MacRiald's Faith, Fraternity, and Fighting is a highly impressive monograph on a subject that is not widely researched and that seems forgotten by the historical record: Irish Protestant migrants in the northeast of England. MacRiald has studied these migrants through their membership of the Orange Order. The order allows them to be identified and their activities tracked through institutional records that have not previously been used. The book is organized to cover all the major aspects of the order in northeast England—its composition, its structure, its public manifestation of marching and its implications, its political impact, its associational nature—and concludes with a discussion of the impacts of the study of diasporas and migration.

The Orange Order makes these migrants distinctive and identifiable because its membership is primarily Irish born rather than drawn from a preexisting “indigenous” population. This is one of MacRiald's major findings from lodge records. The nature of the order affected how these Irish Protestants integrated into their receiving societies. As it was seen as distinctively Irish by those already in northeast England, those who were members were also seen as distinctively Irish: “Never mind that Orangemen from Ulster wanted an Ireland that remained forever in partnership … with Britain. Following migration to Britain, they learned that their worship of a united kingdom of their Ireland with Britain did not entitle them to the embrace of brothers and sisters chanting affirmation of their imagined kindred spirit. Instead, they found a more or less generalised disdain for their movement” (70). The order also affected how the migrants carried and transmitted their ethnic identity: “Orangeism … provided the sort of web of associationalism and religious camaraderie which the other part of the Irish Diaspora found in Catholicism and nationalism” (320). Nevertheless, the associational nature of the order meant that the order did not transmit the same sense of ethnic distinctiveness as the institutions of Irish Catholics.

MacRiald's analysis of the Orange Order is nuanced, complicated, and comprehensive. He does not shirk the outward manifestations of the order that cause contemporary and historical controversy, but neither does he lose the more mundane elements of the order in these discussions. He clearly concludes that the order should be analyzed as an association rather than as a political body in this area. Indeed, the majority of MacRiald's book is spent analyzing the finances and the functions of the order, and the one outstanding impression with which the reader is left is the utter banality of the institution. On a monthly basis the order in northeast England was concerned with raising money and socializing. It seems to have been much better at the second than at the first, and MacRiald's descriptions of Orange “smokers,” teas, and social drinks is fascinating. Its financial situation was insecure and compares unfavorably with other associational organizations of the time. This was primarily due to its membership, which was working class and thus was affected by seasonal shifts and financial downturns. It also set limits on how the order could expand and benefit its members. MacRiald provides evidence that some lodges had funds for assistance in case of sickness or death for members, but the ability of the order to provide a secure and generous safety net to members was severely circumscribed. Frequently, members were unable to make their regular contribution to their monthly dues, never mind an additional payment. This is obviously much less exciting than an ideologically charged discussion of the merits and influence of the order but is a discussion that needs to be undertaken and heard.

The criticisms of this book are slight and are actually a reflection on the quality of the book insofar as it stimulated the reader into thinking about alternative ways of analyzing the Orange Order. First, a map would have been useful to locate the towns and cities of the Orange lodges under study. Second, it would be useful to know how MacRiald analyzes the limits to his data. He acknowledges that the records are complete for only a few lodges and that there is a lot of missing information (11–13), but the discussion is primarily concerned with the difficulties with the sources and not with how these affect the robustness of the conclusions. The data is presented in such a way that the reader can judge, but it would be useful to have such a discussion. Third, although MacRiald is clear that we need to be sensitive to the differences in localities and that his lodges in northeast England are in a different political and social position than the lodges in Ireland, Scotland, Liverpool, or Canada, it seems that MacRiald's claims for his data and findings may be too narrowly contained within a study of migrant communities. Many of his conclusions on the associational nature of the order are not well established within the literature on the main body of Orangeism in Ireland and seem applicable. The Orange Order is still not an institution that is properly understood by academics and the population in general, partly because of its secretive nature. MacRiald peels away the layers of secrecy to reveal an organization that is not particularly malignant and performs important functions for its members similar to other associations. It would have been illuminating to have heard more of MacRiald's comparisons with Ireland in addition to his comparisons with other Protestant migrant communities.

This is an important contribution to the literature. It is to be hoped that scholars and readers with an interest in the organization, as well as in migration, will read this book.