The title of this book—Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950—reflects the two thematic emphases that are meant to wrap its various chapters into a coherent frame. First, the editors, Colin Barr and Hilary Carey, want to move beyond (just) the diaspora provoked by the Famine to look at Irish migration in the centuries before and after the Famine, exploring the ways in which the groups who migrated created shared visions of a Greater Ireland. By “Greater Ireland” Barr and Carey mean “a shared cultural space in which a sense of home and shared identity jostled with the varying challenges of the host societies and the inherited divisions of the Irish themselves” (21). Second, they aim to emphasize the “religious networks of undeniable variety and tenacity” (3) that played a key role in in generating the shared visions of a Greater Ireland among migrants.

In their introduction, Barr and Carey are forthright in making clear two limitations on what is to be found in this book. First, even though they acknowledge (22) that England has always been an especially important destination for Irish migrants, the collection does not deal with the Irish in England (or Britain generally) because it would have been too big a task to include essays on the Irish and Greater Ireland and the Irish in Britain in a single volume. The second limitation has to do with gender. With one exception, the chapters do not focus on women—and here we are told that another book might be useful (23).

Barr and Carey organize the book into four sections. The first is called “Irish Global Networks.” Despite that heading, it seems to include a grab bag of essays that could not easily be fit in elsewhere. These include a serviceable (but fairly standard) chapter on Catholic and Protestant confessional histories in Ireland during the nineteenth century; a chapter on the role of the Church of Ireland Gazette in shaping narratives about migration among Irish Protestants in the post-independence period; and a chapter on the Irish-Australian book trade in the nineteenth century.

The remaining sections address different geographical areas. The “Atlantic World” includes chapters on Irish Catholic migrants and French Catholics in Canada (which seems, I have to say, more concerned with church politics than with visions of a Greater Ireland); the role of the Catholic hierarchy in Newfoundland in promoting a nationalist, and to some extent, an imperial, identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; how the New Light controversy played out in the Presbyterian Church in America during the eighteenth century, and the role that Irish Presbyterians played in that controversy; the temperance movement in nineteenth-century Canada and its role in fostering a distinct ethnic identity among Irish Catholics; and a chapter on Chicago's Board of Education in the late 1800s and the initiatives its various members passed concerning compulsory education and related matters (the relevance of which to the matter of Greater Ireland being only, it seems, the fact that for the Irish in Chicago “being a part of Greater Ireland necessitated studying, working and living alongside people of different nationalities and religions” [200]).

“Asia and Africa” includes chapters on Irish Catholic soldiers in India, and the emergence within this group of a distinctively imperial identification; female Presbyterian missionaries sent abroad, mainly to India and China; and on the ministrations of the Catholic Church to the small number of Irish who settled in southern Africa.

The “Southern World” includes chapters on Irish migration to Australia generally; Irish Anglican clergy in Australia; the development of a colonial identity among clusters of Ulster Protestants in New South Wales; Rutherford Waddell, an Ulster Presbyterian minister who settled in New Zealand in the late 1800s, and his involvement in various reform movements; and four events in Australia in 1920 that reflected sectarian conflict involving Irish Catholics.

Taken as a collection of essays written by scholars knowledgeable about particular geographic areas, this book can be regarded as a basic reference source for anyone doing research on the Irish diaspora. Still, there are some problems.

Mainly, there's a conceptual slipperiness about just whose “vision of Greater Ireland” is being addressed these essays. Too often the voices that come through are the voices of priests, bishops, ministers, and the like, with little or no attention paid to the visions that might have been circulating in the minds of the “rank and file” of the migrant community. This slant may derive from what has survived in the documentary records on which the contributors rely, to be sure, but it is an issue that qualifies the “visions of Greater Ireland” focus that Barr and Carey tell us is central to their enterprise.

A second, and related, problem has already been mentioned: the general inattention to gender. With a few exceptions, the voices that come through these accounts are male voices, and it is their vision of Greater Ireland that is really being discussed. Did female Irish migrants share that vision? Possibly, but possibly not. Here and there, in any event, are some tantalizing clues to possible gendered patterns that might merit further investigation. One example will have to suffice.

In his essay on the Irish Catholic books imported into Australia, Kevin Molloy notes first that most of the books involved were religious, and he calls attention to the fact that many of these were small, compact volumes probably intended for private reflection or for use during Mass (80–81). He then also notes, however, that rosary beads and similar sacramentals do not make an appearance in bookseller ads until the 1860s. So, who were the consumers of the objects being described? Did men and women buy religious texts equally? Or was there a gendered tie to literacy? If the use of sacramentals was mainly associated with women (which I suspect), did something happen in the 1860s with regard to the gendered composition of the Irish migrant population? Or was there an increase in the involvement of women in religious matters? Such questions are simply not raised.