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Reviews in American History 28.2 (2000) 181-186



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The Migration of the Non-English to Eighteenth-Century Colonial America

David Eltis


Marianne S. Wokeck. Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. xxx + 319 pp. Figures, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $21.50 (paper).

In the English language literature, transatlantic migration for many years meant the outflow from England in the seventeenth century and the movement of more than 50 million Europeans to mainly the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The traffic in people from Africa received more attention from the 1960s as recognition dawned that far more Africans than Europeans had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean before 1840. In addition, the large Iberian exodus before 1700 began to receive its due. But compared to the earlier and later periods, and compared to the slave trade at any time, the movement of free migrants in the eighteenth century has continued to attract less scholarly attention. The low profile is partly explained by volume. In the eighteenth century, the ratio of African to European departures was at its all time apogee--perhaps six million of the former to one million of the latter; far more left West-Central Africa alone than the whole of Europe. Partly it is because the proportion of early modern migrants who did not have English as a first language was at its greatest in the eighteenth century, and the proportion going to what became the U.S. was its post-1640 low point. Portuguese migration to Brazil in the aftermath of the Minas Gerais gold rush has still to receive the attention of specialists--in any language.

Marianne Wokeck's new study, parts of it published earlier in essay form, is part of a broader scholarly effort to redress this imbalance which goes back to the mid-1980s. Unlike the movement of people over land, sea-borne migrations generated abundant micro data. The best work carried out since the micro-computer revolution, of which this is very much a part, has first established the data, and then carefully drawn out the generalizations. While the topic is once more North America, this work focuses on non-English speakers in the main. The book begins by laying out the basic argument that a new form of commercial organization developed in the eighteenth century [End Page 181] to bring German migrants to the New World, one which, in effect, provided a model for the vastly greater immigration flows of the following century. German-Colonial America migration generated a template for first the flows from Ulster that continued after German migration tapered off, as well as the later mass migrations from Europe. Earlier and non-English migrations had been organized with large government intervention and regulation. In the English case there had been a large indentured servant component that implied a heavy dependence on labor "debt" incurred by the migrant as a means of financing the passage. Where indentured contracts do not appear to have been common, as in the large early modern Iberian outflows, migration seems to have been grouped around people of social standing or else institutions that were important in the Old World, such as the church or the military or the imperial government. While not much is known about the specifics of the links that made migration possible in the Iberian case, migrants do appear to have moved in effect under a labor debt, albeit in a different and less formal sense than appeared later in north western Europe.

German migration, as presented by Wokeck, was new in the sense that while there were borders to cross and regulations to observe, there was no government organization of the migration itself of the type that was still common in other continental European countries. Merchants responded to the business opportunities presented by the wish of people to leave Europe and go the New World. The resulting volume, direction and organization of the migration emerged...

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