ABSTRACT
Historians of migration and expansion have long understood that the movement of Europeans beyond the geographic confines of their continent did not begin with the voyages of the Portuguese and of Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century. Economic conditions in Britain and the American colonies generally explain the ebb and flow of English migration. High rates of migration from seventeenth-century England to Virginia and Maryland preserved the colonies and dictated, at least in part, their socioeconomic character. The migration of English servants to the Chesapeake continued until 1680, with the flow of emigrants largely determined by English wages and colonial tobacco prices. The research of historians on migration to and through Pennsylvania is especially important, because Philadelphia became the major port of entry in mainland North America in the eighteenth century. The initially English and later broadly European migration of peoples across the Atlantic prevented any part of the colonial world from evolving in isolation.
