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Published in London between 1839 and 1852 and aligned with the commercial objectives of the New Zealand Company, the New Zealand Journal included letters from emigrants. This paper studies letters written by a small cohort of rural labourers who emigrated from Ham House in Surrey to Wellington in 1841. Following Dorothy Smith, I read them as ethnographic data, interrogating them in relation to ruling-class texts including Company records, newspaper reports and correspondence between capitalists, professionals and politicians. The labourers' letters depict capital-labour (class) and colonial (race) relations in embodied form. The everyday actualities of their activities were co-ordinated by extra-local social relations of colonialism and flows of capital and labour. Their schooling in England had been designed to 'keep them in their place'. With reference to the sparse archival resources remaining from the first years of commercially-driven settlement, before there was an apparatus of state, I consider how changing material conditions in the settlement enabled and constrained learning opportunities for these labourers' children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to research on the lived dimensions of transnational mobility through an engagement with recent work on affect. Drawing on interviews with New Zealand skilled migrants, we argue that the attractions and experience of relocation to London are significantly connected to the affective possibilities it offers. As a diverse and enlivening set of ecologies of place, London appears to facilitate a certain feeling of being in the heart of things, an embodied state that is both valued and closely linked to New Zealand's former status as a British colony. We argue that considering the affective possibilities of cities - and the diverse ways in which transnational migrants perceive and appropriate these possibilities - offers valuable insights into the dynamics of subjectivity in a mobile world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider whether London functions as an ‘escalator region’ for international migrants in the same way that has been suggested for domestic migrants. Our case study focuses on New Zealand tertiary educated migrants who move to London for a period of work and travel. We propose a four-fold typology of these movers, seeking to tease out the different motivations and aspirations behind their global mobility, and the different ways in which they make use of London's opportunities. Our findings have broader ramifications for studies of skilled migrants between global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]