File David Fitzpatrick's The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement, 1841–1925 under the exile strikes back. It is almost too cliché to say that Irish migration to America had a profound effect on Irish culture and society. The statement, of course, is as cliché as it is true, so much so that tome after tome has appeared since the end of mass migration to the United States in the 1920s, cataloguing the phenomenon and its many meanings for both sending and receiving societies. Scholars now think about the movement to America that started before the Famine as the most visible part of a broader global diaspora that stretched back and forward in time from the nineteenth century. But this much is clear: the movement worth studying was always outbound.

Fitzpatrick studies the other direction of migration. By the time he wrote The Americanisation of Ireland, he had already made his mark on the study of nineteenth-century Irish emigration, twentieth-century revolution, and Irish culture and society during the broad period that both straddled. Though he passed away before this book was published, this volume serves as a suggestive counterpoint to so much work he had already done. It deserves a serious reading, especially in its thrust and its implications. Armed with an impressive array of data and statistics, Fitzpatrick argues that the return of Irish migrants to Ireland from America—the United States predominantly but also Canada—was not negligible. These silent returnees were often members of the elite, the sort of cosmopolitans one might expect to come and go with ease. He tracks the lives of landowners (or those about to marry landlords), financiers, and artists and writers—whom he characterizes as “performers.” Many of these, as expected, were Protestant. A good many came from Canada. Much more interestingly, he demonstrates that a larger share of common men and women than one might have assumed returned to Ireland to work on farms and in service in some of the most isolated corners of a rural country. These were almost exclusively Catholic—again, as one would guess—and worked with their hands and their backs. The vast majority came back from the urban United States.

To make his point about the unseen prominence of these in the transatlantic story, Fitzpatrick takes us to Leitrim, a country he calls the least modern of all but one that produced a steady outflow of people and that had about the largest percentage of American blowbacks. Here a sizeable number returned right to the very areas they had left. The irony was that the most “backward” region of rural Ireland, as he argues, “was also the most cosmopolitan.” (xi) Though small in comparison to the number of those leaving, the returning exiles force the readers to confront some assumptions about the exceptional nature of Irish migration. As for other ethnic groups, though often for different reasons, the Atlantic represented a two-way street. Fitzpatrick ends each of his chapters with tables that flesh out in numerical detail the points he makes. He also delves into passport applications to illustrate what the returnees looked like and why they were coming back. The sum total of all of his exhaustive work is the fact that Ireland was not so much anglicized in the second half of the nineteenth century as Americanized.

Migration historians will have much to ponder as they delve into Fitzpatrick's data. It is as impressive as it is illustrative. But they will not be the only ones. Fitzpatrick has also unearthed an important set of issues that he has engaged in his previous work and that rising generations of scholars would be wise to revisit in light of his data-driven story of return migration. Just consider these basic questions. How did these men and women understand themselves? Did they see themselves as outliers, as failures, or as success stories? How did they re-enmesh themselves into their communities? Or did they? But more critical is what they meant for the Ireland they returned to. What did these returnees add to Irish culture? As Fitzpatrick suggests, “[t]here is a strong case for attributing the ‘Americanisation’ of Ireland not just to cultural invasion by movies or jazz, but to the cumulative impact of the human ‘exodus’” (x). We would be wise to gauge what the Americanization of Irish society meant for Irish understandings of the migration process. Without a doubt, Fitzpatrick believes, “those who returned . . . though often greeted with reserve or suspicion, helped to bridge the cultural gap between Ireland and the urban world” (17). Presumably, they also contributed to the complex story of Irish nationhood. “The course of Irish history,” Fitzpatrick concludes, “is inexplicable without confronting Americanisation” (212). Much of the return migration Fitzpatrick discovers, of course, took place at the very moment of independence, revolution, and state formation for both what would later be the Republic and for Northern Ireland—those very topics upon which Fitzpatrick built his estimable reputation. Such issues are no less significant than when Fitzpatrick first tried to address them; indeed, today they may mean more than ever. In encouraging scholars to revisit such issues, we owe Fitzpatrick a debt that, alas, now cannot properly be paid.