Recently, there has been serious discussion of colonizing Mars, the Moon, and other celestial bodies. While technically possible, does this make sense? I ask this because it seems that the European colonization of the New World was not pushed because of overpopulation in Europe-quite the contary, Europe in the 1500s was far from overpopulated. I also theink that the medieval kings WANTED larger and larger populations-they needed soldiers to man their armies, for the interminable wars that they were so fond of. Also, since the mortality rate was high, they always wanted high birth rates. Actually, the only nation that really was interested in sending large numbers of colonists to America was England-and this was mostly to get rid of social misfits, criminals, and religious dissenters. France actually did NOT encourage french women to emigrate, and SPAIN (from waht I can tell) actually FORBADE certain types of artisans to emigrate at all. So was england’s preeminance in N America just an accident of history? Or was Europe in need of places to send their surplus populations?
My thoughts were people came to the New World to escape oppressive goverments. Sure the 1st few exploreers were funded by govt’s but the hard core settlers wanted freedom
They colonized for glory, God, and gold. That won’t change on the moon or mars. A lot of the early settlements were made to cut off, strategically threaten or challenge a rival power . Portugal vs. Spain vs. England vs. the French vs. the Dutch. Almost all the early settlements were get rich quick schemes either as a first or second reason and those that weren’t were to escape religious persecution or to set up religious persecution of the indigenous people.
Want to bet the same reasons apply to space? I bet the first lunar base is because the Chinese are building one (a space race? Nah), or to get rich on minerals or for someone like the Scientologists or the Falun Gong who are having a tough time here, establishing a new place out there.
<nitpick>
in sending large numbers of colonists to America was England-and this was mostly to get rid of social misfits, criminals, and religious dissenters. France actually did NOT encourage french women to emigrate, and SPAIN (from waht I can tell) actually FORBADE certain types of artisans to emigrate at all. So was england’s preeminance in N America just an accident of history?
By “America” are you limiting it to the U.S.A.? If so OK. If not “sending large numbers of colonists to America was England” is absolutely wrong. There were easily more Spanish and Portuguese (and French & Germans and Dutch and Irish and forced Africans) and their descendants in the New World, even today than there ever were of the English.
I am not positive about N. America. I know that Quebec with Mexico, Cuba, Florida - though their colonial development was spectacularly different than the 13 English colonies (and in some cases 100’s of years longer) – they were never by any stretch of the imagination ‘dominated’ from the 16th until 19th century.
It sounds good in US school text books and presidential speeches. And it’s true in the case of some migrants like Jews escaping pogroms in Russia in the late 19C, or the Hmong coming over today. But the three main incentives for mainstream colonization were: free land, free land and free land. The next three were: cheap land, cheap land and cheap land.
For an in-depth examination of how the whole thing started, I can strongly recommend Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer.
The early colonies in Australia were a bit different. The main driving factors here were supposedly:
- the loss of the US meant Britian needed a new dumping ground for convicts from the overcrowded prisons - note that this was overcrowding of the prison population not the population of Britian as a whole
*getting in before the French.
One wonders how serious either of these motivations must have been however, particularly the first.
Worth noting that:
- it was almost 2 decades between the “discovery” of Australia by Capt. Cook and the decision to establish a penal colony here
- it must have been extremely expensive to send convicts to the extreme opposite side of the world.
- there must have been closer/cheaper/more useful places to send convicts.
I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that the British colonisation of Australia was a half-arsed scheme dreamed up by someone with nothing better to do who wanted to get Capt Arthur Phillip out of the Admiralty bar
Whilst agreeing that the Spanish and Portuguese massively outnumbered the British emigrants, I would be particularly interested in cites for French, German, Dutch and even ‘Irish’ and forced Africans, outnumbering the British.
There are several reasons for questioning your statement.
First, most emigration prior to 1765 to Non-Latin areas was British- see Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer and Bernard Bailynns’ Passage to the West.
Note the OP states N.America.
Secondly, defining Irish v. British is notoriously difficult. The majority of the ‘Irish’ emigrants prior to 1840 were ‘Scots-Irish’ - descendants of the planters etc. who would have seen themselves as culturally Scots and probably also British, and would have seen the term ‘Irish’ as a term of abuse- being limited to the Catholic masses and maybe the Anglo-Irish Middle classes. It is a point of amusement to me to remind myself each St Patrick’s day that many of those celebrating their Irish heritage in the US have common ancestors with the very people in the six counties today who would absolutely refuse to celebrate St Patrick’s Day as a Republican affair!
If the French, German and Dutch were so prominent, why the survival of so few of their family names in the USA? I would need to see cites for there being more people of these descents into the entire Americas than Brits. The Dutch settled some Caribbean islands and part of Guinea, ditto for the French, plus French Canada. The Brits also settled the Caribbean and Guinea similarly, as well as the thirteen colonies etc…
Although more people in the US claim Irish descent than British descent, IIRC, I believe that this may be an artefact- it is popular to claim the former as it is highly sought after state, wheras British descent is less eagerly sought (Pilgrim fathers excepted!).
I will need to check, but I do believe that there were more British emigrants landing and surviving in N.America than Africans landing and surviving as slaves.
Certainly, after 1830 or so there was increased emigration from Italy, Poland, Germany etc, and less from increasingly industrialised Britain, plus the massive Irish emigration both before and after the famine.
However, the British cultural and legal domination of the first 200-250 years set a context that was difficult to dislodge by successive waves of low class (initially) emigrants.
With subsequent intermarriage, I suspect that many people who steadfastly maintain their lack of British ancestors would be almost certain to find British ancestry, even though they do not claim it.
And in answer to the OP, the British view of emigration to the Americas swang widely between encouraging to banning the masses from emigrating depending on current economic conditions- again, see Bailynn and Fischer.
I’ve always been curious about this. Everyone knows about the British using Australia as a “dumping ground” for its convicts, but we don’t hear much about the American colonies being used in this manner. Are the U.S. history books covering up this part of our American heritage? Were a significant percentage of our early colonists ex-convicts, or descendents of England’s trouble-makers?
What Hemlock said! See “Albion’s Seed”.
Life in the New World colonies early on generally sucked; it is pretty hard to re-create a world you left behind from scratch. I suppose a somewhat representative microcosm would be Maryland of the 1600’s; odds were good you’d die in the first few years there of disease or just too hard work. But if you lived, you could make a fortune either from the high-value crops (tobacco) or in the opportunities that being one of the few (or the only) person for many miles around with your trade would afford. Quite a few people who came over with humble stations in life or even as indentured servants became wealthy.
Given that life back in Devon or wherever else didn’t afford too much higher probability of a long life and definitely less probability of a prosperous one, some people took the risk and shipped out.
Still, though, I beleive it took almost a hundred years for the population to reach 4000.
Whilst reading up on this, I came across a curious fact-little Swedene had a small colony in N. America (it was around the Newcastle, Delaware region), and it lasted untill the mid 1600’s-until it was destroyed by the Dutch in New York. Sweden at that time had no pressing need to send out colonists-it was (and is today) an underpopulated nation. Anybody know more about Sweden’s abortive colony in N. America?
Sweden at that time was a major power in Europe and wanted to get their share of the goods from the new world. You can find a good summary here. BTW, one legacy from that colony is the log cabin that is so prominently featured in US history.
However, the reason for later emigration from Swedish is very much as Hemlock put it:
When they taught us New Jersey history back in grammar school, they mentioned that the Swedes had a small settlement somewhere in NJ (although they didn’t tell us where). I gather that it was pretty small and pretty short-lived.
I agree that population pressure was a factor, but in a subtle way. It’s not that the countries of Europe were so crowded that they had to ship the excess people someplace else. Some people came because “untamed” land offered opportunity, whereas back home all the billets were filled – if there’s no more room in the trade guild you could always go to the colonies – a rougher life but fewer restrictions. Some people came for religious freedom. Some were effectively wage slaves sent out to colonize or die by investors back home who hoped for a profit on their investment.
Will space exploration follow the same course? Considering that it is far more expensive to ship people and material into space, it seems that either the price of lifting has to come down (Space elevators!) or the modern-day investors have to have a serious need to be filled that’s worth throwing a lot of money at. (Helium mining on gas giants for superconducting circuitry?).
Mr Frink asked:
From the Internationational Centre for Convict Studies at http://iccs.arts.utas.edu.au/research.html:
From: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~hornbeck/colamere.htm
If 1/4 of your British immigrants were convicts, I’d say that was a significant proportion. A lot of convicts chose transportation because In England a system was introduced in 1655 which enabled some death sentences to be reduced to transportation overseas, and two years later justices of the peace were empowered to transport vagrants.
Forgot to add to my previous post, the number of convicts shipped to Australia between 1788 and the abolition of transportation in 1868 was about 40,000 - significantly less than were shipped to the US over a similar span of years.
Seems my source for the number of convicts transported to Australia was incorrect. I’ve gone back to the original newspaper article that announced the end of the convict transportation to Australia. It states:
The Australian Govt Immigration Dept says: Transported criminals were the basis of the first migration from Europe. Starting in 1788, some 160 000 were shipped to the Australian colonies.
http://www.immi.gov.au/facts/04fifty.htm#early.
My apologies for posting incorrect information.
I wrote:
By “America” are you limiting it to the U.S.A.? If so OK. If not “sending large numbers of colonists to America was England” is absolutely wrong. There were easily more Spanish and Portuguese (and French & Germans and Dutch and Irish and forced Africans) and their descendants in the New World, even today than there ever were of the English.
If you read what I wrote as saying the Dutch by themselves outnumbered the British in North America I apologize for my sloppiness. I can’t eat or write w/o getting it all over me. If you read it as I meant that these other ethnic groups together outnumbered the British would you still disagree or am I essentially arguing with my own sloppiness?
We need to define “colonial” for most of N.America it is later but for U.S. History it ALWAYS ends circa 1776 so lets use that … fair enough?
Ethnic Division of the U.S. Colonial Population, 1775
English 48.7 %
African 20.0 %
Scot-Irish 7.8 %
German 6.9 %
Scottish 6.6 %
Dutch 2.7 %
French 1.4 %
Swedish 0.6 %
Other 5.3 %
http://www.gliah.uh.edu/historyonline/us6.cfm
My point though was that the Brits were outnumbered in N. America & I was cutting our man Ralph124c a break by not quibbling about the U.S., though I knew they were outnumbered there too. In N.America there was approximately 100,000 French in Quebec. According to the census of 1774, Cuba had a total population of 172,620 inhabitants: 96,440 whites, 31,847 free blacks, and 44,333 black slaves. Hispanola and Mexico need to be included as well. OK? I take it that answers what may have been a misunderstanding …
You on the other hand wrote
QUOTE]*Originally posted by Pjen *
**
If the French, German and Dutch were so prominent, why the survival of so few of their family names in the USA? I would need to see cites for there being more people of these descents into the entire Americas than Brits. The Dutch settled some Caribbean islands and part of Guinea, ditto for the French, plus French Canada. The Brits also settled the Caribbean and Guinea similarly, as well as the thirteen colonies etc…
**[/QUOTE
The Dutch settled New York and the Hudson Valley too.
I think you dismiss the French too readily re their Caribean holdings - you’ve seen the tiny numbers here. In the 1796 Slave revolts, widespread killing of white planters, and burning of cane fields led to the destruction of Saint Domingue’s sugar industry. An estimated 300,000 French and white creole refugees fled to Cuba. This at a time when New York city had a population of circa 25,000.
According to the Census close to 2X as many people today in the U.S. report being of German ancestry than report being English. I understand your comment that alot of intermixed people say something else, I certainly don’t think it explain the 89% of the population of the US reporting non-English ans. as reported by the Census in 1990
However, your numbers would seem to contradict your claim. “Brits” would include Scot-Irish (7.8%) and Scot (6.6%) which, added to the 48.7% of the population that was of English origin would set the “Brits” at 63.1%–a majority, clearly, and far more than any single other group. (Even limiting it to English, their 48.7% dwarfs the next highest single group (imported blacks) by more than 2 to 1.)
As for whether the groups outside the 13 colonies tilted the numbers: the 1763 French population of Quebec was around 70,000 (which might rise to your 100,000 if New Brunswick and the rest of the Atlantic territories are thrown in–I do not know whether the 7,000 Louisianans were or were not part of the 100,000 figure for New France, but they are obviously a small number). However, the population of the 13 British colonies at the same time was 1,700,000. 48.7% of that 1.7 Million is 827,900–still dwarfing the French settlements. To get anywhere near the British contribution to the trans-Atlantic colonization numbers, you have to include the entire Carribean Basin–which, aside from Mexico, is not generally considered the North America of the OP.
Do you have numbers for actual Spanish immigration to Mexico?
(Note that the OP was discussing colonists on this point. Subsequent immigrations to the independent nations of the U.S. and Mexico (and Canada) would have followed separate paths.)
The value of the 1990 U.S. census as a source of information about colonial immigration is negligible. The scale of immigration in the nineteenth century was far larger and its pattern very different. The explanation for the 1990 statistics has much more to do with developments post-1776. Stick to the figures you give for the population breakdown in 1775.
I made clear in the first two posts that I was answering the charge that only England sent shockingly, massively disproportionally large numbers of colonists to America. I used a generic ‘Brits/British’ in the post answering Pjen and I apologize for confusing that issue.
However, that doesn’t mean you are right in the general gist of your post. Certainly the Scots, many of whom were Jacobean/Scottish independence types (and who would rebel against the English 1 more time circa around the time in question) couldn’t be said at this point to be “English”. The “Scot-Irish” I would argue the same, but it is such a very wide catchall I couldn’t say definitely that you are flat out wrong.
As I would much of the rest of your the rest of your post.
I made clear to Pjen I never said the English weren’t the single largest group in the U.S. itself just that they were outnumbered- but if two people have read it must be me & not you & I’m sorry for my lack of clarity.
I find this bordering on the intellectually dishonest. You clearly know damn well that every mapmaker on earth considers the Caribean and “Central America” to be part of N. America (see two cites). By adding “the OP” you can confuse the issue, but **Ralph124c ** clearly talks about the Spanish, so how he could be logically argued not including Cuba & other holdings like the important & populous Puerto Rico I don’t know.
http://www.theglobalist.com/nor/quiz/2001/12-22-01.shtml
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/continents/Northam/label/label.shtml
In 1803, it was estimated that the Poplulation of Mexico was 6 million, 41% pure Indians, 20 % whites, and 38% mixed (which included Africans). [Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811-1814]
This is unfair to you Tomndeb as we were comparing it to 25 years earlier in 13 Colonies, but even if the white and mixed population had DOUBLED(!!!) in those 25 years, there was still roughly as many whites and mixed in Mexico alone as there were Englishmen in the “U.S.” – letting alone the populous Caribbean stuff.
http://www.unm.edu/~ecdn/essay1800.html
APB as I tried and once again obviously failed to make to make clear, I was answering Pjen’s question:
That’s why I felt the 1990 Census was absolutely the correct thing to cite & I stand by that. I understand that it has little value to colonial times, it had great value to the Pjen post questioning my post.
I had never seen the figures of 20% white and 38% mixed for Mexico, before. I had thought the figures were closer to 2% and 10%. von Humboldt’s numbers would certainly bolster your position–actually overwhelming mine.
Minor points:
Regarding Brits vs English: the OP asked about the “nation” that “sent colonists.” While s/he used the word “England,” the Scots and English had been “joined” in 1601 (six years before the Jamestown settlement) and the Scots and Scots-Irish who were sent (and those who were recruited) would certainly have been “sent” by the single functional government based in London.
As to putting the Caribbean Basin into North America: I will simply disagree with your sources. “Every mapmaker on earth”? Not hardly. Certainly, Central America down through Panama is considered North America, but in my experience the Caribbean has tended to be viewed as a separate series of archipelagoes. (This is the sort of thing that geographers and those of us who watch geographers like to wrangle over, endlessly, so I will not hijack the thread by insisting on my point of view. I will note that I had never encountered anyone (prior to your two citations) who placed the Antilles (Greater or Lesser) and Cuba in the realm of North America.)
BTW, by this
I assume you are indicating that you support the belief that Mexico was colonized solely by China and Portugal, since the Spanish couldn’t have been involved. 