Description

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In the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish Civil War, more than seven million Irish men and women left their homeland to begin new lives abroad. While the majority settled in the United States, Irish emigrants dispersed across the globe, many of them finding their way to another “New World,” Australia.
    Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds.  Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
“Well conceived and thoroughly researched . . . . This clearly written, thought-provoking work fulfills the considerable ambitions of comparative migration studies.”—Choice  

About the Author

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Malcolm Campbell is associate professor of history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Praise For…

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“An ambitious and bracing comparative analysis. Campbell’s study cuts across sealed national narratives and tests common assumptions about Irish emigration before and after the Great Famine.”—Eric Richards, Flinders University, Australia

“A sustained essay in comparative history, the purpose of which is to challenge facile assumptions about the Irish in America by contrasting their performance with that of emigrants of similar social, religious, and cultural origins who settled in Australia. The striking contrasts in emigrant performance in these two host countries indicate that transplanted ‘Irishness’ cannot explain the peculiarities of social, economic, and political behavior attributed to the Irish in America.”—David Fitzpatrick, Trinity College, Ireland

“One of the unfulfilled pieties of the academic history profession is that more transnational and comparative history needs to be done. Malcolm Campbell actually does transnational history, and quite brilliantly.”—Donald Harman Akenson, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario

“This volume is a brave and fascinating exercise in comparative history . . . It strikes a brave blow against the rampant exceptionalism endemic in Irish Studies . . .The history of the Irish Diaspora does not map neatly on to the history of Irish Republicanism, and it is clear from the quality of Campbell’s book that the future of the subject will be guided by that fundamental insight.”—Alexander Murdoch, History