Adventurers Across the Atlantic

In the past generation, professional historians, demographers, and economists have revolutionized the field of migration studies. New computer technologies and more rigorous forms of analysis have changed not only the scale and depth of this research, but also expanded the dimensions of the enquiry and challenged many of the basic assumptions about European expansion overseas from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Scholars in the 1940s and 1950s imagined that emigrants abandoned a settled Old World in search of better economic and social opportunities in a restless New World. ¹ Recent research inverts this assessment: English colonists forsook a mobile and modernizing England for a more stable and traditional existence across the Atlantic. ² Geographically, Britain’s westward expansion now appears, not as several distinct arrows of conquest and penetration west into North America and the Caribbean, but as a great arc of interactive parts sweeping north and west through Scotland, Ireland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, mainland North America, and the West Indies. ³ This was a tremendous multifocal process, one that encompassed the voluntary and coerced transfer of thousands of people, one that ultimately transformed the societies and cultures of European, African, and Indian peoples living everywhere in the Atlantic world. ⁴