Book Review

Comparative/World

For more than a century after the Great Famine of the 1840s, the economic, social, and political history of Ireland was molded in crucial respects by systematic emigration, on a scale often exceeding that from any other European country. So long as the "hemorrhage" persisted, politicians and scholars alike found it difficult to respond objectively to a process that seemed to betoken structural failure, ascribed alternatively to Irish archaism or British misrule. The problem of attitude was compounded by contradictory impressions of the emigrant experience overseas, pride at Irish achievements being subverted by indignation at evidence of poverty, marginalization, and discrimination. Today, as Ireland comes to terms with prosperity, net immigration, and multiculturalism, the debate over the so-called "Irish diaspora" is losing much of its passion. "Exile" is easily reformulated as pursuit of economic rationality, "Anglicization" as enlightened cosmopolitanism, and anti-Irish sentiment as ineffectual bluster stimulating emigrants to reconstruct their Irishness as a cultural asset rather than an incubus. Despite sporadic protests against sanitized depictions of emigration, the rapidly expanding body of scholarship both within and beyond Ireland is overwhelmingly positive in tone. In today's self-consciously mobile and "transnational" Irish culture, emigration seems a symptom of precocious modernity rather than crippling archaism.

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