Item Detail
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13422
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3
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0
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English
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The Perpetual Emigrating Fund : Redemption Servitude and Subsidized Migration in America's Great Basin
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University of Utah
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Ph.D diss.
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"The history of American immigration is marked by institutions of redemption servitude, which evolved to alleviate credit market imperfections between potential foreign immigrants and American institutions that valued their labor. Two such institutions were European indentured servitude and Chinese contractual labor. Likewise, the Perpetual Emigrating Fund (PEF) evolved to assist America's Mormon migration. The PEF was an institution in the mid-19th century initiated by the Mormon church to aid migrants to America's Great Basin and facilitate the territory's economic development. The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce the PEF to the economic literature, and examine its role in the economic development of the Great Basin. To better understand the PEF, we must first understand its unique objectives. The PEF was to assist poor migrants to the Great Basin, facilitate economic development by immigrating skilled labor and capital, and to remain solvent by requiring migrants who used the PEF to repay their debts after their arrival in the territory. To determine the Perpetual Emigrating Fund's role in accomplishing its stated objectives, thousands of observations are collected for migrants as they boarded trans-Atlantic vessels in Liverpool, England. Many of these are linked to the United States 1860 and 1870 federal census. This provides wealth estimates for these migrants after their arrival in the Great Basin. Together, these data sets allow the PEF's objectives to be tested, and sheds light on the economic development of America's Great Basin." [Author's abstract]