In the early 1770s it still seemed likely that the struggle between Britain and her American colonies would be peacefully resolved. If it had been, history would have recorded far more clearly a remarkable development that was temporarily cut off by the Revolution. This development was a flood of immigration to British mainland North America and a sudden and immense spread of settlement in the backcountry of the coastal colonies and in the transAppalachian West. Both the immigration and the spread of settlement had been in motion before the last of the Anglo-French wars in America, the French and Indian War of 1754-63; but the magnitude was so much greater after the war than it had been before, the scale and range of migration and settlement so greatly enlarged, that the essential character of the peopling process seems to have been transformed, and with it some basic elements in American life.

Just how this transformation took place is revealed in an extraordinary document, a Register of Emigrants, long known to scholars but only now subjected to exhaustive analysis. The origins of this register, arising out of the turmoil in transatlantic population movements just before the Revolution, is as dramatic a story as the information it reveals, and it involves a huge range of British and North American territory, stretching from the Outer Hebrides to the Mississippi, from London to Savannah, and from Yorkshire to Nova Scotia. The key to it all was the relation between the great land acquisitions that came to Britain as a consequence of the war—the whole of Canada, Florida, and the territories as far west as the Mississippi—and the surging flow of emigration to the North American colonies.

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