In recent years, the shape of the Irish diaspora has undergone some important modifications, not least because historians have begun to explore the experience of Irish Protestant migrants. Much of the research to date has considered eighteenth-century North America (to where an estimated two hundred thousand Irish Protestants traveled), but, as this new collection of essays on nineteenth-century New Zealand demonstrates, research is now extending beyond the British Atlantic world. Forty-five percent of Irish migrants to New Zealand in the nineteenth century were Protestant, and the collection's editor claims that today as many as two hundred thousand New Zealanders “might be classified as of Irish Protestant descent” (9). Protestant Ireland gave the colony entrepreneurs, merchants, and businessmen, preachers and labor activists, scribblers, speechifiers, and public servants. But until recently this group had also been ignored by historians of New Zealand. Now, with the publication of this volume of essays, sustained consideration is being given to these settlers for the first time. Yet, ironically, the reasons for this historiographical lacuna continue to problematize the study of New Zealand's Irish Protestant settlers. For, as Donald Akenson argued in Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand, 1860–1950 (Wellington: Victorian University Press, 1990), the Protestantism, imperialism, and greater Britishness of Irish Protestants made them “perfect colonists” and so contributed to their rapid assimilation. Thus, one of the questions that all of the contributors grapple with at some level in this collection is how to write the history of a group who seemingly disappeared without trace or protest.

One possible route is offered by Rory Sweetman's chapter on the Orange Order in New Zealand, since Orangeism was one of the most distinctive cultural markers of Irish Protestantism abroad. But, unlike contemporary Canada (where one in three adult Protestant men were members), the Order in New Zealand does not seem to have flourished. Indeed, Brad Patterson shows that even the apparently deep-rooted Orangeism of the Katikati settlement (backed by and recruited from among the Order in Ulster) fell away within fifteen years. Moreover, while Bill Massey (one of Ulster's most famous sons in the transmarine dominion) was at one point Grand Master of New Zealand, Geoffrey W. Rice argues that as the colony's premier during the Great War he was no “one-eyed Orangeman from Drumcree” (253). Indeed, in one of the best essays in this book, Angela McCarthy counsels against scholars overplaying such “visible signs of ethnic affiliation” (83) because it risks homogenizing individual migrant experiences. Instead, McCarthy uses correspondence to explore everyday life, concluding that “home” was invoked and to some extent recreated by Irish Protestants through the chain migration of family and friends, rather than symbols such as “the Twelfth.” Sarah Dwyer and Lyndon Fraser's chapter on Canterbury buttresses this point.

This attempt to “capture glimpses of individual migrants” (115) is also apparent (albeit less self-consciously) in several other chapters that look at the New Zealand careers of settlers from Protestant Ireland: Shirley Arabin on the Tipperary-born architect Fitz Gibbon Louch, Séan Brosnahan on the County Down minister Rutherford Waddel, Roberta McIntyre on the entrepreneur and politician John Martin, and Richard P. Davis on the Ulster-born businessmen George Shannon and John Thompson. Because these essays emphasize the range and diversity of Irish Protestant migrants to New Zealand, Jock Philips's statistical profile of the cohort as a whole is welcome since it allows the reader to place these very varied lives in a broader context. More research is required to determine how typical George Shannon et al. were, but several chapters in this collection are suggestive as to why Irish Protestants should have been such a heterogeneous lot. Melanie Nolan, for example, notes that the “foundational” wave of Irish Protestant migrants preceded 1886 and thus grew up in a political and cultural climate very different from that of their coreligionists who left Ireland in subsequent decades (174). Indeed, several of the authors emphasize that many Irish Protestant emigrants identified themselves as “Irish” and some were home rulers. Elsewhere, Alasdair Galbraith notes that the Irish Protestant cohort was “fractured” in terms of emigrants’ denominational, socioeconomic, and provincial backgrounds and that this militated against the formation of a single Irish Protestant identity (34).

The picture of Irish Protestants in New Zealand that emerges from this study does not wholly correspond with that advanced by Akenson in 1990; neither their imperialism nor their “Britishness” now appears to have been axiomatic. This suggests that historians need to map the process of ethnic fade more carefully to better accommodate this diversity. Another question that might repay attention is that of agency: the work of Kerby Miller and others on Irish Protestants in eighteenth-century North America suggests that many settlers were complicit in their own assimilation. Did anything similar occur in nineteenth-century New Zealand? We also need to know more about the cultural baggage emigrants brought with them and the circuitry that developed between Ireland and New Zealand; as Sarah Dwyer and Lyndon Fraser rightly observe, “we must “tear down the salt-water curtains” separating the islands (130). More specifically, Irish Protestant women (disproportionate in number and in some ways perhaps even more “invisible” owing to outmarriage) need to receive more consideration, as does the Protestant Political Association.

The editor of this volume emphasizes that it “should be viewed as a beginning rather than an end” (15). Certainly, many of the contributions are speculative, but (as with Malcolm Campbell's chapter) they are also thoughtful and reflective and will surely provide a firm historiographical foundation for future historians of New Zealand's “people with no name.”