ABSTRACT
Migration and modernity, the nation-state and Empire, all came of age together. It was also a culture where at first the destination for those migrants was not a stable state, but random and mobile, where Barbados or Virginia, New England or Jamaica offered different but equal opportunities and where sojourners and slaves alike settled, moved and returned. The narrative of migration and modernity which emerged was that of Leviathan, the narrative of the victor, not the vanquished. It was a settler society, shaped by the migration of the English, their Irish and Scots indentured servants, and the enforced migration of Africans. The motive for migration may have had as much to do with maintenance of the family and its livelihoods, with the enhancement of status and experience, within a culture which prized migration per se and historically perceived it as a statement of independence, as to do with individual economic self-advancement.
