Book Review

Often a work of comparative history frustrates because the author's conclusion waffles between making differences more significant than similarities and maintaining that similarities outweigh differences. In Receiving Erin's Children, J. Matthew Gallman offers both kinds of conclusion, but he does so in a satisfying and compelling way. The book is less about Irish immigration than it is about how two cities, more similar than different, coped with the floods of famine migration that swamped them in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on Philadelphia and Liverpool, Gallman shows how pre-famine conditions affected the extent to which each city was prepared for the influx and then how public and private institutions reacted once the newcomers arrived. The two cities, he says, had comparable problems and shared knowledge concerning what to do about those problems. Some problems predated the famine migration; some resulted from it; others occurred simultaneously but were unrelated to it. The story thus is a complex one, involving such topics as poverty relief, medical care, law and order, and organizational developments (including gangs and volunteer fire companies, among others), but Gallman relates it concisely and informatively.

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