The People with No Name

Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764

Patrick Griffin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691074627, 9780691074610
• eBook ISBN: 9781400842896
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

More than 100,000 Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish origin migrated to the American colonies in the six decades prior to the American Revolution, the largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a vast store of archival materials, The People with No Name is the first book to tell this fascinating story in its full, transatlantic context. It explores how these people--whom one visitor to their Pennsylvania enclaves referred to as ''a spurious race of mortals known by the appellation Scotch-Irish''--drew upon both Old and New World experiences to adapt to staggering religious, economic, and cultural change. In remarkably crisp, lucid prose, Patrick Griffin uncovers the ways in which migrants from Ulster--and thousands like them--forged new identities and how they conceived the wider transatlantic community.


The book moves from a vivid depiction of Ulster and its Presbyterian community in and after the Glorious Revolution to a brilliant account of religion and identity in early modern Ireland. Griffin then deftly weaves together religion and economics in the origins of the transatlantic migration, and examines how this traumatic and enlivening experience shaped patterns of settlement and adaptation in colonial America. In the American side of his story, he breaks new critical ground for our understanding of colonial identity formation and of the place of the frontier in a larger empire. The People with No Name will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in transatlantic history, American Colonial history, and the history of Irish and British migration.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Identity in an Atlantic World
• Chapter One: The Transformation of Ulster Society in the Wake of the Glorious Revolution
• Chapter Two: “Satan’s Sieve”: Crisis and Community in Ulster
• Chapter Three: “On the Wing for America”: Ulster Presbyterian Migration, 1718–1729
• Chapter Four: “The Very Scum of Mankind”: Settlement and Adaptation in a New World
• Chapter Five: “Melted Down in the Heavenly Mould”: Responding to a Changing Frontier
• Chapter Six: “The Christian White Savages of Peckstang and Donegall”: Surveying the Frontiers of an Atlantic World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index