British and Irish diasporas: Societies, cultures and ideologies

By Eamonn O' Ciardha, Kathrin Zickermann, David T. Gleeson and 3 more

People from the British and Irish Isles have, for centuries, migrated to all corners of the globe.Wherever they went, the English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and and even sub-national, supra-regional groups like the Cornish, co-mingled, blended and blurred. Yet while they gradually integrated into new lives in far-flung places, British and Irish Isle emigrants often maintained elements of their distinctive national cultures, which is an important foundation of diasporas. Within this wider context, this volume seeks to explore the nature and characteristics of the British and Irish diasporas, stressing their varying origins and evolution, the developing attachments to them, and the differences in each nation’s recognition of their own diaspora. The volume thus offers the first integrated study of the formation of diasporas from the islands of Ireland and Britain, with a particular view to scrutinizing the similarities, differences, tensions and possibilities of this approach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526127877

Eamonn O' Ciardha

Éamonn Ó Ciardha is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Ulster

Book preview

Tables

4.1 The English-, Scots- and Irish-born population of the main territories of the British Empire in 1901 and the United States in 1900

6.1 Net and gross outmigration, England & Wales and Scotland, 1861–1920

6.2 Emigration from Scotland to non-European destinations, in thousands, and as percentage, 1853–1930

6.3 Male population of the states and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the census of 3 April 1911

6.4 Female population of the states and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the census of 3 April 1911

Contributors

Tanja Bueltmann is Professor of History at Northumbria University and the author of Clubbing Together: Ethnicity, Civility and Formal Sociability in the Scottish Diaspora to 1930 (Liverpool, 2014); (with Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton) The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013); Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 1850 to 1930 (Edinburgh, 2011); and, most recently (with Donald M. MacRaild) The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester, 2017). Bueltmann was principal investigator of the ESRC-funded ‘European, Ethnic, and Expatriate’ project, and co-Investigator of the ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora’ project funded by the AHRC.

Jonathan Clark was educated at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Peterhouse and a contributor to the ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought. At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls College, and he was also a Visiting Professor at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. Latterly he was Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas. His work focuses on British and colonial American history in the ‘long eighteenth century’, but extends both backward and forward in time; it deals especially with the relations between political thought, religion and politics, and includes attention to the role of religion as a political mobiliser and as a source of division in social identities. His best-known books are English Society 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 1983, 2000) and The Language of Liberty 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 2004); his Thomas Paine, a study of the political, social and religious thought of England's greatest revolutionary, was published in 2018.

David T. Gleeson is Professor of American History at Northumbria University. He is the author of The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill NC, 2001), The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill NC, 2013) and ‘Ireland in the Atlantic world’, Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford, 2015), as well as the editor of the essay collection The Irish in the Atlantic World (Columbia SC, 2010).

Donald M. MacRaild is Professor of British and Irish History and Head of Humanities at the University of Roehampton. He has written or edited fourteen books. He recently wrote (with Kyle Hughes) Ribbon Societies in 19th Century Ireland and Britain: The Persistence of Tradition (Liverpool, 2018), co-authored (with Tanja Bueltmann) The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester, 2017) and co-edited (with Tanja Bueltmann and David Gleeson) Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2000 (Liverpool, 2012). Don was Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in 2010–11 and 2015–16. He also has written extensively on the Irish diaspora. He also has won major project funding from the AHRC, ESRC and Leverhulme (twice).

Graeme Morton is Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee and was previously the inaugural Scottish Studies Foundation Chair at the University of Guelph. With research interests in nationalism, national identity and diasporic studies, his recent publications include William Wallace: A National Tale (Edinburgh, 2014), The Scottish Diaspora (with T. Bueltmann and A. Hinson) (Edinburgh, 2013), Ourselves and Others: Scotland 1832–1914 (Edinburgh, 2012) and Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples (co-edited with D. Wilson) (Kingston and Montreal, 2013). Graeme is editor (post-1688) of the Scottish Historical Review and past editor of the International Review of Scottish Studies (2005–13). His current research examines the effects of meteorological variation and climate change on historical patterns of migration.

Éamonn Ó Ciardha has published extensively on law and order, popular culture, cultural history, the outlaw and the use of Irish-language sources for Irish history. Formerly a Research Assistant at the University of Aberdeen and the Royal Irish Academy, he has held visiting professorships at the University of Toronto, the University of Notre Dame, the University of the Saarland, the University of Vienna and Framingham State University. He is a Senior Lecturer in History at Ulster University. Éamonn is author of the critically acclaimed Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002). He also edited (with Micheál Ó Siochrú) The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice (Manchester, 2012).

Philip Payton is Professor of History at Flinders University and Emeritus Professor of Cornish and Australian Studies at the University of Exeter (where he was Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies from 1991 to 2013). Recent books include The Maritime History of Cornwall (ed. with Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe) (Exeter, 2014), Australia in the Great War (London, 2015), One & All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia (Adelaide, 2016), Emigrants and Historians: Essays in Honour of Eric Richards (ed. Adelaide, 2017), and A History of Sussex (Lancaster, 2017).

Siobhan Talbott is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Keele University, having previously held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Manchester and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2010. Talbott's research interests lie in early modern British, European and Atlantic economic and social history. She examines influences on patterns of trade and commercial activity, particularly during periods of war and political change. Her work focuses on the actions of individuals and the importance of local and regional contexts in maintaining commercial links during periods of upheaval, examining the construction of commercial networks, communities and identities. Talbott's work on Scottish and British relationships with France has won several prizes, including the IHR's Pollard Prize in 2011. Her first monograph, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London, 2014), was awarded the 2016 Senior Hume Brown Prize for the best first book in Scottish History.

Introduction: British and Irish diasporas: societies, cultures and ideologies

Donald M. MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann and J.C.D. Clark

Migrations, trade, settlement, and corresponding flows of ideas, beliefs and cultures, have been shaping human societies since the earliest times.¹ In the period from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, a globalising world of ‘thickening connections across national boundaries’² framed the growing British sphere of influence. The layers of that influence were many and varied, and intertwined the islands’ peoples, whose religious roots and migratory experiences cut across apparent national lines. The expansion of England that drove the emergence of a unifying Britishness first developed at home and resulted in conflicts, both religious and territorial, against the Celtic countries, and between Protestants and Catholics. Religious conflicts saw, at times, both Catholics and Puritans excluded from the ideology that shaped the expansive ambitions of the English. It is in this context that we look not just at migrations – the movement of people – but at diasporas: that is, communities of people with shared experiences and old homeland links that shape their lives long after they leave their homelands. These diasporas were about much more than shipping lanes and population transfer; they were sometimes rooted in a common culture, some in a shared ideology, many in a co-religious commonality. For some British and Irish folk, exile, flight, grievance and disagreement shaped their identities.

We show in this volume that exile, victimhood and imposed or self-ascribed difference (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) framed many diasporas emanating from the British and Irish Isles from the 1500s onwards. For the early modern period in particular many of those departing were religious refugees, both British and Irish, English as well as Scots. Even later, indentured labourers, Jacobin radicals and Chartists, and displaced handicraft workers, were, to differing degrees, victims. While these types of victim diasporas from the British and Irish Isles were not the same as those of the Jewish exile or African slaves who were forcefully shipped across the Atlantic, some of our groups faced real personal danger if they did not flee repression. At varying times, the harshest possible punishments hung over English Catholics and Protestants, Irish and Scottish Jacobites, United Irishmen and Jacobin radicals. The extent of their victimhood should not be exaggerated over the long duration, but neither should it be ignored. In addressing these and other issues, we attempt to complicate the picture of diaspora-formation by addressing early modern religious and military diasporas on the continent, as well as seaborne settlements in North America and beyond. In so doing, the volume provides the first integrated study of the formation of national or ethnic diasporas from the islands of Ireland and Britain, with a view to scrutinising the similarities, differences, tensions and possibilities of this approach to island history.³

While Britain was not alone in propagating expansion – territorial acquisition was an ambition shared by most major European powers – ultimately, none was to come close to the range and number of settlements or sustained colonisation programmes of the British. They built an empire, a wider British World,⁴ by establishing colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australasia, commercial entrepôts in Asia and informal economic domination in diverse locations around the globe. Neo-Britons and neo-Irish in the colonies did not exist in isolation but became part of transnational imperial networks. Communications systems emerged along migration pathways and connected exiles and settlers across long distances through shared roots, a shared culture and common structures, such as political or educational systems. For us, one of the key features of a diaspora is that peoples who had never lived in or seen their familial or community homeland still maintained active association with it. Although far-flung, these were real as well as ‘imagined’ communities.⁵

Ubiquitous migration is not itself an argument for the certainty of diaspora. For one thing, as the early chapters of this book show, British and Irish diasporas were not initially only maritime in nature; important streams, such as the Puritans in the Low Countries, English and Irish Catholics across Europe, and the Scots in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, were significantly continental in frame. Moreover, even where seaborne migrations became more important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nature of overseas migration was not the same for all of the island nations. The empire may have been English or British in conception and implementation, with 350,000 English settling in colonial America in the seventeenth century; yet, in the eighteenth century, Irish and German emigrants outnumbered the English settling there.⁶ For these groups the sense of connection to a country of origin, a sense of nationhood even outside of the homeland, was the active agent that linked them, whether religious or military refugees in early modern Europe, or second-generation Irish nationalist activists in mid-nineteenth-century America. Equally, as this volume plainly shows, not all diasporas, especially in the early modern period, were rooted in nationhood or nationalism. These modernist notions do not apply to, for example, sixteenth-century Catholic exiles, whom Clark reveals here.

Notions that there were British diasporas in colonies they founded have been challenged in an important recent study. Constantine's pioneering essay on settlement and diaspora-formation in the Anglo-world carefully frames the peopling of these new worlds in terms of the migration of English-speaking British and Irish peoples, as distinguished from the subsequent diaspora-formations of non-English-speakers from Europe and Asia.⁷ For him, settlers (the British and Irish) constructed colonial or national territories in which subsequent non-British/Irish settlers (say from Europe or Asia) formed diasporas. This is a suggestive approach: one which fits into a wider, important development in the historiography. Where older studies of the colonies and dominions stressed the importance of the rise of post-colonial nation-states, newer thinking, such as Constantine's, stresses the continued importance of ‘the lingering appeal of empire culturally as well as politically until late in the twentieth century’.⁸ Such views lay at the heart of ideas brought under the umbrella of a ‘British World’. Since then, the British World has yielded several essay collections and a dedicated journal,⁹ while the most recent study of religions within a related compass emphasises a ‘Greater Ireland’.¹⁰

Constantine's position potentially undermines any contention that the original English-speaking settlers in the colonies may have formed diasporas. This argument also chimes with the idea that because the Anglo-culture formed by these people was primarily English, and so was the very culture against which diasporic peoples defined themselves,¹¹ they, the English, could not express the ethnicity which later settlers expressed. The English, in other words, were ethnically invisible. Even if we accept this approach to English emigration, it still leaves open the possibility that other streams of emigrants from the British and Irish Isles could themselves be formed contra the dominant Anglo-culture of the colonies. Certainly, the Irish in particular were quick to present themselves against the English, Protestant-dominated, elite culture of the US and the settler colonies. Some exponents of ethnic history have gone so far as to describe the settlement journeys of some Europeans, including the Irish, as a struggle for acceptance into ‘whiteness’.¹² Lake and Reynolds's important transnational consideration of ‘Whiteness’ makes it clear, however, that the ‘global colour line’ was drawn between white Europeans and indigenous peoples, not between whites themselves.¹³ While the Irish clearly had more challenging entry points and access ways into US life than the English, diasporic consciousness (i.e. English sense of being part of their own global community) is no longer viewed simply as a synonym for migration nor as restricted to suffering, though the term has been used most expressly to describe exile and victimhood, principally for the Jewish people, but also Africans, Armenians and others.¹⁴ Let us now consider the British and Irish specifically.

British and Irish foundations

Diasporas were actively forged from within the cultures of emigrants. In turn, these emigrations were first and foremost functions of political and religious conflicts, economic imperialism and of related territorial expansions. This was certainly the case in the modern period, from after the first Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the Americas. New Spain, New France, New Holland, New Sweden, New England, Nova Scotia, or the labelling of the islands of New Zealand initially for Ulster, Leinster and Munster, are names which attest to the spread of European engagement with the idea and practice of colonisation and settlement, and, through them, the potential for wealth and prestige.¹⁵ In the British Isles, a further layer of colonisation also was one of the first, most persistent and certainly the most proximate to the people themselves. What Hechter called ‘internal colonisation’ was a precursor to many English venture schemes of the colonial settlements in America. In other cases, internal colonisation was a partner to external colonisation.¹⁶ It was often undertaken by the same people. Those who held lands in the Irish plantations – Raleigh, Chichester and others – also had interests in the Americas.¹⁷ The continuing conquest of Ireland brought new determination to end the persistence of Irish opposition through the plantation of Britons – Scots as well as English – in Ulster especially.

From the perspective of migration, rather than colonisation, the peoples of all of the islands and nations of the Atlantic archipelago embodied the early modern excitement for overseas expansion. Population growth, expert propaganda and schemes to send indentured and convict labour, each fuelled the fires of emigration to the Americas.¹⁸ A little later seasonal work opportunities, such as those offered by the fur trade in British North America, played their part.¹⁹ The emigrations of Britons and Irish post-dated the mass movement of Portuguese and Spanish peoples, but continued in vastly larger numbers long after movements from the Mediterranean powers had been halted by imperial decline and loss of territorial influence. Critically, these mass movements of peoples from Britain and Ireland were almost all-encompassing: English, Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Scots, people from the metropolis of London, or the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and North, to those from remote parts of the Highlands, Catholics as well as Protestants. Few regions had no emigrants to the New World, and few classes were excluded either.

These migrations also closely shaped relations between the nations of the British and Irish Isles. In part, this was the result of English imperialism from a heartland around London and the south of England, first through Hechter's ‘Celtic fringe’, and then on through the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia.²⁰ Processes of subjugation are implied, but this assumption simplifies realities. While the Gaelic and Catholic Irish struggled against these processes, settler English and Scots-Irish in Ireland shared in them, quickly forming hybrid peoples who were both Irish and British. Critically, they were loyal to Britain and willing to venture in the name of the monarch. After the failure of the Scots’ Darien scheme²¹ and, by extension, Scotland's own imperial dream, the Act of Union ensured that the Scots similarly became partners in empire – in fact, more strongly so than did the Irish. Arguably, the Scots had a greater influence on migration and settlement on these united terms than would have been possible had Darien succeeded and the Act of Union not occurred.

Yet wherever migrants from the British and Irish Isles went in combination or separately – and they went in their millions – the Irish, Scots and English, Welsh and Cornish, co-mingled, blended and blurred. In so doing, they created new identities as neo-Britons, neo-Irish, neo-Scots – persons who were colonials, new nationals, and yet still linked to their old country and home nations. Critically, they could also hold multiple identities. Therefore, while they gradually integrated into new lives in far-flung places around the globe, British and Irish emigrants also perpetuated elements of their distinctive national cultures in music, literature, saints’ days, and broader, diffuse interactions with fellow nationals. While this could be positive, bringing together British and Irish Isle cultures in unique new ways, one feature of their co-migration and co-mingling, on occasion, was that old-world conflicts also went with them.

The specific settling of neo-Britons, and their related social activities and cultural practices, have been the subject of strikingly variant historiographies. On the English, until recently, there has been next to nothing: as the largest migrant group, but seemingly without distinct cultural markers to set them apart, they have been rarely recognised as a distinct group.²² The Welsh are often hidden simply because of their comparatively low numbers and close association with the English, for they are frequently lumped together in censuses and the like under ‘England and Wales’. The Scots were more apparent in this respect, with significant stress laid on their contributions to building and maintaining the British Empire, as well as their distinctive impact in different host societies. Today, debates on the Scottish national question generate new interest in the idea of a Scottish diaspora.²³ But it has been the Irish who, for decades, have been washed over by a torrent of works, including detailed migration profiles and studies of migrant life post-migration, as well as matters concerning the role of religion in Irish communities abroad – a scholarship generated in particular by American ethnic historians. This variety and variance is important to understand because it relates directly to the idea of how the nations of the British and Irish Isles came to view themselves as through the prism of overseas expansion and empire.

From an early point in Irish history – especially from the ‘Flight of the Earls’ in 1607 –²⁴forced emigration created a national exile narrative, and this still strongly informs Irish self-identification. We see this in Ó Ciardha's chapter here. National writers in Ireland, in the wake of the Great Famine, acknowledged the vital role played by Irish exiles in shaping Irish identities at home, and abroad. A.M. Sullivan, assistant editor and later editor of the Nation from the 1850s until the 1880s, viewed the reluctant exile as the model of Irish ingenuity (in so doing he expressed ideas of contemporary political economy and the loss of human capital as much as ideas of national sentiment).²⁵ For England, the eminent imperial historian and Victorian commentator J.R. Seeley considered the absence of such ideas at home in England as no great surprise, since, for him, ‘the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia’.²⁶ Since the failures of the Darien scheme in the late seventeenth century, and through military adventuring and partnership in revolution, the Scots, too, could point to the eminent actions of its people abroad in shaping how Scots at home saw themselves. As nabob wealth flowed in, the Scots could not seriously question their connection to imperial expansion. Within this wider context we find scholars, such as Tom Devine (on Scotland), J.R.C. Young (on England) and Declan Kiberd (on Ireland), who have pointed to the transnational link between homeland and new-land, refracted through the prism of migration, return, travelling, communication and the activities of what today are often called diasporas.²⁷

Let us consider the slippery meaning of this term now.

The varied applications of diaspora

For the most part, ‘diaspora’ has been deployed as a collective noun: an umbrella term to draw together all those who left given national or colonial territories for whatever reasons. More specifically, ‘diaspora’ has been framed in terms of the movement of people, particularly including movements that were the result of forced dispersal and exile, the latter associated too with victimhood, which thus emerged as key criteria for diasporas. For some, such as Jews or the millions of Africans in the Slave Trade, these are critical parameters indeed. However, Akenson's most recent work explains how even in the Jewish case there is conflict between the Jewish diaspora which was forced into exile (for 2,000 years before the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948), and those who voluntarily live outside Israel today.²⁸ For Akenson, even within scholarship on this most diasporic group, ‘mushiness in meaning was a prerequisite for popularity’.²⁹

Clearly, this problem is not exclusive to the Jewish case: it is amplified by a much wider use of the term in present scholarship. Here diasporas are much more liberally described – too liberally in fact, as seemingly every nation has a diaspora now. There are two questions here: why has this happened, and does this terminological shift make sense?³⁰ In some cases we can see that the term has become so general as to be inadequate as a unifying term – for instance to describe Ireland's synchronically and diachronically diverse population movements. Enda Delaney is correct to argue that ‘diaspora implies, even superficially, a unity of purpose’; but the truth is that Ireland (like Italy or Britain) sent forth many diasporas.³¹ At the same time, scholars such as Rogers Brubaker and Cairns Craig have rightly questioned the validity of the diaspora concept, arguing it has lost value through its ubiquitous application to all kinds of migratory experiences.³²

The path forward is to refine our definitions to focus both on those who were victims forced into flight and those who maintained diaspora as a result of a sense of connection and community in the absence of that experience. The Irish are well established in the literature as a victim group, whether we focus on the effects of English colonialism over many centuries, or set our sights on natural disasters, such as the Great Famine, which were made worse by the British government's callous mismanagement of relief efforts. We also show, however, that English Catholics as well as Irish ones were forced into exile, and that English workers forced into economic redundancy by technological advancement also constituted types of victim diasporas, albeit in far less dramatic ways than other peoples. At the same time, our study looks at how groups other than English Catholics, Puritans or the poor Irish also demonstrated what we term ‘diasporic consciousness’. Even those like Scottish or English industrial workers or capitalists, for example, maintained strong public rituals of national identity for decades and even centuries after they, or their forebears, left their homelands: saints’ days, pipe bands, folk festivals and Highland games are all added to what we view as cultural manifestations of belonging. The chapters in this collection follow necessarily varying emphases to enable this focused refinement.

All historians are concerned with problems of empirical evidence: we are no different; studying diasporas is no different. We are mindful of the words of Kevin Kenny who, in a highly influential piece on the Irish diaspora, once declared that ‘historians can study diaspora discursively only to the extent that the surviving evidence permits’, going on to suggest that ‘it is difficult to find traces of diasporic sensibility among the poor and minimally literate who constitute the bulk of most mass migrations’.³³ This is, of course, true. But similar points were once made about ‘history from below’ or about women's history, and the challenge has been overcome in these fields of inquiry. In more general terms, it should be remembered that studying the past from ‘surviving evidence’ is precisely what historians aim to do. The problems of diaspora history are the problems of history writ large.

In this respect, Chowdhury's conception of three types of diaspora is very helpful: first, the one of common identity, of shared national or ethno-national origins: Irish, Scots or Welsh; Cornish, English or Northern; Catholic, Protestant or Quaker, say. Or, secondly, an identity that deliberately is one reflecting multiple layers of connections, such as is the case for those who choose British or opt to employ it together with another identity. Chowdhury's observation that diaspora means participation, whereby membership is declared and action in the name of the diaspora is taken, is helpful in this respect. The action of naming, enhancing and promoting one's identity as a member of this or that global community, a diaspora, is the key. But Chowdhury also sees a third definition: as a metaphor for both ‘belonging’ and ‘unbelonging’; a declaring of homelessness and exile, simultaneously with suggestions of membership of a group whose members are all similarly situated.³⁴ Certainly, memories had to be empowered in order for shared cultures to transmit transnationally; for diasporas to exist, cultural time-depth and geographical range were necessary partners. How these memories of diaspora circulate transnationally has been the subject of important new works.³⁵

Chowdhury's observations naturally point to the value of multiple locations of study, which we see in all of the chapters here. Scholars in our fields find themselves comparing: Scottish and Irish Jacobites, émigré Catholics from all quarters, the Cornish and Welsh miners, the English customs and character of Canada and New Zealand, and many others. The comparison, thus enabled, potentially applies not only across groups of people, but across these groups in different locations. But in our quest to comprehend the meaning of diaspora it may not be enough simply to develop analyses in multiple locations.³⁶ What is certain is that we must move beyond bipolar comparisons.³⁷ New cultural historians, in stressing transnational rather than nation-based approaches or comparisons, have moved against the national units of measurement and strict comparisons nation by nation.³⁸ They have de-centred traditional narratives, creating a new language of shifting ‘diaspora spaces’ in place of the once hegemonic nation.³⁹ In such a formulation, the elitist, imperialist assumptions of ‘metropole’ versus ‘colony’ are removed, except as anthropological memories of a dead language and culture dating to when the nation was paramount. In some senses, this postmodernist ‘turn’ is understandable. Emotions and ideas are not restricted by national boundaries, and while state policies can (and do) profoundly affect the migration patterns and social and political formations we now associate with diasporas, they can only limit, not exclude, the transnational transmission of cultures. For historians, however, this cultural turn in diaspora studies raises the level of analysis from the empirical to the abstract and intensifies the problems of developing a research agenda that will be recognised as producing ‘real’ histories.

It is through clearer definition and identification of how a diaspora is measured that it is possible to utilise the term more fully and ensure that its distinct utility in migration history is fully exploited. How can that be achieved? This collection highlights that a key definition of diaspora is the presence of transnational communication between members of these British and Irish Isle national or regional communities. Communication is key not only between homeland and new-land to maintain connections, but also between communities in different diaspora locations, even if to facilitate only an imagined community – a Scot in the US might not have known a Scot in New Zealand, but could well have read of shared celebrations on St Andrew's Day in newspapers. Therefore, each author is challenged to take a dynamic approach and to test empirically the frameworks for not just a description of diaspora, but also for an empirical demonstration of diasporic connection and consciousness. It is through that demonstration that diasporas can become tangible.⁴⁰

Interrogating diasporas in this way opens up a key problematic of the volume: how the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic identity’ are used. Like ‘class’ and ‘gender’, these concepts are often deployed indiscriminately and, among historians at least, have become largely accepted and unquestioned series of affinities and affective relations based on common origins. Scholars now often apply ethnicity or ethnic identity to national, religious, regional and many otherwise quite varied groups, with the result that homogeneity is imputed to immigrants and emigrants without actual testing of their togetherness. What is also often neglected is that ethnicity can be both active and passive: individuals and groups can choose actively to express an ethnicity, a particular ethnic identity (e.g. through membership of an ethnic association), but they can also passively receive outside ascription as ethnic, usually with negative connotations of difference or inferiority.⁴¹ Therefore, a second critical aim of this collection is to historicise ethnicity/ethnic identity, asking how did the groups and peoples we explore become nations, when did a language and culture that might suit the ascription ‘ethnic’ come into being, and how was it employed among those living beyond the home nation? Donna Gabaccia has shown how emigrants in the United States who were from pre-unification Italy began to refer to themselves as Italians – an active choice on their part – even though, when they left, Italy was not a nation-state and so they were without that level of singular ethnicity. The absence of the national (at least until 1861) made the term ‘diaspora’ problematic for early migrants: they were Venetians, Sicilians and Calabrians. After the nation was formed, they became Italians as well as, for example, Sicilians, and the term ‘diaspora’ then took on explanatory cogency.⁴²

Such modernist notions of nation-building and diaspora do not serve us well for the early modern period. While modern diasporas are often associated with nations, we also show (especially in Clark's contribution) that many were not. In the context of our volume, Catholic exiles from early modern England did not go on to form nations elsewhere, but instead integrated into existing Catholic networks on the continent.

Ultimately, what the existing work highlights is the overlap and connection between groups from the British and Irish Isles – quite naturally because of shared history and culture, but also often very practically in activities and joint initiatives. This blurring between these groups highlights one motivation for setting out this volume deliberately to examine together the diasporas that emanated from the British and Irish Isles. So let us turn to the content of the collection.

Major themes of the volume

The present volume seeks to establish the origins of the diasporas formed by people of the British and Irish Isles – the underpinning and foundational migratory flows, as well as their key characteristics. Generally, scholars also to some degree assess the applicability of the concept of diaspora to their respective national or regional groups and major historical themes. While the authors, here, have applied varying interpretations and conceptualisations of the term ‘diaspora’, all are united in actually interrogating it. Such assessment is critical to enhance our understanding of what diaspora can and cannot do in terms of furthering clarity through deepening analysis.

The express aim of the volume is thus to move beyond that approach to offer perspectives on how diaspora can – or cannot – become a tool of inquiry into migrant worlds, continued connections between the old world left behind and new worlds settled. We also seek to understand the term's contemporary purchase in an age of consciously ethnic identity politics. The volume stresses the varying foundations and evolution of the British and Irish diasporas, the developing attachments to them and the differences in each nation's recognition of its own diasporas. The volume explores units that have been or are nations or states in the modern period, including England, Scotland and Wales. It also explores a diaspora driven by religious hatred, the Catholic diaspora. We acknowledge that Wales sits somewhat between, having not been politically distinct from England since the sixteenth century, while for Scotland the caesura of the Union of 1707 brings up interesting questions about distinct diaspora patterns before and after that watershed. Moreover, and as we indicated in the discussion above, reference to the national level to identify and explore diasporas can only get us so far. What about groups that behave like diasporas, but do not have a national referent? To probe this the volume explores not only issues of regional identity and loyalty, for example among migrants from Yorkshire, but also includes Cornwall as a distinct diaspora. While neither a nation nor a state in the same period, Cornwall has ancient claims to the kind of ethnic and linguistic difference from England that sustains other diasporas. In assembling the present content, we also suggest that Cornwall, as it sits in the half-light, is more clearly distinct than other counties in England, with an historiography of difference which supports the suggestion. Moreover, we also note that the factors of language, culture and religion made the Welsh diaspora very clearly distinct from the English, even if political arrangements at home suggested otherwise.

Importantly, an argument running through several chapters is that even old unitary states such as England were, in the modern period, less homogeneous than applications of ethnicity would have us believe: northern and southern, urban and rural, but especially Catholic and Protestant differences could militate strongly against a singular identity. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, the additional factor of internal colonisation by a powerful neighbour, England, may have precipitated a singular ethnicity, but here, too, religious, regional and provincial cleavages were pronounced. We thus find ourselves wondering whether Seeley was right in seeing true national identities – especially reduced, that is, simplified, ethnic identities – as being forged overseas, where homeland cleavages were less important in sometimes hostile new communities than common origins.⁴³ Seeley was a Victorian positivist who largely ignored the role of religion in the formation of national identities, whereas, by contrast, historians in the last thirty years or so have given a huge amount of attention to it. Certainly, a core set of questions around ethnicity and its historical emergence will frame the chapters outlined below to enable a tightening of the analytical purchase of the concept of diaspora.

The chapters covering the earlier periods shape our principal understanding straight away, namely that the preconditions of diaspora were well established by the eighteenth century. If the nineteenth century was David Armitage's pre-history of globalisation,⁴⁴ then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laid out crucial preconditions. This does not mean that the eighteenth century was merely an entrée to the centuries that followed. The earlier period had its own specific conditions and developments and deserves equal interpretive weight with the later period, and this is why we devote three substantial chapters to the pre-1800 diasporas. One of the most remarkable things about the early modern migrations from these isles, and although they were smaller in scale, is how rich and diverse they were. Clark, Ó Ciardha and Talbott, in their chapters on pre-1800 English, Scottish and Irish diaspora-formation, point not to mass migration and colonisation of the New World as a principal driver for the creation of early diasporas; instead, they locate their studies significantly in the Old World of continental Europe, and examine the ways religious émigrés sought out Catholic communities on the continent, or how military adventurers and exiles (principally Jacobites in both Scotland and Ireland) made their way to fight for Catholic monarchs. At the same time, and more generally, British and Irish holy orders, merchants and elite family networks contributed to threads of transnational activity among the peoples of both islands of the Atlantic archipelago. Clark, Ó Ciardha and Talbott all, in some way, stress the importance of military exiles and adventurers, and the role of networks of religious orders and individuals. Some of these patterns remain key in the later period, as sojourners from all parts of the British and Irish Isles made temporary homes in locations around the world, often for economic gain or to actively help build and maintain the British Empire – acting as partners in empire – as Bueltmann and Morton show in their chapter.

Clark focuses on English religious emigrants and their contribution to the European networks that represented one of England's earliest strands of diaspora. His study begins with exiled Catholics, such as Lady Lucy Herbert, who is known to us because of her study in devotion, which she wrote as a nun in Belgium, publishing her work in Bruges. Even in this early period the level of mobility was significant. Clark's chapter identifies a forgotten phenomenon, but one extensive in time (from the 1530s to the 1790s) and in space (across continental Europe). That also holds true for those in the military. Ó Ciardha also brings such military perspective into his assessment, revealing much more striking patterns of enduring identity for the Irish than we find for either the English or Scottish cases covering the same period. The point is clear: the military flight into Europe of clan chiefs and their officers, men and families, reflected the onset of renewed, altered and deepened British colonisation. For the plantation of Munster and of Ulster in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based on lands seized from these Irish lords.

Talbott's chapter begins by charting the expansion of scholarly interest in the early modern migration of Scots to continental Europe. This has been welcome, not least because scholars have considered a broad range of questions, including that of return migration. In light of the proliferation of movements and range of destinations in which early modern Scots settled, they have been described as a ‘diasporic people’, but use of the term ‘diaspora’, argues Talbott, is problematic for early modern Scots. In recognition of that, the chapter explores the range of motives that influenced the decision of early modern Scots to leave their homeland, investigating patterns in the destinations chosen. Talbott then goes on to examine how migrants accessed a variety of support mechanisms – some of which relate to measurable strength of diaspora ties – and reflect on the concept of ‘return migration’ and the role of ‘identity’. Ultimately, Talbott's exploration of the variety of Scottish migrants that were present in early modern continental Europe, advocates that the early modern ‘Scottish diaspora’ be viewed not as a homogeneous entity, but as a collection of individuals with different aims, objectives and experiences.

The question as to what extent we might speak of homogeneous diaspora groups is not only relevant to the Scots in the early modern period, however, but also comes through in Bueltmann and Morton's chapter. Starting with the Union of 1707, the key concern of the chapter is how, after the Union, the Scots were not simply participants in empire but partners in empire. By adopting that role, and although we can find substantial evidence that attests to strong invocations of Scottishness, there was a strong element of Britishness in the making of the Scottish diaspora. Bueltmann and Morton begin their discussion with a section focused on exploring further how identity is a critical measure and structuring principle of the Scottish diaspora: diaspora is not only a term that denotes the movement of people, their transnational connections and continued homeland affinity – though these characteristics are essential to it – but is also in itself an identity concept. Following this theoretical conceptualisation, they turn to examining how the British Empire shaped the migration choices of Scots from 1707, establishing the timing and geographical scope of the Scots’ partnership in empire, but also some uniform characteristics across sites, for instance the gendered nature of the partnership as men were more likely to be involved. The final section of their chapter then goes on to scrutinise how, across geographies and time, the partnership of Scots in empire actually manifested itself, exploring, for instance, the role of Scots in British imperial armies.

Identity, and how it relates to the making of diasporas, brings with it a plethora of further nuances that are important to recognise. What we often find too, for example, is a concentration on nostalgia: an idea that was not conceptualised until the 1790s and which was strikingly absent from the Catholic diaspora which Clark discusses. An obvious example of this is the way in which Irishness has been grasped by disparate peoples in the relatively recent explosion of interest in the celebration of St Patrick's Day and the marketing of related Irish kitsch as well as authentic Irish products. Public displays of ethnic identity were common to all immigrant groups, since on saints’ days, Scots, Irish, Welsh and English paraded between church services and dinners, albeit not in the significant number seen among Irish Catholics ‘wherever green was worn’.⁴⁵ But, as Gleeson shows in his chapter, such activity could also be tied up with politics. There certainly existed a nostalgic Irish-American militant nationalism that supported the