ABSTRACT
The initial impulse to migrate, and the size and composition of the migration, is determined as much by the way people conceive of the social group to which they belong and by its values as it does with the normal human instinct to improve one’s well–being. The most transatlantic migration is impelled not only by the migrants’ desires to better themselves, but also by the desire of the European consumer for cheap sugar, the desire of the African elites for imported textiles and metals, and the demographic decline of American indigenous populations which, from the European perspective, meant a shortage of labor. The story of transatlantic migration is a conclusion to the expansion of this sense of identity to incorporate ever–larger geographic and cultural areas. A hemispheric and very long-run perspective suggests that fundamental shifts in how people defined the group in which they lived lay behind the migration patterns.
