Adventurers and Proletarians

Since the Age of Discovery, people have left Europe for new lands, a movement that swelled to a flood between 1850 and 1930. Before the mid-nineteenth century, most of those crossing the Atlantic were slaves and indentured servants; then overpopulation and the dislocations caused by industrialization spurred a great voluntary exodus. Bringing together for the first time a wealth of research from sources in a dozen languages, Adventurers and Proletarians succinctly details the characteristics of immigrants to Latin
America from the colonial period to the present. It draws on and interprets a mass of information to explain why so many Europeans chose to come to the New World, how they traveled, what working and living conditions they found, and how many returned home.
Traditional theories have stressed the economic forces behind migration. To these Magnus Moerner and Harold Sims, who translated and expanded this work for English publication, add the myriad other factors causing people to uproot their lives and start over in a new land. They examine assimilation, economic success and failure, return migration, and the differences between immigrants to Latin America and their U.S. counterparts.
The historical and sociological study of the settlement of Latin America is a complex new field to which this pathbreaking work-the most comprehensive coverage of the subject yet compiled-makes a strong contribution. It includes twenty-one figures and four maps.