ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the changing numbers of potential migrants over time, the fluctuations in domestic and colonial demands for labor, the opportunities to find and fund transatlantic passage, and the relative attractiveness of competing destinations explains many of the larger trends in English migration to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians of migration and expansion have long understood that the movement of Europeans beyond the geographic confines of the continent did not begin with the voyages of the Portuguese and of Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century. Localism is an important element in both the social experience and the mentality of sixteenth and seventeenth-century people, but it is only one element. The increasing movement of peoples from one region to another further complicates the eighteenth-century data, making it difficult to distinguish between transatlantic migration from Europe and internal migration from other places in colonial America.
