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1996 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 1996 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "The Movement of People: Mobility and Migration, Recruitment and Resettlement." Each author's name is linked to the 1996 program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, and links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here. We regret that we cannot fill requests for copies of the Working Papers at this time, but we hope to do in the future. Please contact individual authors for more information about each paper.
Rosalind J. Beiler, "Transporting Settlers to the British Colonies: The Religious Foundations of Transatlantic Migration"
Historians writing about eighteenth-century transatlantic migration have demonstrated the dominance of economic motivational factors. More specifically, they have shown how the immigration transportation system that emerged by mid-century was fueled by commercial and mercantile interests. This paper argues that seventeenth-century religious communication channels laid the foundation for the secular transportation system of the eighteenth century. Beginning in the 1640s, Mennonite church leaders throughout the Rhine Valley corresponded regularly with one another as they helped Swiss religious exiles resettle in the Palatinate. By 1680, Quaker missionaries established regular meetings for worship among the same families and communities linked to Mennonite information networks. When he received the charter for his colony, William Penn distributed promotional literature through these same channels. What began as a domestic migration expanded to a transatlantic movement. As motivations for migration shifted, European church officials withdrew financial support from needy emigrants. Merchants replaced the church as the suppliers of credit, but church leaders continued to make travel arrangements for potential American settlers. Consequently, religious information networks in seventeenth-century Europe formed the basis for the eighteenth-century secular transportation system. [WP #96004]
Maurice J. Bric, "Irish Emigration to America, 1783-1800"
Although the outlines of Irish emigration to America in the eighteenth century are clear, this paper attempts to analyze the specific characteristics of the flow of people at the end of the century, after the American Revolution. Later emigrants came during a period of more organized, commercialized, passenger travel, and the agents involved in carrying emigrants to America became less directed toward carrying indentured servants and more attuned to the possibilities of paid passenger travel. For their part, migrants themselves were overall more able to deal with the exigencies of such travel, both on their own and with the aid of ethnic-based groups founded to help travelers, which in turn contributed to a growth of national feeling among the emigrants. [WP #96021]
Douglas B. Chambers, "Eboe, Kongo, Mandingo: African Ethnic Groups and the Development of Regional Slave Societies in Mainland North America, 1700-1820"
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, masters and slaves in mainland North America knew that there were several kinds of Africans, and by implication that there also were several African-derived kinds of so-called Negroes. The differential patterns of the transatlantic slave trade meant that Africans of different ethnic backgrounds predominated in particular times and places. Because the slave trade was less random than heretofore thought, and because groups of enslaved Africans were taken in distinct waves to the Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the Lower Mississippi Valley, the ethnic backgrounds of the slaves were important in the development of three distinctive, African-derived, creole slave societies in these three regions. [WP #96014]
Meaghan N. Duff, "Imbibing Information at the Carolina Coffee House: Emigration and the Dynamics of Promotion in a Proprietary Colony"
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Englishmen mounted an extraordinary literary campaign intended to encourage exploration, trade, and settlement in North America. Historians know much about the substance of this promotional propaganda; many of these writings, circulated in both manuscript and printed form, survive today and are published in anthologies or colonial documentary collections. Despite our understanding of the content of early American written propaganda, little is known about the dissemination of all forms of promotional information--including not only published pamphlets, but also colonial constitutions, maps, shipping schedules, land advertisements, and personal correspondence. Who sponsored the creation of this information? How was it distributed and how widely did it circulate? Most important, what was its direct influence on individual and collective emigration to America? A close look at the patrons of London's Carolina Coffee House, founded in the 1680s, offers the unique opportunity to observe the influence of promotional information from its commission and creation through the settlement of immigrants across the Atlantic.[WP #96018]
Georg Fertig, "Household Formation and Economic Autarky in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Transatlantic Migration as a Test Case for the European Marriage Pattern"
A widespread, but recently more critically debated, concept in historical demography assumes that in pre-industrial Europe neo-local marriage kept population and resources in balance. There are two variants of this model, an individualist wage model associated with England, and a corporatist positions model associated with the European continent. In this paper, I discuss the different structural conditions that have influenced such patterns in England, the German lands, and colonial North America, which was settled by emigrants from both countries, as well as comparative methods that might produce new insights into the problem.[WP # 96008]
Patrick Fitzgerald, "A Sentence to Sail: The Transportation of Irish Convicts and Vagrants to Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century"
This paper seeks to expand upon and contextualize the sketch of eighteenth-century Irish convict transportation that appears within A. Roger Ekirch's 1987 study of the phenomenon in Britain. First, it is proposed that the total number of Irish transported was some 5,000 greater than previously estimated. In contrast to England, roughly half of those transported from Ireland were vagrants. This reflected Ireland's previous experience, more limited provision for the poor, and inadequate carcerial regime. A profile of some 2,000 transports sentenced between 1737 and 1743 illustrates, among other things, that many of those shipped off had little other than their poverty to condemn them. Nonetheless, considerable numbers of the more serious offenders managed to return across the Atlantic early, undermining to some degree the rationale behind the system.[WP #96022]
Aaron S. Fogleman, "The Transformation of Immigration into the United States during the Era of the American Revolution"
During the era of the American Revolution, a fundamental transformation occurred in the nature of immigration into the United States. Before the Revolution perhaps nearly 80 percent of immigrants came to America in servitude--as slaves, convicts, or indentured servants. By the early nineteenth century, nearly all immigrants were free passengers. The Revolution itself more than anything else led to this transformation. It ended the forced migration of African slaves and British convicts, and, although the exact causes of the demise of indentured servitude are still debated, the Revolution seems to have provided the social and cultural framework that eventually led to its collapse.[WP #96002]
Alison Games, "'Gallants, to Bohemia' and Maids for Virginia: The London Port Register of 1635"
The 1635 London port register, the largest register for a single year in the colonial period, contains the names and ages of almost five thousand people who left London in that one year for the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Barbados, Nevis, and Saint Christopher, Bermuda, and Providence, Rhode Island. These 5,000 people participated in a crucial migration that established the viability of England's nascent Atlantic empire. Altogether, however, 7,500 people traveled from the port of London in 1635. Just over one thousand of these people voyaged to destinations on the Continent, while 1,595 were soldiers bound to the Continent. The London port register is unique in this respect, depicting as it does a tripartite movement through London. Thus the London port register offers an unusual opportunity to place Atlantic migrations in a broad context circumscribed not by colonial aspirations alone, but by global imperial and commercial endeavors as well. In contrast to the trend among historians of colonial migration, this paper insists on the role migration played in creating not isolated and discrete colonies, but instead a single Atlantic world.[WP #96009]
Christine Hucho, "Pious, Submissive, but Literate: The Schwenkfelder Women of Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania"
Considerable research has been undertaken on the migration of German-speaking people to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, who formed the largest white, non-British group of emigrants at that time, but the story of their women still remains to be told. These female settlers of the first and second generation were exposed to the conflicting alternatives of assimilation and cultural persistence. These pressures had a crucial impact on the development of their roles, attitudes, and actions. Findings on gendered differences among one particular group, the Schwenkfelders, may reveal new insights into the lives of all German women immigrants. An unusual letter collection and a number of wills show a highly patriarchal society with separate spheres based on gender. Schwenkfelder women had very little contact with settlers of different ethnicity, but they enjoyed a strikingly high level of education.[WP #96024]
Eric Klingelhofer, "Settlement Types in the First Century of English Colonization"
This paper is an unannotated review of types and patterns of English settlements, 1540-1640, in France, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, using documentary, cartographic, and archaeological evidence. [WP #96027]
Willem Klooster, "Moving to 'the finest, healthiest and most fertile land of this world': Dutch Migration to New Netherland, 1624-1664"
Migration to New Netherland, a Dutch colony from 1609 to 1664, was hardly impressive compared to migration to the English colonies. It was only toward the end of Dutch rule that hundreds were arriving every year. Push factors such as in England were lacking in the Dutch republic with its favorable religious climate and its economic boom. In addition, the West India Company's wavering between setting up a factory or starting a settlement colony was not helpful. [WP #96007]
Thomas J. Little, "Mobility, Migration, and the Development of Evangelical Protestantism in the Eighteenth-Century Southern Anglophone World"
The movement of people was basic to the development of evangelicalism in the early modern Atlantic world, yet relatively scant attention has been given to the interconnections between the peopling process and the lively trafficking of vital religious ideas, especially in the lower southern colonies of British North America. In an effort to redress this lacuna in the scholarship, this essay examines the development of evangelicalism in the Lower South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that mobility and migration served as the main vehicles for the transmission of vital religious ideas and helped to create social conditions conducive to the acceptance and internalization of evangelical values.[WP #96005]
Timothy J. Lockley, "Competing Forms of Labour: The Reaction of White Working People to the Introduction of Slave Labour into Georgia, 1733-1775"
This paper explores the attitudes of white indentured servants and artisans toward the introduction and use of African slaves in Georgia between the founding of the colony and the Revolution. By examining the interaction between two markedly different immigrant social groups--one consisting of semi-free European settlers, the other of bonded Africans--insights can be gained into the competing ideologies of white and black labour in a slave society. Therefore this paper examines the techniques of accommodation used by all white working people to cope with the introduction of Africans into the colony. It concludes that only those white workers who made their skills indispensable could survive in the new economic climate engendered by slavery, while those unable to do so were forced into a subsistence existence.[WP #96015]
Barbara MacAllan, "Idealism and Compromise--`the beginninge of the world': The Plantation of Hampton, 1639-1644"
This paper looks at the founding process of one New England town in 1639--Hampton, New Hampshire. In particular it examines the creation of a landscape and the social implications of land distribution over a five-year period from 1639 to 1644. Responsibility for town planning and land distribution rested with Commissioners appointed by the General Court and then the freemen of the new town. Did these founders have a vision of an ideal settlement and society in mind when they began their enterprise, similar to that suggested by several modern historians looking at other early New England towns, and if so, did it survive?[WP #96028]
Jennifer L. Morgan, "This is 'Mines': Slavery, Gender, and Reproduction in Barbados and South Carolina, 1650-1715"
Slaveowners from Barbados were among the initial settlers in the mainland colony of South Carolina. One of the many consequences of this Barbadian influence on Carolina was the immediate assumption that wealth in the mainland colony would be dependent on slave labor. This paper explores the possibility that there was another consequence--the belief that enslaved women were valuable producers and reproducers in a slave society. Among the enslaved, sex ratios in Barbados were uniquely balanced. In no other colonial slave society did the numbers of women equal the numbers of men. Probate records show that South Carolina planters, like their Barbadian counterparts, appropriated women's reproductive potential, linked African women's childbirth to the socioeconomic prosperity of the colony, and thereby suggest a tangible consequence of white slaveowners' migration on the enslaved. This paper raises questions about the transposition of a gendered slaveowning ideology, and explores the parameters of life under slavery for women in Barbados and Carolina.[WP #96017]
John J. Navin, "In the Company of Strangers: English Separatists in Holland and New England"
In 1609, separatist leader John Robinson and one hundred other British members of the "Christian Reformed Religion" sought refuge in the Dutch town of Leyden. Their tenure in bustling Leyden and then in humble Plymouth Plantation exposed the respective strengths and limitations of neighborhood, kinship, association, and covenant theology as the building blocks of community. This paper explores the social dynamics of community formation, the challenges of assimilation, and the tensions arising from conflicting goals and beliefs by examining the experiences of those English separatists who emigrated to Holland and then, in the company of strangers, established Plymouth Plantation, the first permanent English settlement north of the Chesapeake.[WP #96030]
William T. O'Reilly, "'A Paragon of Wickedness': Newlanders and Agents in Eighteenth-Century German Migration"
This paper is taken from my forthcoming doctoral dissertation, which is concerned with the role of returning migrants and government and private agents in eighteenth-century German-speaking migration. As Germans are unique in the eighteenth century, both in their broad choice of destinations for relocation and in their dependence on the invitations of other European (colonial) powers to settle in their territories, eighteenth-century German migration can be seen as a template for later European mass movements. This paper introduces the reader to the concept of the immigrant agent, an individual who manipulated his experience and acquired knowledge for economic and social advantage. Though this paper concentrates on the role of agents in the westward migration, similarities and dissimilarities with the eastward journey are suggested.[WP #96025]
Philip Otterness, "The 'Poor Palatines' of 1709: The Origins and Characteristics of an Early Modern Mass Migration"
In 1709 over 13,000 German-speaking emigrants left their homes and traveled to London, the first leg of a journey they hoped would eventually end in America. Although the British government sent most of the emigrants home, it did eventually dispatch 3,000 to New York. Their arrival in 1710 marked the beginning of large-scale German migration to British North America. Although they played a significant role in shaping German society in colonial America, the origins, characteristics, and motivations of the 1709 emigrants have been little studied. This paper describes the dynamics of the 1709 migration, arguing that it was shaped by the poverty of its participants and by the powerful rumors of free land that lured them from their homes.[WP #96026]
Anthony W. Parker, "The Highlands of Scotland in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century: Fertile Fields for Recruiting Settlers for Georgia's Colonial Frontier"
The study of the economic and social changes in the Highlands of Scotland during the first third of the eighteenth century challenges the generally accepted view that the first phase of clearance began in the 1760s after the conclusion of the Seven Years War in America and with the introduction of sheep into the Highland culture. By understanding the social upheaval in the Highland glens during the decades before the 1745 Jacobite uprising, we are able to see that the motives for migration to British North America were already well established. Though emigration from Scotland before 1760 has been acknowledged by leading Scottish historians such as Tom Devine and Allan Macinnes, this paper indicates that the importance of these early migrations has been understated. The Georgia movement represents an active change in attitude in the relationships between clansmen and chiefs and a reaction in the Highlanders' views toward their traditional society that was endemic throughout the Highlands in the 1730s. For many emigrants, migration was an effort to maintain the traditional social structures and values. These challenges to Highland culture provided the "push" element for the initial migrations well in advance of the 1760s, while the appearance of the Georgia recruiters in 1735 produced the "pull" component.[WP #96010]
Mark S. Quintanilla, "Poor Whites in a Slave Society: The Monmouth Rebels and the West Indies Monoculture"
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of rapid change in the British West Indies as that region, beginning with Barbardos and continuing to Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, settled into sugar monoculture. Because sugar monoculture was predicated on the ability of a few elite whites who controlled the ownership of viable lands, labor supplies, and trade, socioeconomic opportunities for poor whites were limited. This paper will use the Monmouth Rebels, a group of English political prisoners deported to the British West Indies in 1685 after their unsuccessful effort to overthrow James II, as a point of reference to glean information on the level of social opportunity that existed in these colonies. Because the rebels were distributed between Britain's principal West Indian colonies (Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands), they provide a unique opportunity to examine social mobility during a very crucial time in the development of monoculture throughout the region.[WP #96016]
Louis H. Roper, "Promotion, Periphery, and Patronage in Proprietary South Carolina"
This paper investigates efforts to create and promote an ideal early modern English settlement in proprietary South Carolina. The Carolina promoters incorporated various attractions into prospectuses that proffered opportunity in the form of readily available landed estates to those interested in advancing themselves. Industrious migrants would not only acquire estates, but would contribute to proprietary revenues and provide balance to the provincial order. The Lords ultimately failed because they were unable, partly due to the distance between London and Charles Town, to create patronage networks with which to cement their control over their colony. Yet, since prominent Carolinians subscribed to the sociopolitical beliefs that underpinned the proprietary vision, a recognizably land-based, arisocratic society developed anyway.[WP #96019]
Claudia Schnurmann, "Migration and Communication: Relations between Inhabitants of English and Dutch Colonies in the New World, 1648-1713"
This paper is a summary of one chapter in a more detailed study of English-Dutch relations in early modern America. An examination of the official as well as the private contacts between Nieuw Nederland and New England on the one hand, and between Nieuw Nederland and the Chesapeake Bay colonies on the other before 1674 demonstrates the existence of a far-reaching intercolonial network, independent of national boundaries. Moreover, it can be seen that the several proprietary changes of Nieuw Nederland/New York from 1664 to 1674 did not change the colonists' economic behavior. Migration and business relations between the colonies, as well as between Europe and America, formed an international network able to ignore European attempts at legal restriction well into the eighteenth century.[WP #96003]
Indrani Sen, "Trends in Slave Shipments from the Gold Coast: New Evidence on Slave Prices, 1710-1792"
The purpose of this paper is to explore the level and determinants of slave shipments from the Gold Coast during the peak period of the eighteenth century. Extensive price data are derived from the account books of individual traders, slave ships' logs, and the books of the Royal Africa Company, as well as from information about the cost of the goods exchanged for slaves. Analysis of these data yields evidence about the respective demand for male and female slaves, the role of the middlemen, and the proportion of slaves exported compared to those sold locally. The paper concludes that supply-side factors, particularly a possibly growing demand for slaves in the domestic Gold Coast market, may have had a significant impact on the volume and structure of slave exports from that region.[WP #96012]
Stephanie Smallwood, "After the Atlantic Crossing: The Arrival and Sale of African Migrants in the British Americas, 1672-1693"
This paper examines the enslaved African migrants' transition from the slave ships to the plantation societies of the British Americas--a moment in their forced migration from African to American soil that has received little attention in the scholarly literature on either the Atlantic slave trade or New World slavery. Focusing specifically on African immigration in Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, the paper uses invoice records for slave cargoes delivered by the Royal African Company of England to undertake a comparative analysis of the size and gender composition of the groups in which African immigrants left the slave ships and entered the plantations and farms that would be their new homes.{WP #96013]
Holly Snyder, "The Unfolding Self: Transmutations of Jewish Identity through Migration to British North America, 1654-1776"
Jewish migration to British North America in the colonial period has been, to date, a topic largely neglected by scholars in both Jewish and American history. Following the pioneering work of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi on Marranism and recent work by Frank Felsenstein on eighteenth-century English perceptions of Jews as "Others," the investigation of colonial source materials reveals a deep and complex identity shift within those Jews who chose to emigrate from Europe. Comparative study of Jewish settlements in colonial America suggests the outlines for a new model of both the motivations of and the impact on Jews of the migration process. Such a model would need to take into account social as well as economic and religious factors.[WP #96006]
R. Scott Stephenson, "'Were my project to make money, I would never leave America': Highland Soldiers and Scottish Emigration to North America, 1756-1775"
This essay explores connections between Scottish Highland soldiers' experiences in the American campaigns of the Seven Years' War and Scottish emigration to British North America in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Drawing largely on surviving letters from Highland soldiers to correspondents in Scotland, I examine how these men perceived and described social and economic opportunities in the colonies, estimate the volume of correspondence and the impact of the letters in Scotland, and trace the role that veterans played in shaping this chapter of the "Peopling of British North America."[WP #96011]
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, "A 'Best Poor Huguenot's Country'? The Carolina Proprietors and the Recruitment of French Protestants"
In the early 1680s, influenced by prevalent mercantilist and populationist views and disillusioned by a colony that failed to return profits and settlers who challenged their authority, the Carolina Proprietors launched a vast promotional campaign in the hope of developing their domain while attracting migrants more favorable to their plans. Part of this recruiting effort was devoted to the Huguenots who, as foreign Protestants reputedly experienced in wine and silk culture, appealed to Proprietors anxious to introduce new commodities into their colony and unwilling to people Carolina at the expense of England. As the flow of Huguenot refugees crossing the Channel reached unprecedented proportions as a result of the intensification of Bourbon anti-Protestant policy, tracts promoting Carolina in French appeared in London, The Hague, and Geneva. Filled with traditional arguments that presented the colony as a land of milk and honey, these pamphlets successfully spread an Eden-like image of Carolina in the large urban refugee centers and the parts of France where they were circulated. Along with large land grants and little taxation, prospective Huguenot settlers were also promised free and easy naturalization that would enable them to benefit from the famed English liberties. In the same years, publications in French appeared in Holland in an effort to dissuade the Huguenots from going to Carolina. Though of limited impact, this counter-promotional literature, which consistently presents ana unfavorable description of Carolina when compared to its northern neighbors, appeared as a reaction against the Carolina Proprietors' successful campaign. Thus, though wine and silk production never reached a profitable level in the colony, and the Huguenot geographic and socio-economic recruitment followed independent parameters, several hundred French Protestants migrated to Carolina primarily as a result of the Proprietors' recruiting effort.[WP #96020]
Cynthia J. Van Zandt, "Actors across Boundaries in Early Colonial Atlantic America"
This paper focuses on the widespread mobility, cultural diversity, and boundary-crossing that created the exceptionally fluid character of Atlantic North America in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. Drawing on the work of Bernard Bailyn, Ira Berlin, Jack Greene, and John Thornton, the paper argues that territorial and cultural boundaries were constantly changing and remarkably porous. As a result, cultural mixing was extensive, though often contested, and people with many identities and cross-cultural contacts played an essential role. Everyone in the colonial world relied upon the boundary-crossing abilities of culturally heterogeneous people, and European colonies would not have survived the early period of colonization without them.[WP #96031]
Cécile Vidal, "The Original Peopling of the Illinois Country, 1699-1765: A Colony of 'Peasants' Not Tied to Their Land"
This paper studies the demographic development of the six French villages of the Illinois Country on the Mississippi River from their founding in 1699 until 1765, when they passed into British hands. It applies the methods and questions of recent work by Canadian historians on the demography and society of New France in a region, French Louisiana, particularly neglected by previous historiography on colonial North America. It shows how the original peopling of the Illinois Country can be explained by the particular location of the settlement, the royal policy toward the colony, and its socioeconomic development.[WP #96029]
Marianne S. Wokeck, "Servant Migration and the Transfer of Culture from the Old World to the New"
Servants played a critical role in the lasting success of settlement in the British colonies of North America. Historians have explored the impact of servants as laborers; the varying opportunities for freed men and women in terms of establishing households, improving their status, and increasing their wealth; and the transition from servitude to slavery on the one hand and to wage labor on the other. This essay, which centers mainly on the German settlements in the Middle colonies, raises questions about the influence of servants in shaping American customs and traditions. The system of redeeming the fare for transatlantic passage through a limited time of servitude was critical in the transfer and adaptation of culture. When the system worked properly, these temporary arrangements between masters and servants served both parties well. They provided servants with the necessary orientation and experience before they set out for themselves; they gave masters the labor they needed and also offered their children the kind of socialization that they were familiar with and that reinforced Old World behavior and customs. Once German farmers could count on their own children for work, however, the need for bound servants decreased and as the back counties filled up, subsequent, temporary labor shortages could easily be met by hiring wage workers or cottagers for tasks that exceeded the capabilities of the family.[WP #96023]
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© 1999 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.Created January 16, 1998; last revised, March 19, 1999.