Book Review

Georg Fertig's book on local life and the Atlantic world is a study that attempts to connect aggregate measures of the German migration from the Rhine to eighteenth-century North America with statistical tests that gauge behavior and motivation of people—emigrants and those who stayed—on the local level. This dual focus divides the treatise: the first half deals with the migration stream across the Atlantic Ocean; the second half centers on Göbrichen in Baden-Durlach, a village of fewer than 1,000 superbly documented residents, 34 of whom left for America, the first in 1742, the rest at the emigration peak (1749–1754). The central question concerns "the decision to emigrate to America." The answer is that the German migration flow to the American colonies was insignificant in comparison with population movements among German-speaking lands and in continental Europe; that Göbrichen's long-distance emigrants pursued opportunities of land and work across the Atlantic because those were among options open to them; that locally neither economic nor political circumstances encouraged or hindered residents in their migration decision; and that most emigrants chose to move to the American colonies as individuals, not as part of a group.

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