The Migration of the Non-English to Eighteenth-Century Colonial America

Abstract

In the English language literature, transatlantic migration for many years meant the outflow from England in the seventeenth century and the movement of more than 50 million Europeans to mainly the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The traffic in people from Africa received more attention from the 1960s as recognition dawned that far more Africans than Europeans had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean before 1840. In addition, the large Iberian exodus before 1700 began to receive its due. But compared to the earlier and later periods, and compared to the slave trade at any time, the movement of free migrants in the eighteenth century has continued to attract less scholarly attention. The low profile is partly explained by volume. In the eighteenth century, the ratio of African to European departures was at its all time apogee-perhaps six million of the former to one million of the latter; far more left West-Central Africa alone than the whole of Europe. Partly it is because the proportion of early modern migrants who did not have English as a first language was at its greatest in the eighteenth century, and the proportion going to what became the U.S. was its post-1640 low point. Portuguese migration to Brazil in the aftermath of the Minas Gerais gold rush has still to receive the attention of specialists-in any language. Marianne Wokeck's new study, parts of it published earlier in essay form, is part of a broader scholarly effort to redress this imbalance which goes back to the mid-1980s. Unlike the movement of people over land, sea-borne migrations generated abundant micro data. The best work carried out since the micro-computer revolution, of which this is very much a part, has first established the data, and then carefully drawn out the generalizations. While the topic is once more North America, this work focuses on non-English speakers in the main. The book begins by laying out the basic argument that a new form of commercial organization developed in the eighteenth century