Earn Voyagers To The West: A Passage In The Peopling Of America On The Eve Of The Revolution Formulated By Bernard Bailyn Offered As Kindle
data density and bibliographic resource, But a little underedited and repetitive, David Hackett Fisher is more engaging for the lay reader Voyagers To the West won the Pulitzer Prize for NonFiction someyears ago.
It is an indepth record and analysis of the various immigrations to America that occurred during the yearsthrough,
The book is not a narrative per se but rather a compendium of facts exploring the causes of immigration, the types of immigrants and where they settled.
In addition to settling in theestablished colonies there were settlements in Florida and the Gulf states and even illegal colonies, like Transylvania, deep in the Appalachians.
This book opened my eyes to this preRevolutionary War period, The work here does not distract the reader with the first undercurrents of the Revolutionary War movement but instead maintains focus on those people moving to America during that period.
I have read a fair amount of Colonial American history and as much asof this books content was new to me.
Some of the most interesting aspects were the chapters covering the iron industry and the indentured servitude that was pervasive in Maryland and Pennsylvania during this period.
There were a few facets to this book that might turn some away, There is little discussion of slavery, For obvious reasons slavery was not considered to be immigration, Secondly there is no discussion of famous colonial leaders or rebels, Finally, the writing does have an academic air to it so it is not an entirely effortless read,
I read history books for a lot of reasons, This one gets five simply because the scholarship is so unique and interesting and the writing is good enough, Excellent read on how America was populated from just before the Revolution, This is really great, for what it is, What I mean is, Bailyn does this job impeccably, It is just the most targeted, datadriven study here is the data we have, here are the conclusions I'm drawing, The data he is using comes from the records of migrants from the British Isles to the American colonies right before the revolution.
The migration, Bailyn concludes, was actually a dual process, Young male laborers, who were already mobile around England looking for work, were indenturing themselves and heading to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Families looking to improve their situations were simultaneously migrating from Scotland and the north of England, to places like New York, North Carolina, and Nova Scotia.
These family units tended not to be destitute, starving masses, and neither were the laborers really, The truth was that wages were high and rents low in the colonies, so moving from the London labor market to New York was smart.
And there was a huge land speculation boom going on that was drawing family units,
Anyway, there is a lot of fascinating stuff here, You could criticize it for a small sample size I guess but I thought it was really worthwhile,Approx,Germans entered through Philly betweenand,
The draining of UK peasants,
The Register of Emigrants recorded betweenandcovered only England and Scotland,
The ages of emigrants were recorded but often rounded to multiple ofs,
Scottish wives often used their maiden names on manifests,
Most emigrants were age,
Majority of emigrants traveled alone,
Largest group of emigrants were artisans not farmers or laborers,
Common artisan skills included clothing, food prep, metal work, wood work,
More Scots were laborers that artisans,
About half traveled as indentured servants,
Paid their way by selling themselves fortoyears in exchange for transportation,
Vast majority in the survey were lured note driven to emigrate,
Vast majority of emigrants went to middle colonies of Md, NY, Pa,
Many of the indentured servants were auctioned upon arrival, This book was a challenge to read, The first two hundred and fifty pages are as dull as any social science you're likely to read and the last hundred and fifty pages lack anything like a conclusion or summary chapter.
None the less, you have to give credit where credit is due and acknowledge the majesty of this work,
Bailyn, in exhausting detail, uses records maintained by the British crown betweento document the who, what, where and why's of British migration to the colonies in the years immedietaely proceeding the revolution.
His main thesis can be summarized by stating that there were, in fact, two parallel migrations, The first was of unattached, single men from the area around London to the middle states of Maryland and North Carolina.
The second migration was of families from the british midlands and Scotland, These migrants used Pennsylvennia and New York as a jumping off point for their population of the back country,
Baiyln backs up the thesis with tons of charts, graphs and maps, This was a much heavier read then I expected,
an interesting analysis of emmigration records from the now UK in the early's, However, very statistics heavy and sometimes redundant, Not one I would recommend unless you really want to get down in the weeds on a very specific subject,
revised edit: I'm bumping this down tostars, I didn't really pay attention to the charts in this book when I read it, but then I went to class and the professor showed us how horrible the charts in this book really are.
Confusing layouts, percentages that don't add up to, they're pretty bad, I liked it. This book makes you work to find the conclusions under the mountains of statistics, but amazing to see how the English immigrants traveled and populated the colonies during the time period.
I really enjoyed seeing where everyone came from and traveled to, in addition to what drove them to go, One of the most specific books I have ever read, Great detail. Was less interested in the sections on Florida, but found most of it very engrossing Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Saloutos Prize of the Immigration History Society
Bailyn's Pulitzer Prizewinning book uses an emigration roster that lists every person officially known to have left Britain for America from Decemberto Marchto reconstruct the lives and motives of those who emigrated to the New World.
"Voyagers to the West is a superb book, It should be equally admired by and equally attractive to the general reader as to the professional historian, "R. C. Simmons, Journal of American Studies Source: A Walk in the Woods Many of the individual stories of why people came to settle in America were interesting.
Much of the detail however was very in the weeds not as readable as I had hoped, This book won the Pulitzer Prize, and in reading this massive, epic history of a narrow time range in American colonial history, it is easy to see why.
There is the usual wit and charm that comes from Bailyn's writing, There is a blend of different approaches of history that work amazingly well in tandem: a discussion of broad social trends that become visible when one looks at the statistical resources of eighteenth century British officialdom that is combined with a look at the people involved in the late colonial exodus to British North America that is so granular as to be focused on specific key individuals who engaged in land speculation, sought to help or hinder the movement of people from London and Yorkshire/Scotland to the colonies, or who participated in that movement and sought to make a better life in a strange new world for themselves and their families.
On all levels of this complicated and immensely interesting story Bailyn succeeds in weaving together the best of quantitative approaches with traditional narratives, and that sort of consummate achievement is worthy of all the awards it received.
The narrative of this book is a large one and a complex one, coming in at more thanpages of material that covers a small span of time between the French amp Indian War and the beginning of the American Revolution, with a focus on the last three to five years, when there is a great deal of data that was present to examine the composition and motivation of the move from the British Isles to the North American colonies from Florida to Nova Scotia.
This magnum opus is divided into five parts and sixteen chapters, with numerous subheadings as well, The first part of the book provides a background to the study with a look at the West as a magnet to people in the British Isles I with a discussion of the expanded world of, the dilemma of British policy of wanting to discourage emigration but also settle the empty lands of the colonies and profit from improvement and land speculation, and the search for the facts in the register of emigrants and the limitations of that source.
After that Bailyn masterfully discusses the dimensions of late colonial British migration II with a look at the magnitudes, locations, and flow of that emigration, the identities and motivations of emigrants that show there was a dual flow between young male London indentured servants and convicts in the Chesapeake and intact Yorkshire/Scottish nuclear families searching for freeholding land in the Carolinas/Georgia and in New York/Nova Scotia, and the arrivals and destinations of those emigrants.
Bailyn then turns his attention to the mobilization of the labor force that was flowing to the colonies through transportation III, including the demand for that labor and the importance of skills, the sources of that labor among London, the provinces, or convicts, the recruitment of that labor through broadsheets and register offices and even enticement and kidnapping, as well as the sales and distributions of indentured servants, which reminded observers of the public sales that were associated with chattel slavery.
At this point, Bailyn turns his attention to the peopling of the peripheral lands IV, showing the relationship between Yorkshire and the Maritime Northeast of Nova Scotia and neighboring provinces of the future Canada, the failure of efforts to recruit Europeans to settle in the swamps of Florida, and the greater success at building a future plantation society in the gulf coast of the future Redneck Riviera.
Finally, the last three chapters of the book discuss the population of the Great Inland Arc V of North Carolina, Georgia, and New
York, where land speculation and the desire for freedom and free land brought fame and honor to some and ruin to others.
If you have an interest in the patterns of British behavior and of the massive population surge of the colonies of British North America on the eve of the American Revolution, this book is certainly a worthwhile one.
There are multiple layers of achievement here that worth celebrating, For one, Bailyn's skillful use of statistical procedures as well as the available source data on emigration and land ownership and speculation allows the data to serve a larger and fascinating narrative that would not have been obvious without his keen eye and sound historical judgement.
Additionally, this is a work that combines multiple types of historical approaches, with a look at political history as well as institutional history and economic history, that shows the breadth of Bailyn's expertise in Atlantic History, tying together concerns on both sides of the ocean in a narrow time window.
In addition to all of this, though, Bailyn's work allows the reader to understand the tensions and the ambiguities behind British imperial rule that would lead to a rupture between the periphery and the core of the British Atlantic Empire, because ultimately the British wanted too many things that were in conflict with each other and were unable to act in their best longterm interests because their own selfinterest in profiting from land speculation as well as rack rents to fund their home improvements ultimately were in conflict with their desire to keep a quiescent population at home profiting them in industries and agriculture.
This is a story that Bailyn tells with immense expertise and a wide range of skills,
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