Ireland, Sweden and the Great European Migration, 1815-1914 by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

Akenson compares Ireland's emigration with Sweden's, although he has more to say about Ireland's. He also offers a detailed analysis of the work of the experts in the field. What really interests Akenson, however, is the experience of migration, not, for example, the economic history of it. For example, those people who emphasize real income differences between, say, Ireland and the United States often think "that the consequences of a decision are the cause of that decision" (229). There are many things wrong with these data sets, but this fallacy is not one of them.

Akenson's view is that more people could have left Ireland before the Famine than did—the O'Grada paradox.¹ Why did people who were able to leave remain behind? The Irish population was increasing at an annual rate of about 1.4 percent during the 100 years before the Famine—much faster than that of rapidly industrializing Britain. In the 1840s, about 60 percent of the pre-Famine population lived in poverty; that is, they would have been at risk after only one year of distress. In Sweden, 40 percent of the population was at risk during the key decade of the 1860s. In other words, according to Akenson, the Irish were not alone.

The Famine changed Ireland into a county where emigration was normal and expected. Akenson holds that after the Famine, the Catholic Church changed the population dynamics by restricting sex before marriage, reducing future agrarian risk by tight controls on sexuality. The view that the Catholic Church acted in response to the Famine is not held by many people. Akenson also rejects the view that pre-Famine Ireland was "morally pure," maintaining that just before the Famine, probably 20 percent of the women who were about to be married were pregnant at the altar.

There are some problems with the comparative approach. For one thing, Sweden might not be the best comparator. The Swedish depression (called the Great Deprivation) from 1867 to 1869 was the equivalent of the Famine in Ireland, but many of the Swedes who emigrated during the 1870s traveled more comfortably, by steamship, than the Irish did. Moreover, their rate of emigration was far lower than that of the Irish. Sweden's decadal emigration rates were 0.5, 3.1, 2.4, 7.0, and 4.1 between 1851 and 1900 (lower than Britain's), whereas Ireland's were 14.0, 14.6, 6.6, 14.2, and 8.9 during the same period. Furthermore, the Irish preferred urban settings wherever they went. Their westward movement in the United States was far more limited than that of the Swedes and others. Akenson says nothing about the sex ratio. Irish migrants were almost 50 percent female, a figure that was unique in this period. Returns are also a problem in Akenson's scheme. The rate of return migration to Ireland was unusually low; returns to Sweden were about 20 percent until 1930.

This book does not tell specialists much more than they already know about these migrations, largely because Akenson's real interest, the experience of migration, is not really knowable. Nonetheless, the book is a fine survey of Irish and Swedish emigration in the broad sense.