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Voyagers to the West: A Review Colloquium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Henry A. Gemery ,
James T. Lemon ,
John J. McCusker  and
E. A. Wrigley
Henry A. Gemery
Affiliation:
Henry A. Gemery is Dana Professor of Economics, Colby College
James T. Lemon
Affiliation:
James T. Lemon is professor of Geography, University of Toronto
John J. McCusker
Affiliation:
John J. McCusker is professor of history, University of Maryland
E. A. Wrigley
Affiliation:
E. A. Wrigley is senior research fellow, All Souls, Oxford.
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Abstract

Occasionally books appear that are broad enough in subject or methodology to afford scholars in various specialties a useful opportunity to look at the same material from different viewpoints. Like other documents, works of history tend to answer only those questions asked of them, and the juxtaposition of the questions important to readers of diverse scholarly backgrounds may be in itself illuminating. For this, the first in a continuing series of review colloquia, we invited a specialist in British population movements, a historical geographer, an economist who has done quantitative work in the field of colonial immigration, and an authority on the economy of British North America to consider Bernard Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning study.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Business History Review , Volume 62 , Special Issue 4: Resource-Based Industries , Winter 1988 , pp. 678 - 696
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988

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References

1 Bailyn, Bernard, “The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 2 (1985): 1–98Google Scholar. This essay has since been reissued as a separate volume (New York, 1986).

2 Meinig, Donald W., The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1986)Google Scholar.

3 Greene, Jack P., Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989)Google Scholar.

4 See The Historical Atlas of Canada, ed. R. Cole Harris and G. Matthews (1987), 1: plate 31.

5 Bailyn, Bernard, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87 (Feb. 1982): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Bailyn, Bernard and Bailyn, Lotte, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714: A Statistical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Smith, Abbot Emerson, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947)Google Scholar; Galenson, David W., White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

8 Campbell, Mildred, “English Emigration on the Eve of the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 61 (Oct. 1955): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Erickson, Charlotte, “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1831,” Population Studies 35 (July 1987): 175–97CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

10 Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (Boston, 1951)Google Scholar; Higgs, Robert “Race, Skills, and Earnings: American Immigrants in 1909,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 420–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See, for instance, K. G. Davies “Passages to a Better World,” Times Literary Supplement, 4 Sept. 1987, 959, who nevertheless concludes that “Voyagers to the West is not, however, the work of an apostate.” Davies's concern about any falling out among the faithful is warranted given Bailyn's ringing admonition that “quantification is a form of intellectual terrorism…and so is economic history.” Comments made at a Conference on the Economy of British America, 9 Oct. 1980, Williamsburg, Va.

12 See Jones, Alice Hanson, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. She published her sample data in American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods, 2d ed., 3 vols. (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. Compare her “Estimating Wealth of the Living from a Probate Sample,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982): 273–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 As one example, Bailyn (p. 287, n. 17) calls our attention to several periods of labor unrest in Great Britain and Ireland as specified in Dobson, C. R., Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations, 1717–1800 (London, 1980), 159–62Google Scholar, namely: 12 disruptions in 1764–66, 27 in 1768–69, and 17 in 1773–75. We should note not only the correspondence between these periods and downswings in the economy, but also the correspondence between the intervening periods in which no disputes occurred and the upswings in the economy. Compare Table 3.4, “Periods of Economic Expansion and Contraction in England and British America, 1614–1796,” in McCusker, John J. and Menard, Russell R., The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 62–64Google Scholar.

14 See the graph on p. 599 of Ouellet, Fernand, Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760–1850: Structures et conjoncture (Montréal, 1966)Google Scholar.

15 See McCusker, John J., “Growth, Stagnation, or Decline? The Economy of the British West Indies, 1763–1790,” in The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763–1790, ed. Hoffman, Ronald et al. (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), 278Google Scholar.

16 Certainly Bailyn suggests something along these lines in his overview of his larger project, which he promulgated in “The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction.”