Ireland and the Atlantic World (Atlantic History)

Introduction

Ireland sits in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest of the main European continent. It would seem then to be a natural part of the Atlantic world. When that “world” is defined purely as the expansion of European empires in the Americas and Africa, however, Ireland’s significance is not evident. A textbook on the Atlantic world from 1400 to 1900, for example, mentions Ireland in only 3 of its 674 pages of text. Ireland did not have an empire in the New World and could not participate directly in this expansion of Europe around the Atlantic basin. But, the Irish, as members of the British Empire, were participants in this first Atlantic world. Indeed, Ireland itself played a crucial role in the expansion of the English colonies in North America. There was also a large-scale movement of Irish people across the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries, where they, like other Europeans, could participate in, as D. W. Meinig describes it, “the vast interaction” (The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 1 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986], p. 65) among the various cultures from around the Atlantic coming together in the Americas. Ireland’s economy too was integral, even when sometimes excluded by colonial regulations, to the burgeoning of the Atlantic economy. From the American Revolution in l775 to 1820, Ireland and Irish people retained strong connections with the new United States through established links and continual Irish immigration into the new republic. Irish Catholic exiles also continued to play a role in the administration of the remaining empires in the New World, both in Canada and the Spanish Empire in North and South America. While the Spanish and Portuguese withdrew from large portions of the Americas after 1820, signaling for many scholars the end of the Atlantic world, the Irish retained a transatlantic influence long after the collapse of the European empires, mainly through their continued peopling of Canada and the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the significance of Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic world, both before and after 1820, the literature on the subject is disparate and diverse. The subject still needs a lot more exploration. Nonetheless, there is a sizeable amount of explicit scholarship on the Atlantic world, particularly on the earlier period, while it is often implicit in the works focused on post-1820.

General Overviews

There is no one comprehensive general overview of the Ireland in the Atlantic world, but the collection of essays in Gleeson 2010 highlights the breadth of scholarship, in terms of discipline and chronology, while also providing an analytical framework to assess the significance of Ireland and the Irish in it. O’Hearn 2001 provides a critical and interpretive account of Ireland in the Atlantic economy through its relationships with Great Britain and the United States from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. The pioneer of assessing Ireland in the early Atlantic world, Nicholas Canny, synthesized his views in Canny 1988, concluding that the best way to understand Ireland and its relationship with Britain before the Act of Union (1801) was to examine Ireland as a colony and not just another kingdom. As a result, Canny argued for a broader study of Ireland in the context of an Atlantic world, a world very much based on colonization. Canny 1988 is therefore the starting place for anyone interested in Ireland in the Atlantic world. Smyth 2006 is a work of historical geography but shows clearly, through a series of maps, the major effects of English/British imperialism in Ireland and how it forced many across the Atlantic. Connolly 2008, a survey of early modern and 18th-century Ireland, accepts the importance of the Atlantic world to the Irish colony but sees Ireland more as a kingdom than a colony in the general scheme of British imperialism. For the role of Irish people in the Atlantic world, though very much focused on North America because that’s where the overwhelming of majority of Irish emigrants went, the best general book is Miller 1985. Kerby Miller analyzes Irish emigration and its impact on North America from the 17th through the early 20th centuries. Paying serious attention to the denominational differences of Irish emigrants, he argues for the continued importance of Irish culture in the lives of the Irish in America. Indeed, the Irish, particularly those of poor Catholic origin who came as a result of the Great Famine (1845–1855), were alienated from the business-oriented and individualistic United States and, in some ways, remained exiles in America, unable to handle the modernity of growing republic. By the turn of the 20th century, however, they had acclimatized to the United States, and “the long dark winter of Irish exile in America was over” (Miller 1985, p. 555).

Canny, Nicholas. Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
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A concise work based on a series of lectures, it combines primary and secondary sources to contextualize Ireland’s role as colony of the early English and British Empire. In some ways, Ireland became a test and a model for conquest and colonization for the construction of an empire across the Atlantic. This book is the starting point for those interested in the Irish in the early Atlantic world.
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Connolly, S. J. Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630–1800. Oxford History of Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199543472.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The best single-volume history of early modern and 18th-century Ireland has a chapter dedicated to Ireland in the Atlantic economy. The book also examines in detail the effects of the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements in Ireland. Despite the major changes brought by these attempts to pacify Irish Catholics and to transfer their property to loyal Protestants, Ireland remained a kingdom and not just merely a colony.
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Gleeson, David T., ed. The Irish in the Atlantic World. Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
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This collection of fourteen essays provides an interdisciplinary (history, literary criticism, and musicology) examination of Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic world. Running from the 17th to the 20th centuries, individual essays examine the cultural, economic, and political effect of the Irish on the Atlantic world and the Atlantic world’s effect on Ireland. Gleeson argues that, for Ireland, the Atlantic world did not end in 1820.
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Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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In a comprehensive and interpretive examination of the Irish in North America from the 1600s to the 1920s, Miller finds that Irish Catholic emigrants retained a lot of premodern traditions that hindered their integration into American society. They thus saw themselves as exiles rather than emigrants, and this retention of traditional Irish habits had profound effects on America and the Irish in it. Reprinted as recently as 2010.
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O’Hearn, Denis. The Atlantic Economy: Britain, the US and Ireland. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.
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Using world system theory, O’Hearn tries to explain the lack of historical Irish development, seeing similarities across the centuries. Ireland, he believes, remained an exploited periphery in the Atlantic economy.
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Smyth, William J. Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750. Critical Conditions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
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Smyth’s work shows vividly the impact of English/British imperialism in Ireland, as well as the persistence of certain Gaelic cultural patterns. One section focuses particularly on the Irish connections to the Atlantic world and emphasizes the growing significance of places such as Virginia and the West Indies in early modern Ireland.
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Primary Sources

Because the subject of the Irish in the Atlantic is not a specific field, there is no overarching collection of primary sources. There are, however, sources that can be mined among public papers and manuscript collections with strong Irish Atlantic components. Some of these are available online, including, for example, the State Papers Online. Fortunately, the author of Gwynn 1932 went through large collections of state records in Ireland and Britain in search of materials in relating to Irish in the West Indies, which he published as an annotated bibliography. Kerby Miller, in Kerby A. Miller Collection, has both deposited copies of letters in archives and published an important collection. Miller, et al. 2003, on the Irish in colonial and revolutionary-era America, includes a large number of letters and memoir extracts. There is no journal dedicated to the study of the Irish in the Atlantic world, though Irish Migration Studies in Latin America is dedicated to the study of the Irish there and is available electronically. It often publishes useful primary sources.

Gwynn, Aubrey. “Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies.” Annalecta Hibernia 4 (October 1932): 139–286.
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List of sources that mention the Irish in the West Indies, provided with copious annotations taken from British and Irish public records as well as contemporaneous pamphlets, travel accounts, and manuscripts.
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Irish Migration Stories in Latin America.
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This open-access English-language journal, available online since 2005, publishes on all aspects of the Irish presence and influence on Latin America, from the colonial times to the present.
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Kerby A. Miller Collection. Manuscripts. National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
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This large collection comprises photocopies of the thousands of manuscript letters Miller collected for his book Emigrants and Exiles. Most are from Irish immigrants to friends and family in Ireland.
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Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, eds. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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Miller and colleagues have published hundreds of letters and memoir extracts in this collection and have provided extensive editorial information about writers and recipients. Collection has a good balance of Catholic and Protestant sources.
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State Papers Online. Thomson Gale.
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These papers, available by subscription as a database online (one section dated 1509–1714, and the other, on the 18th century, on the “Government of Great Britain”), include numerous sources on Ireland as a part of English/British colonial policy. It also includes sources on Irish connections with British colonies in America, and the links, often dangerous in British eyes, between Ireland and the Catholic powers on the European continent.
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Ireland in the Atlantic World to 1820

Its location puts Ireland in the traditional Atlantic world, but its political subservience to England from the late medieval period meant that it did not take a lead in the European exploration of and expansion into the Atlantic world. Nevertheless, Ireland itself played an important role in the honing of England’s practice of colonization, and Irish people were also participants, both willingly and unwillingly, in the empire building of Britain and Continental powers.

Expanding Empires

Canny 1986 is dedicated to David Beers Quinn, an Irish historian who did pioneering work on the early English explorations and colonizations in the Americas. In his editing of colonial narratives on these voyages, Quinn (Quinn 1966) noticed that numbers of the personnel involved in this transatlantic expansion were also involved in English colonization efforts in Ireland. Inspired by Quinn’s early research, Canny 1973 focuses on the ideology of plantation in Ireland and colonization in America, establishing that the ideology of colonization in the Americas had its roots in early modern English views of the Irish. Ireland was not a kingdom to be incorporated into an English/British imperial network, but a place to be conquered and subjected to British rule through the planting of British settlers. This English view of the Irish as a barbaric people to be conquered had its roots in the literature of the Spanish conquistadores, whom many English adventurers saw as exemplars. Canny 1986 also examines the Irish influence on later colonizers such as William Penn; this thesis of Ireland as a role model has become the accepted one in the textbooks of the Atlantic world. The historiography of Ireland in the early Atlantic world is covered in Ohlmeyer 1999. There has been some criticism of this placing of early modern Ireland in the Atlantic world, particularly in Morgan 1991–1992. The most rigorous challenge to Ireland as a role model, however, has come from Horning 2013, which emphasizes the major differences between the colonization of Ireland, specifically Ulster, and that of Virginia, both in terms of ideology and policy. Akenson 1997 assesses the Irish in the early Atlantic world not in terms of the colonized but as colonizers and willing participants in the expansion and administration of the British Empire in the Americas. Similarly, Texada 1970, a short work on Alexander “Alejandro” O’Reilly—an Irish exile in the Spanish army of the mid-18th century—signifies the important role that Irish men played in the operation of other European empires in the Atlantic world.

Akenson, Donald Harman. If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730. Joanne Goodman Lectures 1997. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.
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Akenson describes the vital role of Irish immigrants in the English/British colonization of this island in the Caribbean. The Irish rulers and landowners of Montserrat ran their colony no differently than those of English administrators.
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Canny, Nicholas P. “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 30.4 (1973): 575–598.
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Following on from the initial research of D. B. Quinn, this seminal article analyzes the way in which English colonizers of Ireland racialized and dehumanized Irish natives in a fashion similar to what English colonizers would do upon encountering indigenous peoples in America.
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Canny, Nicholas P. “The Irish Background to Penn’s Experiment.” In The World of William Penn. Edited by Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, 139–156. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
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Canny examines Penn’s initial ideas of founding a settlement for Quakers in Ireland, finding that his failure to do so let him look to America instead. Irish lessons again influenced colonization in the Atlantic world.
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Horning, Audrey. Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
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Focusing on Ireland and Virginia, archaeologist Horning challenges the view that Ireland was a role model for English colonization in America. In particular, despite all the negative rhetoric, the relationship with and treatment of Irish natives was very different from the one between English settlers and Native Americans. The Irish were to be accommodated into the English settlement of Ireland, something not seriously contemplated for natives in Virginia.
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Morgan, Hiram. “Mid-Atlantic Blues.” Irish Review 11 (Winter 1991–1992): 50–55.
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A short, but sharp, critique of the thesis and methodology that placed early modern Ireland in the Atlantic world. Morgan believes that Continental European models had far more influence in Ireland than did any transatlantic colonizations.
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Ohlmeyer, Jane H. “Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories.” American Historical Review 104.2 (1999): 446–462.
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The second half of the article provides a good historiographical overview of early modern Ireland in the Atlantic world.
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Quinn, David Beers. The Elizabethans and the Irish. Folger Monographs on Tudor and Stuart Civilization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
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Examines the cultural views held by the English toward the Irish in the 16th century and how these influenced some of the early English explorers and colonizers of the Atlantic world.
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Texada, David Ker. Alejandro O’Reilly and the New Orleans Rebels. Lafayette: Center for Southwest Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, 1970.
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A member of the so-called “Wild Geese,” Catholic Irishmen who left Ireland to join the Catholic armies of Europe, this study is of the Dublin-born Alexander O’Reilly. Texada illustrates the important role O’Reilly played, both militarily and politically, in the administration of Spanish Louisiana, after having earlier served in the military in Europe, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
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Peopling

The earlier sections of Miller 1985 (cited under General Overviews) provide the best overview of Irish immigration to North America before 1820. Beckles 1990 attempts to evaluate the scope and significance of Irish labor in the West Indies through the 17th century. The 18th century saw the spectacular rise of Scots-Irish migration from Ulster to the British colonies in North America, particularly to Pennsylvania and southward. Dickson 1966 remains the best comprehensive account, though efforts in Jones 1991, Hamilton 2010, Wilson and Spencer 2006, and Hofstra 2011 attempt to dig deeper into the settlement patterns and cultural impact of these Ulster Presbyterians. The best interpretive account is in Griffin 2001, which focuses on the transition from Ulster to Pennsylvania. The author highlights how integral the Ulster migration was to a creation of a British Atlantic world in the 18th century. Kerby Miller (Miller 1985) worries, though, that the native Irish numbers in America may be underestimated, because many of those who did cross the Atlantic came as single men and indentured servants, convicts, or soldiers. Those who lived through these burdens faced integrating into the dominant Anglo and Protestant colonies and lost all contact with their families and friends. They did not leave the manuscript trail that the Ulster Scots maintained through their continued connection with their church in Ireland and the continued migration of families, indeed whole communities, to North America.

Beckles, Hilary McD. “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 47.4 (1990): 503–522.
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This article is the best scholarly work on Irish labor in the West Indies. On the basis primarily of West Indian sources, Beckles finds that the Irish faced very tough conditions on islands such as Barbados and often reacted with insubordination and even organized violence.
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Dickson, R. J. Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775. Ulster-Scot Historical Series 1. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
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The starting point for all those interested in Scots-Irish immigration to North America. Dickson provides valuable statistics on this migration but also tries to explain why such large numbers left Ulster for America in the 18th century. Republished as recently as 2001 (Belfast, Northern Ireland: Ulster Historical Foundation).
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Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
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Focused on the Scots-Irish in Pennsylvania, Griffin uses Ulster and American records to show how much cultural baggage they brought with them and the resulting hostility they faced from the settled “English” population in America. Ultimately, they claimed rights as British subjects to deal with this opposition, thus becoming a key element in the making of a British Atlantic world.
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Hamilton, Marsha L. “The Irish and the Formation of British Communities in Early Massachusetts.” In The Irish in the Atlantic World. Edited by David T. Gleeson, 229–250. Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
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This essay establishes that Irish immigration to America extended into the Puritan colonies, indicating their important contribution to the heterogeneity of the British colonies. The Irish proved to be a model of social integration.
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Hofstra, Warren R., ed. Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.
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This collection of essays counters the popular image of the rugged, individualistic “Scotch Irish” settler in America, instead emphasizing that they were much more dependent on community and church for survival than on their own wits.
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Jones, Maldwyn A. “The Scotch-Irish in British America.” In Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. Edited By Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, 284–313. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
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In a book focused on the cultural margins of British America, Jones’s essay establishes the differences between the Ulster Presbyterian settlers and English setters, which, despite common British antecedents, were real and strong. Reprinted as recently as 2006.
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Wilson, David A., and Mark G. Spencer, eds. Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World: Religion, Politics and Identity. Ulster and Scotland 4. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2006.
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This broad collection of essays assesses the effect of Ulster Presbyterians on the economy and society of colonial North America and the early United States.
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Economics, Politics, and Culture

Truxes 2004 is the starting point for understanding Ireland’s economic role in the Atlantic world up to 1783. Despite certain restrictions on Irish exports placed by mercantilist British legislation, Irish trade thrived with British colonies in the Americas and with the European continent, the latter maintained by the close links between Catholics and coreligionists and exiled relatives in France, Spain, and Portugal. Irish businessmen in the port cities and towns of Ireland thrived too on the back of this trade and had well-established links around the Atlantic world, something that paved the way for mass migration. MacMaster 2009 indicates, for example, how far and deep Scots-Irish merchants’ business interests were from Boston to Charleston, creating shipping links between Ireland and the east coast of North America, thereby providing important routes for immigration. The extent of Irish trade with the Atlantic world went beyond what would become the United States, with a number of Irish businessmen having interests in commodities such as sugar in the West Indies. As a result, Rodgers 2004 highlights how some were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The Atlantic world also provided opportunities in non-slave-produced commodities. Mannion 2001 describes, for example, how Catholic merchants became heavily involved in the fishing industries of Newfoundland, thereby creating a new middle-class elite at home in Ireland as well as in settlements in Atlantic Canada. This myriad of links through trade and migration generated important cultural and political effects. In cultural terms the religion of the American colonies was deeply affected by the large influx of Irish, with, for example, Ulster immigrants founding the Presbyterian Church. Hoffman and Mason 2000 points to the significance of prominent Irish immigrants to the Catholic Church’s early leadership in what became the United States. Politically, the ideas of the American Revolution, influenced in some ways by the ideas of Ulster Presbyterians, filtered back across the Atlantic, which, in part, led to the founding of the Society of United Irishmen and brought Ireland into the age of revolution in the Atlantic world. Doyle 1981 outlines the role of the Irish and Ireland in the American Revolution, while Whelan 2004 explains the impact on Ireland of Atlantic revolutionary ideas. Wilson 1998 indicates how these radical ideas came back across the Atlantic to the United States after the failure of the United Irishmen to end British rule in Ireland.

Bric, Maurice J. Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 1760–1800. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2008.
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An examination of the large Irish presence in colonial and early republic Philadelphia makes the valid claim that the Irish set the pattern of how the United States would absorb immigrants. The city also influenced events in Ireland as it became a hotbed for Irish opposition to British rule.
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Doyle, David Noel. Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820. Dublin, Ireland: Mercier, 1981.
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The first comprehensive study of the Irish role in the American Revolution and how it, and the founding of the United States, influenced politics in Ireland.
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Hoffman, Ronald, and Sally D. Mason. Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500–1782. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
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A lengthy investigation of an Irish Catholic family in colonial Maryland, highlighting how the British Empire in America provided opportunities for those dispossessed in Ireland and how Catholics negotiated life in an overtly Protestant area.
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MacMaster, Richard K. Scotch-Irish Merchants in Colonial America. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2009.
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Traces the myriad and substantial economic links between Ulster and colonial America, indicating the importance of Irish merchants in colonial cities for their business acumen but also for their facilitation of emigration from Ireland.
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Mannion, John. “Irish Migration and Settlement in Newfoundland: The Formative Phase, 1697–1732.” In Special Issue: The New Modern Early Newfoundland: Part One. Newfoundland Studies 17.2 (2001): 257–293.
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The most comprehensive study of early Irish settlement in Atlantic Canada, an area where Irish in Ireland and Irish immigrants could find economic opportunities in the provisioning trade.
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Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-slavery, 1645–1865. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
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The first study of Irish involvement in the slave trade and slavery indicates extensive participation of Irish businessmen in the slave trade and the commodities produced by slaves in the Americas.
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Truxes, Thomas M. Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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A thorough and detailed description of the extensive trade links between Ireland and the Atlantic world. Truxes destroys the view that British navigation acts ended trade between Ireland and Europe and the colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Originally published in 1988.
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Whelan, Kevin. “The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Edited by Kathleen Wilson, 216–238. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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A comprehensive examination of the Irish influence on political radicalism around the Atlantic world. Whelan believes that this influence was substantial and important.
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Wilson, David A. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
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Explores how Irish exiles survived in America but also how they influenced politics in America and attempted to continue having an influence on affairs back in Ireland. Reprinted as recently as 2011.
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Ireland in the Atlantic World since 1820

Despite the demise of the imperial Atlantic world in 1820, there remained for Ireland and the Irish after that date a significant Atlantic world of communications in both directions, with important effects—economic, political, and cultural—both for Ireland and America, long after 1820. The Great Famine in Ireland (1845–1855) in particular played a major role in the keeping Ireland connected to North America as millions emigrated. There are a large number of works looking at the Irish immigration and immigrants after 1820, and though most do not place the Irish in the explicit context of an Atlantic world, the migration of over four million people across the Atlantic between 1820 and 1920 had profound effects both on the host countries and the Ireland they left behind. From sending remittances home to supporting Irish nationalist movements, strong and influential transatlantic connections therefore remained.

Peopling the Atlantic World

The Napoleonic Wars (1797–1815) saw a decline in the numbers of Irish crossing the Atlantic, because of difficulties in transportation and the major demand for Irish food in Britain. That situation could have ended the integral role of Ireland in the Atlantic world, but a postwar depression meant that emigration began in earnest and continued through the 1820s and 1830s, culminating in the massive immigration of almost two million Irish to North America during the Great Famine era (1845–1855). Most settled in the United States, but many others went to Canada and some even immigrated to Argentina. Emigration continued after 1855, with over a million Irish leaving between then and 1911, with the vast majority again heading across the Atlantic. For the United States, Miller 1985 (cited under General Overviews) offers the most comprehensive account, but Kenny 2000 is the best concise history. Akenson 1985 challenges Kerby Miller’s theory of exile, and Akenson 1984 is the best study on the Irish in Canada, indicating that in Ontario, at least, the Irish did not huddle together in cities but were more likely to settle in the countryside. McKenna 1997 has the best interpretive account of the Irish in Argentina, signifying again that the Irish could settle and thrive in rural areas and also that they would go anywhere in search of opportunity. The experience of Irish women in transatlantic emigration is explored in Diner 1983 and Nolan 1989, but Irish immigrant women still await a comprehensive study.

Akenson, Donald Harman. The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984.
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A case study of the Irish in Canada, emphasizing how well the Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, settled in the countryside.
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Akenson, Donald Harman. Being Had: Historians, Evidence, and the Irish in North America. Port Credit, ON: P. D. Meany, 1985.
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Following on from his work on the Irish in Canada, Akenson gives a strong critique of the thesis of the Irish in America as exiles, blaming its origin in part on an overreliance on unrepresentative immigrant letters.
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Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 101st ser. 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
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A short introduction to the lives of Irish women in America, but the most comprehensive study available to date. Reprinted as recently as 1993.
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Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Studies in Modern History. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000.
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The best concise volume on the complete Irish experience in the United States. Kenny pays close attention to denominational and generational differences and describes how Irish immigrants created an Irish American identity for themselves.
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McKenna, Patrick. “Irish Migration to Argentina.” In The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity. Vol. 1, Patterns of Migration. Edited by Patrick O’Sullivan, 63–83. London: Leicester University Press, 1997.
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To date, the most comprehensive study of Irish immigrants in Argentina. Unlike their compatriots in the United States, they found opportunity in the countryside rather than in the cities, particularly in large-scale sheep farming. First published in 1992.
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Nolan, Janet A. Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.
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Nolan examines the period of transatlantic emigration where unmarried Irish women became the largest group leaving Ireland. Changes in marriage patterns forced many to seek a better life in America.
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The Great Famine

The potato blight that hit Ireland in 1845–1846 and helped bring about the Great Famine created the largest emigration from Ireland across the Atlantic. The death of over one million from hunger and disease depressed the Irish economy, and many Irish fled the devastated country well into the 1850s, even though the potato harvest had recovered by the earlier part of the decade. Since the organization of sesquicentennial commemorative activities of “this Great Calamity” (Kinealy 1994) in the mid-1990s, there has been an explosion of literature on the subject. Some of these works pay close attention to transatlantic aspects, ranging from the actual experience of immigrating to Canada and the United States via Liverpool (Scally 1996) to the implications that the huge influx of Irish meant for the authorities of port cities in the Atlantic world (Gallman 2000; Crowley, et al. 2012). Works focused on the ideology of the famine, such as Delaney 2012, also pay serious attention to the international implications, as does the more general Donnelly 2001. Gribben 1999 is an important collection of essays that focus directly on the Great Famine’s implications for Irish America, acknowledging important demographic, political, and cultural effects. Kelly 2014 focuses on the memory and commemorative aspects of the Irish famine in America and its contribution to the Irish American identity.

Crowley, John, William J. Smyth, and Michael Murphy, eds. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
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This comprehensive geographical study of the famine includes many interdisciplinary elements, but its 150 maps are useful for understanding the famine’s impact on Ireland but also on Atlantic world cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow, and New York City.
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Delaney, Enda. The Curse of Reason: The Great Irish Famine, 1845–1852. Dublin, Ireland: Gill & Macmillan, 2012.
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Taking a biographical approach focusing on four important figures in the Great Famine era, assistant secretary to the treasury Charles Trevelyan, archbishop John MacHale, radical nationalist John Mitchel, and landlord’s wife Elizabeth Smith, Delaney examines the use and misuse of “reason” in exacerbating and prolonging a natural disaster. This “curse of reason” led many Irish across the Atlantic, mainly at Mitchel’s insistence, to view the famine as genocide.
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Donnelly, James S., Jr. The Great Irish Potato Famine. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2001.
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Donnelly’s survey of the famine covers the main historiographical views but also carefully examines the issue around the export of foodstuffs out of Ireland in its greatest hour of need, and whether Ireland’s participation in the free trade economy of the British Empire and the Atlantic world caused the major loss of life.
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Gallman, J. Matthew. Receiving Erin’s Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845–1855. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
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Gallman shows the profound effects the mass exodus of Irish during the famine had on two cities where many of them arrived. As a result of the Irish influx, Liverpool and Philadelphia had to introduce unprecedented regulations and policies, revolutionizing government in both.
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Gribben, Arthur, ed. The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Introduction by Ruth-Ann M. Harris. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
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This collection of essays examines the impact of the famine migration on Irish immigrants already in America. It focuses on immediate reflections among the Irish and what it meant to be American in the context of the large influx of “famine Irish,” as well as on the public commemoration of the famine since the 1840s.
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Kelly, Mary C. Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
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Kelly traces the memory of the famine among the Irish in America from the mid-1850s through the late 20th century and finds it to be a major element in the construction of a distinct Irish American identity.
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Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–1852. Dublin, Ireland: Gill & Macmillan, 1994.
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This popular survey is very critical of British policy in Ireland and lays most of the culpability for the catastrophe on its leaders, especially Charles Trevelyan.
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Scally, Robert James. The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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Ostensibly the story of one group of emigrants whose landlord assisted their emigration from Ireland; Scally provides good descriptions of the transatlantic experience during the Great Famine. Thrown into the modern era, Scally finds that these premodern people found the move to America and life there very traumatic.
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Economics and Politics

As a major provider of labor to North America through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ireland remained an important element of the Atlantic economy. Way 1993, for example, shows the centrality of Irish workers to the digging of canals in the burgeoning United States. Gleeson 2001 reveals that even in the slave South, they played an important role in urban economies, especially in New Orleans, the largest export port in the United States and the vital supplier of cotton to European textile mills. Mulligan 2010 indicates, however, that as Irish men and women found opportunity in this era of free trade (particularly after the United States lowered tariffs in 1846), indigenous industries in Ireland suffered. Politically, though Ireland did not become independent until 1922, it still had an impact on transatlantic relations, especially because of Irish Americans’ continued interest in Ireland; Brown 1966 remains the best introduction. Kenny 1998, a study of the Molly Maguires in eastern Pennsylvania, shows how Irish political practices could influence American politics. Murphy 2010 gives a nuanced account of how Irish, American, and antislavery politics overlapped in the mid-19th century. Erie 1990 describes how the Irish refined and dominated urban machine politics in the late 19th century, while Nelson 2012 indicates how Irish nationalism could be influenced by events in and ideas from the Americas and South Africa.

Brown, Thomas N. Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890. Critical Periods of History. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
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Though old, this classic volume covers the high point of Irish Americans’ influence on Irish politics during the home rule movement. As a result, Irish Americans made Irish politics an important transatlantic concern both for the United States and the United Kingdom. Republished in 1980 (Westport, CT: Greenwood).
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Erie, Steven P. Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. California Series on Social Choice and Political Economy 15. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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Examining the politics of six major US cities in the 19th and 20th centuries, Erie explains how and why the Irish were successful at dominating the burgeoning urban politics of some cities but not others. First published in 1988.
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Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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The first comprehensive study of the Irish in the US South describes the important role Irish immigrants played in the urban economy and politics and how they adapted to working in a slavery economy.
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Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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A deep analysis of the “Molly Maguires,” a secret society of Irishmen in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania in the mid-19th century, which used threats of as well as actual violence in an attempt to gain better pay and conditions from mine companies. Kenny argues that the group represented a transatlantic cultural transference because the Maguires’ tactics mimicked those of Irish agrarian secret societies.
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Mulligan, William H., Jr. “The Anatomy of Failure: Nineteenth-Century Irish Copper Mining in the Atlantic and Global Economy.” In The Irish in the Atlantic World. Edited by David T. Gleeson, 38–52. Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
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An assessment of how the nascent copper industry in Ireland was destroyed by American competition in the 19th century, and how the Atlantic world provided problems as well as opportunities for the Irish.
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Murphy, Angela F. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
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A nuanced account that reveals the continuing transatlantic connections around the issues of repeal of the union between Ireland and Britain and the campaign to end slavery in the United States. Murphy demonstrates that the Irish maintained a transatlantic identity in America.
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Nelson, Bruce. Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
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To comprehend the creation of an Irish identity in the long 19th century, Nelson argues that it can be understood only by understanding how Irish nationalists defined themselves in comparison to others nations and peoples around the Atlantic world and beyond.
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Way, Peter. Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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A history of canal workers in the early United States indicates how important Irish workers were to this effort, in laying the infrastructural foundations for industrial capitalism in the United States.
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Culture

Such large numbers of Irish arriving in North America after 1820 had important cultural effects on the host society. The Catholic Church developed in the United States as an immigrant religion, with the Irish at the center of this process. Dolan 1993, Fanning 2000, and Moloney 2002 investigate the creation of a hybrid Irish American culture, while also describing (as does Williams 1996) how this new culture became an integral part of the American milieu. The propensity for parading on Irish holidays in America and how that tradition then went back to Ireland are analyzed in Cronin and Adair 2006. MacRaild 2010 examines how Irish Protestants brought their tradition with them around the Atlantic world too.

Cronin, Mike, and Daryl Adair. The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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A comprehensive study of how an Irish feast day was transformed by Irish immigrants in America into an American tradition, a version of which then returned to Ireland.
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Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
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A pioneering work (first published in 1975) that showed how vital the immigrants, especially the Irish, were to the development of the Catholic Church in America’s largest city, as well as the importance of the church to the Irish. The high visibility of Irish and German churches created a distinctly multiethnic city.
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Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. 2d ed. Irish Literature, History, and Culture. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
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A comprehensive examination of the most-important Irish American writers and how their Irishness affected their writing, as well as the major influence they had in the development of a distinctive American literature.
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MacRaild, Donald M. “The Orange Atlantic.” In The Irish in the Atlantic World. Edited by David T. Gleeson, 307–326. Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
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An analysis of how Irish Protestants brought their Orange tradition with them around the Atlantic world and adapted it to fit into the host societies where they had settled.
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Moloney, Mick. Far from the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration through Song. New York: Crown, 2002.
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An examination of how immigration affected Irish music in Ireland and America. Book includes a CD of 19th-century songs about immigration. Indicates how Irish and Irish American music cross-fertilized back and forth across the Atlantic.
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Williams, William H. A. ‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream’: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
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Using over seven hundred pieces of sheet music, Williams follows the transformation of the Irish presence in American music through the 19th century, from an image that was negative to one that was positive and was an integral part of the American cultural milieu.
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