Emigrants in Chain - A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and other Undesirables 1607–1776

Emigrants in Chains—A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and other Undesirables 1607–1776; by Peter Wilson Coldham; 196 pp; Softcover; 1992, reprinted 2007; 6x9; ISBN: 9780806317786; Item #: GPC1109 Few colonizing powers can have relied so heavily and consistently on the wholesale deportation of their prison population as did England through two-and-a-half centuries of imperial expansion. By the time America made her Declaration of Independence in 1776, the prisons of England had disgorged some 50,000 of their inmates to the colonies, most of them destined to survive and, with their descendants, to populate the land of their exile. In a story largely untold until now--certainly never told as well--Coldham's groundbreaking study demonstrates once and for all that the recruitment of labor for the American colonies was achieved in large measure through the emptying of English jails