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Reviewed by:
  • Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922
  • Kevin Kenny
Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922. By Malcolm Campbell (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. xiii plus 249 pp. Cloth $65. Paper $29.95).

More than seven million men, women, and children left Ireland for overseas destinations in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The great majority settled in North America, especially the United States, with a significant minority going to Australia and New Zealand. Malcolm Campbell’s book is the first to attempt a comparison of Irish-America, the most intensively studied of the Irish overseas communities, with Irish-Australia, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent decades. His purpose is to challenge the widely held assumption that a transplanted pre-migration culture determined Irish behavior abroad. Instead, he persuasively argues that immigrant adaptation to the particular social, economic, and political realities in the host countries was the key determinant.

This book poses a timely challenge for historians of the Irish overseas, especially in the United States. Campbell questions what he sees as an entrenched tradition among Americanists, stretching from Oscar Handlin through Kerby Miller, which attributes the various pathologies of the Irish abroad to pre-migration legacies, whether the impact of the potato famine or a cultural predisposition to see emigration as exile rather than opportunity. In laying down this challenge, Campbell surely goes too far in the opposite direction, all but excluding pre-migration culture from consideration, but his central point about adaptation to nationally specific circumstances offers a strong and flexible explanation for the variations in Irishness abroad. [End Page 222]

The first two chapters synthesize the historiography on Irish-America and Irish-Australia for the prefamine and famine eras respectively. Based on secondary sources, these chapters produce original insights by juxtaposing and comparing the two national histories. The American Irish in 1815 were in a strong position politically, economically, and culturally. By 1845, however, their condition had deteriorated markedly, due to the early onset of the market revolution and intense anti-Catholic bigotry. The massive influx of famine migrants over the next decade made things considerably worse. In Australia, by contrast, the Irish started in a miserable position (as convicts) but moved steadily toward prosperity and respectability. The economy developed at a slower, more favorable pace in Australia, religious tolerance was greater, and relatively few immigrants arrived from Ireland during the famine. The greater adversity experienced by the American Irish, however, produced a more robust sense of ethnic identity, based on affiliation with the Democratic party, control of the Catholic Church, and an intense ethnic nationalism directed toward the liberation of Ireland.

The two best chapters in the book compare, respectively, the lives of rural Irish settlers in Minnesota and New South Wales and the lives of the Irish in California and Eastern Australia. These chapters exemplify in concrete, tangible detail the merits of the comparative approach developed at macro level in the opening chapters. Campbell chose Minnesota in part to demonstrate, contrary to most recent historiography, that some Irish Americans settled on the land and prospered as farmers. Using tightly-focused trans-regional comparative analysis, Campbell shows how the Irish communities in Minnesota and New South Wales emerged out of common experiences of chain migration, rural settlement, and relative prosperity compared to Irish communities in the Northeast. The Irish in California and eastern Australia, likewise, generally did much better than their counterparts in the American Northeast, which Campbell attributes to their early arrival, the fluid and dynamic character of the host societies, a high degree of religious toleration, and the presence of Chinese immigrants. Continuous exchanges of people, information, and goods between California, Australia, and New Zealand allow Campbell to posit a Pacific Irish culture in which transnational interaction as well as cross-regional comparisons can be studied.

Because four of the seven chapters were published previously as articles, the book is somewhat uneven in tone and approach. The transition from the two broad opening chapters, which are...

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