IMMIGRATION INTO NORTH AMERICA IN THE 1700s
Germans and Scottish were the major groups that arrived in America in the 1700s. The first significant group of Germans arrived around 1670 and settled in Pennsylvania and New York. The palatines arrived from the German Palatine region in 1709. They were followed by multiple German waves that settled in the southeast settling in Virginia, North Carolina, New England, and Georgia (Boxer, 2017). Over a third of the Pennsylvanian population was German by the start of the revolutionary war.
The Scottish migrated from the Ulster area of Ireland as they arrived to escape religious conflict with the English, drought, religious strife, and poverty. Over 200, 000 Scottish-Irish had immigrated between 1710 and 1775 and settled in Virginia, the Carolinas, Ohio and Indiana, and other southern points due to the cheap land prices in the regions. The significant settlements, immigration, and naturalization in the 1700s saw the population of the United States rise dramatically (Boxer, 2017).
A new era of Scottish migration started in 1707 resulting from the act of the England-Scotland union. They settled in the colonial seaports. New York and the tobacco colonies were occupied by lowland artisans and laborers from Glasgow to serve as servants. The German Palatines arrived in 1709 in the wake of devastations of the Lois XIV, and they settled in Pennsylvania and the Hudson Valley (Fogleman, 2014). In 1717, with the English parliament legalizing the transportation of offenders as punishment to America, many were brought from jails to Maryland and Virginia. Large numbers of Scotch-Irish arrived in New England, then to Maryland and Pennsylvania escaping from high rents, short leases, and absentee landlords. The Germans and the Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania colonized the Carolinas and Virginia valley in 1730. In 1732, Georgia was occupied by James Oglethorpe producing raw silk, providing a haven for imprisoned debtors, and acting as a buffer against the Spanish and the French attack. In an attempt to encourage Jewish immigration, the parliament of England in 1790enacted the Naturalization Act conferring British citizenship on alien colonial immigrants (Fogleman, 2014). Scottish rebels were transported to America after a failed Jacobite attempt to reinstate the Stuarts back on the throne in 1745. The French Acadians settled in Louisiana in 1755 from Nova Scotia after expulsion on disloyalty suspicion. Severe crop failure and depression between 1771 and 1773 saw an influx of Scotch-Irish to the American colonies.
References
Fogleman, A. S. (2014). Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Boxer, C. R. (2017). Plata es sangre: Sidelights on the drain of Spanish-American silver in the Far East, 1550–1700. In European Entry into the Pacific (pp. 209–230). Routledge.
