“Before the Great Flood,” is one of a number of recent contributions to the study of immigration to the United States in the era before 1820. Like Marianne Wokeck's study, (Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), it takes advantage of primary sources to delve deeply into the nature of early U.S. immigration. Hans-J¨rgen Grabbe draws on records written in English, Dutch, German, and French from numerous archives in North America, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. This book, covering European migration to the U.S. from 1783 to 1820, picks up approximately where Wokeck's work ends. As the author explains, research on this time period has suffered for lack of passenger ship records for U.S. ports, on which scholars have drawn for subsequent periods. The work usefully mobilizes a disparate set of primary sources, among others newspapers, contemporary reports, pilot reports, isolated passenger ship lists, consular documents, and travel diaries.

The first two chapters provide an accounting of the number of immigrants who came to the United States, broken down by year and national origin. With the exception of Henry Gemery's estimation (“European Emigration to North America, 1700–1820: Numbers and Quasi-Numbers.” Perspectives in American History, New Series, 1 [1984]: 283–343), Grabbe argues, previous scholars have mostly underestimated how many early immigrants the United States received, particularly between 1783 and 1820. He first estimates immigration to Philadelphia and the Delaware region, because this area constituted the most important migrant-receiving region and also uniquely offers sufficient documentation from various health and port authorities to allow reliable measures.

Chapter 2 analyzes the entire volume of immigration from 1783 to 1820. Table 13 (pp. 93–94) gives the overall figure of 364,360 migrants to the United States. While the estimates for immigration to the Philadelphia/Delaware region are most reliable, this second set, based on both primary and secondary sources, is probably fairly close to the true figures. Cautioning that future careful studies of different ethnic groups and commercial activities at American harbors may provide some corrections, Grabbe implies that he cares more about seeking the historical truth than about just getting the numbers right. Besides a new set of migration statistics, these first chapters yield interesting conclusions: Irish immigration was mostly from Northern Ireland, and thus most likely heavily Protestant; estimates of the immigrants who passed through Nova Scotia or Newfoundland on their way to the United States show that most came out of Ireland; several scholars have actually overstated the emigration of some ethnic groups, particularly the Germans and Irish, as shown by Grabbe's more precise reckoning in table 13.

The remainder of the book devotes chapters to the confluence of international trade and overseas migration, the economic conditions migrants faced at home and in North America, the involvement of the state in emigration and immigration, and the demise of the redemptioner system. Grabbe's work conveys real understanding of the economic, social, and legal conditions migrants faced in these years. The multitude of sources yields all kinds of information about the practical aspects of long-distance movement before 1820, and numerous examples of actual emigrants and their experiences are used for illustrative purposes. I highlight a few major points below.

Chapter 5 discusses the involvement of the state in migration movements. Many European states discouraged or outlawed migration to a foreign country. Various Dutch and German sources serve to assess the rigidity with which authorities enforced existing migration restrictions, notably prior to the mid-nineteenth century, when many more Europeans gained the legal right to leave their homelands. One particularly interesting result is that in years when Dutch and German authorities tried to enforce emigration rules effectively, the percentage of adult women and children among the emigration cohort fell. Grabbe argues that men moving by themselves could more easily leave and travel, drawing less attention. He also covers the various British emigration laws of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which largely tried to prevent skilled workers from leaving. A decline in the number of British immigrants arriving in the United States in 1803 is partly explained by the British 1803 Passenger Act, which restricted the number of migrants on a ship to one per two tons of cargo on British ships and one per five tons of cargo on foreign ships.

The final chapter discusses the decline in the use of redemptioner and indentured servitude contracts. Grabbe attributes this to several factors: increasing sympathy in U.S. courts for indebted immigrants; the rise of New York as the harbor of choice, displacing Philadelphia; the increasing place of factories in industrial production, drastically altering the demand for long-term labor contracts, notably apprenticeships; and a shift in cultural values regarding white servitude. Unlike the case in Philadelphia, New York's antipoverty laws in the early nineteenth century discouraged ship captains from selling indenture contracts. While very interesting, this last chapter cites, but unfortunately does not directly engage, the key arguments of economic historians David Galenson and Farley Grubb, among others, regarding the demise of the redemptioner and indentured servant markets around 1820. Galenson (“The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas. This JOURNAL 44, no. 1 [1984]: 1–25) emphasizes the fall in passage cost as instrumental. Grubb (“The End of European Immigrant Servitude in the United States: An Economic Analysis of Market Collapse.” This JOURNAL 54, no. 4 (1994): 794–824), on the other hand, stresses that by 1820 more emigrants were using savings or borrowing from family and friends to prepay their tickets.

Grabbe shows in this work how political and economic changes in this formative period of the United States altered the nature of migration. Migration scholars will appreciate Grabbe's painstaking explanations in the first two chapters of his sources, the assumptions he made, and how reliable his figures are. A highly abridged version of material from these first few chapters can be found in English in a previous article by Grabbe in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, (“European Immigration to the United States in the Early National Period, 1783–1820.” 133, no. 2, [June 1989]: 190–214). Still, the author may want to think about having his book translated into English so as to reach a wider audience of scholars. Overall, Grabbe's work is an impressive and very useful addition to the literature on historical migration on which readers of German will want to draw for their own research.