ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville thought that the advance of Europeans across the continent would essentially wipe out the Indians. But he predicted great struggles issuing from the coexistence of blacks and whites: Whatever efforts southerners make to keep slavery, they will not succeed indefinitely. In a world of democratic liberty and enlightenment, slavery, squeezed into one corner of the globe, attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as deleterious, cannot survive as an institution. Political identity was by no means the only sphere in which the simultaneous transformation of networks, identities, and relations with other groups occurred. The social networks used and transformed by migration endure far beyond the time of displacement. They provide a setting for life at the destination, a basis for solidarity and mutual aid as well as for division and conflict. Networks brought into being by immigration serve to create and perpetuate inequality.
