| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Philip Otterness. Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 235. $39.95.

Nearly seventy years after the appearance of what many once considered a definitive history of the German group migrations to New York in 1709, Philip Otterness offers a detailed reexamination and assessment of what he calls "one of the most watched groups of immigrants to enter America" (p. 5), comparing them to the Vietnamese boat people of the 1970s and the Haitian refugees of the 1990s. Walter Allen Knittle's Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration: A British Government Redemptioners Project to Manufacture Naval Stores (1937) provided a detailed assessment of the background of the sudden migrations of more than 15,000 people from the southwest German territories and Switzerland to London beginning in 1709, and of the disastrous further migration of about 3,000 of those migrants the following year to New York, one fourth of whom died in route. These immigrants suffered from being part of a poorly planned and executed scheme by the British government to produce naval stores on the upper Hudson, and most ultimately scattered to the western New York frontier and colonies further south. Whereas Knittle's study assessed Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, especially "frontier individualism," and the ability of the British government to manage industry, Otterness uses British official records, the writings of the migrants themselves, public commentaries, and the work of a recent genealogist to trace in much more detail the origins and settlement patterns of the migrants, their attempt to find a new Canaan on the Schoharie River in upper New York, and the development of an ethnic identity among these "Germans."

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