A migration is not a diaspora if the movement is not forced, if there is no yearning to return to a lost homeland, and if there is no discrimination. The “Great Migration” of English colonists into New England, between 1629 and 1642, was therefore not a diaspora. First, although most left their homes in order to preserve their religion, the colonists were still able to return, and as many as one quarter of them did so. Second, the colonists’ image of New England is characterized by John Smith’s foundational map of the region from 1616 [1], which depicts the region stripped of all Indian presence and overlain with English place names.

Two conditions would need to pertain for the Great Migration to have become a diaspora. First, they have to have been exiled from England, which might have been the case had the Puritans not won the English Civil War. Second, had their attempts to settle in New England been successfully rebuffed by the Native Americans, the English Puritans would have had to move still elsewhere. They would then have become a rootless community, unwelcome or barely tolerated wherever they went. In such a situation, the political map of the region might have looked more like an historical reconstruction of New England before colonization [2].