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

A volume in the series McGill-Queen’s Studies in Ethnic History, this book will be of particular interest to those who study aspects of the Irish diaspora. It is also a book that breaks new ground by bringing into sharp focus – in a comparative framework – how the Irish settled in two North American cities, Toronto and Buffalo. As William Jenkins (Department of Geography, York University) points out in his opening chapter, it is striking that “the American and Canadian literatures [on Irish migration] have remained largely separate. Scholarly visions have aligned with national boundaries.” Comparing Toronto and Buffalo also has the advantage of offering a scope that falls between, at one extreme, the overly broad strokes of global migration histories and, at the other, isolated localized studies of what the author aptly describes as “onecompany mill towns.” But this is not only a book about the experiences of the Irish men and women who migrated to these two Great Lakes cities; it is also a book about the change and continuity found in those migrants’ perceptions of Ireland. Jenkins “explores how immigrants departing from particular regions of Ireland over a roughly comparable time period fitted into life in Buffalo and Toronto” at the same time that he attempts to delineate what those immigrants thought “about the political fate of Ireland itself.”

Between Raid and Rebellion is divided into two parts, comprising nine chapters in all. As Jenkins explains in chapter 1, his story is bracketed by the conclusion of the American Civil War (in 1865) and the Fenian Raid at Ridgeway (in 1866) on one end and, on the other, by the “Ulster Crisis” (ca. 1912–14) and the Easter Rebellion (of 1916). Chapter 2 sketches the histories of Toronto and Buffalo from their frontier origins through to their existence as “thriving urban centres of undoubted importance” in the 1880s. Illustrative maps in this chapter show that Irish migrants to Toronto tended to come form Ulster; Buffalo’s Irish predominantly came from Munster. Chapters 3 and 4 illuminate the “living standards and social experiences” of the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto in the late Victorian period. Attention goes to employment and housing, as well as the social networks to which the Irish belonged. Those included churches, of course, but also various lay voluntary associations. Chapter 5 focuses on politics. While there were marked differences between the political experiences of the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, there was also an underlying similarity. In both cities Irish migrants tended to filter their perceptions of Ireland through their New World contexts. In Buffalo, the “sense that the Irish could find their way within an American system replete with its fluid shibboleths of liberty and democracy contrasted with the situation in Ireland,” and many came to believe “that similar freedoms should prevail in Ireland.” In Toronto, “abstract ideas about ‘Canadian-style freedom’ and the political design of the new dominion” similarly informed “debates about Ireland’s political status.” Chapter 6 traces those “diasporic imaginations” in the 1870s and 1880s.

Part 2 takes the story into the early twentieth century. In chapter 7 we learn that during the first decades of the 1900s Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, in both Toronto and Buffalo, showed “upward mobility in terms of jobs and careers.” Chapter 8 complicates the sense of “place” by tracing the physical movement of second- and third-generation Irish migrants both within the cities of Buffalo and Toronto (again with wonderful maps) and, sometimes, further afield. Chapter 9 traces some of the complex ways in which, “for many North American Irish, questions of economic and political achievement on the western side of the Atlantic were inseparable from the goal of realizing some form of Irish nationhood.” Adding it all up, the author concludes that “[e]thnicity … betrayed a fluctuating and non-linear rather than a strictly assimilationist character.”

Between Raid and Rebellion is richly documented with several...