Review on Bernard Bailyn's Books on US Colonial History

choi

William Anthony Hay, Master of the Atlantic; Bernard Bailyn cuts through layers of settled opinion to show how Englishman became Americans—and then became revolutionaries. Wall Street Journal, Feb 28, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/book-review ... d-bailyn-1425077123
(book review on Bernard Bailyn, Something an Art; Nine essays on history. Knopf, 2015)

Quote:

"Quantitative history, an approach using statistics and computer databases, began as an aggressive effort to make history writing more 'scientific' and thus more defensible to skeptics who worried that historians were engaged in something akin to storytelling: too much Thomas Babington Macaulay and not enough methodological rigor. But often quantitative history substituted number crunching for interpretation or failed to reach beyond 'what' to ask 'why.' Part of Mr Bailyn’s purpose, in this collection and elsewhere, is to reassert history’s literary tradition while harvesting the material uncovered by quantitative work and other 'scientific' schools of historical analysis.

"As Mr Bailyn observes, 'numbers alone, sheer quantities' can in fact reveal a great deal. The database on the Atlantic slave trade created by the Du Bois Institute offers a case in point, tracing 27,233 voyages—roughly two-thirds of the trade over the 350 years it existed—all in a searchable format.

"Mr Bailyn’s later work charted what he called 'peopling the peripheries.' Nearly 400,000 English emigrants crossed the Atlantic over the first century of settlement, with another 300,000 following in the 18th century. Roughly 200,000 Scotch-Irish Protestants, 100,000 Germans and not less than 1,744,000 Africans joined them. The magnitude of the transference of people across vast distance to populate Britain’s empire had no precedent. Neither Rome nor Britain’s imperial rivals matched it, as Mr Bailyn notes. The result was a truly new world of materials drawn from the old.

Note:
(a) Thomas Babington Macaulay
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay
(1800-1859; a British historian; section 5 Political writing)
(b) WEB Du Bois Instituteen.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois_Institute
(c) Thomas Hutchinson (governor)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hutchinson_(governor)
(1711 (born in Boston) - 1780 (died in England))
(d) Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America; An introduction. Knopf, 1986
(e) Regarding quotation 3.

Bernard Bailyn, Something an Art. two consecutive pages (page number not displayed)
books.google.com/books?id=FPwYBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT139&lpg=PT139&dq=slaves+america+1,744,000&source=bl&ots=u_YAIX7MWJ&sig=lWOgCDJPr1nu6JZCfuyZE4ga0s8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LIjzVOT2O8-AygSfs4LYDw&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=slaves%20america%201%2C744%2C000&f=false
("What are the dimensions of the population movements into the first British empire? The figures can only be approximate. From England, in the first century of settlement in the Western hemisphere, came nearly 400,000 emigrants (a figure equivalent to 69 percent of the entire natural increase of the English population), and in the eighteenth century another 300,000. In addition, some 200,000 Irish (that is Scotch-Irish Protestants [not Catholics, that is]) joined the trans-Atlantic migration before 1776, as did close to 100,000 German-speaking people and, involuntarily, no less than 1,744,000 Africans of mixed ethnicities drawn principally from the hinterlands of the Gulf of Guinea, the vast region at the eastward bend of the African coast, now the sites of the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The estimated total number of people, therefore, transferred to the British territory in the Western Hemisphere before 1776 is an approximately 2,744,000 souls, in a period in which the total population of Britain itself rose to only eight and a half million.  The contrast with the other imperial powers in the West is striking. From France (population approximately twenty million) to New France came a total of less than 30,000 people in the entire colonial period, though an estimated 636,000 African slaves were exported to the French Caribbean islands. And while Spain's trans-Atlantic emigration was much larger than that of French, the ratio of Spain’s emigrants to its domestic population was less than half that of Britain's. At the end of the first century of their respective colonization efforts, the number of Britons or their descendants in British America was twice that of the peninsular Spaniards and Creoles in Spanish America. In each of the two short peak periods of population movements from Britain to America, 1630-60 and 1760-76, the flow totaled close to a quarter of a million people. These key facts somehow obscured by historians of the empire concentrating on institutions, power rivalries, cultural transfers, and trade")

(i) The first federal census was conducted in 1790.
(ii) Before that, each colony conducted its own census, which are preserved to this date.
(iii) Profile America; Facts for Features. Census Bureau, July 4, 2010
www.census.gov/newsroom/releases ... ions/cb10-ff12.html
(2.5 million[:] In July 1776, the estimated number of people living in the newly independent nation. Source: Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 <http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html>”

The link no longer works.