American historians have long been fascinated by the "peopling"
of North America in the seventeenth century. Who were the
immigrants, and how and why did they make their way across the
ocean? Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to British
immigrants who came as free people or as indentured servants
(primarily to New England and the Chesapeake) and to Africans who
were forced to come as slaves. Trade in Strangers focuses on the
eighteenth century, when new immigrants began to flood the colonies
at an unprecedented rate. Most of these immigrants were German and
Irish, and they were coming primarily to the middle colonies via an
increasingly sophisticated form of transport.
Wokeck shows how first the German system of immigration, and
then the Irish system, evolved from earlier, haphazard forms into
modern mass transoceanic migration. At the center of this
development were merchants on both sides of the Atlantic who
organized a business that enabled them to make profitable use of
underutilized cargo space on ships bound from Europe to the British
North American colonies. This trade offered German and Irish
immigrants transatlantic passage on terms that allowed even people
of little and modest means to pursue opportunities that beckoned in
the New World.
Trade in Strangers fills an important gap in our knowledge of
America's immigration history. The eighteenth-century changes
established a model for the better-known mass migrations of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which drew wave after wave of
Europeans to the New World in the hope of making a better life than
the one they left behind--a story that is familiar to most modern
Americans.
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