Abstract
Raymond L. Cohn, Mass Migration Under Sail: European Immigration to the Antebellum United States, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2009; 254 pp.; 9780521513227, £48.00 (hbk); 9780521182485, £20.99 (pbk)
In his economic history of European migration to the United States from 1815 to 1860, Raymond Cohn provides an in-depth and comprehensive analysis, using and evaluating already available data as well as presenting new documentary material. By choosing the first half of the nineteenth century as the object of his study, the author emphasizes the beginning of mass migration to the US and tells the story of crossing the Atlantic on sailing ships. Due to the high transportation costs and the long and sometimes dangerous voyage, migrants seldom had the intention of returning to Europe. Their movement to the new continent was usually a permanent one and migrants had to start a new livelihood at their destination. Therefore, Cohn’s study also tries to answer the question as to how these masses of people influenced life in the United States of America.
Centred on the three most important European countries of origin – Ireland, Germany and Great Britain – and organized into nine chapters, the book has three broad sections. In Chapters 2 through to 5, the author looks at the migrants before they left Europe. Chapter 2 carefully reconstructs the number of migrants who made their way to the US between 1815 and 1860. The key finding, a rise in their number around 1830, is explored in more detail in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 analyses the influence of economic factors on migrant flows by emphasizing the importance of American economic cycles, while the next chapter is devoted to migrants’ occupational patterns over time and across countries of origin.
Chapter 6 explores the conditions of the trip undertaken by Europeans, drawing attention to the financial cost and health risks associated with an ocean voyage under sail. The economic and political consequences of migration to the United States of America before the Civil War are investigated in Chapters 7 and 8. On the basis of different economic sectors, the book analyses the influence of European migrants on the production process, transportation, the development of wages, and the overall growth of the American economy. In a final chapter, Cohn describes the changes in immigration in the second half of the nineteenth century, summarizes his findings, and gives suggestions as to possible avenues for future research.
Cohn’s study is particularly successful in highlighting the importance of antebellum migration to the US. Over 50 million Europeans moved to the United States before the outbreak of World War I, and about five million of these had already reached the American shore before the Civil War. Nearly 92 per cent of early migrants left from Ireland, Germany or Great Britain, the rest originating from the Netherlands, Scandinavia, or other western and northern European countries. While studies on European transatlantic migration most often start around the middle of the nineteenth century, Cohn’s focus highlights an earlier turning point in the volume of migration flows and emphasizes the importance of continuing migration already in the early nineteenth century. The author points to various factors which are responsible for the beginning of mass migration. Besides better transportation opportunities on sail ships and the economic, demographic, and political conditions in Europe, it was mainly the boom in the American economy, accompanied by an urgent demand for labourers, which caused the rise in the volume of migrants around 1830. On the other hand, the US economy was positively influenced by these early migrants in various ways: most of them were skilled and educated; they were highly motivated and possessed enough seed capital to either start their own business or to reclaim land and set up a farm. In sum, this important episode of international mass migration fully deserves the attention accorded it in this study.
One might quibble with some aspects – for example, in Chapter 3, Cohn emphasizes the importance of population growth as a cause of transatlantic migration, neglecting new findings which question such demographic explanations. Overall, however, this is a masterful, highly interesting economic and demographic history of US antebellum immigration, which focuses on relatively under-explored topics of mass migration movements. The author has a broad knowledge of the available historical documents, interrogates their informative content, and offers new and alternative modes of interpretation. The book is an important contribution to migration history and can be recommended to all scholars and teachers of the subject.
University of Vienna