Strangers Within the Empire

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thoroughly English character of the American colonial population had been shattered by waves of German, Swiss, Ulster Scot, Scottish, Irish, and other immigrants of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds, such as Jews and Muslims. The two predominant streams of non-English immigrants were German and Ulster Scots Protestants who flooded into the Mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake, and Lower South colonies by the hundreds of thousands.