The final core chapter studies radical possibilities held in chronicles of rural emigration to and/or return from the settler areas of the British world-system: namely southern Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, but also with reference to regions of British influence or interest, including Brazil and North America. Through a chronological approach, the study charts how the settler areas of the world-system, especially in Hardy’s middle and late fiction, are critically reconstructed as heartlands of adversity, working-class disaffection and even anti-patriotic sentiment. Through searing accounts of working-class illness, death, disaffection and narratives of ‘failed’ emigration, the tales challenge late nineteenth-century myths, peddled by social elites, that colonial settlers were a ‘healthy’ extension of British society, sharers in colonial wealth and bound by strong kinship ties the motherland. The convulsive outcomes of imperial emigration for the relationships between the classes, sexes and generations in many of the short stories and in novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895) narrate the strains of imperial assimilation and offer regional resistance to myths of ‘even’ development across the settler world. In addition to its strong historical and biographical component, the chapter includes comparative glances at other nineteenth-century literary conceptions of emigration, for example in Chartist poetry and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848).