Utopian Dreams and Untenable Realities: The Georgia Trustees' Failure to Stabilize the Frontier through Foreign Migration

Abstract

In the 1730s and 1740s, the Trustees of Georgia incorporated a variety of ethnic and religious groups into the colony in order to protect the borderland between the British and Spanish empires in North America. Historians have largely emphasized economic underdevelopment in explaining the decline of the early Georgia settlement, but the neglect of the Trustees in creating connections among these diverse groups remains an understudied factor in the colony's struggles. Georgia officials' improvisational approach to colony-building in the early eighteenth century demonstrates a failed experiment within the British imperial system, and ultimately it did not create a sustainable settlement. Scottish and Irish as well as German-speaking, Jewish, and other settlers increased British-allied presence on the frontier, but in many cases these groups remained linguistically and geographically siloed. A reading of the Trustees' plans and the correspondence of their representatives in the southeast demonstrates a lack of planning for coordinating and integrating these communities that paradoxically made the colony more fractured, and thus less secure and effective in defending against Spanish spies and military threats. The difficulties of populating this contested borderland proved too complex for the Trustees.