Ireland's New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922

Conclusion

Conclusion C   provides hard and fast answers—its principal power is to stimulate new questions and bring to bear new perspectives on a subject. Through a process of comparison, this book has demonstrated that explanations grounded in Irish migrants’ origins, prior historical experiences, or cultural legacies, are in themselves inadequate explanations for their diverse adjustments to life abroad. Instead, it proposes that the economic and political contexts of Ireland’s new worlds played a decisive role in shaping the distinctive experiences of immigrants in the United States and Australia. Specifically, this study has highlighted the importance of the timing of the onset of industrialization and urbanization and their relation to large-scale Irish immigration as a critical determinant of the newcomers’ experiences. Important, too, were the political and ideological contexts that enveloped these sweeping changes. These factors were not constant across Ireland’s new worlds but varied significantly, even within national borders. America’s earlier engagement with sweeping market reform, the power of republican idealism, and the extent of the Irish flight during the famine decade sharply delineated the experience of the American Irish from that of their compatriots resident within Britain’s empire in colonial Australia. The complexity and diversity revealed in this comparison of Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia should, I hope, encourage historians in both societies to challenge more deeply their assumptions about norms of immigrant behavior and bring into sharper focus the specific and distinctive features of Irish settlement in their own nation. Should, but may not! In a stocktaking of Irish America, Lawrence McCaffrey acknowledged the “tempting possibilities” of comparative diaspora studies, but counseled younger scholars to concentrate their efforts on the greater challenges of  Conclusion  “uncovering the many hidden facets of Irish America.” McCaffrey believed “the best future in Irish studies for Americans is right here at home.”1 No doubt some Australian scholars would entertain similar beliefs as to the primacy of nationally framed inquiries. McCaffrey is correct when he asserts that local and national studies are important. As historians, we ought to be sensitive to differences between neighboring New England towns, adjacent prairie states, or nearby Australian regions. But we also need the facility to adjust our focus and to recognize that from a global perspective the degrees of difference we take for granted may seem to others very slight indeed. More than half a century ago, Marc Bloch chided: “The authors of monographs must be once again reminded that it is their duty to read the literature on subjects analogous to theirs, and not only that bearing upon their own region . . . but also (something too often neglected) that dealing with more distant societies, separated by differences of political constitution or nationality from those they are studying.”2 Bloch’s appeal for cross-cultural perspectives is as valid now as ever. Perhaps more than anything else, the comparisons in this book emphasize the need to write in the host nation as a critical agent in immigrants’ lives. By this I do not mean a homogeneous, nondescript nation but an organism grounded in historically specific processes of economic change and ideological formation. It is a simple enough demand—one advanced long ago by Frank Thistlethwaite in his memorable essay on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European migration—but a complicated task still too often unfulfilled.3 Transnational comparisons and the uncovering of multilateral connections between different destinations across the Irish diaspora will help fulfill this objective and bring differences in immigrants’ experiences into sharper relief. At the same time, this book advocates the potential of comparison at a regional level to complement nationally oriented studies. Such exercises in comparison, whether of cities, country regions, or coasts, open new possibilities for the intensive study of immigrant communities and provide the opportunity to scrutinize that critical seam between regional life and nationstate where so many newcomers’ lives are indelibly marked. They need to be conceived with verve and imagination, embrace a wide array of evidence, and draw on the best of the humanities and social sciences. It would be a sad irony if, at a time when Ireland itself has moved increasingly to embrace the global dimensions of its historical experience, historians of those scattered Irish peoples were unable or unwilling to adequately acknowledge the transnational dimensions of those lives.4 A strong onus exists on us all to reflect on the ways in which history can best be practiced to...