it there was; the answer depends on measures - population structure and sex ratio, labour supply and wages, remittances, family separation, the growth of Maltese communities abroad and the networks of letters and money the interviewee describes. A large outflow over fifteen years can have lasting effects even if it later stopped.
The strongest answer therefore uses the statistics as a framework for periodisation and then uses the pamphlet and testimony to explain mechanisms.
3. The candidate asks whether she should simply write that emigration 'modernised' Maltese society. Advise her on defining 'change' before she writes.
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'Modernised' is a word that hides the argument rather than making it. It bundles together economic growth, secularisation, urbanisation and changing family life, and it implies a direction of travel that the evidence may not support. The examiner will want the term unpacked.
She should define change along dimensions and decide what would count as evidence for each: demographic (age and sex structure, marriage rates, population totals), economic (remittances, labour scarcity, wages, skills brought back), social and familial (separation of parents and children, women's employment, the growth of transnational kin networks), and cultural (language use abroad, food, religious practice, the return of migrants with new expectations).
She should also specify the period and compare it with a baseline: change relative to 1945, not change in the abstract. And she should distinguish change caused by emigration from change happening alongside it, since independence, the expansion of the economy and the rundown of the British base were working at the same time. A conclusion that emigration changed family life and expectations more than it changed Malta's economy, or vice versa, would be a real answer; 'it modernised society' is not.