On Every Tide
The making and remaking of the Irish world
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- CHF 6.00
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- CHF 6.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
ON EVERY TIDE is a wide-ranging and challenging reassessment of the Irish diaspora. Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research, and his own career-long engagement with the complexities of Irish identity, Sean Connolly reveals the forces that compelled millions of Irish men and women to abandon their homeland, and explores their new lives in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
What emerges is an Irish story, but also a chapter in world history. Irish emigrants fled a society blighted by poverty and lack of opportunity. But they also became part of a massive population movement, driven by the requirements of an ever more interconnected world economy, that transported the adventurous and the desperate to new parts of the globe. What distinguishes the Irish from tens of millions of other European immigrants is the position they established in their new homes. Initially treated as a despised and exploited underclass, they created a commanding position, in politics, in the labour movement, and, by the twentieth century, as cultural icons.
From his starting point in the grim realities of Famine and social crisis, Sean Connolly takes the reader forward into the twentieth century, when Ireland itself has become a receiver rather than an exporter of emigrants, and when a reimagined Irishness has become a commodity to be marketed to a global audience. On Every Tide plays directly into wider, contemporary debates about migration, as well as offering a unique and distinctive view of two hundred years of Irish history.
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Irish immigrants who left home in the 19th and 20th centuries created and maintained a "shared transnational culture," according to this sweeping account. Historian Connolly (Divided Kingdom) traces to the roots of Ireland's "outward movement" to 1816, when the eruption of an Indonesian volcano created a "worldwide ecological crisis," and traces migration patterns through the Great Famine (1845–1851) and the first and second world wars, detailing how Ireland's economic hardships, combined with the abundance of opportunities abroad, fostered immigrants' desire to make the long and often arduous journey to Australia, Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere. He also shows how religion simultaneously united Irish migrants separated by geography and alienated them within their new locales; describes the violent draft protests, labor disputes, and political rivalries that gave rise to enduring perceptions of the Irish as "an alien and threatening presence" in 19th-century America; and analyzes how grief over the loss of "ethnic identity and historical memory" provoked support for Irish republicanism among later generations of Irish Americans. Throughout, Connolly draws on an impressive array of primary evidence, including census records, personal testimonies, and popular fiction, without getting bogged down in statistics and minutiae. This is a seamless and well-rounded study of a consequential historical trend.