The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764

Abstract

My reading of The People with No Name was haunted by another book published forty years ago. During the 1960s, Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (1963) led a revolution in historical scholarship. Powell's exquisite reconstruction of Sudbury, Massachusetts, at its founding in the 1630s and his illumination of its English origins fed prominently into a powerful current of scholarship swelling under the influences of the Annales school, the Cambridge group, new computer technologies, and a realization amid the political upheavals of the 1960s that ordinary people can change history. Patrick Griffin's book has something of the air of that earlier volume. Both Powell and Griffin examine colonial migrations. Both treat the transferral and transformation of cultural institutions in New World environments. Both mine social conflicts for insights into how people adapted to unfamiliar surroundings. Powell's book and its stepchild, the new social history, led to a revi-sioning of seventeenth-century historiography that barely touched the eighteenth century. That, however, is Griffin's century, and his people were variously Irish, Irish Protestants, Scotch Irish, Scots Irish, and Ulster Scots. In the 1700s mass migrations from the north of Ireland, central Europe, and West Africa transformed the largely English world of eastern North America. Slave-based plantation agriculture also redefined the southern colonies, secularization overwhelmed the New England landscape, Middle Atlantic colonies became the “best poor man's country” in the thinking of James T. Lemon (1972), the southern back-country delineated the first interior frontier of Anglo-America, and imperial conflict reshaped both Native American worlds and the colonial societies of New France, New Spain, and New England writ large. That list could go on, but Griffin makes the point well that his “generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age.”