Book 1, Introduction and Chapter 1 An Expanded World, 1760-1776 Summary

In Voyagers to the West, Bernard Bailyn examines the dramatic increase in immigration to the American colonies from Britain in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He focuses on who the immigrants were, where they came from, why they were immigrating, and where they went to in the colonies. His main data sources is an emigration register kept by British customs officials during this time, and he supplements that information with data from newspapers, town records, personal manuscript collections, and so on.

In the pre-Revolutionary years, many people emigrated from the British mainland to America. The population of the colonies spread into the backcountry of the coastal colonies and trans-Appalachian west. The magnitude of these developments was greater in these years than they had been in the...