The British Buckeyes: The English, Scots, and Welsh in Ohio, 1799-1900 (review)

In a time when immigration policy represents a major political issue, it is good to read a book about a time and place when immigration created far less "angst." Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people from the British Isles continued to come to the United States, including Ohio, where they made a substantial impact on Ohio.

Van Vugt argues that Ohio was attractive to those from England, Scotland, Wales, and even from Man and Guernsey because of the existence of ample, cheap land. Many who came with skills, even professions such as medicine, as well as from British cities came for the opportunity to acquire farmland. England's industrialization process had created an urge in English people to continue the romantic attachment to land, and Ohio was an ideal place to continue that tradition.

The research for this book was well conceived, and the mining of county histories was done in an excellent manner. Though in places the book can get a bit tedious in reviewing immigrant after immigrant as illustrious of a larger theme, this is a nicely written and well-researched historical work. Van Vugt effectively argues the obvious that the British immigrant was more welcome than other ethnic groups in Ohio and came to be a part of the American context with an ease that was not possible for those with linguistic differences or significant ethnic appearances that differentiated them from the larger Anglo-American context of Ohio in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the author also effectively documents the major contributions that came from this migration. The large and very profitable pottery industry that marked eastern Ohio came almost entirely from English origins. Many Ohio potters migrated directly from English cities to the Ohio potteries to work. Their transition was eased by their quick absorption into largely English communities of fellow potters. Similarly, the coal mining industry of Ohio had largely Welsh origins. Those from southern portions of Wales came to Ohio after the coal beds had been discovered and began large-scale coal mining operations in the Buckeye state in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the most persuasive chapter, though, comes when the author writes about the complex relationships between the native population, the French, the British, and the Americans in the Ohio Territory in the eighteenth century. The Indian-friendly relationship with the less-intrusive English and their hostility to the Americans and their pressure to take the area is exceptionally well written and is very persuasively argued by Van Vugt.

On a more humorous side, one who reads carefully can find perhaps the earliest documented case of a transgendered person in Ohio, "Sophia Gibaut: an immigrant from Guernsey."

At a time when immigration policy is in turmoil and when nativism continues to be a central point of the immigration discussion, British Buckeyes illustrates clearly the impact of new people on the transformation of American society.