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Chapter 3 Migration and Empire The eighteenth century saw an Atlantic world in motion—a transit of peoples on an unprecedented scale. Most dynamic in the British Empire were the North American colonies, magnets for immigration that consequently underwent a comprehensive transformation from scattered, sparse outposts to continuous, dense settlements. Colonial newspapers bore witness to this world of amplifying geographical mobility. They published departure notices for people seeking to resolve their financial affairs before returning to England or elsewhere in Europe. But more poignant were missing persons notices in search of kin, whose ceaseless publication testified to how continuously the colonial landscape—whether port city or hinterland—was full of people arriving, and moving, and losing track of each other. In 1700 the number of people living in the colonies amounted to 8 percent of England’s population, approximately 265,000 people, white and black. Seven decades later, on the eve of the War of American Independence, they equaled 43 percent of England’s population, an astonishing growth to approximately 2,300,000 whites and blacks.1 Historians long placed the population movements of the eighteenth century inside a continuum of transatlantic migration to the ‘‘United States’’ from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, all as an argument for American exceptionalism as a beacon of ‘‘freedom’’ in the world. Yet approximately three-quarters of immigrants to the British colonies in the eighteenth century were unfree: enslaved, indentured , or convicted.2 For Germans and Britons emigration across the Atlantic was an extension of a far more massive migration within Britain and within Europe. The vast majority of German migrants, for instance, sought economic opportunity and affordable land in Eastern Europe, with only a small minority relocating to North America. English, Scottish , and Irish migrants moved foremost around the countryside or from country to city, again with only a small minority emigrating to the American colonies.3 Given the proportion of unfree movement, and the amount of migration that never crossed the Atlantic, historians now fit all this geographical mobility into a broader narrative of an Atlantic Migration and Empire 101 world encompassing Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and an even broader narrative of a global condition of migration surging from the twelfth century onward.4 Myths of freedom and notions of American exceptionalism no longer make sense in helping us understand what propelled so many people into motion in the eighteenth century, nor before, nor after. The more historians scrutinize the factor of motivation, the more migration motives can be found on a personal level: coercion, freedom, opportunity, desperation, jealousy of an older brother, hatred of a stepfather .5 Once we look beyond the motivation for departure that has preoccupied historians, we can more closely investigate the process of resettlement, how transatlantic immigrants and frontier migrants strove to come to terms with displacement and change. To fit oneself into a new environment and milieu did not stop with any moment of motivated desire, but entailed an intensive process of comparing, evaluating, calculating, and explaining how life seemed to work in one place versus another. The letters of transatlantic immigrants and frontier migrants contain all the sentimental expression one would expect of people separated by distance, and missing each other, and sensing the permanence of that separation. Yet they also observed the hustle and bustle of livelihoods , hinterland production, market towns, regional economies, and Atlantic worlds. From these observations, we can draw out their conscious concerns and unconscious assumptions as they placed themselves in relationship to family expectation, to economic structure, and to social landscape—all the basic and broader terms of life that impinged on their sense of personal agency in adapting to a new place. This chapter begins with transatlantic immigrants and frontier migrants whose relationships were reduced almost completely to letters. ‘‘When your annual letter arrives,’’ Peter Fontaine, Jr., exulted to an uncle he would never meet, ‘‘I am persuaded there is a kind of instinct in souls; for though I never see with my bodily eyes either you or my dear uncle John . . . I seem quite intimate with you both, and so closely united in familiar friendship.’’6 Fontaine was from a Huguenot family that had fled religious oppression in France in 1685, and then dispersed itself to England, Ireland, Wales, and most recently Virginia: truly an Atlantic world family. Such letters did more than the work of family and emotion and pleasure for people like Peter Fontaine. They also enabled immigrants and migrants to...

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