Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916 by William Jenkins (review)

In early 1880, Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of Irish nationalism, visited Buffalo and Toronto on his tour of North America. The former city had enthusiastically invited the Irish mp to speak to its citizens; the latter was not quite so welcoming. In Buffalo, Parnell spoke about the evils of eviction, mass starvation, and landlordism, generating an expected anti-English response from his audience; in “Tory Toronto,” he had to revise his inflammatory commentary in order to vilify the English press and government but not England or the empire in a city renowned for its Orange political dominance.

Parnell’s visit is just one of many transnational events, institutional practices, and daily patterns William Jenkins investigates in Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916. Comparing these two cities of the Irish diaspora at the end of one century and the beginning of another allows Jenkins to highlight the wide range of lived experiences and professed allegiances held by those of Irish birth and extraction in a relatively small geographic space. Despite their close proximity across the border, or perhaps because of it, Buffalo and Toronto offer an intriguing site for comparison through their different political persuasions, their similar urban landscape, and their significant post-famine Irish populations.

For those acquainted with either city’s history, many of Jenkins’ observations at first seem familiar: Buffalo incorporated an Irish nationalist identity based on the triumvirate of Catholicism, the Democratic Party, and the working class; Toronto, by contrast, was a bastion of Orange imperialism, where Irish Protestants and Catholics shared many traits but harboured just as many prejudices, giving the “Belfast of Canada” its Ulster-inspired moniker. However, upon closer inspection, Jenkins reveals a level of nuanced observation and analysis that makes this work an invaluable addition to the growing fields of Irish diasporic history and urban cultural geography. As Jenkins himself notes, this project involved the trying task of combining what could have been two separate books into a single synthesis covering five decades of social and political transformation. Using a comparative approach that blends qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Between Raid and Rebellion makes great strides in answering the call for more in-depth and complicated histories of Irish communities abroad. Located firmly in a post-famine period, this history of social, political, economic, and cultural experience on either side of the border deals with Irish integration and assimilation into each respective national fabric, rather than concerning itself with the more familiar and mythologized migratory experiences of the 1840s.

While Jenkins quickly points out that this is not a military history, despite the title, the martial episodes of the Fenian invasions and the Easter Rising act as recognizable bookends for his analyses. The monograph’s organization into two separate parts – the first dealing with the period of Canadian Confederation to the fall of Parnell in 1891, and the second from the 1890s to the time of the Great War – allows Jenkins to manoeuvre between thematic accounts of political networks and upward social mobility, while still retaining a strong chronological structure. Given the time period under investigation, it is perhaps appropriate that many of his insights seem to find a Laurier-esque “middle way” between standard and revised academic arguments. As one would expect, Jenkins draws upon the work of Mark McGowan in characterizing Toronto’s Irish Catholic community. Where McGowan’s The Waning of the Green (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999) argued that there was a notable disinterest in Irish affairs by the early twentieth century, Between Raid and Rebellion counters this by highlighting not only Toronto’s coverage of and participation in the Third Home Rule Crisis, but also the city’s nationalist sentiments between 1881 and 1912, including the public careers of John O’Donohoe and Patrick Boyle. More, perhaps, could have been done to make the sections on Irish “Bridgets” and female employment seem...