ABSTRACT
Before 1800, Europe had sent between two and three million people to her transatlantic colonies. However, between 1800 and 1961 a staggering 61 million Europeans moved across the Atlantic (de Landa 2000: 151). The majority of these migrants left Europe in a 70-year period. The historian Alfred Crosby stressed the singularity of the phenomenon:
And so the Europeans came between the 1840’s and World War I, the greatest wave of humanity ever to cross oceans and probably the greatest that ever will cross oceans. This Caucasian tsunami began with the starving Irish and the ambitious Germans and with the British, who never reached the peaks of emigration as high as some other nationalities, but who have an inextinguishable yearning to leave home. The Scandinavians joined the exodus next, and then towards the end of the century, the southern and eastern European peasantry. Italians, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese, Hungarians, Greeks, Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Ashkenazic Jews – for the first time in the possession of knowledge of the opportunities overseas and, via railroad and steamship, of the means to live a life of ancient poverty behind – poured through the ports of Europe and across the seams of Pangaea.
