European Emigration to the Americas: 1492 to Independence: A Hemispheric View

Abstract

In Eric Hunderaker's and Rebecca Horn's slim, stapled booklet, European Emigration to the America's: 1492 to Independence, readers will not find a recitation of the much-beloved (to Polish Americans) story of the Polish glassmakers at Jamestown. In a sense, more's the pity, as an explanation of how a group of Polanders got there would have dovetailed nicely—and broadened—the transnational interpretive framework of the volume. The authors admirably integrate migration flows from the Iberian Peninsula with those from northwestern Europe, but as is typical of American scholarship, central and eastern Europe remain terra incognita, as if the western half of the continent floated bubble-like in space, like the television weather maps which depict the United States as a separate entity unconnected to an invisible Canada or Mexico.In the authors’ defense, the eastern part of the European continent figures little in the transatlantic migrations of their period. In fact, what they do ably accomplish is an ambitious yet compact overview of pre-Revolutionary migration from Europe to the Americas whose endnotes alone, which make up about a third of this slim volume, are worth the price of admission. Their essay may remind scholarly readers of Frank Thistlethwaite's impactful interpretation of trans-Atlantic migration during a later period, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (1960), a high compliment to Hinderaker and Horn.European Emigration to the Americas is so full of economically presented information covering movements from half a continent over roughly three centuries that it is impossible to summarize, even only adequately, in a brief review without almost risking exceeding the length of the monograph itself. The volume, of course, commences as Europeans “settled among or dislocated Native American peoples” (p. 1). If this might suggest a version of Robert E. Park's succession model writ large, some scholars (probably sociologists), taking a similarly long view, might want to explore possible parallels, comparisons, and contrasts between this often violent process of population displacement/replacement with the impact of the so-called new immigrants (like the Poles who migrated za chlebem [for bread]) who displaced native-born urban populations and subsequently the latter-day urban newcomers—immigrants and internal migrants—who displaced them. But Hunderaker's and Horn's framework draws not upon Park's model but rather colonization and expansion as historical processes, which they do not attempt to theorize. The authors also reject mechanistic push-pull models to which many non-specialist historians who teach the subject still seem to cling to in favor of a more dynamic understanding of how and why, where and when various people have moved. Though some of those early movements (and more of them in the last third of the period they study) received state sponsorship, most were privately organized and financed, and the majority of Europeans (about two million in all, and heavily male in composition) moved as individuals.Looming especially large in the repopulation of the Americas by Europeans was that singularly important colonial product: sugar. For the Caribbean and Central and parts of South America, the history of sugar production, on which there is now a brilliant literature (including, for example, the now-classic work of Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History [1985]) is the history of the race and class exploitation of lower-class European labor migrants (including convicts and the indentured), Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans, something that readers with a sweet tooth might think about. The subject of sugar also brings up what, for this reviewer, is an unfortunate, although understandable, omission from this short volume, namely, what became of the various colonial products exported from the western hemisphere during these centuries covered by the book. Some, of course, became part of the notorious Triangle Trade that connected the Americas, Europe, and Africa and saw the circulation of tobacco, sugar, molasses, rum, guns, trinkets, and slaves, among other things. Other products circulated within and among western European countries and regions with impacts on their societies, cultures, and economies not explored here. But, at the very least, colonial tobacco also made its way through northern Europe and into Russia. Did other colonial products travel eastward as well? Would that the authors, metaphorically speaking, had retraced the path the Polanders took to Virginia to describe the penetration of colonial products into various Europeans societies and markets east as well as west and, if into the former, possible connections between central and eastern Europe and Atlantic history. This reviewer does not wish they had written a different book, only a bigger and more comprehensive one, where their exceedingly fine scholarship would have been even more on display.