The Class of '35

Alison Games. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiii + 322 pp. Illustrations, tables, figures, appendixes, notes, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper).

The m.o. known as cohort analysis has been both popular and successful for generations. Eminent scientists, tweedy scholars, downtown artistes, and Grub Street hacks have all frequently employed the method, often to powerful effect. It is this method that links Boston University doctors and Howard Chudacoff, John Updike and Michael Apted, and, alas, David Wallechinsky and Michael Medved. Indeed, examples abound of researchers, writers and artists, who, in tracing individuals, groups, classes, or entire communities over time, have ensnared and implicated readers and viewers in the "stories" they wish to tell. Whether one is interested, let us say, in Framingham hearts and lungs or residential mobility in Omaha, the career paths of English children, Harry Angstrom's sexual adventures, or, gasp, the 1965 senior class at Palisades High, cohort analysis has proven a tried-and-true narrative strategy and method of research design.

Alison Games attempts to employ this method in Migration andthe Origins of the EnglishAtlantic World, offering readers a fascinating, albeit messy, incomplete, and statistically non-representative account of the fates and fortunes of almost 5,000 people (4,878, to be more precise) who quit London for England's American colonies in 1635. Both the virtues and limitations of this important first book suggest much about the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting those who take the plunge into the murky waters of early modern Atlantic history.

Given how hot the Atlantic history approach, or, more accurately, framework is these days, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the wee beginnings of the "Atlantic world." Indeed, most scholars employing the conceit proceed under the assumption that the entire Atlantic world--minimally defined as western Europe, western Africa, and the Americas--was integrated, perhaps even unitary in character during (throughout?) the early modern period, and that this world ipso facto can best be studied tout ensemble rather than in a fractional way, which is to say, via strict imperial ties, anachronistic national boundaries, imagined communities, geographical zones, etc. This is not the time or place to evaluate the efficacy of Atlantic history as a "covering idea," but both proponents and opponents of the frame would probably agree that spatial and temporal precision about the actual workings of the Atlantic world is generally lacking, if often promised, the implication being that this world emerged Athena-like, fully grown and fully armed. ¹ Games's data-driven Migration and the Origins of theEnglish Atlantic World is all about specificity, if not precision, and, if nothing else, puts the lie to the "Athenian" creation account.

With a cheer for empiricism and another for specificity, let's turn to Games's data set itself. The "Games 5,000" is drawn from the 1635 port register for London, which survives in the Public Record Office in Kew. The register itself includes information on 7,507 people who embarked from London in 1635, but Games focuses mainly on roughly 65 percent of this total: those that embarked for destinations in America. The remaining 35 percent were headed for the Continent, either for military postings (21 percent) or for business purposes, family matters, private concerns, etc. (14 percent). Although Games does some limited analysis of the Continental travelers--note that she intentionally uses terms such as traveler, voyager, and passenger in order to avoid the sense of purpose suggested by the word immigrant (p. 22)--her principal concern is clearly those that ventured westward to America.

Scholars have long been aware of the American subset of the 1635 London port register--this portion of the complete list was published in the late nineteenth century, for example--but Games is the first person to analyze the subset in a systematic way. Before exacting the data contained therein to scrutiny, moreover, she is careful to...