Reviews of Books

Ethnicity without Identity

Reviewed by H. Tyler Blethen, Western Carolina University

In the diverse and expansive world that was the first British empire, no group could take its cultural identity for granted. That was as true for the subjects of the crown in the Old World as in the New. A growing sense of British-ness bound them together as imperial power waxed over the course of the eighteenth century. In this framework, the constituent ethnic groups in the British Isles—the Scots, Welsh, and Irish—carved out distinctive positions. But one group remained elusive in its time and our own: the Scots-Irish who migrated from Ulster to America. Although regarded as prototypical backcountry pioneers, they never staked out a cultural niche or asserted a distinctive identity, thereby confounding historians' efforts to make sense of ethnicity in Britain's multicultural empire.	1
The ambiguity surrounding this group of mixed heritage is reflected in the uncertainty over what to call them. In Ulster they were known as "Ulster Scots," even though perhaps a quarter of them were of English ancestry. In North America they usually called themselves "Irish," while outsiders customarily referred to them as "Irish Presbyterians" or "Protestant Irish." The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first American appearance of "Scotch-Irish" to 1744, but use of the term became widespread only after the arrival of several million Irish Catholic refugees fleeing the devastating potato famine of the 1840s. Irish Protestants, led by the Scotch-Irish Society of America, consequently embraced the label to escape a rising nativist backlash whose targets included Irish Catholics.	2
Although "Scotch-Irish" is the name most commonly used in America since the 1880s, "Scots-Irish" has recently been coined by academics, out of deference to present-day Scottish sensitivities. A cursory Internet search elicited 30,800 hits for "Scotch-Irish" vs. 12,200 for "Scots-Irish," but a search of Amazon.com's book titles found only forty-six "Scotch-Irish" versus eighty-two "Scots-Irish." Popular usage has apparently not kept up with scholarly fashion.	3
For Patrick Griffin, these eighteenth-century emigrants from Ulster to Britain's North American colonies were the People with No Name. That lack of identity derives from the complexity of their descent from two cultures: Were they Scottish? Were they Irish? Did they maintain Scottish ways in Ulster, or did they adapt to Irish circumstances? Once in America, were they molded by the traditions they brought with them or by the physical and cultural environments of their new home? In Griffin's view, the confusion has yet another source: it stems primarily from a historical peculiarity. Unlike other ethnic groups in British North America, the emigrants from Ulster reached no consensus as to their group identity; instead, adaptability became their hallmark. Because they constantly accommodated to the rapidly changing conditions of the turbulent eighteenth century, their identity was malleable and conditional. Like many modern Americans, they regularly reinvented themselves.	. . .