Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World

by Games, Alison

• ISBN13: 9780674007024
• ISBN10: 0674007026
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-05
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration. The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement--New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda--and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties--Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Clearinghouse and Countinghouse: London and Overseas Expansion	13	(29)
The Colonial Travelers of 1635	42	(30)
Life, Death, and Labor in an Unsettled Land	72	(30)
The Trappings of Success in Three Plantation Colonies	102	(30)
Piety and Protest in the Puritan Diaspora	132	(31)
Persistence and Migration in Old and New England	163	(27)
Migration and the Atlantic World	190	(29)
Appendix A: Calculating Travelers	219	(2)
Appendix B: Supplementary Tables	221	(20)
Notes	241	(60)
Archival Sources	301	(6)
Index	307