The Peopling of Early America: Two Studies by Bernard Bailyn. A Review Article

Abstract

With these two books Bernard Bailyn has begun a massive treatment of a most important subject in early American history: The composition of the eighteenth-century colonial population and its relationship to the Revolution. Bailyn has synthesized the works of other historians on migration, the shipping industry, indentured servitude and other topics, as well as doing his own research into British, Canadian and America records, to come up with the beginnings of a survey on the population of British North America in the years before the Revolution. More importantly than this, he is looking at all this material in a somewhat different light than others have, and he is asking questions-the right questions-that put eighteenth-century migrations in their proper perspective. In the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of free and bound immigrants from Europe and Africa poured into the North American continent. While these migrations have not gone unnoticed by other historians, few have ever tried to establish what the overall picture looked like, or what (as Bailyn puts it) all this movement of people might have looked like to a satellite hovering over the Atlantic. In order to understand migrations fully, one must investigate what the situation was at the source of the migration, during the middle passage and in the receiving country. This is what Bailyn is doing, and he is going to do it for all immigrant groups, though at this point we only have a detailed picture of English and Scottish migrants. Perhaps the most important question asked by Bailyn is, how does the actual movement of so many thousands of people, as well as the activities of the migrants themselves fit into or influence the overall historical development of the area in question, in this case mid-eighteenth century British North