By: Kevin Kenny
| If a single theme has dominated the historiography of the United States in the last decade, it is the need to extend the boundaries of inquiry beyond the nation-state, to internationalize the subject and render it more cosmopolitan. Placing American history in a global context was a central initiative of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in the late 1990s, with the Journal of American History devoting several round tables and special issues to the topic. In 1999 the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) took as its theme “Diasporas and Migrations in History,” and at the 2001 meeting AHA president Eric Foner added a global dimension to his ongoing investigation into the history of American freedom. Under the auspices of the OAH, Thomas Bender directed a four-year collaborative effort culminating in the recent publication of a manifesto on teaching, training, and faculty development, the La Pietra Report, and a seminal collection of essays, Rethinking American History in a Global Age. One might confidently expect that American immigration and ethnicity, which by definition have an international dimension, would fit comfortably into this newly emerging framework. Yet there is confusion over the appropriate perspective and methodology. This essay seeks to delineate an approach suited to the history of one prominent migrant group, the Irish, but the issues at stake are central to American immigration history as a whole.1 | 1 |
| The recent literature suggests two broad possibilities. Diasporic approaches to the subject seek to transcend the nation-state as the primary unit of historical analysis, searching for reciprocal interactions and the sensibilities they nurture among globally scattered communities. Comparative approaches, by contrast, examine specific similarities and differences in the experiences of similar migrants who have settled in different nations or national regions. The first of these approaches, following Ian Tyrrell, might be called “transnational,” and the second, following George M. Fredrickson, “cross-national.”2 The argument presented here is that neither perspective will suffice, but that a combination of the two holds promise. Nation-based comparisons cannot capture the fluid and interactive processes at the heart of migration history: mass movement of people across oceans and continents, participation by migrants or their descendants in the nationalist affairs of the homeland, and articulation of literary, cultural, or political sensibilities that connect widely dispersed migrant groups with one another and with the homeland. But a strictly transnational approach can underestimate the enduring power of nation-states and the emergence within them of nationally specific ethnicities that sharply differentiate an ostensibly unitary “people” (the Irish, the Italians, those of African descent) across time and space. What is needed is a migration history that combines the diasporic or transnational with the comparative or cross-national. Only then can the history of American immigration and ethnicity be integrated into its wider global context. | 2 |
Irish global migration had some distinctive characteristics. For most of the nineteenth century, emigration as a proportion of population was higher in Ireland than in any other European country, and no other country experienced such sustained depopulation in that period. By the second half of the nineteenth century, as the historian David Fitzpatrick put it, “Emigration had become a massive, relentless, and efficiently managed national enterprise.” Counting those who went to Britain, between 9 and 10 million Irish men, women, and children have migrated from Ire-land since 1700. The number of migrants is almost twice the population of Ireland today (5.3 million), and it exceeds the population at its historical peak on the eve of the great famine in the 1840s (8.5 million). In the century after 1820 almost 5 million Irish people emigrated to the United States alone. In 1890 two of every five Irish-born people were living abroad. Today, an estimated 70 million people worldwide claim some Irish descent; among them are 45 million Americans who claim “Irish” as their primary ethnicity.3 | 3 |
| We have many excellent studies of Irish immigrants within individual nation-states, but little sense of the migration as a unified whole. After the United States, the areas of the world that received the largest numbers of Irish immigrants were Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and South Africa, in that order. The Irish-born made up a greater proportion of the population in Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, and the Australian provinces in 1870–1871 than in the United States. Contrary to a widespread assumption, Britain, rather than Canada or Australia, received the second largest number of Irish migrants after the United States. Since the 1920s Irish migration has been primarily to Britain, and until the advent of the “new Commonwealth” immigration following World War II, the Irish were always the largest non-British ethnic group there. Yet the term “Irish British” (as compared to “Irish American” or, to a significantly lesser extent, “Irish Australian”) strikes most people as a contradiction or impossibility. In neither Britain nor Australia did ethnicity (Irish or otherwise) assume the historical importance it has had in the United States. The concept of ethnic identity itself has a history that differs from country to country, and it was more central to national self-identification in the nineteenth-century United States (alongside and in relation to race) than elsewhere.4 | 4 |
| The starting point for any analysis of Irish global history is the process of migration, which varied considerably by time, religion, sex, region, and class. Large-scale Irish migration across the Atlantic Ocean began in the opening decades of the eighteenth century and not, as is often assumed, in the middle of the nineteenth. Most of the migrants before the 1830s were Protestants rather than Catholics, and Protestants accounted for sizable minorities of those who migrated to North America and the antipodes thereafter. Their story demands integration into the larger history of Irish global migration. The gender composition of the migrant flows decisively influenced the formation of Irish communities overseas. Men always outnumbered women in the movement to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, but their early predominance in the United States gave way to roughly equal sex ratios in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since by that time nearly all Irish migrants were unmarried, the result was a unique demographic profile, reflected both in the remarkable concentration of Irish American women in domestic service and in the equally remarkable rates of intragroup marriage until the 1920s (whereas in Australia the imbalance between the sexes weakened ethnic group cohesion).5 | 5 |
| Determining where in Ireland the migrants originated is critical to understanding their overseas history, as regional distinctions corresponded closely to religious affiliation, economic development, and relative poverty. The impoverished western province of Connacht was overrepresented in migration to the United States but underrepresented in that to Britain and Australia; prosperous Ulster sent disproportionate numbers to Canada, Scotland, and New Zealand; and the commercially developed south midlands of Leinster and Munster, with their preponderance of substantial farmers and agricultural laborers, provided the majority of Irish Catholic emigrants to Australia. “Thus Irish emigration may usefully be envisaged,” in Fitzpatrick’s words, “as a complex network of distinct streams flowing from particular regions of origin to particular countries of settlement, even though the United States remained everywhere the majority choice.” By paying close attention to regionally specific pre-migration conditions, historians such as Kerby A. Miller, David M. Emmons, Timothy M. O’Neil, Victor A. Walsh, and Tyler Anbinder have developed important arguments about culture, labor, and ethnic nationalism in Irish American history, complementing a line of inquiry developed by other historians of European immigration such as Donna R. Gabaccia and Jon Gjerde.6 | 6 |
| While the study of Irish migration has produced a vast and varied library, the outstanding work for the last generation is Kerby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles. Miller’s central theme is how Irish emigration came to be seen, on both sides of the Atlantic, as exile and banishment rather than a quest for opportunity and self-improvement. He traced the origins of the exile motif not simply to the poverty and alienation of Irish American urban life but, more controversially, to the culture and politics of Ire-land itself. Miller argued, first, that the beliefs and practices of what he saw as a “pre-modern” Catholic peasantry predisposed them to regard emigration as involuntary banishment rather than voluntary enterprise or self-improvement. But, in a second and quite distinct argument, he demonstrated that the chief beneficiaries of mass emigration in the nineteenth century were an emergent class of Irish commercial farmers who blamed emigration, not on their own practices of eviction, enclosure, and market-oriented farming, but on British colonial rule. Thus, both the rural poor who emigrated and the stronger farmers who benefited from their departure were apt, though for different reasons, to explain Irish emigration as a matter of exile rather than of voluntary departure. There was a strong element of expediency in the invocation of banishment and exile by those who stayed at home.7 | 7 |
Miller’s critics have largely ignored the second (and more durably compelling) of those arguments in favor of the first, which has come in for sustained criticism. Miller argued that Ireland’s pre-migrant Catholic rural culture hindered the adaptation and progress of the Irish overseas. He saw that culture as characterized by communalism rather than individualism, dependence rather than independence, and fatalism and passivity rather than enterprise and activity. This conception of premodern culture, derived from the modernization theory in vogue when Miller was researching his book twenty years ago, has since been abandoned by most scholars. Students today sometimes have difficulty distinguishing Miller’s account of the rural Irish poor from those of hostile British and Protestant contemporaries, a particular irony given the deep empathy and compassion inspiring his book. Led by Donald Harman Akenson, historians have launched a critique of Miller’s conception of Irish culture, especially the putative disabilities bequeathed to the Irish abroad.8 8 Akenson built his critique of Miller by questioning the applicability of the exile motif to the Irish globally—in Canada, Britain, South Africa, and the antipodes—as well as the United States. In the global context, he argued, Irish Catholic migrants did just as well on average as Irish Protestants and were evidently unimpeded by their pre-migration culture. Irish American historiography, he concluded, was based on “a derogatory (and inaccurate) interpretation of the cultural background of the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic migrants.” Akenson’s alternative portrait of Irish emigrants—as entrepreneurs rather than exiles—was a good deal more persuasive for Canada and Australia than for the United States and Britain. Nonetheless, in demonstrating the social success of some Irish migrants abroad, he called into question Miller’s pessimistic portrait of the culture they had left and, by extension, the dominant interpretation of Irish American history. Even David N. Doyle, who had collaborated with Miller in formulating the initial thesis on exile and thereafter in writing important historical works, later rejected the notion that nineteenth-century Catholic emigrants could adequately be described as “Gaelic and post-Gaelic prisoners of a collectivism incapable of enterprise and individualism.” In Doyle’s view, Kerby Miller—like Oscar Handlin in his 1941 classic, Boston’s Immigrants—too often saw the migrant Irish as “the passive playthings of masterful forces they but gradually and dimly understood.”9 9 The force of these criticisms notwithstanding, Miller’s book remains by far the best account of Irish mass migration and of Irish American history. Emigrants and Exiles, indeed, is the only sustained interpretation of Irish emigration as a whole, from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century. Its conception of pre-migration culture has been called into question, but Miller’s account will remain dominant until an alternative matches its scale, empathy, and ambition. The opening up of a global perspective on Irish migration, inspired in part by Akenson’s critique, suggests the contours of that new interpretation. When placed in a global setting, the standard questions of nation-based immigration history, of which the American case is the best studied, elicit new answers and a new understanding of the past. To accomplish this task, historians need to combine the diasporic and the comparative, the transnational and the cross-national, in a unitary approach to global migration. 10 Irish migration in the modern era was both massive and global. But how is its history to be told? In seeking to explore the transnational dimensions of migration history, scholars around the world have turned in recent years to the concept of diaspora. The term has achieved a remarkable popularity in American and Irish scholarly (and popular) discourses for much the same reason: the undermining of traditional conceptions of nationhood as territorially bounded. Until recently the term diaspora had a specific, restricted meaning. Its primary referent was the dispersal and exile of the Jews. In the twentieth century, the term came to be used, by extension, to refer to the forcible dispersal of other populations—often catastrophic in origin—and their exile, estrangement, and longing for return to the homeland. Diaspora in this sense has been used to describe enslaved Africans and their descendants overseas, as well as Armenians following the genocide of the World War I era. In the last generation, however, the meaning and usage of diaspora have undergone a remarkable expansion. In the words of Khachig Tölölyan, an Armenian American scholar who edits the leading journal on the subject: “Where once were dispersions, there now is diaspora.” As scholars such as Floya Anthias, William Safran, and James Clifford have noted, the term diaspora is now widely used to describe migrants, expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, and ethnic and racial minorities, along with a wide range of processes connected with decolonization, transnationalism, and globalization.10 11 The rich and suggestive etymology of diaspora can be briefly summarized. Its proto-Indo-European root, spr, is found today, as Tölölyan notes, in such English words as “spore,” “sperm,” “spread,” and “disperse” and in the Armenian spurk (diaspora). Thucydides, in a minor passage, used the Greek term diaspeirein (a compound of dia, over or through, and speirein, to scatter or sow, hence the dispersal of peoples) to describe the destruction of the city of Aegina and the scattering of its population across the Hellenic world. Thereafter, the Greek usage typically signified migration and colonization, generally through commerce, plunder, or conquest. The connotation of exile came into prominence only following the Greek translation of the Torah (c. 250 B.C.E.), which rendered the Hebrew term galut (exile, understood as the scattering of peoples by an angry God) as diaspora. For the Jews—and, later, Africans, Armenians, Palestinians, and others—the term diaspora came to signify, as the diaspora scholar Robin Cohen put it, “a collective trauma, a banishment, where one dreamed of home but lived in exile.” The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers this latter sense, citing Deuteronomy 28:25 as its origin (“The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth”). The OED offers as the standard meaning of the term “the dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations; all those Jews who lived outside the biblical land of Israel,” but it adds as a secondary definition “(the situation of) any body of people living outside their traditional homeland.” Significantly, its illustrative example of the latter usage is “the famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.”11 12 If the semantic span of diaspora in its classical sense was arguably too narrow, it has in recent years become remarkably broad. In the current literature on migration the term is more often than not employed in a generous, highly elastic manner. Tölölyan’s Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies is “dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the history, culture, social structure, politics and economics of both the traditional diasporas—Armenian, Greek, and Jewish—and those transnational dispersions which in the past three decades have chosen to identify themselves as ‘diasporas.'” The latter, for Tölöyan, include “groups ranging from the African-American to the Ukrainian-Canadian, from the Caribbean-British to the new East and South Asian diasporas.” Since its foundation in 1991, Diaspora has included articles on virtually every group, theme, and topic imaginable within its field, from the return to Japan of emigrants who had settled in Brazil to Irish nationalism in America and from Tibetan migration and cultural dispersion to Jamaican “dub” poetry (a performance poetry rooted in reggae and Rastafarianism) in Canada. Robin Cohen, in perhaps the most influential book on the topic, Global Diasporas, adopts an equally broad approach. “The word diaspora,” Cohen remarks, “is now being used, whether purists approve or not, in a variety of new, but interesting and suggestive contexts. To mount a defence of an orthodox definition of diaspora, which in any case has been shown to be dubious, is akin to commanding the waves no longer to break on the shore.” Cohen proposes an elaborate five-part typology: labor diasporas (with Indian workers as his example), trade diasporas (Chinese and Lebanese), imperial diasporas (British), cultural diasporas (characterized by multiple cultural intersections, as among Afro-Caribbeans in Britain), and, his primary category, “victim diasporas,” in which he includes the Irish—chiefly on the basis of the great famine—alongside Jews, Africans, and Armenians.12 13 Expanding the conception of diaspora in this manner has some obvious disadvantages. If “diaspora” is used coterminously with “dispersal” or “migration,” then why use the term at all? How much precision and analytical value does it retain? To counter such objections, some recent theorists have proposed common features that all diasporas must share. The first is dispersal from a homeland to two or more foreign regions, including not only traumatic dispersals such as those caused by the Armenian genocide or the Irish famine but also voluntary migration in search of work or in pursuit of trade. Second, diasporas manifest some collective myth about the homeland, a commitment to its maintenance or restoration (or creation), and a desire to return home, whether literally or spiritually. Third, diasporic communities generally experience alienation and isolation in their new homelands, even if this is often accompanied by cultural creativity. It is hard to see, however, that those three attributes significantly distinguish between migration in general and diasporic migration.13 14 Sensing the conceptual confusion here, a final group of theorists calls into question the validity of typological approaches per se. With “discourse” as its central category, this school is concerned not with what diaspora is but with how the concept works, how it is deployed in systems of meaning and representation. In Clifford’s words, we “should be wary of constructing our working definitions of a term like diaspora by recourse to an ‘ideal type,’ with the consequence that groups become identified as more or less diasporic, having only two, or three, or four of the basic six features.” Rather than constructing typologies that run the risk of being arbitrary or exclusive, avowedly “postmodern” approaches such as Clifford’s are concerned with how “hybrid” forms of identity and consciousness are constituted and represented and how a new “diasporic space” that transcends the nations of origin and settlement is created. This discursive approach opens up new realms of culture and sensibility that sociological typologies might miss, among them popular memory, invented traditions, and ongoing group definition by the invocation of particular historical sufferings (such as enslavement, famine, or genocide).14 15 Nonetheless, it is hard to see how diaspora can be a useful category of historical analysis unless it involves some typological stipulations. In addition, a focus solely on sensibility creates problems for historical research. Historians can study diaspora discursively only to the extent that the surviving evidence permits. And it is especially difficult to find traces of diasporic sensibility among the poor and minimally literate who constituted the bulk of most mass migrations. Themes of banishment, exile, and regeneration can certainly be found in the Irish American ethnic press and in popular literature and culture, for example, but we should be wary of projecting onto the mass of ordinary migrants such conceptions, especially a transnational identification with Irish settlers elsewhere. In the absence of direct evidence, a flexible typology is needed. To be of use to historians, any such typology should include three limiting criteria, involving origin, articulation, and temporality. How did the population movement in question originate? Was it voluntary or involuntary, and what are the criteria for the latter (for example, does economic compulsion count)? Did the members of a given dispersed population see themselves in diasporic terms, articulating a sense of common identity among themselves as well as with their homeland? And how did the group’s experience and self-understanding change over time? As Clifford remarks, “at different times in their history, societies may wax and wane in diasporism, depending on changing possibilities—obstacles, openings, antagonisms, and connections—in their host countries and transnationally.” Groups that were once diasporic, or potentially so, can develop in different directions thereafter, moving in and out of, or beyond, diasporic self-identification.15 16 This historicized conception of diaspora has evident applicability to Irish global migration during the era of the great famine, the central event of modern Irish history both domestically and overseas. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million Irish people died of starvation and famine-related diseases in the period 1846–1855, out of a population that had stood at about 8.5 million on the eve of the disaster. Another 2.1 million fled the country, 1.8 million of them to North America (1.5 million to the United States and 300,000 to Canada, many of whom soon migrated southward). In ten years the population of Ireland was cut by more than one-third. The Irish were the largest immigrant group in the United States in the 1840s, accounting for 45 percent of the total influx, and the second largest (after the Germans) in the 1850s, when they accounted for 35 percent of arrivals. They also settled in large numbers in Britain and Australia. It is the experience of catastrophe and dispersal in the mid-nineteenth century that for Cohen, as for most recent commentators, merits the inclusion of the Irish in the category of diaspora: “The scarring historical event—Babylon for the Jews, slavery for the Africans, famine for the Irish, genocide for the Armenians and the formation of the state of Israel for the Palestinians—lends a particular colouring to these five diasporas. They are, above all, victim diasporas in their historical experience.”16 17 The impact of the great famine on Irish history and the degree of British responsibility have been subjects of heated debate by historians. Popular memory on both sides of the Atlantic has long held the famine to be a catastrophe that dramatically altered the course of Irish history, with deliberate British policy (or lack thereof) turning crop failure into mass starvation or worse. In the words of the exiled revolutionary leader John Mitchel in 1861, “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.” Calling the famine migration a “diaspora” or an “exodus” can serve—inadvertently or otherwise—to support a view of the famine as genocide. But few professional historians, regardless of their political background or affiliations, have agreed. The famine, they argue, cannot be described as genocide in the strict sense of active, conscious intent to exterminate, even if British policy was culpably inadequate and the resulting catastrophe changed the course of Irish history. Talk of deliberate extermination flourished in popular, rather than professional, historical memory, and it may have been most durable among the American Irish. Yet, historians need to take seriously the experience and sensibilities of those who lived through the catastrophe and came to America or Britain feeling themselves exiles banished from their native land by British iniquity. The theme of exile suggests that a diasporic approach to the famine dispersal has considerable potential, especially if a sense of connectedness, based on a common traumatic experience, can be discovered among Irish settlements around the globe (as it clearly can be at least among their cultural, political, and nationalist leaders).17 18 By most accepted standards, then, the famine dispersal can usefully be described in diasporic terms: the single catastrophic event, the involuntary migration, the sustained migration to several destinations at once, the strong international sense of grievance and exile thereafter. What tends to be overlooked is that the great famine was but one especially tragic and dramatic episode in a much larger story. Two million people fled Ireland as a result of the famine, but almost four times that number left the country during other periods. As Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley remark in another context, the concept of diaspora has a strong tendency to conceal “differences and discontinuities” and to erase “complexities and contradictions as it seeks to fit all within the metaphor.” Collapsing all of Irish migration history into one overarching concept derived from a single event, however critical, is a stark example of this tendency. Undifferentiated, that history loses its religious, regional, socioeconomic, and temporal diversity. There is much more to the story of the global Irish than the terrible events of the 1840s. To capture Irish global history in its full complexity, the chronological scope must be extended backward 150 years and as far forward, and the diasporic perspective must be incorporated into a new framework of inquiry.18 19 Two of the best recent works on the Irish famine concern the mass migration that attended it. Robert M. Scally’s The End of Hidden Ireland tells how the small, isolated townland of Ballykilcline disintegrated in the late 1840s under the impact of starvation, evictions, and dispersal. Concealed behind layers of legal and bureaucratic obfuscation before the famine, its inhabitants cross the historical stage as bit players in one of the great transnational movements of the era, passing through the great commercial port of Liverpool and out onto the boundless space of the Atlantic Ocean, where we lose sight of them once more. Scally’s is transnational history at its most effective. But the famine migration lends itself equally well to a strictly comparative approach. Thus, J. Matthew Gallman, in Receiving Erin’s Children, offers a multilayered comparative analysis of public policy in response to the famine influx into Liverpool and Philadelphia, getting to the heart of major political and governmental differences between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. The best work in the future is likely to combine Scally’s transnational perspective with Gall-man’s comparative approach, and for such an approach the interconnected histories of Liverpool and New York City provide an ideal research project. Millions of Irish migrants passed through those two great commercial ports in the nineteenth century; many others settled permanently in the two cities, lending them a distinctively Irish flavor.19 20 Before considering how this might be done, a look at the comparative method is needed, especially its applicability to the themes of migration, ethnicity, and assimilation. Enthusiasm for comparative history has waxed and waned among Americanists, in part because of its inherent difficulties: the need to master more than one national historiography, the tendency of projects to become unwieldy, the submergence of narrative history by schematic analysis, and the absence of institutional and financial support. Such practical considerations are important, yet a revival of comparative history seems indispensable if American historiography is to continue its current global trajectory. Transnational or diasporic perspectives are critical in doing global history, but they have limitations. Some forms of history transcend nations; others require that we retain the nation-state as an essential unit of analysis. Any genuinely global history of migration in the modern era requires cross-national as well as transnational analysis. And here the comparative method comes into play.20 21 The nation-state, or regions or processes within it, provides the principal context for comparisons in immigration and ethnic history. That the nation-state today shows signs of potential dissolution is no argument for its diminished importance in the past. On the contrary, it is precisely the coupling of the nation with the state in the modern era that demands historical investigation. However arbitrary the construction of nation-states may have been, they became, as Fredrickson notes, “probably the most salient sources of modern authority and consciousness. Historians, comparative or otherwise, can scarcely afford to ignore them.” Too much is lost if we forget that immigrants settled in nation-states and that their subsequent histories were molded by distinctive national contexts. “Acknowledging the international context,” Fredrickson points out, “does not mean disregarding the nation as a unit of analysis.” Such renewed attention to national histories in their global context does not “commit the historian to historiographic nationalism or to a belief in national exceptionalism.” Recent comparative work in the Irish case, it should be added, has not attempted to analyze entire national histories, but has instead concentrated on specific processes, movements, and institutions in different nation-states or, more typically, in cities or regions within those states.21 22 The common theme in those comparative efforts is the formation of nationally specific ethnic identities in the different places where migrants settled. The starting point for any future global history of the Irish is that the migrants settled in nation-states or their equivalents into which they were gradually and often grudgingly incorporated through an “ethnicization” that was in part voluntary but was also required for assimilation. The American ethnic group, as Kathleen Neils Conzen and her coauthors suggest, can be seen as a “process” rather than a “thing.” Rejecting theories that trace ethnicity either to primordial attachments or to interest group politics, Conzen and her collaborators point to its ongoing “invention” through “a complex dialogue between American imposition of ethnic categories and immigrant rallying of ethnic identities.” The ethnicization experienced by each group, they conclude, “was fraught with internal conflict and dissension over the nature, history, and destiny of its peoplehood,” a process in which immigrant leaders played a decisive role. Ethnic identity, in short, is the product of historical struggle rather than consensus, let alone a priori definition. Deploying such categories as “nation,” “ethnicity,” and their correlates “incorporation” and “assimilation,” may appear strange in an essay of this sort. Since the 1960s, critics have argued that those terms, which refer to processes operating within individual nation-states, are fundamental obstacles to doing transnational history. But studying immigrant acculturation is essential to comparative migration history. Ethnicization was by definition a national process, and national contexts therefore provide the best ground for comparative work.22 23 In the United States the construction of ethnicities was inseparable from immigrants’ “becoming American.” The acquisition of an ethnic identity—based not just on pre-migration culture but also on the new conditions in the host land—was a precondition or means to assimilation, rather than an obstacle. Immigrants in the United States, in other words, became American by simultaneously becoming “Irish American” or “Italian American.” Often, indeed, they also became “Irish” or “Italian” for the first time, with Old World regionalism giving way to a retrospective sense of pre-migration national identity that became part of their American ethnicity. The development of an ethnic identity among the American Irish involved a twofold and simultaneous struggle over power: within emerging ethnic communities and between those communities and the host society. At stake in the former struggle was the meaning of an emerging ethnic identity. But the internal conflict was also part of a wider struggle over the meaning and limits of American culture, and a version of ethnic identity could triumph only to the extent that it was acceptable to those holding power in the society at large.23 24 The model of ethnicity presented here does not imply a neutral, linear process of incorporation into nation-states. The concept of assimilation rests upon its contrary, exclusion. Those migrants deemed unfit for incorporation into the United States were excluded from entry or naturalization, classified as racially inferior, or denied basic civil, political, and economic rights.24 Those who were permitted to enter and stay in the United States, including the Irish, often faced an enduring struggle against poverty, bigotry, and discrimination. Ethnic history always involves reciprocal interactions between immigrants and their host society. Assimilation or incorporation is never a one-way street. Immigrants and ethnics carve out their own identities, mediating between their cultures of origin and the cultures of the host land. As they do so, particular immigrant groups can retain, or develop, diasporic sensibilities that become integral to their emerging, nationally specific ethnic identities. Tracing that process opens an approach to history that is simultaneously transnational and cross-national, that transcends some national processes while analyzing others. Comparison and diaspora thereby come together in a new, integrated perspective on the past. 25 A new, combined perspective on global migration would adopt a twofold approach. It would examine movement and interaction between migrants in places of overseas settlement (whether North America, Great Britain, or Australia), and between those communities and the home country (in this case, Ireland). And it would integrate those transnational inquiries with comparative study, typically at the urban or regional rather than the national level, of Irish migrants and their communities in the very different places where they settled. The balance between the two approaches varies according to the topic under consideration, but both are needed in any comprehensive history. The best way to illustrate this is to consider some key themes in the history of Irish migrants. This is not the place to attempt an encyclopedic review. Although an equally strong case could be advanced for such topics as religion, music, dance, drama, and popular fiction, the focus here will be on settlement patterns, labor, race, and nationalism.25 26 Certain aspects of migration history lend themselves best to straightforward objective comparison. The regional, class, religious, and gendered origins of migration are a good example. Another is the pattern of settlement abroad, determined in part by those domestic considerations. The Irish quickly became a predominantly urban people in the United States and Britain, but not in Canada or Australia. David Doyle, refuting Akenson, finds Irish Americans in the nineteenth century to be “among the most urbanised people in the world, notably more so than the Americans as a whole, and more so than almost all peoples in Europe, except in Britain and the Low Countries.” Three-quarters of the American Irish lived in urban-industrial counties in 1870, compared to one-quarter of the American population as a whole.26 Although the Irish-born accounted for only 5 percent of the population in 1870, they were concentrated in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois and made up almost one-quarter of the population in New York City and Boston. Likewise, the Irish-born accounted for 3 percent of the population in Britain but were heavily concentrated in London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, where their share of the population was similar to that in New York City and Boston. While Irish migrants were dispersed across Britain and the United States, their dispersion was much greater in Ontario and Australia, where more than half the Irish settlers (Catholic as well as Protestant) were farmers. As Doyle remarks, “‘Irish-Canada’ remained well into the 1880s what Irish-America had ceased to be after Andrew Jackson: largely rural and agricultural, largely led by protestants, and largely scattered.”27 27 Broadly speaking, then, Britain and the United States fall into one camp, Canada and Australia into another. This pattern is clearly reflected in all measures of social advancement, with the Irish in the latter two countries progressing much more rapidly. Regional comparisons within national settings are also instructive. In the United States, for example, the Irish experienced greater success in occupational attainment, property ownership, educational levels, and general prosperity the further west they went. In Boston, where they had arrived as unwelcome intruders into a closed, long-established hierarchical society, the Irish lagged behind well into the twentieth century; in New York City they did only slightly better; in Butte, Montana, “the most Irish town in America” in 1900, they prospered because they had been there from the beginning of white settlement. Such variations provide the ground for comparison across nations, as in Malcolm Campbell’s recent work on different regions in Australia and the United States.28 28 Patterns of settlement and social mobility are best seen as aspects of a larger question of labor. Any account of migration history must rest on an understanding of how the migrants sustained themselves, and the starting point is the transnational movement of labor and capital. The nineteenth-century Irish have justly been described as a highly mobile proletariat in an international capitalist economy that manifested itself simultaneously in the commercialization of Irish agriculture and in an industrial revolution affecting societies as diverse as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.29 Viewing Irish labor in this transnational context, the traditional distinction between “push” and “pull” factors breaks down, just as it must have been absent from the minds of most migrants. Heavy demand for Irish unskilled labor abroad combined with unemployment, enclosures, and evictions at home can be seen, and were surely experienced, as twin aspects of the same process, involving global migration networks, emigrant remittances, capital formation, and labor dispersal. History of this sort is inherently transnational rather than comparative. It is not a question, say, of comparing the economies of Ireland and the United States, which would be too asymmetrical to make sense, but of examining the workings of a transatlantic economy that transcends national boundaries. 29 Comparison is required, however, in understanding the different labor histories of the separate nations and regions where the Irish settled. Questions concerning wages, skill levels, the use of strikebreakers, participation in the labor movement, the occurrence of violence, and the structure of women’s work—all lend themselves to comparative analysis. In the United States, Canada, and Britain, the Irish provided a cheap, expendable labor force for the construction of an emerging industrial and urban infrastructure. With the exception of Peter Way’s recent work, unskilled Irish immigrant workers in the United States have yet to receive much attention, and those in Britain and Australia have received even less.30 Similarities in the conditions of Irish labor in different countries do not, in the absence of an articulated sense of transnational solidarity, imply the existence of a single Irish “labor diaspora.” But clarifying the differences and similarities in patterns of labor at the national and regional levels is an essential first step in understanding the cultures the Irish built abroad. 30 A good example is women’s labor history. Farm or domestic service was one of the few occupations open to women before they left Ireland, and in the United States about half of all Irish female immigrants worked as domestics at the turn of the twentieth century, filling 80 percent or more of the positions in many cities. But one cannot infer that this was the case wherever the Irish settled. Remarkably, there appear to be no occupational studies of Irish females outside Ireland and the United States. Domestic service in Australia was Irish to a significant extent, but it was an urban phenomenon, and in the nineteenth century, at least half of the Australian Irish lived outside cities. Irish women in Britain were far from dominant in domestic service, excluded in part by ethnic discrimination but mainly by the availability of a large pool of English and Scottish working-class labor. Native-born women in the United States, by contrast, tended to avoid domestic service as beneath their republican dignity. The formation of Irish ethnic identities abroad depended on women’s labor—in their own homes, in the homes of others, and in factories—just as much as it depended on the more visible labor of men. While women’s history is often concealed within the private sphere, most Irish female immigrants had no choice but to work for wages, and they did so largely outside their own homes. Large numbers of them worked in the homes of others, and we know quite a lot about their lives as domestic servants. Yet the recent debate on whiteness in American history has rested its claims about Irish racial identity largely on the public activities of male workers. The exclusion of women is especially ironic since the history of wage-earning Irish and African American women was racialized and intertwined from early on, both groups being heavily concentrated in domestic service. Such exclusion typifies historians’ tendency to formulate Irish ethnicity, in Britain and Australia as well as in the United States, as implicitly masculine. Rigorous, nationally specific comparison of labor and race, by exposing differences and similarities in women’s history, would help remedy this imbalance.31 31 Comparative analysis is central to understanding migrant labor history. The Irish responded to unfavorable conditions in two distinct ways, first, by adapting to their new circumstances modes of violent protest derived from the Irish countryside and, later, by forming and joining trade-union movements. Throughout British and North American history, especially in coal mines and on public works, canals, and railways, runs a subterranean pattern of Irish collective violence featuring faction fighters (gangs based on local or county origin) and secret societies such as the Ribbonmen and Molly Maguires. Although some scattered evidence of transnational links between the groups has survived, the most fruitful line of inquiry is to examine the national conditions that were most conducive to the groups’ emergence and the forms they assumed. As the hostility of native-born workers to Irish immigrant labor abated, the older forms of protest gave way to Irish participation in national trade-union movements. In the opening decade of the twentieth century, as the labor historian David Montgomery noted, “Irish Americans occupied the presidencies of more than 50 of the 110 unions in the American Federation of Labor.” Unskilled and semiskilled Irish workers made similar advances in British trade unionism from the 1880s and 1890s onward, transforming their image, as David Fitzpatrick put it, “from strike-breaker to strike-maker.” The results were paradoxical, at least from an Americanist perspective. The American Irish outstripped the British Irish in social mobility, but labor unionism in Britain (and to some extent in Australia) provided greater access to political power, with the unions forming an important component of their countries’ emerging Labour parties. Study of Irish migration thereby intersects with the perennial debate in American comparative history about the presence or absence of socialism.32 32 Although comparative history provides an essential framework for studying migrant labor, it leaves unaddressed critical aspects of the story that can best be examined in diasporic terms. Activists such as Patrick Ford, Michael Davitt, Henry George, Rev. Edward McGlynn, and Joseph P. McDonnell were all deeply involved in radical movements in both the United States and Ireland in the late nineteenth century. Patrick Ford, in Eric Foner’s words, spoke “the traditional language of American radicalism.” As editor of the leading Irish American newspaper, the Irish World (which added the words and American Industrial Liberator to its title in 1879), he supported the right of labor to organize unions and go on strike, spoke out in defense of the Molly Maguires (one of only a handful of Americans, Irish or otherwise, to do so), and campaigned for women’s rights, an income tax, an eight-hour workday for American workers, and Irish land reform and national liberation. “The cause of the poor in Donegal,” he declared, “is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River.” Together with the American-born land reformer Henry George, the Irish American radical priest Edward McGlynn, and the Irish-born radical Michael Davitt, Ford stood at the vanguard of a genuinely transnational working-class movement in New York City in the 1880s that combined ethnic nationalism, trade unionism, and social activism. Ireland’s two foremost labor leaders of the early twentieth century, the syndicalist James Larkin and the republican socialist James Connolly, also had extensive experience as organizers in the United States. The careers of these men, the movements they led, and the ideologies they embodied unite the study of labor and ethnic nationalism in a single transnational history. That transnational approach, when combined with comparative analysis, can capture both the substance and the dynamism of the past.33 33 The global history of Irish labor was inseparable not only from Irish nationalism but also from critical issues of race. Nationalism and race, indeed, are the two diasporic characteristics par excellence: every conception of diaspora gives a central place to racial identity and to sentiment about the homeland. Historians in the last decade have embarked on an intensive study of Irish racism and racial identity as part of the highly influential debate on whiteness. The thesis on “how the Irish became white,” put forth first (and best) by David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness and since taken up by a host of scholars, is familiar and needs only brief elaboration here. The Irish, it is argued, arrived in the United States without a sense of being white and were depicted and treated as racial inferiors before eventually embracing whiteness as the central ingredient of their new American identity. Race thereby became a means of assimilation for the immigrants. Eric Arnesen, Peter Kolchin, and other historians have recently pointed to problems in this approach that will doubtless be addressed as the debate continues. Three points require emphasis here: the nature of Irish self-perception, the distinction between the Irish and other “racialized” groups, and the application of American whiteness studies to other national contexts.34 34 The existing literature tells us surprisingly little about how the Irish thought and felt about themselves. We have no real sense of how they thought about race, even if their actions can fairly be described as racist. As a practical matter, if an Irish immigrant laborer in the United States had been asked to identify himself racially, it is hard to imagine how he could have said anything other than white, that being the appropriate marker in the peculiar new racial hierarchy he had entered. If the whiteness of the Irish was in doubt, then the doubters must have been other Americans, especially those wielding power (but perhaps some of the newcomers’ fellow workers too). It was from those people that the Irish had to win the privilege of being recognized as white, and they did so, the argument suggests, by becoming racists. But even if we grant that some Americans did not regard the Irish as “fully white”—the meaning of which term remains elusive in the literature—the position of the Irish in American society seems to have suffered relatively little as a result. Unlike African Americans and Asians, they could become citizens, could vote, could serve on juries, were not segregated, had no restrictions on their travel, and did not endure sustained or systematic violence. The Irish were subject to vicious racial caricatures and stereotypes, to be sure, but a strong qualitative distinction needs to be drawn between their case and that of blacks and Asians. Put another way, cultural bias should not be conflated with social practice enshrined in law. 35 Criticisms of this sort can be addressed by future research in American history, but more problematic is the rapid importation of whiteness studies into scholarship on the Irish elsewhere. Even as historians in the United States have begun to adopt a noticeably more critical stance toward the literature concerning white racial formation, recent scholarship on the Irish in Britain has embraced it wholeheartedly. The argument that the Irish in Britain were and still are a racial minority is at best questionable. According to a recent report compiled for the quasi-public Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) by the sociologist Mary Hickman and the geographer Bronwen Walter, the British Irish continue to suffer systematic discrimination today and are best characterized as a racialized ethnic minority group. The CRE survey, which elicited much controversy, demonstrated a pervasive pattern of jokes and derisory comments drawing on stereotypes of stupidity, drunkenness, and violence. Certainly there was stereotyping, just as there had been in the nineteenth-century United States. But it is big leap to translate those forms of prejudice and nastiness into a system of racial subordination worthy of the name. Was there a racial quality to pejorative descriptions of the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic over the last two centuries? Undoubtedly. Did the Irish abroad ever endure systematic racial subordination? Surely not. Invoking the ambiguities of Irish whiteness tends to obscure this dichotomy between prejudice and oppression.35 36 Shifting whiteness from one national context to another, moreover, conceals the differences between those contexts. Implicit in this move lies belief in a single, unitary Irish identity transcending the particulars of history and asserting itself wherever the Irish settled, in apparent disregard for local circumstances. The American debate on whiteness emerged from the study of a historically specific racial hierarchy predicated on black chattel slavery. At the very least, the absence in Britain of racial slavery means that becoming white (to the extent that such a process occurred) would have been correspondingly different. Indeed, had Irish Catholics in Britain attempted to assert their common identity with the native-born as Irish Americans did, the response would surely have been rejection on religious grounds rather than eventual acceptance on racial ones. Accordingly, most historians of the Irish in Britain have until recently resisted the lure of American whiteness studies, favoring an approach based on ethnicity, class, and religion instead. The category of “whiteness” has been employed in Britain, not by historians, but by sociologists and geographers studying the racially more complex present. Rather than searching for a common Irish diasporic experience, whether as subjects or as agents of racism, it would be better to compare the nationally specific forms that Irish global history assumed in this case. Once again, uncritical deployment of the concept of diaspora can flatten out such distinctions, explaining too little by seeking to explain too much. 37 Cross-national comparisons of “whiteness” by no means exhaust the possibilities for studying race in Irish global history. Irish involvement in campaigns against Asian immigrants in both the United States and Australia, for example, is in need of comparative investigation. But the most promising grounds for research may lie, not in the comparative history of Irish racism, but in a diasporic history of Irish opposition to racism. Long overdue in this respect is a renewed interest in Daniel O’Connell and through him the subject of Irish abolitionism. The foremost Irish nationalist of his age, O’Connell secured Catholic Emancipation (which ended the civil and political disabilities of Catholics) for the Irish in 1829, hence his name, the Liberator, which William Lloyd Garrison soon adopted for his abolitionist newspaper. Thereafter, O’Connell agitated for repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 (which had abolished Ire-land’s parliament), served as an active member of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and was prominent in the parliamentary debates that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean. Garrison published many of O’Connell’s passages condemning the hypocrisy inherent in a republic that held slaves, and in 1833 African Americans in New York City held a special meeting in the Abyssinian Baptist church in O’Connell’s honor, praising him as the “uncompromising advocate of universal emancipation, the friend of oppressed Africans and their descendants, and of the unadulterated rights of man.”36 38 For O’Connell, Ireland’s subjugation and the enslavement of black Americans were part of the same international syndrome of oppression. His commanding presence lies at the heart of a history that was transnational by definition, featuring radical movements in Ireland, Britain, and the United States and involving such figures as Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond as well as Garrison. Douglass and his fellow black abolitionist Remond toured Ireland in 1840s, and the latter helped compose “An Address of the Irish People to Their Countrymen in America,” praising the republican government of the United States but condemning slavery as a violation of natural rights and a sin against God. The address was rolled into a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Faneuil Hall on January 28, 1842, with 70,000 signatures attached. Irish Americans eventually deserted O’Connell when he called on them to condemn slavery, bringing to an end his dream of uniting nationalism and abolitionism in a transatlantic alliance. That O’Connellism, in the end, represented a minority opinion among Irish Americans does not mean that historians should abandon study of the vision he embodied and the support he enlisted. Perhaps, on the contrary, historians should begin to examine once again how his message was received in the Atlantic world. Like most white Americans in the nineteenth century, most Irish Americans adopted racist views and practices. Their racism is undeniable, but it takes on its full meaning only if alternative Irish conceptions of race are unearthed and examined. Discovering the history of race and racism in Ireland is one important precondition for studying what happened in America.37 39 A similar mix of comparative and diasporic approaches is needed in studying ethnic nationalism. Of all the themes and topics in global migration history, nationalism is the one most likely to exhibit diasporic features. The major types of Irish nationalist movement were active in Britain, North America, and Australia as well as Ireland. Constitutionalists favored peaceful, gradual change within the existing framework of the United Kingdom; physical-force nationalists demanded a republic and were prepared to use violence if necessary; and a small group of radicals agitated for a revolution that would move beyond national independence to embrace questions of social justice. There is plenty of room for comparative work here. Within individual countries, for example, support for different types of Irish nationalism can be related to class, gender, and recency of arrival. Cross-national work, focusing on varying constitutional and political conditions, would help explain the divergent forms of support exhibited by Irish settlements in different nation-states. If republican, and sometimes anti-imperial, nationalism found a natural home in the United States, support for physical force was often foolhardy in Britain, and strong imperial connections in Australia and New Zealand encouraged moderate constitutionalism. But Irish overseas nationalism also clearly involved extensive interconnections between Ireland, Britain, Australia, and North America. John Belchem, for example, has placed Irish American nationalism in the context of a dense, diasporic network featuring mass transatlantic migration, European revolutionary politics, British labor radicalism, and American republicanism. A transnational history of Irish nationalism would examine, among other things, the visits of such men as Charles Stewart Parnell or Eamon de Valera to the United States; the escape of Irish political prisoners from Australia to the United States; the links between republican revolutionaries in New York City, London, and Dublin; and the writings of nationalist leaders, journalists, and novelists all over the world. So well-suited is this subject to a transnational approach, indeed, that it is often referred to as “diasporic nationalism.”38 40 In light of all this, it may at first seem ironic that the best accounts of Irish American ethnic nationalism have been cast in terms, not of diaspora, but of assimilation. According to Thomas N. Brown’s still very influential thesis, the origins of Irish American nationalism lay, not in a concern with Ireland per se, but in the loneliness, alienation, and poverty of the immigrant experience. By extension, Irish nationalists abroad were certainly fighting for an independent Ireland, but they were also fighting, more concretely, for acceptance and success in their adopted countries. An independent Ireland, they believed, would raise their status, whether as Americans or as Australians. The very act of organizing in pursuit of nationalist goals could be seen as proof of their growing political acumen and power, further demonstrating their fitness for citizenship. This idea of assimilation via ethnic nationalism, however, is clearly not as well suited to Britain, where a combination of contiguity and nationalists’ use of political violence made Irish nationalism highly suspect. And even in the United States, the approach retains its plausibility only if it is extended beyond the small, if powerful, middle class to include the working-class majority of Irish immigrants. Irish American workers, as Eric Foner has shown, became American on their own terms, deploying Irish nationalism in support of radical goals. The prevailing interpretation of ethnic nationalism, then, peculiar though it initially seems, conforms well to the argument on ethnicity presented earlier in this article. Brown and Foner differ on the question of class, but both understand nationalism as one component of an emerging ethnic identity that served as a precondition, rather than an impediment, to becoming American.39 41 Thus, in the Irish case, a maturing ethnic identity became a means to assimilation, but that identity contained a nationalist strand that was strongly diasporic. The diasporic component, however, indicates that studying comparative assimilation in different national contexts cannot, on its own, provide an adequate explanation of ethnic nationalism. After all, there are easier ways of achieving assimilation than joining movements, often radical or extreme, for the liberation of one’s country of origin. Die-hard nationalists such as John Mitchel, John Devoy, or Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa seem to have had little or no interest in “becoming American,” dedicating themselves single-mindedly to the liberation of their homeland through violent means if necessary. Wherever the Irish settled, nationalism became a means of expressing not only an ethnic but also an international or diasporic sense of Irishness that transcended any simple desire for acceptance in the host land. The development of diasporic sensibilities within nationally specific ethnic identities is an ideal subject for comparative inquiry. 42 Taking the Irish as a test case, this article has examined the relative merits of diaspora and comparison as ways of placing the history of American immigration and ethnicity in a new global context. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, but in combination they provide a powerful and flexible framework for the task at hand. The Irish were central to the history of American immigration in the nineteenth century, and they are among the most intensively studied of migrant groups anywhere. They are, therefore, an ideal subject for a case study of the type presented here. Although the Irish have particular attributes, the principal themes in their history are common to the study of American immigration as a whole. Placing German, Italian, or Chinese migration to the United States in their respective global contexts would involve the same general themes and a similar attempt to balance the diasporic with the comparative. The same issues have been central to African American studies as that field moves from a nation-centered to a global focus. The dual approach suggested here would also intersect fruitfully with recent efforts at cross-ethnic and cross-temporal comparison in U.S. immigration history.40 43 All attempts to write the history of modern immigration and ethnicity must grapple with the connection between the nation and its larger contexts. Both of the approaches considered in this article, the diasporic and the comparative, seek to transcend the limitations of national history, yet neither of them breaks free of the nation altogether. In the case of comparative history this is largely deliberate, but for the diasporic approach it raises a final, concluding irony. Diasporic conceptions of history open up aspects of the past that comparative history is ill-equipped to consider, from the mass movements of people across oceans and continents, to global nationalist networks agitating on behalf of the homeland, to great manifestations of religious and cultural life uniting globally scattered migrants in a single sense of peoplehood. But current conceptions of diaspora rarely contain an explicit comparative dimension. Hence, they have difficulty dealing with those aspects of history that differentiate people of common origin across time and space. Indeed, diasporic approaches sometimes appear to posit a “transnational nation”—a single, globally dispersed culture exhibiting common features wherever it took root, by virtue of a presupposed common peoplehood. The result, ironically, is national history writ large. To locate a dispersed population group in discrete portions of the globe and analyze its members as a single people is by no means to transcend the pitfalls of essentialism or the tyranny of place. If the inhabitants of the different areas are endowed by the historian with attributes based on their place or culture of origin, it is only a short step back to national history. 44 The comparative method overcomes this tendency to homogenize and to flatten out diversity. Comparative history involves differences as much as similarities, but it is possible only when there is sufficient symmetry or equivalence between the societies or groups to be compared. Comparing Ireland and the United States by most measures would make little sense; but comparing Irish communities in the United States, Britain, and Australia is feasible. Both the diasporic and the comparative approaches seek to transcend national exclusivism, but comparison does so precisely by focusing on two or more nations at once. In U.S. historiography, however, the result has at times been less genuine comparison between equals than the investigation of other national histories in order to understand one’s own. Such history has its merits, but it can also reinforce American exceptionalism, seeking to highlight what is distinct, special, or even unique about the United States.41 That problem can be readily overcome, but a second and deeper problem is that the comparative method does not illuminate patterns of mutual interaction between the nations or regions being investigated. In other words, it misses those demographic, economic, political, and cultural movements that can be described as genuinely transnational. Dynamic movements and interactions of this sort are fundamental to migration history, and without a framework to accommodate them, the comparative method cannot do justice to the history it seeks to discover. This is where diaspora excels, capturing the fluidity, hybridity, and frequent ambiguity of transnational interactions. When diaspora and comparison are integrated, the result is a comprehensive and flexible framework of historical analysis. 45 Both the comparative and the diasporic methods, whether by intention or by unanticipated irony, remain deeply entangled with the concept of nation they seek to overcome. This should not be surprising, for the rise of territorially bounded nation-states is a defining theme of the modern era, and their potential demise in the future (which is open to much exaggeration) only reinforces the need to study their origins and power in the past. Nation-states exist in larger contexts, but they attain their legitimacy in part by suppressing that fact; they therefore exist both apart from and within broader historical contexts. Only by studying the history of nations, internal as well as external, can one hope to transcend them. To be diasporic, at least in the present, is to be uprooted from one’s place, detached from one’s nation, and searching for both. A prime subject for historical inquiry is how the diasporic sensibilities of a given migrant people vary according to the places where they reside. In the end, diaspora and comparison are inseparable elements of migration history. 46 Notes Kevin Kenny is associate professor of history at Boston College. He would like to thank Tyler Anbinder, Bernard Bailyn, David Armitage, James T. Campbell, James Cronin, Rosanna Crocitto, Enda Delaney, Hasia Diner, David Emmons, Robin Fleming, Donna Gabaccia, Nathan Glazer, Marjorie Howes, Lynn Lyerly, Tim Meagher, David Northrup, Kevin O’Neill, Robert Olwell, Robert Savage, Stephen Schloesser, Sergio Serulnikov, James Sidbury, James Smith, Larry Wolff, Peter Weiler, and Christopher Wilson; the members of the Boston College History Department Dissertation Workshop, the Boston College Irish Studies Colloquium, and the Immigration and Urban History Seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society; the fellows at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University (2000–2001); Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Armeny, and the readers for the Journal of American History; and, especially, Prasannan Parthasarathi and David Quigley. Readers may contact Kenny at <[email protected]>. 1 Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review, 106 (Dec. 2001), 1692–1720; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” ibid., 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031–55; David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992), 432–62; Eric Foner, “American Freedom in a Global Age,” American Historical Review, 106 (Feb. 2001), 1–16; La Pietra Report: Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History ([New York], 2000); and, published after this article was completed, Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002). 2 Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History”; George M. Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History,” Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 587–604. 3 David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. V: Ireland under the Union, I, 1801–70, ed. W. E. Vaughan (Oxford, 1989), 569; David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1871–1921,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. VI: Ireland under the Union, II, 1870–1921, ed. W. E. Vaughan (Oxford, 1996), 607; Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto, 1996), 56; Andy Bielenberg, “Irish Emigration to the British Empire, 1815–1910,” in The Irish Diaspora, ed. Andy Bielenberg (London, 2000), 224; David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 1801–1921 (Dundalk, 1984), 5; Michael Hout and Joshua R. Goldstein, “How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Became 40 Million Irish Americans: Demographic and Subjective Aspects of the Ethnic Composition of White Americans,” American Sociological Review, 59 (Feb. 1994), 64–82. 4 Standard works include Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985); Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York, 2000); Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Great Britain, 1750–1922 (New York, 1999); Graham Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991); Enda Delaney, “‘Almost a Class of Helots in an Alien Land’: The British State and Irish Immigration, 1921–45,” in The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Donald M. MacRaild (Portland, 2000), 240–65; Enda Delaney, Demography, State, and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–71 (Montreal, 2000); Thomas M. Devine, ed., Irish Immigration and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1991); Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters (Buffalo, 1990); David Wilson, The Irish in Canada (Ottawa, 1989); David Fitzpatrick, ed., Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994); Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Kensington, 1987); Donald H. Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand, 1860–1950 (Wellington, 1990); Lyndon Fraser, To Tara via Holy-head: Irish Catholic Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Christchurch (Auckland, 1997); Patrick McKenna, “Irish Emigration to Argentina: A Different Model,” in Irish Diaspora, ed. Bielenberg, 195–212; and Donal P. McCracken, “Odd Man Out: The South African Experience,” ibid., 251–71. On population distribution in 1870, see Alan O’Day, “Revising the Diaspora,” in The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, ed. D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (New York, 1996), 189. On the history of ethnicity as a concept, see Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the USA,” Altreitalie (Turin), 3 (April 1990), 37–63. 5 Standard works include R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775 (London, 1966); James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962); and Maldwyn A. Jones, “The Scotch-Irish in British America,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, 1991), 284–313. For an example of the integration of Irish Protestant migration into Atlantic and “new British” history, see Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001). On women’s migration, see Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1983); Janet Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington, Ky., 1989); and, for the Irish background, Timothy W. Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Princeton, 1997), esp. 133–240. 6 Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1871–1921,” 612; Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 1801–1921, 11–13; David Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Oceans of Consolation, ed. Fitzpatrick, 3–36; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana, 1989); Timothy M. O’Neil, “Miners in Migration: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Irish and Irish-American Copper Miners,” Eire-Ireland, 36 (Spring–Summer 2001), 124–40; Victor A. Walsh, “‘A Fanatic Heart’: The Cause of Irish-American Nationalism in Pittsburgh during the Gilded Age,” Journal of Social History, 15 (Winter 1981), 187–204; Tyler Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne’s Irish Tenants Encounter North America’s Most Notorious Slum,” American Historical Review, 107 (April 2002), 351–87; Jon Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West (New York, 1985); Donna R. Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick, 1988). 7 The argument on expediency is most fully developed in the long chapter on postfamine migration, which has received less attention than earlier sections of the book: Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 345–492. For the argument on culture, see ibid., throughout; and Kerby Miller with Bruce Boling and David N. Doyle, “Emigrants and Exiles: Irish Cultures and Irish Emigration to North America, 1790–1922,” Irish Historical Studies, 22 (Sept. 1980), 97–125. 8 Donald Harman Akenson refers to Miller’s cultural argument as “the Gaelic Catholic Disability variable”; see Akenson, Irish Diaspora, 237–38. See also Donald Harman Akenson, “The Historiography of the Irish in the United States of America,” in The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, vol. II: The Irish in the New Communities, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (Leicester, 1992), 99–127. 9 Akenson, “Historiography of the Irish in the United States of America,” 115–16; David N. Doyle, “The Remaking of Irish-America, 1845–80,” in New History of Ireland, VI, ed. Vaughan, 732–33; Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1941). 10 Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora, 5 (no. 1, 1996), 3; Khachig Tölölyan, “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,” ibid., 1 (no. 1, 1991), 1–7; Jon Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora,” ibid., 6 (no. 3, 1997), 301, 304–5; Floya Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’: Beyond Ethnicity,” Sociology, 32 (Aug. 1998), 557–80; William Safran, ” Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora, 1 (no. 1, 1991), 83; James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology, 9 (no. 3, 1994), 302–38; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, 1997), 177; Michael O. West, “‘Unfinished Migrations’: Commentary and Response,” African Studies Review, 43 (April 2000), 61. For conceptions of diaspora in Irish scholarship, see O’Day, “Revising the Diaspora”; Breda Gray, “Unmasking Irishness: Irish Women, the Irish Nation, and the Irish Diaspora,” in Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish Society: Emigration and Irish Identities, ed. Jim MacLaughlin (Cork, 1997), 209–35. 11 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.27. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary takes its illustrative example, undated, from a British newspaper, the Observer. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993 edition), s.v. “diaspora.” English-language translations of the Greek tend to employ such generic terms as “expulsion” and “exile” rather than the more specific “diaspora.” See, for example, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York, 1954), 140. Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 10–11; Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews,” 304–5; Cohen, Global Diasporas, ix. Biblical citations are to International Bible Society, New International Version <http://www.gospelcom.net/ibs/niv/> (Oct. 18, 2002). Deuteronomy provides perhaps the seminal text: “If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law…. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other.” Deut. 28:58–68 |
13 Cohen, Global Diasporas, 24–26; Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” 83–99. On “return” as more symbolic or spiritual than literal or physical, see Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews,” 307; Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 714–22; Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” 91; Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” pars. 8, 12. On the simultaneously traumatic and creative dimensions to diasporic experience, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
14 James Clifford is referring to the typology in Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies.” Clifford, “Diasporas,” esp. 306; Cohen, Global Diasporas, esp. 127–53; Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London, 1997), 299–346; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” ibid., 50–59; Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place, and Irish Women (New York, 2001).
15 Clifford, “Diasporas,” 306. On the importance of an articulated identity, see Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review, 43 (April 2000), 11–45; Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”; Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora”; and Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s).” On the temporal dimension, see Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, trans. A. M. Berrett (New York, 1997), xix; and Nicholas Van Hear, New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal, and Regrouping of Migrant Communities (Seattle, 1998), 6.
16 After expressing doubt as to whether the Irish—by which they mean the Irish in the United States—are better described as a “migration” or a “diaspora,” Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau decide, largely on the basis of the great famine, to include them as one of their twelve cases, the others being the Jewish, Armenian, Gypsy, black, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Lebanese, Palestinian, Vietnamese, and Korean “diasporas.” Cohen, Global Diasporas, 29; Chaliand and Rageau, Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, trans. Berrett, xv, xix.
17 Mary E. Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dublin, 1986); Mary Daly, “Revisionism and Irish History: The Great Famine,” in Making of Modern Irish History, ed. Boyce and O’Day, 71–89; Peter Gray, The Irish Famine (New York, 1995); Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850 (Portland, 1999); James S. Donnelly Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, Eng., 2001); Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–1852 (Dublin, 1994); Cormac O’Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, 1999); John Mitchel, quoted in Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 306. On the interpretation of emigration as exile, see ibid., esp. 280–344.
18 In addition, diaspora, if construed as banishment and exile, tends to exclude Protestants still further from Irish history by concentrating on British injustice toward the Catholic population. Patterson and Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations,” 20.
19 Robert M. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (New York, 1995); J. Matthew Gallman, Receiving Erin’s Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine, 1845–55 (Chapel Hill, 2000). On twentieth-century Irish migration in combined transnational and comparative contexts, see Matthew O’Brien, “Irishness in Great Britain and the United States: Transatlantic and Cross-Channel Migration Networks and Irish Ethnicity, 1920–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2001).
20 On cross-national comparisons, see Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability.” On American efforts at comparative history, see George M. Fredrickson, “Comparative History,” in The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, 1980), 457–73; George M. Fredrickson, “America’s Diversity in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of American History, 85 (Dec. 1998), 859–75; Raymond Grew, “The Case for Comparing Histories,” American Historical Review, 85 (Oct. 1980), 763–78; and Peter Kolchin, “Comparing American History,” Reviews in American History, 10 (Dec. 1982), 64–81.
21 Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability,” 590, 591, 589; Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon,” 1702–3; Grew, “Case for Comparing Histories,” 764. Recent regionally or thematically specific comparative studies of Irish migration include Gallman, Receiving Erin’s Children; David Noel Doyle, “The Irish in Australia and the United States: Some Comparisons,” Irish Economic and Social History (no. 16, 1989), 73–94; Malcolm Campbell, “The Other Immigrants: Comparing the Irish in Australia and the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 14 (Spring 1995), 3–22; Malcolm Campbell, “Immigrants on the Land: A Comparative Study of Irish Rural Settlement in Nineteenth-Century Minnesota and New South Wales,” in Irish Diaspora, ed. Bielenberg, 176–94; Alan O’Day, “Irish Diaspora Politics in Perspective: The United Irish Leagues of Great Britain and America, 1900–14,” in Great Famine and Beyond, ed. MacRaild, 214–39; and Donald M. MacRaild, “Crossing Migrant Frontiers: Comparative Reflections on Irish Migrants in Britain and the United States during the Nineteenth Century,” ibid., 40–70.
22 “National contexts” here include the heavily Irish white settler colonies of the British Empire—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa—before and after they were formally granted self-governing dominion status (1867, 1901, 1907, and 1910, respectively). George M. Fredrickson likewise uses “the nation-state” and “the semi-autonomous colony or possession of an imperial power” interchangeably in this respect. Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability,” 589; Conzen et al., “Invention of Ethnicity,” 40, 44. On ethnicity more generally, see Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review, 100 (April 1995), 437–71; and Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History, 84 (Sept. 1997), 524–58.
23 See, for example, Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York, 1998).
24 Fredrickson, “America’s Diversity in Comparative Perspective,” 859–60.
25 On the idea of an Irish global diasporic identity based on Catholicism, see, for example, Sheridan Gilley, “The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (April 1984), 188–207.
26 Doyle, “Remaking of Irish-America,” 741; David Noel Doyle, “The Irish as Urban Pioneers in the United States, 1850–1870,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 10 (Fall 1990–Winter 1991), 36–59; D. H. Akenson, “An Agnostic View of the Historiography of the Irish-Americans,” Labour/Le Travail, 14 (Fall 1984), esp. 123–28, 152–58.
27 Doyle, “Remaking of Irish-America,” 726; Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” 569; David Fitzpatrick, “‘A Peculiar Tramping People,'” in New History of Ireland, VI, ed. Vaughan, 633–34; Patrick O’Farrell, “Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1791–1870,” in New History of Ireland, V, ed. Vaughan, 663–64; Patrick O’Farrell, “Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1870–1990,” in New History of Ireland, VI, ed. Vaughan, 704–5; Lynn H. Lees and John Modell, “The Irish Countryman Urbanized: A Comparative Perspective on Famine Migration,” Journal of Urban History, 3 (Aug. 1977), 391–408.
28 Of Butte’s 30,470 people in 1900, 8,026 (26%) were first- or second-generation Irish (Irish-born or American-born of Irish parents); see Emmons, Butte Irish, 13. On Irish American social mobility, see Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (New York, 1988); Suzanne Model, “The Ethnic Niche and the Structure of Opportunity: Immigrants and Minorities in New York City,” in The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, 1993), 161–93; Jo Ellen McNergney Vinyard, The Irish on the Urban Frontier: Nineteenth-Century Detroit, 1850–80 (New York, 1976); and R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 (Manchester, 1979). On Canada, see Akenson, Irish Diaspora, 238–42. On Australia, see O’Farrell, “Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1791–1870,” 664; and O’Farrell, “Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1870–1990,” 704–5. On the comparative dimension, see Campbell, “Other Immigrants”; and Campbell, “Immigrants on the Land.”
29 The point that the Irish provided an international pool of cheap labor has been made often, but it has yet to be taken up in any sustained comparative or transnational manner. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 469–85; Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals, 1780–1860 (Baltimore, 1993); Clifton K. Yearley Jr., Enterprise and Anthracite: Economics and Democracy in Schuylkill County, 1820–1875 (Baltimore, 1961), 166. On migration and the Atlantic economy, see Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, Eng., 1973).
30 Way, Common Labour; Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin, 2001); James E. Handley, The Navvy in Scotland (Cork, 1970).
31 The statistics on Irish women in American domestic service are from Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 89. Gender is central to the analysis of Irish racial identities in Walter, Outsiders Inside. On Australia, see O’Farrell, “Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1870–1990,” 706.
32 Way, Common Labour; Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires; John Belchem, “‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’: Ribbonism in Early Nineteenth-Century Liverpool,” International Review of Social History, 39 (April 1994), 33–56; David Montgomery, “The Irish and the American Labor Movement,” in America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, ed. David Noel Doyle and Owen Dudley Edwards (Westport, 1980), 206; David Fitzpatrick, “Irish in Britain, 1871–1921,” in New History of Ireland, VI, ed. Vaughan, 683.
33 Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1980), 158. For Patrick Ford’s statement, see David Brundage, “Denver’s New Departure: Irish Nationalism and the Labor Movement in the Gilded Age,” Southwest Economy and Society, 5 (Winter 1981), 11.
34 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3–32; Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 154–73.
35 Mary Hickman and Bronwen Walter, Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain (London, 1997). The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which sponsored the study, is “a publicly funded, non-governmental body set up under the Race Relations Act 1976 to tackle racial discrimination and promote racial equality,” Commission for Racial Equality <http://www.cre.gov.uk/about/about.html> (Jan. 14, 2003). Bronwen Walter, “Inside and outside the Pale: Diaspora Experiences of Irish Women,” in Migration and Gender in the Developed World, ed. Paul Boyle and Keith Halfacree (London, 1999), 311; Walter, Outsiders Inside. On anti-Irish discrimination in Britain, see L. P. Curtis Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (New York, 1968); L. P. Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, 1971); and R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993).
36 Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971); Gilbert Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” American Historical Review, 80 (Oct. 1975), 890–93, esp. 892.
37 Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” 890–99, 903–8.
38 John Belchem, “Nationalism, Republicanism, and Exile: Irish Emigrants and the Revolutions of 1848,” Past and Present (no. 146, Feb. 1995), 103–35. See also David A. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, 1998); and O’Day, “Irish Diaspora Politics in Perspective.”
39 Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890 (Philadelphia, 1966); Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, 150–200.
40 See, for example, Model, “Ethnic Niche”; Perlmann, Ethnic Differences; Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, 2000).
41 Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” 1035; Fredrickson, “Comparative History,” 461–62; Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability,” 587.
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