Scotch-Irish Merchants in Colonial America (review)

Notwithstanding some confusion (this book is listed on amazon.co.uk, with the same ISBN number, as Flaxseed and Emigrants: Scotch-Irish Merchants in Eighteenth-Century America)—Richard K. MacMaster's study of Irish (and mostly Ulster Presbyterian) merchants, sea captains, shopkeepers, and inland traders in colonial America is a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century transatlantic history. In great detail, it illuminates the workings of the British mercantile system, the patterns of Irish-American trade (especially in flaxseed, linens, and migrants—free and bonded), and the early development of commercial, agricultural, and industrial capitalism in both Ireland—especially in Ulster, Ireland's northern province—and in the British colonies that later became the United States.

The depth of MacMaster's research in primary sources, on both sides of the Atlantic, is quite impressive. Works consulted extensively include both Irish and American newspapers, letters by merchants and other transatlantic correspondents, port records and passenger lists, colonial land, probate, and tax records, and a host of other official and unofficial documents. Indeed, at times the consequent detailed information concerning merchants' names, activities, and affiliations threatens to overwhelm the reader.

Scotch-Irish Merchants in Colonial America nicely complements several classic texts: Thomas M. Truxes's Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783 (1983), on transatlantic commerce, for instance; as well as R. J. Dickson's Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1785 (1966). One very useful feature of MacMaster's work is its balanced consideration of the incomplete and often contradictory evidence concerning the volume of Irish and especially Ulster migration to the colonies prior to the American Revolution. Since scholars' estimates of the numbers of Ulster and other Irish migrants vary so enormously, however, it is to be lamented that, despite his prodigious research, the author does not essay more of his own conclusions regarding that subject.

Surprisingly, also, MacMaster appears to have ignored perhaps the single most important work on early Irish Protestant (and Catholic) migration, David Noel Doyle's Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America (1981). Likewise, although he lists them in his bibliography, he does not cite or otherwise directly engage Doyle's and my Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003, with Arnold Schrier and Bruce D. Boling) or Maurice Bric's Ireland, Philadelphia and the Reinvention of America, 1760-1800 (2008).

Unfortunately, such omissions may not have been entirely inadvertent. Scotch-Irish Merchants in Colonial America is an example of what in Ireland is sometimes called "partitionist history"—that is, it rests upon and reinforces the politically-driven insistence that the history of modern Ireland (and of the Irish overseas) is characterized by permanent and irreconcilable divisions between Ireland's "two [ethno-cultural and religious] traditions"—one Protestant and "British" (or "Scotch-Irish" or sometimes "Ulster Scots"), the other Catholic and "Irish" (or sometimes "Gaelic")—each necessarily embodied, in Ireland itself since 1920, in separate, antagonistic "national" states.

As a result, on the one hand, MacMaster often "fudges" and expands the parameters of "Scotch-Irish" ethnicity, which, if the label has any concrete meaning, should connote immigrants from Ireland (usually from Ulster), whose ancestors migrated to the island from Scotland in the 1600s, and who commonly were Presbyterians when they re-migrated to America in the 1700s and afterwards. However, MacMaster often leads the reader to believe that the "Scotch-Irish" group in the American Colonies also included a significant minority of migrants who were Anglicans (as were most of New York's prominent Irish merchants) and/or of English descent (as was Philadelphia's George Bryan—a Dublin-born Presbyterian). On the other hand, MacMaster ignores entirely the minority of merchants who were Irish Catholic immigrants, such as Thomas FitzSimons and Stephen Moylan, both prominent traders in Philadelphia and the latter in 1771 the first president of the city's interdenominational Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

To be sure, the St. Patrick society's members were predominantly of Ulster Presbyterian (and Anglican) stock. However, their election of Moylan (brother of a future...