Emigrants and Exiles: Irish Cultures and Irish Emigration to North America, 1790- 1922.

Abstract

From 1740–1922, as many as seven million people emigrated from Ireland to North America. Arguably, if there are any patterns in modern Irish history, a cultural analysis of this vast flow may help to reveal them. For while the Irish question is usually defined in Anglo/Irish terms (those of conflict) it has more universal import as the adjustment of Irish identity and culture, both personal and national, to the demands of the modern industrialising world. Emigration afforded one such response; Irish nationalism another; Irish American nationalism linked the two. More humans were directly and articulately involved in the migratory response than in the nationalist, both cumulatively over time and in the degree of freely active personal involvement. If scholars such as Robert Kennedy, Cormac Ó Gráda and others have studied emigration in terms of Ireland’s economic modernization, we would suggest that it may be studied culturally as a revealing cross-section of Ireland’s attendant psychic modernisation.