"To Make America": European Emigration in the Early Modern Period. by Ida Altman; JamesHornReview by: Abel A. AlvesThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 921-922Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2541612 .

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Book Reviews 921

life, is cast as a struggle between a sadistic, domineering male principle and a passive, obedi- ent, masochistic female principle (387).

Even if one is willing to ignore the culturally determined sexism of Freudian discourse, one cannot ignore the author's self-imposed imprisonment within Freudian terminology. At times, Meissner alludes to the possibility of gender-role construction in Ignatius' culture, and he even points to a number of women who fought to express agency within patriarchy (238- 71), but he fails to recognize that early modernVirgins could punish and maim, thus retain- ing the potent and fearsome aspects of ancient mother goddesses (see William A. Christian's Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 56- 7).Among other things, women were not necessarily always identified with the passive ideal of Freud's bourgeoisViennese society.

Perhaps even more disturbing is Meissner's unwillingness to go beyond the Freudian par- adigm to explore alternative psychological analyses of Ignatius. The reader is left asking why Roland Barthes' Sade, Fourier, Loyla is never mentioned when Meissner addresses the issue of Ignatius and sadomasochism. Likewise, Meissner does refer to the saint's scrupulosity as "obsessional," but he fails to mention the recent work by clinical psychologists in the area of obsessive-compulsive disorder (94). In 1989, Dr. Judith Rapoport, M. D. specifically referred to Ignatius' scrupulosity as an "irrational yet distressful force" comparable to present-day di- agnoses of OCD, a biochemical condition related by clinical psychologists to the brain's me- tabolism (see The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing, E. P Dutton, pp. 235, 10-1). Rapoport's explanations might be as reductionist as Meissner's, but they are at least worthy of being taken into account as counterarguments to the Freudian paradigm.

Though Meissner's study is thought-provoking, and even quite masterful in its analysis of H. D. Egan's work on Ignatian spirituality (347-58), it leaves the reader unsatisfied by only considering one school of hermeneutics and failing to consider alternative medical and philosophical perspectives on psychology. Abel A. Alves....................................................... Ball State University

"To Make America": European Emigration in the Early Modern Period. Ida Altman and James Horn, eds. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Ox- ford: University of California Press, 1991. 251 pp. $34.95.

"To Make America" is one of those few works that should be released as soon as possible in a paperback edition for classroom use. Though few of the particular conclusions reached

by the book's six authors are unexpected, the anthology's overall conception is excellent.

Filling a void in historical literature, "To Make America" presents a collection of essays ana-

lyzing the socioeconomic makeup and motivations of European emigrants to the Americas from 1500 to 1800.Any advanced undergraduate or graduate course focusing on Europeans in the "New World" can benefit from this survey.

The introductory essay by Ida Altman and James Horn sets the stage by summarizing "important similarities in patterns of emigration" where the British, Spanish, French, and Germans are concerned (21).The importance of contract and convict labor in the European settlement of the Americas is reviewed, while a certain Spanish (and Portuguese) proclivity for the extensive use of indigenous and African forced labor, and its contributions to con-

structing a society of castas, is not ignored. Above all else, European emigration is presented as an economic phenomenon, depending on the "push" of limited opportunities in Europe and the "pull" of promised opportunities in the Americas.Those without sufficient liquidity

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922 Sixteenth Century Journal XXIV / 4 (1993)

to finance their own voyage could seek the route of the indentured servant, engage, redemp- tioner, retainer, sailor, soldier,fille du roi, or even stowaway. Individual essays by Altman on Spaniards (based on her Emigrants and Society), Horn on Englishmen in the Chesapeake, and Marianne Wobeck on eighteenth-century Germans are especially good at presenting infor- mation on regional patterns of emigration and immigration-patterns often based on re- cruitment by family members or local notables already in (or destined for) the Americas. In Horn's words, "Transatlantic connections founded on trade, family, and kinship were an en- during legacy and helped shape Anglo-American society long after the flow of settlers to the Chesapeake waned" (118). Detailed accounts of very real individuals help this book to tran- scend the usual quantified demographic lists. Altman writes of Alvaro Rodriguez Chac6n, who left Trujillo around 1550 to become a Mexico City merchant. After returning to the Iberian peninsula in 1574, he sailed back to Mexico the very next year with a true casa po- blada: three unmarried sons, a married daughter, her husband, servants, and some others (38). In turn, Altman's discussion is further embellished by Auke Pieter Jacobs' review of the illegal and semilegal ways of traveling to the Spanish Indies.

The collection does a laudable service in summarizing the unique problems of emigra- tion to Canada.While Christian Huetz de Lemps' piece on the emigration of individual ser- vants to the French Antilles shows patterns and motivations found in other "plantation soci- eties," Leslie Choquette's "Recruitment of French Emigrants to Canada, 1600-1760" is quick to point out that emigration to Canada never became self-sustaining since promises of economic opportunity never truly outweighed popular images of"a few acres of snow" cap- tured in Voltaire's Candide."The climate, with its harsh winter, mosquito-laden summer, and radically shortened growing season, and the continual wars with the Iroquois, did little to boost the reputation of the colony" (162).While "most nations" had to encourage emigra- tion and settlement in the early stages of colonization, "encouragement" in the form of mer- cantile, seigneurial, and royal recruitment persisted well beyond the initial stages in the case of French Canada. In fact, the decline of seigneurial recruitment after the seventeenth cen- tury may have been a substantial reason for the lack of an agricultural base in New France since only seigneurs envisioned "indentured servants not as negotiable commodities but as their own future censitaires" (147). Canada remained a scantily populated society of trading posts. In contrast,Wobeck's piece rounds out the book nicely by showing how eighteenth- century German emigration foreshadowed nineteenth-century European emigration (230- 31).

It is only a slight disappointment that this volume does not take a few more risks and expend some more effort reviewing non-economic, non-regional, and non-familial forces leading to emigration. Choquette's all too brief discussion of popular images of Canada points in that direction without satisfying the reader by presenting an adequate amount of corroborating evidence. Human dreams are not always reducible to the tangible and the ma- terial.

Abel A. Alves....................................................... Ball State University

Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492- 1787. Peter Hulme. NewYork and London: Methuen and Co., 1986. xv + 349 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. n.p.

In this provocative book Peter Hulme examines the emergence of a distinct colonial dis-

course, which attempted to justify European expansion into the extended Caribbean (de-

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