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Emigration and the Irish abroad: recent writings*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
There has been a remarkable revival of interest in the Irish abroad within the past ten years. In part this is attributable to the new confidence experienced by the Irish at home with the economic success of the ‘tiger economy’ and the decline of ‘migration by necessity’. Equally the Irish abroad, especially in the United States, have risen to the top of the immigrant pile and have achieved prosperity and assurance of their position in their adopted homelands. This itself has led to a reduction in some of the inhibitions that have held back serious attention to the history of the immigrants and to a recognition of their place in the sun. Public awareness has been further stimulated by changing patterns of immigration and by the development of new attitudes towards immigrants in the host societies, now including Ireland itself. Such changes have created a need to give meaning to the term ‘plural society’ and to challenge the racism that has characteristically followed in the wake of increased numbers of immigrants.
These seven books are representative of a large number that have begun to address the topic in the last few years from an historical point of view. For the most part they relate to the Irish in Britain but use the focus on the immigrants to open up issues about the history of Ireland and Britain and the role of each in an emerging global system. For example, one of them is a comparative account of the Irish in Liverpool and Philadelphia which allows consideration of some of the broader questions regarding the treatment of the Irish immigrant in the literature both by historians and other interested scholars.
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2001
Footnotes
*
The Irish diaspora. Edited by Andy Bielenberg. Pp 368. Harlow: Longman. 2000. £45 hardback; £14.99 paperback.
Receiving Erin’s children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine migration, 1845-1855. By J. Matthew Gallman. Pp xii, 306. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. £41.50 hardback; £14.95 paperback.
The Irish in Victorian Britain. Edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. Pp 320. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1999. IR£39.50 hardback; IR£17.50 paperback.
Demography, state and society: Irish migration to Britain, 1921-1971. By Enda Delaney. Pp 345. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. £32 hardback; £12.95 paperback.
The Irish in the west of Scotland, 1797-1848: trade unions, strikes and political movements. By Martin J. Mitchell. Pp 286. Edinburgh: John Donald. 1998. £20.
Immigration and integration: the Irish in Wales, 1798-1922. By Paul O’Leary. Pp xiii, 340. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2000. £25. (Studies in Welsh History, no. 16)
Irish migrants in modern Britain, 1750-1922. By Donald M. MacRaild. Pp 230. London: Macmillan. 1999. £45 hardback; £14.99 paperback. (Social History in Perspective)
References
1 Jackson, J.A., The Irish in Britain (London, 1963), p. 118Google Scholar, quoted in Mitchell, The Irish in the west of Scotland, p. 11.
2 Lees, Lynn H., ‘Patterns of lower-class life: Irish slum communities in nineteenth-century London’ in Thernstrom, Stephan and Sennett, Richard (eds), Nineteenth-century cities (New Haven & London, 1969), pp 359-85Google Scholar; eadem, Exiles of Erin: Irish migrants in Victorian London (Ithaca & Manchester, 1979)Google Scholar.
3 Thompson, E.P., The making of the English working class (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Jones, G.S., Outcast London: a study of the relationship between classes in Victorian London (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar.
4 James McLaughlin, ‘Changing attitudes to “new wave” emigration? Structuralism versus voluntarism in the study of Irish emigration’ in Bielenberg (ed.), Irish diaspora, p. 323.
5 Gallman, Receiving Erin’s children, p. 179.
6 Ibid., pp 182-3.
7 Ibid., p. 212.
8 Ibid., pp 211-15; cf.Fraser, Derek, The evolution of the British welfare state (London 1973; 2nd ed., London, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 As discussed, for instance, in Lipset, S.M., American exceptionalism: a double-edged sword (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.
10 Gallman, Receiving Erin’s children, p. 224.
11 Hickman, Mary, ‘Alternative historiographies of the Irish in Britain: a critique of the segregation/assimilation model’ in Swift, & Gilley, (eds), The Irish in Victorian Britain, p. 245Google Scholar.
12 Meehan, Elizabeth, Free movement between Ireland and the U.K.: from the ‘common travel area’ to the Common Travel Area (Blue Paper, Policy Studies Institute, Trinity College Dublin, 2000)Google Scholar.
13 Scots Times, 17 Mar. 1841, quoted in Mitchell, The Irish in the west of Scotland, p. 201.
14 O’Leary, Immigration & integration, p. 312.