"Like Sailors . . . to a Wreck": Culture and Emigration in Ninteenth-Century Ireland and Sweden

Few historians, indeed, few authors of serious intent, have been as prolific as Donald Akenson, author of more than twenty books and scores of articles and editor of numerous collections of essays. Most of his books have focused on Ireland and the Irish, ranging from historical studies of Irish education, religious life, and local communities to biographies, but his work on the Irish diaspora has been particularly influential, inspiring new studies of the Irish in Canada and Australia and helping to shape how people in Ireland see their "cousins" overseas.¹

The volume under review continues to focus on the Irish, but it compares the histories of Irish and Swedish emigration. Such comparisons of peoples in different countries has been a staple of Akenson's extensive work on the Irish diaspora, where he set the histories of the Canadian and Australian Irish against that of Irish Americans to challenge notions that Irish immigrants' experience in the United States could stand for the experiences of all Irish people throughout the diaspora. Here, however, he uses the comparison of Ireland and Sweden to "remove the dead hand of a literary tradition that depicts Ireland as a story unto itself." He wants to place Irish and Swedish emigration firmly in the context of broader European patterns, and, thus in addition to questioning Irish "exceptionalism," achieve a broader goal to "illuminate the causes of the Great European Migration" that extended over the long nineteenth century from 1815 to 1914 (p. 7).

Professor Akenson's methods in this comparison are much the same as in his previous work. He is the historian as scientist: identifying sites for research that represent a "nice clean set of laboratories" unpolluted by the effects of extraneous variables; searching for useful, statistical "data sets" from those laboratories; and relentlessly sifting through those sets to draw out evidence for arguments of potentially broad application. His tone and style shift often, however, from the analytical to the conversational: chatty, step-by-step lessons on evaluating historical evidence, for example; or to the emotional and moral: acidic criticism of conventional historical wisdom or blistering judgments of past historical injustices.

The central question in this book is why, when large proportions of Ireland's and Sweden's population were "at risk" for their very survival in the early nineteenth century, only a minority of these vulnerable tried to escape their plight by migrating overseas (p. 39). This he calls "O'Grada's paradox," named after the great economic historian of Ireland, Cormac O'Grada. O'Grada acknowledged that, even though hundreds of thousands of Irish left home in the early nineteenth century, "the reluctance or inability of the Irish to leave in still greater numbers" was a puzzle. The poor Irish seemed to cling to home, O'Grada suggested, "like sailors to the mast or hull of a wreck."² This was even more true of Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century, however. Akenson estimates that the proportion of "vulnerable" in Sweden then was not as great as it was in Ireland, but it was still huge, and the number leaving was much smaller. Akenson wants to prove that it was not previously hidden economic or demographic trends that account for this reluctance, but something in the dominant cultures of Sweden and Ireland that held most people back. Searching for evidence of "culture" by trolling through reams of statistics has also been a hallmark of Akenson's previous books.

Some people did leave Sweden and Ireland in the early nineteenth century, of course, "leading sectors" as Akenson calls them, but they were "countercultural"—"deviants" from the dominant culture. By leaving, he contends, these "deviants" did not simply escape the smothering culture of the old country, they also "punctured" holes in it and ultimately eased "the quick and efficient transition to a society-wide emigration tradition." Yet even...