Personal Narratives of Irish and Scottish Migration, 1921–65: "For Spirit and Adventure" (review)

Angela McCarthy's latest work builds upon her many years of research on Irish and Scottish migration. After having published a volume on Irish migration to New Zealand (Irish Migrants in New Zealand, 1840–1937: The Desired Haven, 2005) and edited a collection of essays about the Scots' global diaspora featuring her own article on Scottish emigration to North America ("Ethnic Networks and Identity among Inter-War Scottish Migrants in North America," in A Global Clan: Scottish Migrants Networks and Identities since the Eighteenth Century, 2006), McCarthy adopts a challenging comparative perspective by tackling the migration of both nationalities and shifts the focus of her analysis to a more recent period of time. She embraces a comparative perspective also with regard to the migrants' countries of settlement, covering a wide range of destinations within the English-speaking world, namely the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. McCarthy thus sets herself the difficult task of identifying change and continuity, similarities, and differences in the diasporic dynamic of two important ethnic groups in half a century of history and a geographically extensive area.

As in her previous work on Irish migration to New Zealand, which revolved around the analysis of a large corpus of letters, McCarthy exploits personal accounts of the migration experience. Yet this time she focuses on oral interviews, without neglecting other first-hand accounts such as correspondence and shipboard journals. Along with personal narratives, she examines more traditional print sources, that is documentary evidence deriving from census and immigration files as well as maritime records. Such sources certainly provide useful contextual information, but she mainly employs them to supplement personal narratives, which always remain central to her analysis.

McCarthy divides her work into nine thematic chapters preceded by an introduction discussing methodological and theoretical issues and followed by a brief conclusion summarizing the main results of the work as well as raising further research questions. The first chapter provides the historical and historiographical context of Irish and Scottish migration to the Anglophone world. The subsequent sections tackle a variety of aspects of the migration experience: the second chapter focuses mainly on the emigrants' motives for leaving their country; the third on the organization of the move; the fourth on the journey to the New Worlds; the fifth on the migrants' arrival at Ellis Island and their first impressions of New York—this is perhaps the most interesting section of the work, thanks to the richness of the oral material; the sixth on the emigrants' entering the British Dominions; the seventh on the importance and workings of the migrants' networks; the eighth on issues of identity, culture, and belonging; and the last on returned migrants, a subject largely neglected by historians up to now. At the beginning of each chapter, a long engaging excerpt from a select personal narrative introduces readers to the main topics discussed in the section and plunges them straight into the emigrants' experiences. Regrettably, each chapter also ends with a conceptually repetitive section summarizing the conclusions reached through the analysis of the documentation.

McCarthy's aim is laudable since, as the author herself clarifies," until now, comparative work has not been undertaken to see if life-ways, expectations, and experiences differed between groups and across places, as revealed in the migrants' own words" (222). And indeed, through a close reading of personal testimonies, McCarthy is able to identify similarities between the Irish and Scots as well as point out distinctive experiences of the members of the two groups.

However, along with its positive aspects, McCarthy's work has some serious weaknesses. Personal Narratives is an ambitious book that does not live up to its promise. In order to investigate such a vast topic a work twice as long would have been necessary, as well as a more systematic collection and analysis of sources. The documentation fails to cover the chronological period and the geographical space evenly, which often...