Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study

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	. . .