Most immigrants to British North America in the 17th century were of English extraction. English immigration to North America began with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and accelerated after the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. In the Great Migration, which lasted from 1629 until the onset of the English Civil War in 1642, approximately 20,000 English men, women, and children migrated to New England and as many as 40,000 to other English colonies, particularly Maryland and Virginia. Most of the New England settlers were Puritans (many from East Anglia, the center of English Puritanism), most were people of modest means—farmers, craftspeople, or lesser gentry—and most immigrated in family groups. The Chesapeake region drew a much larger percentage of single adults (mostly men), moneyed investors, and servants.
Immigration patterns changed markedly after 1649. During the English Civil War, some Puritan settlers returned to England. Relatively few English immigrants settled in New England after 1649; later 17th - and 18th-century immigration focused on the South and, above all, Pennsylvania and the Middle Colonies. The population of the Delaware Valley (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware) escalated from about 3,000 settlers in 1680 to 24,000 in 1700 and 170,000 by 1750. Initially, Quakers from Wales and the English midlands dominated the regions culture. They sought to escape religious persecution and to create a society that reflected Quaker ideals. After 1715, however, many non-Quaker English immigrants also settled in these colonies, so that by 1760 Quakers were a minority in the region. The Quaker leadership’s liberal social policy quickly made the Delaware Valley one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions of British America.
A large percentage of English immigrants to the Delaware Valley and the South were indentured servants, teenagers and young adults who obtained free passage to the New World by bartering their labor for a period of years (typically four to seven years, although children were sometimes bound for much longer terms). All the British colonies imported indentured servants, but they were most numerous in Virginia and Maryland in the 17th century, where an average of 2,000 servants arrived each year from the 1630s until 1700. Indentured servitude declined in the southern colonies in the late 17th century as economic conditions in England improved and the cost of importing slaves declined. During the 18th century most indentured servants went to the Middle Colonies. English convicts (and occasionally prisoners of war) were transported to North America in a slow but steady stream throughout the colonial period. Convicts were bound for even longer terms than indentured servants were, typically seven to 14 years. Most went to the southern colonies. The transportation of convicts to the American colonies was controversial, however, and colonists generally discouraged it.
In 1690, 90 percent of the colonists in British America were of British descent. In the 18th century, however, a large percentage of immigrants to the British colonies were German, Scottish, Scots-Irish, and African. Between 1715 and 1775, 250,000 people fled famine and poverty in northern Britain—the north of England, the Scottish lowlands, and northern Ireland—and sought economic refuge in British America. The movement began as a trickle but accelerated rapidly in the 1760s. Both families and young, single adults tried their fortunes in the New World. Many came as indentured servants. They faced horrific conditions aboard immigrant ships and often encountered ethnic prejudice from other British Americans. As the richest land along the eastern seaboard had long since been claimed and cultivated, most of the new northern British immigrants moved west to backcountry regions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, where they established small farms. The northern British and Scots-Irish influence is still evident in Appalachia today. Still, the largest group of new arrivals in 18th-century British America were Africans forcibly brought to the New World as slaves.
Further reading: Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of ish North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
—Darcy R. Fryer
World History
