American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by David A. Gerber

Author:David A. Gerber [Gerber, David A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

9. Emigrants at Bremerhaven waiting to board ship for America. Bremerhaven was the leading emigration port for Germans, the largest nineteenth-century group to immigrate to America. The port also collected people from all over central and Eastern Europe, who traveled there to find ships sailing to the United States.

A fateful demographic transition that began in Europe and would reach the rest of the world in the twentieth century has been at the heart of the rise of modern immigration patterns. After 1750 Europe’s population began a very rapid ascent, first in western Europe and then, by the mid-nineteenth century, in central, southern and eastern Europe. Much of this growth is explained by improvements in diet that were made possible, for example, by the cultivation of the potato, originally a New World crop. Until catastrophic crop failures due to a fungus infection in the 1840s in France, the Netherlands, some of the German states, the Scottish Highlands, and especially Ireland, where a million died of starvation and disease, and almost 2 million were forced to emigrate, the potato was a principal staple of peasant diets.

In addition, long before the antibiotic revolution in medical pharmacology in the mid-twentieth century, improvements in sanitation that included more potable drinking water, better waste disposal, and aseptic child-birthing brought down morality rates. Typically there was no significant expansion in the amount of arable land, so population growth placed pressure on food supplies for the peasant majority, which was engaged in a wide variety of land-owning, leasing, or renting relationships characteristic of European agriculture.

The consequences are seen in patterns of landholding. When inheritance laws and customs favored the eldest son, younger sons found themselves unable to find land at prices that provided opportunity for an independent existence. But where there was partible inheritance, with the passage of generations, many sons found themselves in possession of smaller and smaller holdings that could not sustain existence. The same situation also could be seen in leasing or renting relationships, in which expectations of generational continuity on a given piece of land were disrupted by growing numbers. Even land of no more than marginal value was for sale at escalating prices. Under the circumstances, leaving the land often seemed the only way to survive.

That was only one face of the crisis of agriculture. The growth of population and the related rise of people living in the industrial cities encouraged the commercialization of agriculture, through which the cultivation of both food and fiber, using technology and scientific cultivation, was placed on an industrial footing. Peasants were reduced to wage laborers in rural areas, and their customary rights, including long-term lease arrangements, were destroyed.

Key to the process of commercialization was the consolidation of holdings. Extensive cultivation over vast acreage created the basis for significant economies of scale and a vast potential for production and profit. The traditional patchwork pattern of small holdings, farmed by people often barely making a living for themselves, and the ancient common lands that they shared for grazing work-animals and livestock, were antithetical to capitalist agriculture.

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