Contains the 4 volumes of The complete book of emigrants and The complete book of emigrants in bondage and its Supplement.

The forced emigration of convicts, destitute persons and children, "undesirables", and non-conformists from England to the Americas.

Between 1614 and 1775 some 50,000 English men, women, and children were sentenced by judicial process to be sent to the American colonies for a variety of crimes. The data on these involuntary colonists came from a variety of official records which the author of this work spent over fifteen years studying. Among those covered were minutes of eleven Courts of Assize and Jail Delivery and of twenty-eight Courts of Quarter Session, as well as Treasury Papers, Money Books, Patent Rolls, State Papers, and Sessions Papers. The names of those deported are printed in alphabetical order and form what can be considered the largest passenger list of its kind ever published. The data presented in this volume is highly condensed but most entries include some or all of the following information: parish of origin, sentencing court, nature of the offense, date of sentence, date and ship on which transported, date and place landed in America, and the English county in which the sentence was passed.

"This book was conceived as an attempt to bring together from as many English sources as survive a comprehensive account of emigration to the New World from its beginnings to 1660"--Introduction.

Before 1650, only a few hundred Scots had trickled into the American colonies, but by the early 1770s the number had risen to 10,000 per year. A conservative estimate of the total number of Scots who settled in North America prior to 1785 is around 150,000. Who were these Scots? What did they do? Where did they settle? What factors motivated their emigration? Dobson's work, based on original research on both sides of the Atlantic, comprehensively identifies the Scottish contribution to the settlement of North America prior to 1785, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth century.

The original volume of "Emigrants in Bondage" published in 1988 acknowledged that there were some notable omissions from the list of transported felons then printed, which remained to be researched and remedied. The Supplement of 1992 began to supply the omissions, but now with the publication of "More Emigrants in Bondage," Mr. Coldham has closed the remaining gaps. Altogether there are some 9,000 new and amended records in this important work, which is arranged and annotated in the same way as the parent volume. To the original list of 50,000 records, these additions come as a windfall, arising from the availability of previously closed archival resources and the re-examination of conventional transportation records such as Assize Court records, Circuit Court records, and the quaintly-named Sheriffs' Cravings, to which can be added newspapers and printed memoirs. The addition of 9,000 records to the canon makes this the most important list of ships' passengers to be published in years. Whether as a list of additions or corrections, this new work is an indispensable tool in the researcher's arsenal, and anyone using the parent volume and supplement cannot possibly ignore this volume.