No-Names in the Atlantic World

Abstract

When justifying American independence from Britain, Thomas Paine noted that it was incorrect to think of England as the mother country of any of the colonies, for even among Europeans, one third of the inhabitants, even of [Pennsylvania], are of descent.' Historians have recognized ethnic pluralism as a staple of early American history, but the tendency remains to speak of English colonists as if that covers most everyone in the eighteenth century. Yet increasingly in the years preceding the Revolution, the colonies teemed with settlers from Germany, West Africa, Scotland, and, as Patrick Griffin shows in fine detail, Ulster. More than 100,000 would come to America from Northern Ireland between 1718 and 1775. Why are these people not more recognized and/or recognizable in histories of early America? Griffin argues that the reasons lay in problems of identity. He contends that we cannot label the Ulster Scots with any convenient precision because they were a people conflicted, mobile, and un-identified. Griffin's outstanding treatment of these people makes a significant contribution to one of the most promising (and now maturing) recent trends in American historiography: the new history. Growing partly out of contemporary interests in transnational politics, economics, and religion, world history has emphasized seventeenthand eighteenth-century migrations and exchanges between various African, European, and Native American peoples, places, and goods. As David Armitage has observed, many older presentations of the world seemed racially white, but more recent offerings have helped show the diversity of the world's cross-currents, including the green Atlantic of the Irish dispersals.2 Griffin's Ulster Scots (or whatever we should call them-Griffin deliberately refuses to assign them a standard designation) present no convenient color-coding. He adds to the literature by examining the contested nature of identity