Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (review)

Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. By Marianne S. Wokeck (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) 319 pp. $60.00 cloth $21.50 paper

Trade in Strangers has two intertwined but distinct parts. One is a painstaking study of the volume of German and Irish immigration to North America, particularly the Delaware Valley, during the eighteenth century. Wokeck uses a variety of sources to compile detailed listings of the numbers of voyages and passengers arriving annually in the colonies. These data will be of interest to anyone concerned with immigration during the later colonial period.

The other focus of Trade in Strangers is on the industry that brought these immigrants to America. This part is less successful. After devoting considerable effort to producing quantitative estimates of the volume of immigration, Wokeck unfortunately fails to bring this evidence to bear on the conduct of the trade; instead, she relies largely on qualitative sources in considering the recruitment and transportation of the immigrants. For example, she argues that Irish migrants benefited from access to more timely information about current conditions in America, and easier access to ports, than German migrants. If this were the case, we might expect that over time the volume of Irish immigrants would have been more sensitive to American economic conditions than that of the Germans, but Wokeck does not test this proposition with her evidence on flows. Elsewhere, Wokeck argues that conditions for Irish immigrants on board ship deteriorated during periods of peak immigration, crowded as they were onto unsuitable ships, under the care of inexperienced captains, with consequences that were "disastrous for many immigrants" (208). Yet, she provides no quantitative evidence about the relationship between death or disease rates and the volume of immigration.

Wokeck contends that a new form of specialized mercantile activity that developed in conjunction with eighteenth-century German immigration became the model for the later mass European immigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But since she presents little systematic evidence on the characteristics of the eighteenth-century firms that recruited and transported immigrants, and none on those of the nineteenth century, this assertion--like many of the specific claims in her description of the industry--remains an interesting but untested hypothesis. The lack of systematic quantitative analysis consistently limits the book's findings. Yet Trade in Strangers makes a useful contribution to our knowledge of colonial immigration, and raises many questions for future research.

David W. Galenson
University of Chicago

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