Palatines and print culture: imagining migration and identity in the British Atlantic world

Zach Hagadone

This thesis explores the role of print culture and public opinion in shaping and directing the flow of migrants from southwest Germany to colonial New York in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Commonly referred to as the Palatine emigration of 1709, this mass movement began with the sudden departure of as many as 30,000 people from territories located in the Rhine River drainage basin--primarily from Cologne in the north to Basel, Switzerland in the south. These migrants varied widely by geographic origin, regional dialect, and religious belief, but all were united by common access to the Rhine--either directly or via its many riverine connections--and their desire to relocate in British North America. The arc of this story follows these disparate people as they were steadily constructed by print into a composite community called "the Palatines." Though many push factors existed to compel people to quit the western Holy Roman Empire in 1709, this thesis proposes that colonial promotional literature activated the migration, enabling so many people to imagine themselves as settlers in America. Along the way, the migrants traveled through London, where they underwent another imaginative transformation at the hands of the metropolitan British press. English-language writers such as Daniel Defoe seized on the coming of the German-speakers to articulate emerging notions of Britishness. In the process, these writers reconstructed the migrants as "the poor Palatines"--a term that only came into popular usage through the efforts of the political press in London. Applied universally to as many as 13,000 German-speakers who passed through the city in 1709, the Palatine moniker served as a catchall label for the migrants, irrespective of their varied origins. Essentialized as poverty-stricken foreigners rather than prospective Britons, the Palatines made ideal candidates for indentured servitude in New York. Constricted and redefined by labor contract, the Palatines pushed back against their indenture by leveraging the constructed group identity foisted on them by the London press to demand the freedom they imagined would be theirs based on the promotional promises that drew them from their homes in the first place.

Palatines and print culture: imagining migration and identity in the British Atlantic world

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