On every tide The making and remaking of the Irish world

Review by Choice Review

Connolly (emer., Queen's Univ. Belfast, UK), a distinguished academic whose previous works focus on Irish social and religious history, provides an engaging, insightful survey of the Irish diaspora from the 18th century to the present. Despite its broad scope, this study offers a surprisingly intimate portrait of the Irish world, full of memorable characters and incidents. The author expertly integrates the existing scholarship into a compelling narrative that explains the reasons for mass migration, the conditions emigrants faced abroad, their means of coping in their new environments, and their shifting relationships with their homeland. Although Connolly examines emigrants' experiences through the familiar lenses of social class, nationalism, and Catholicism, he stresses the diversity of circumstances, convincingly arguing that the powerful sense of common identity that characterized the diaspora in the US neither represented nor appealed to all emigrants, particularly those in Canada or Australasia. He also scrupulously documents the prejudice and hardships the Irish faced, and the political, economic, and cultural advantages and successes they enjoyed. The growing affluence and sophistication of both Ireland and its diaspora suggest how profoundly things have changed since the 19th century. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Padraic C. Kennedy, York College of Pennsylvania

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Irish immigrants who left home in the 19th and 20th centuries created and maintained a "shared transnational culture," according to this sweeping account. Historian Connolly (Divided Kingdom) traces to the roots of Ireland's "outward movement" to 1816, when the eruption of an Indonesian volcano created a "worldwide ecological crisis," and traces migration patterns through the Great Famine (1845--1851) and the first and second world wars, detailing how Ireland's economic hardships, combined with the abundance of opportunities abroad, fostered immigrants' desire to make the long and often arduous journey to Australia, Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere. He also shows how religion simultaneously united Irish migrants separated by geography and alienated them within their new locales; describes the violent draft protests, labor disputes, and political rivalries that gave rise to enduring perceptions of the Irish as "an alien and threatening presence" in 19th-century America; and analyzes how grief over the loss of "ethnic identity and historical memory" provoked support for Irish republicanism among later generations of Irish Americans. Throughout, Connolly draws on an impressive array of primary evidence, including census records, personal testimonies, and popular fiction, without getting bogged down in statistics and minutiae. This is a seamless and well-rounded study of a consequential historical trend. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Sweeping history of Irish migration and the many forms Irishness took in new lands. As longtime Irish history professor Connolly observes, the numbers of Irish who left the island in the 19th century were huge: a mere 14,000 in 1816-1817, but 244,000 between 1831 and 1835, numbers that would further swell to millions with the Potato Famine. Some went to Australia, some to Canada, but most to America, for, as Connolly writes, "the mass movement of people was possible only because of the inexhaustible demand for settlers and workers in the expanding economy of the United States." Whereas in Australia and Canada, Irish immigrants tended to spread out into provincial towns as well as major cities, the largest waves to America landed in cities on the East Coast, both because that's where the jobs were and because most immigrants lacked the financial resources to go further. Consequently, in Australia and Canada, there were fewer purely Irish enclaves than in America. In the latter, though, postwar suburbanization was a powerful vehicle for changing the face of Irishness. "The move to the suburbs," writes Connolly, "already meant that, for growing numbers, neighborhood life no longer revolved around the parish church and the clubs and societies linked to it," making Catholicism a less central symbol of identity than in years past. The author shows how Protestant Irish were heavily represented in the immigration rolls. Combined with rising affluence and a splintering of the old community was an increasing pattern among both Protestants and Catholics to marry outside their ethnic group, also common in other diaspora communities elsewhere in the world. Working the statistics--Connolly observes that, for example, England's Irish communities grew markedly during World War II both because of jobs and because travel across the oceans was perilous--and popular culture and social history alike, the author delivers a complex but accessible narrative. A masterwork of Irish diaspora history and immigration studies generally. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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