The Immigration of Irish, Germans, Scottish

The immigration of Irish, Germans, Scottish

According to our Western Civilization history, the first people to emigrate from Europe and colonized this North American land were the English, the Colonization migration of the XVII century. Some years after the first settlers arrived, the first British mass exodus landed from the Mayflower, approximately 155,000 in number, mostly as indentured servants, contracted for a specific term of years. Some Scottish and Irish-Scottish peoples came along with them, approximately 12,000 a year. The English government instituted later migrations to the British colonies. If not purposely driven out from their country, British people escaped from political and religious persecution towards such groups which included the Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-Sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some independent, some Jews and a few Roman Catholics, as well as the German Mennonites (ancestors of the Amish) and other 225,000 colonists and the French Calvinists called Huguenots.

The following biggest wave of migration was the one in which 84,500 chained Africans slaves were sent to the colonies to work on the land. The first joint-stock companies, formed by merchants under the law of James I, settled in Jamestown and this was the English colony that bought Africans from a Dutch ship in 1619. This is the origin of the African American heritage in the United States: Forced migration. After the term of white indentured servants ended, these immigrants went into farming for themselves. That was the main reason for the white landlords to buy slave labor between the 1600s to the 1780, in order to provide better economic profits to the British colonies.

During the time that the American Revolution began, the XVIII century migration showed its influence in the new born American society, as the author says: by 1782, the former English colonies were then separate states, linked by common ...