Reviews of Books

How many people crossed the Atlantic to make new lives in North America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? For all the scholarship done in the twentieth century on immigration in United States history, we still do not have a consensus. The estimates offered by Marcus Lee Hansen, Abbot Emerson Smith, and Oscar Handlin a half century ago remain the standard figures, supplemented by more recent studies of specific subsets of newcomers, ranging from slaves, convicts, and indentured servants to virtually all European ethnic groups. But they have become the subject of considerable debate. The economic historians Robert W. Fogel and Henry A. Gemery rely on a "residual" method to gauge the level of immigration; they estimate the rate of natural increase (births minus deaths) in North America, calculate the approximate gain in numbers it produces, and deduct this figure from the total population increase. The result is attributed to immigration. But such extrapolations are dismissed as too high by scholars who have inspected the actual records of the vessels that made possible this mass movement. Counting passengers from shipping lists would seem the most direct and reliable method. Yet, those numbers may also be misleading. They hinge on the comprehensiveness of customs officials in registering vessels in port and on the survival of the records they kept. The "trade in strangers," as Marianne S. Wokeck calls it, demands careful scrutiny.	1
Much is at stake in getting the numbers right or at least in the correct ballpark. Historians have long noted the astounding rate of natural increase that slaves on the North American mainland supposedly enjoyed in the eighteenth century, in notable contrast to the experience of Africans in the Caribbean and South America. From such impressions derive large claims about the comparative treatment of slaves in the Americas, the rise of a creole population in the colonial South, and the persistence of African ways. But these interpretations presume knowledge of the number of Africans transported to what became the United States—a figure that is now being recalculated in light of the massive database of the slave trade compiled by David Eltis and colleagues from individual slave voyages from Africa to America (Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM [Cambridge, 1999]). To take another example, Thomas Archdeacon has argued that the anti-immigrant hysteria that produced the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 waned in the first decades of the nineteenth century not because the native white Americans became more tolerant but because immigrants arrived in insignificant numbers between 1800 and 1830 (Becoming American: An Ethnic History [New York, 1982]). But what if thousands of Europeans did pour into the new republic? Cultural and political history, as much as economic, requires reliable numbers.	2
Into this thicket of demography and economics enters Wokeck, whose account of German migration to eighteenth-century North America is based on shipping lists—the records of vessels arriving in Philadelphia and other Delaware Valley ports—and on data from Dutch, German, and Pennsylvania archives. Her interest is twofold: to reconstruct the redemption system that financed the movement of Germans across the Atlantic to colonial Philadelphia and from that experience to create a "model of mass migration" (p. xxix) that will capture the migration patterns and experiences of Irish immigrants in the eighteenth century and the massive movements of European newcomers in the nineteenth.	. . .